Violence in Irish schools’ on RTE, October 30

RTÉ’s new documentary ‘Leathered: Violence in Irish Schools’ sheds new light on the use of corporal punishment in Irish schools and the impact that the culture of violence it creates continues to have for generations.

An RTÉ documentary featuring first-hand stories from a number of victims of corporal punishment in Irish schools, many of whom are speaking publicly for the first time and who have suffered lifelong consequences from the treatment they received, the RTÉ documentary critically examines the scope and scale of physical abuse in the thousands religious and secular schools.

The document also raises new questions about the level of official documentation regarding the treatment of children in schools throughout the country.

New figures, made available to RTÉ documentary makers for the first time by the Department for Education, show that between 1962 and 1982 the Department recorded just 108 allegations of physical violence by teachers against pupils.

More than three-quarters of these allegations involved other forms of harassment. 87 allegations concerned primary schools attended by children as young as four. 21 were at the second level.

During the same period, millions of students passed through the state education system. In 1962 alone, 570,380 students attended state-funded primary and secondary schools. By 1982 – after the introduction of free secondary education in 1966 – this number had increased to 766,864.

The Department for Education also revealed to RTÉ that a further nine allegations were made in the five years following the introduction of a ban on corporal punishment in schools between 1982 and 1987. This brings the total number of allegations of physical abuse received between 1962 and 1987 to 117 and suggests that allegations of physical abuse in schools did not disappear after the ban in 1982. Teachers in Irish schools remained unpunished for “physical punishment” until 1997.

Navan native Peter Kane recalls that as a 12-year-old: “There was an element of fear every day. He could have started for the simplest of reasons… That particular morning, Brother called me, “get up here,” he says, and the first thing I heard was several blows to my head and face. I think I spanked him six or 12 times with the leather belt.

“I wasn’t crying, that in itself was a signal for him to keep hitting you, and he did, he bounced my head off the board, threw my body around the room, tackled me onto the desk, and at one point in the stage I collapsed and fell to the ground because he did something to my back. He then picked me up and started beating me. I was in a lot of pain, my whole body was hurting in general. It took me several weeks to recover.”

Poet and author Theo Dorgan recalls his school days in Cork: ‘When the door closes and you’re in a closed room, you see predator and prey – if you look at the teacher the wrong way, you’ll get spanked. We had a whole range of gentle spankings and brutal spankings…”

His long-time friend and schoolmate, film festival co-director Mick Hannigan, recalls: “It wasn’t an everyday event, but an hourly event, class by class. If you made a mistake in counting, if you made a mistake in a difficult Irish line, you were punished.”

Eoin Costello tells the documentary about one day at his school in Kilkenny when his classroom fell silent: “I saw this shadow on the glass door at the entrance to the classroom. He literally marched with clenched fists, punched, then punched… and then turned on his heel and left… It never went away. Forty years. The impact of that punch in the face never went away.”

The use of corporal punishment in schools was banned by ministerial regulation in 1982. Until then, under Department of Education regulations, only certain appointed teachers could physically punish their students in primary and secondary schools. In practice, many other teachers regularly used violence to enforce school discipline, often going much further than school rules allowed.

Experts interviewed in the documentary say the small number of recorded allegations reflects the culture at the time, as well as poor record-keeping by the state.

Former independent senator Jillian Van Turnhout, who led the campaign to ban corporal punishment in the home in 2015, said: ‘Perhaps no one thought it was important enough to write down a report, to make a report after it was received by (the) Department for Education. We saw, for example, the Ryan Report in 2009, which clearly showed us that in industrial schools the incidence of physical abuse is twice as high as that of sexual abuse. So why don’t we see similar levels when it comes to schools reporting corporal punishment?”

Recent publication of a report from the Scoping Study on historical sexual abuse in schools run by religious orders once again highlighted the state’s historic failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

Amid an outpouring of public grief and anger, the government announced plans to launch a full state inquiry. However, some of those who contacted the investigation team also wanted to draw attention to the physical violence they experienced while studying in schools across the country. They were told that their alleged harassment was beyond the scope of the investigation team.

Dermot Flynn, who previously contacted RTÉ Radio 1’s Liveline’s Joe Duffy about his experiences at Blackrock College and Willow Park School, reveals he recently received a €100,000 settlement from the Spiritan Order for the physical abuse he suffered at school.

“When the scoping study was announced, I thought it would be a great opportunity for us. I filled out their questionnaire and communicated with them via email.

“And then I get the bombshell from them that you know you haven’t experienced sexual violence. We don’t really want to know about your case. It made me feel like the physical abuse wasn’t that important, even though it had affected my whole life.”

Leathered sheds light on the use of corporal punishment in Irish schools and the impact that the culture of violence it engenders continues to have on generations of Irish students#Leather | Wednesday | 21:35 pic.twitter.com/0LAYiajSwm

— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) October 28, 2024

Van Turnhout adds: “I don’t understand how you can separate out harassment, as if there were some hierarchy of scales on the basis of which you could say that sexual harassment would definitely be treated as part of redress. But if you have experienced physical abuse, absolutely not.

‘Leathered – Violence in Irish Schools’ will air tonight, Wednesday, October 30 at 9.35pm in Ireland on RTÉ One and RTE Player.