Chapter 9 — Tralee

Emotional abuse

One ex-Brother, Professor Tom Dunne, who left the Congregation after seven years and has written articles on his experience of being a Christian Brother, spent a short period in Tralee doing holiday relief work in 1963. He said in one of these articles that he had been shocked, while watching ‘States of Fear’, by the testimony of one man who claimed to have suffered appalling abuse whilst in Tralee. Professor Dunne said that he had spent several weeks on relief duty there in the summer of 1963, but had subsequently suppressed all memory of that time. He told the Committee he believed that he had psychologically wiped the memories of his time there from his mind because it was such a distressing experience.

He said in evidence that his memory of Tralee related mainly to the demeanour of the boys. He said that he did not beat any of the boys when he was there but, not knowing the culture that was there, he talked to them. He said that the culture in Tralee was ‘essentially you didn’t talk to them on an individual basis because that would encourage them to – that was too soft and I was going in very soft on lots of levels’.

Professor Dunne went on to identify what particularly bothered him about the boys in Tralee. He said that ‘they were pathetically grateful and almost tried to form some kind of ... bond with you’. He said that the boys in Tralee were ‘very ... surprised to be talked to in a way that wasn’t simply authoritarian and they were almost pathetic in their response. I think it affected me a lot. That I remember’.

He went on to say that he recalled it as a place where he intensely disliked the way the boys were talked about by the staff. He added, ‘I think there was a sense of them, you know, as being just simply a problem. I remember it as harsh in its general atmosphere’.

He said that he had no specific memories of Tralee and was not a reliable witness as to what it was actually like for individual boys there. He explained: The memory is simply of atmosphere and what it was like to interact with the boys ... I suppose they lived in a certain kind of fear of authority that was far in excess of what I was used to in schools.

In his article published in the Dublin Review, Professor Dunne was even more explicit: At this remove, I can only recall that it was a profoundly upsetting experience, not because I was witness to any particular horror, but because of the atmosphere of meanness, bleakness and fear. This was a different world from the excellent school less than a mile away ... and even more from our comfortable, normal life in community ... My clearest memory is of embarrassment at the harsh demeanour of staff and the cowed servility of the boys, so overwhelmingly grateful for any hint of kindness. Perhaps I put it out of my mind as soon as I could because of the overwhelming sense of human misery and my own inadequacy in the face of it ... It was a secret, enclosed world, run on fear: the boys were wholly at the mercy of the staff, who seemed to have entirely negative views of them.

Professor Dunne went on to say in the article that the Brothers ‘often left the far more needy boys of their industrial schools to the inadequate or the troubled, who were given no special training and little supervision’.

This disturbing view of Tralee was partially echoed by Br Mahieu. He stated that, when he first went to Tralee in the early 1960s, he noticed that the children ‘seemed to be crying out for a bit of love and a bit of attention and a bit of care’. He said that he felt sorry for the boys. They were a nice, decent bunch and seemed reasonably happy.

During Br Mahieu’s time, small but significant improvements to the quality of life of the boys in Tralee were introduced: a tape-recorder for music was acquired, and a projector was donated for the showing of a weekly film. There were books, comics and magazines available to the boys in the dormitory.

He said that, when he went out into the yard, 20 or 30 of the boys would immediately surround him and ‘link out’ of him. Looking back on it now, he would say that this linking was possibly a sign of emotional instability. He thought that they ‘needed somebody’, ‘they wanted somebody to cling on to’.

Br Aribert, whilst accepting only that one of the Brothers was maybe harsh ‘on occasions’ towards the boys, also identified a loneliness in them. He did not know if the emotional needs of the boys were adequately catered for. He said that, whenever he or any Brother was on yard duty, the boys came and linked with them (three or four on each side of the Brother) and he felt it meant a lot to them, ‘that at least they had someone literally to hang on to’. He felt that there was an element of the boys feeling rejection and loneliness, even though they did not say so in so many words.

Whilst these three Brothers were clearly identifying an emotional need in the children in Tralee, they were not able to say what might have been done to offer a greater degree of comfort to the boys there. The witnesses who spoke to the Committee were quite clear that it was not possible to report or complain to any other Brother about mistreatment or abuse.

Other Brothers who were in Tralee did not identify emotional deprivation in the boys there. One Brother who was in the School in the mid to late 1940s stated that, as far as he knew, the Brothers and the boys got on well. He did not know if the boys were afraid of the Brothers but said that they had more respect for the Principal than the rest, as he had power.

Another Brother, Br Boyce, who had also worked in Artane, said that Tralee was more relaxed than Artane, for both the Brothers and the boys. He said that the small numbers there meant that they could deal with the boys easily. He was able to talk to the boys more easily. The boys were the same kind as in Artane, although he thought the boys were more relaxed in Tralee. He felt that the boys were helped, i.e. emotionally supported, by the smaller numbers in the School.

Br Bevis said that he did not think that there were many boys who found it difficult to cope. He accepted that they had their own fears and that there were tears for being rejected by their parents, tears of loneliness and tears from probably being taunted by the other boys, but they could tell ‘most of the Brothers’. For his own part, he said that boys would come to him and tell him that someone was bullying them or jeering at them. He did not accept that the atmosphere was cold and indifferent to their plight. He said the boys could complain to the Brothers about excessive corporal punishment being meted out by other Brothers, but accepted that there was no system for making complaints and that no investigations into complaints took place.