Even a teacher who hated corporal punishment resorted to violence – The Irish Times.

If brutal social control is key to running a country, start with children.

While not all teachers beat their students in the decades up to the 1980s, it wasn’t just a case of a few bad apples. Violence in Irish institutions was systemic, and the beating of children in schools was enabled by the state’s legal apparatus. Over the years Department of Education it modified the rules on the use of corporal punishment, banning it, for example, for “simple failure in class” in 1947. However, it did little to enforce it.

Many of the incidents featured in the RTÉ documentary, which will be shown tonight, occurred after that date and could be considered excessive, even by standards acceptable before 1947.

The documentary, titled Leathered, reveals a society where physical violence and fear perverted care and love.

It was only in the early 1950s that the issue began to emerge as a controversial issue in public debate, with parents writing to newspapers to expose the terrible levels of violence in Irish schools. The official answer to this challenge? The Minister of Education relaxed the regulations in 1956 to allow the use of the belt. Over the following decades, the state continued to resist moves to abolish corporal punishment from Irish schools. Even after it was abolished in 1982, teachers had effective immunity from prosecution until 1996 (when corporal punishment became illegal).

( “He beats you every day”: Victims of corporal punishment for classroom violenceOpens in a new window )

When, in the late 1960s, a mother and her GP, Paddy Randles, stood up for one little boy against a system that was abusing him, she recalls in the program: ‘It saved a life. Someone dared to protect you instead of causing you pain. It’s that simple, and it goes to the heart of everything that was wrong with the Irish education system until at least the 1980s: the right to inflict pain on generations of children and young people overrode the imperative to protect. Teachers – monastic and lay – were not afraid of inflicting pain because it did not involve any risk. However, they were often afraid to protect those under their care, risking isolation, unemployment and slander. How has this been the social equation in Ireland for so long? Uncovering these dynamics is crucial to understanding the brutality of systems.

One brave teacher interviewed in the documentary, who was strongly opposed to corporal punishment, candidly recalls the two times he used it, describing it as dehumanizing to boys and himself. His testimony reveals so poignantly that once violence is normalized in a system, it dehumanizes all those involved.

Although some incidents of violence were particularly brutal, brutal enforcement of discipline and learning was the norm. Fear has done a lot in Irish classrooms.

The document noted that between 1962 and 1982, 108 complaints were registered in the Department of Education archives. Archives are rooted in the systems of power that create them. These are not neutral places. The state bureaucracy worked to serve and protect this state; it was not a system willing to document its flaws.

Complaint protocols are simply records of submitted complaints. They tell us about these specific cases, how complaints were handled and highlight factors that may have affected people’s ability to make a successful complaint. These are not records of experienced harassment or its frequency.

Just ask anyone who was educated in Ireland between the 1940s and 1980s: most of them have a history of experiencing or witnessing violence. A 1974 survey by the Irish School Pupils’ Association found that 84 percent of schools surveyed used corporal punishment using implements ranging from leather straps to hurleys, sticks and branches.

( “He hit me so hard in the face he knocked me down”: Corporal punishment in Irish schoolsOpens in a new window )

Cultures are shaped from the top. My first memories of education still radiate love; the nun in charge of my first primary school was a wonderful person. Love came from above. In 1980, when we moved to another part of the country, my life changed radically thanks to a teacher. I was seven years old and learned to fear school. This teacher wasn’t particularly targeted, but in my memory, in my gut, her knuckle-bumping on every girl who stuttered or couldn’t recall that week’s sermon at mass or recite the multiplication tables created a collective little hell, in that everyone was waiting to be next.

My experiences are not as serious as those described in the RTÉ documentary, but I don’t like talking about them and was hesitant to include them here. I can only imagine what the men at Leathered had to do to share their stories. This is a devastating watch. Grown men stopped in their tracks under the emotion of memories, little boys whose futures had been stolen from them time and time again. Lifelong anxiety, educational deprivation, mental breakdown and alcoholism – the price many people paid to survive this abuse. And there must have been those who didn’t survive it – how many we may never know.

Institutions protect themselves; that’s what they were designed for. They also have a culture that is extremely difficult to change. If the Irish state includes incidents of physical abuse in its investigation into abuse in Irish schools, it will mean that the culture has changed to one that “dares to protect”.

Lindsey Earner-Byrne is Professor of Modern Irish History at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the TCD Center for Modern and Contemporary Irish History. Leathered: Violence in Irish Schools airs tonight at 9.35pm on RTE One and RTE Player