‘He bate the f**k out of you – every day’: victims of corporal punishment on violence in the classroom

For Dubliner Norman Croke (76), every one of his schooldays, from 1954 to 1961, started with waiting to be beaten.

“The first thing in the morning from the teacher was: ‘Hands up who didn’t do your ecker [homework]?’.”

As the third youngest of 12 children in a tiny inner-city house, whose mother worked two jobs and whose father was in England, he had neither space, nor anyone to tell him, to do his homework.

“You didn’t have a copy or pen-nib either,” he says. “So, you stood up, joined a queue of boys along the wall. You spat on your hands and rubbed them to heat them and so they’d be moist.

“He [the teacher] stood there with a leather strap with two layers of coins sewed between three pieces of leather and bate the f**k out of you – every day.”

Croke grew up on Meade’s Terrace behind Holles Street, attending the now closed St Andrew’s boys’ national school on Pearse Street.

“My only recall of the six years I spent there was violence,” he says. It included being hit around the head and upper-body for “infractions” such as not being able to spell a word.

“Your entire time within school was about avoiding eye contact, looking for invisibility. You couldn’t learn, being in constant terror.”

When violence became unbearable, he and his younger brother would “mitch”. He remembers the fear when the “cigire” – school inspector – visited the school to check on boys’ attendance but never whether they were learning. When he was nine, his mother, Mary Ellen Croke, was prosecuted under the 1926 School Attendance Act. He remembers attending the Children’s Court, then in Dublin Castle, with her and his younger brother.

“She was holding each of us by the hand and told us as we were going in, we might not be going home with her,” said Croke.

“Me and my brother were told to stand at the back while she went up to face the judge. The court was packed with terrified parents and kids. No one ever asked us [children] why we were mitching, why we chose to walk the streets in the winter, in freezing cold and pissing rain.”

His mothers was warned that if her sons skipped school again, they would be sent to one of the industrial schools at Letterfrack, Artane or Daingean.

“So, she brought us back to the school where yer man bate the shite out of us again,” he said.

Croke “ran” out of school aged 13, unable to read or write. He taught himself, borrowing books from Pearse Street library, getting various jobs and becoming shop-steward at one point at Ringsend Glass Bottle factory where he met “hundreds” of men who had left school illiterate, many of whom attended the same school he had. He gained degrees from the Open University and held senior positions in the trade union Siptu.

He has spoken previously of his experiences of corporal punishment, arguing what was inflicted went “far beyond” what was legally permissible. It is “not credible” the State did not know this, says Croke.

“Everyone knew kids were being assaulted in schools, but the State mandated you must go. If you tried to escape, the State provided immunity to the perpetrators while criminalising the children and sending them to reformatory schools,” he said.

In addition, he says, children were being denied an education in such conditions. “The State needs to own up to its responsibility and acknowledge its culpability in that,” he says.

Corporal punishment was first legally provided for in Irish schools in the 1908 Children’s Act.

In 1933 Department of Education rules for national and industrial schools authorised physical punishment for misconduct by use of the cane, strap or birch, but not the leather strap.

The 1946 Rules and Regulations for National Schools said corporal punishment “should be administered only for grave transgressions and in no circumstances for mere failure at school lessons”.

They rules said it should be confined to “slapping on the open palm with a light cane or strap”.

“The boxing of children’s ears, the pulling of their hair or similar ill-treatment is absolutely forbidden and will be visited with severe penalties,” the 1946 rules stated.

In 1956, the use of a leather strap was explicitly permitted.

By 1965 the Rules for National Schools said that teachers should have “lively regard for the improvement and general welfare of their pupils”. One rule, Rule 130, said that corporal punishment “should be administered only in cases of serious misbehaviour and should not be administered for mere failure at lessons”.

They stated that punishment “should be administered only by the principal” and “any teacher who inflicts improper or excessive punishment … will subject to severe disciplinary action.”

Terry Fagan (74), who grew up in north inner-city Dublin, describes a punishment meted out to him when he was 10, at the now-closed old Rutland Street national school, so excessive he had to crawl back to his desk.

“At the end of the school day my friends had to carry me out. My hands and legs were raw and swollen. They commandeered a box-cart and brought me home, got me up the stairs to my mother,” he said.

His father, a docker, confronted the teacher the following morning, telling him his son would not return and would go instead to the local Presbyterian school. The Catholic priest begged his father not to send him to a Presbyterian school, promising him his son would not be hit again.

Fagan recalls the trauma for families whose sons were sentenced to Artane for school non-attendance, and the lasting impact on those sentenced. The memories of school violence “don’t go away” he continues.

“It affected me that bad – not just me, but a lot of people,” he said.

Though many argue severe corporal punishment was “part of life” at the time, there were voices speaking out against it, including letter-writers to newspapers, journalists such asMichael Viney and Oireachtas members.

In the 1950s, senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington proposed legislation to end corporal punishment for girls.

Dr Noël Browne TD, in June 1957 described permitting “the barbarity … of an adult beating a child with a strap” as “unthinkable”, while in the 1970s John Horgan TD called repeatedly for abolition.

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Corporal punishment was finally abolished in 1982, with a circular from the department rescinding Rule 130. It was not outlawed until 1997, when it came under the aegis of the Offences Against the Person Act.

Younger survivors include poet Dave Lordan (49), who attended national school in Co Cork in the 1980s. He recalls a third-class teacher as a “sadist”.

“He punished children emotionally, humiliated children. If you had a lisp he imitated it. If you were a Traveller he’d just kick you as you went past. Every day somebody got it. I witnessed violence in that theatre of terror that will never leave me,” said Lordan.

“There was one boy, he was dyslexic and couldn’t get the spellings and he was tortured over that. [The teacher] knocked two teeth out of him and gave him a black eye. The violence dominated your thoughts all the time. You were subconsciously in fear of your life.”

Lordan suffered depression he attributes in part to his school experiences.

The teachers cited in these interviews were lay-men, though the schools’ patron bodies were Catholic.

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The Department of Education, in 2019 correspondence with Croke, said the “physical punishment” experienced by children was “reprehensible” but not its responsibility. The “legal position”, it said, “is that the State provides for education, which takes place in a system of … schools which operates under the aegis of private entities. School patrons and managers are responsible for the day-to-day running of schools”.

Children’s rights advocates, however, point to the 2014 Louise O’Keeffe judgment at the European Court of Human Rights, which found the State was liable for sexual abuse she suffered in a school in 1971.

It was “an inherent obligation of Government to ensure [children’s] protection from ill-treatment, especially in a primary education context” and to “prevent ill-treatment of which the authorities had, or ought to have had, knowledge”, said the court. It based much of its judgment on Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, ratified by Ireland in 1953, and which was in force when survivors interviewed here were in school.

Julie Ahern, director of legal services with the Children’s Rights Alliance, says “anything” children experienced in schools “beyond what was legally permissible and which the State knew or ought to have known about … should be looked at”.

“The State should acknowledge that [abuse] and apologise,” she said.

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Ombudsman for Children Niall Muldoon said that he hoped that “the experiences of cruelty and mistreatment endured by the thousands of people across Ireland represents times past”.

“Those experiences shouldn’t be whitewashed either and the State must recognise the cruelty of these practices and condemn them. Any ‘turning of a blind eye’ should be acknowledged as being wrong,” he said.

Irish National Teachers’ Organisation general secretary John Boyle said that corporal punishment was “wrong” and expressed “deep regret:that any child found themselves in an education system that allowed the use of corporal punishment and failed to recognise its abhorrence”.

Niamh Murray, principal of the new Rutland national school in Dublin 1 which has links to the school Terry Fagan attended, said that it was “very important the voices of children who are past pupils are heard”.

“Clearly, we would not condone any form of corporal punishment. Rutland national school is a very different place now. It is well known for its strong nurturing ethos with all staff trained in restorative practice,” she said.

A spokeswoman for the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland said that it was not aware of any plans for an apology from the State but would be open to examining such proposals.

“The ASTI abhors any illegal child abuse, including historical abuse,” she said.

The Department of Education, asked for comment on survivors’ calls for an apology for physical abuse in schools, said that it “takes child protection very seriously and considers that the protection and welfare of children is a fundamental responsibility of all involved in the care and education of children”.

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The lengthy statement went on to detail child protection measure in place since 1982, including the Children First Act 2015 and the Children First: National Guidance for the Protection and Welfare of Children 2017.

Alan Hynes, chief executive of the Catholic Education Partnership, which speaks on behalf of Catholic schools, said the abolition of corporal punishment was among the “most significant” and “welcome” changes in Irish society.

“What was once viewed as normal is now thankfully inconceivable as an acceptable practice. The Catholic education sector sincerely apologises to those who as children suffered violence and to those children that witnessed such violence,” he said.

“The time to make an honest reckoning with this aspect of our past is long overdue.”