My Blood on the Daisies

Blood on the Daisies
Originally uploaded by The Knitter.

In St. Patrick's in Kilkenny there was a game a nun used to play using a hurley stick and a sliothar. Sometimes us children were allowed to play in a green area, called the Parade, at the back of the Institution. The Parade contained swings, climbing frames, a see-saw, and benches; and woe betide any child who dared to use these. Mostly we played in the grass making chains from the daisies or clover flowers that fairly carpeted the Parade, some sat on the benches. I liked to sit on one of the concrete posts attached to the climbing frame and pretend I was driving a tractor - I always faced my "tractor" away from the Institution and I "drove" like mad to get away over the fields and to whatever lay beyond.

Anyway this nun used to hit the sliothar up the Parade and boys would chase after it and whoever got it and brought it back to the nun would get a "treat" in the shape of one of those Nice biscuits with the sprinkling of sugar on one side of it. I never took part in this game mainly because I was much younger and smaller than those boys who did take part.

When it was time to line up in our group I got down from my "tractor" and ran towards my group. The nun with the hurley then noticed my knees were dirty. One thing these nuns could NOT abide was DIRT and she started to punch me with the hand holding the sliothar - I was rigid with shock and fright, but to the nun I was obviously being sullen. She began to whack me across the legs with the hurley stick.

Such was the force of these blows that I fell onto the grass and blood spurted from my knee and covered a clump of daisies. In panic I ran from the Parade and ended up in the only sanctuary us boys had in St. Patrick's: the toilets. I went into a cubicle and sat down but more blood gushed out and I began to feel the pain in my bloodied knee and I went towards one of the exits doors. There was a trail of blood in the toilets where I had run around in panic. On the door, about head height, there was a reflective protection panel and in the reflection I could see the face of an ashen faced boy with tears rolling down his face - and very very sad eyes. I wished then I could help that boy but I couldn't. The next thing I remember is lying in bed in the dormitory and my left knee was throbbing and heavily bandaged. How long I was in that bed I don't know but soon another boy was put into the bed next to me. His leg was in plaster. Over the next (I really don't know how long) weeks I had to teach this boy the responses to the Latin mass - each day a nun would come into the dormitory and quiz him and if he failed her test I was deprived of my dinner: some green substance with carrots ot greasy cabbage added. And I did go hungry for a while - but really we were ALWAYS hungry in ....those Places.

So when Sister Una O'Neill replies to a specific allegation that a former resident saw another child being beaten "with an instrument" [ a hurley stick] : "...she accept[s] that it was what was in the memory of the man who made the allegation .... but that the sisters had no memory of it."

Let me say to her: "I've never forgotten the eyes of that little child reflected back at me in the toilets; That was actually the FIRST EVER time that I saw what I looked like. I hold the memory of teaching Latin mass responses to a boy with a broken leg deep within me - and each time I see daisies I see blood spatters on them."

So don't fucking patronise me Sister Una, you had your fucking chance to challenge me when I sat in the witness box for over an hour and gave my sworn testimony -each time the Judges went back to your legal team and offered you the chance to question me and EACH FUCKING TIME you declined to ask me any questions.

Is it strange (or instructive) the things you remember of CERTAIN incidents from such a childhood?

MINUTE AND EXACT DETAILS

The sisters of charity had TWO nuns employed FULL-TIME filling in the PUNISHMENT BOOKS.

This Book had a big E&OE stamp on it's wine-coloured cover. It was stated at the commission this week that if a child wet his bed he was made to stand by his bed for 4 or 10 minutes, then he was slapped and he had to carry his own sheets down to the laundry. In a dormitory of with 100 boys no child is going to wait 5 or 10 minutes for his punishment - what actually happened was that we were lined up in single file against the wall in the dormitory and one-by-one we were taken into the nuns cubicle where our trousers were taken down and we were lashed with with a stick (sister beard) or lashed with a leather strap (sister moustache). Us children waiting in line for this PUNISHMENT were terrified and formed huddles where we tried to comfort each other - in this way we gave each other strength and courage; and our biggest fear here was that we would cry, NOT that we were going to get hit (being hit was a regular occurence) or that there was going to be pain (pain was a constant) - THAT was our fear - Crying was a NO-NO. After being hit we then had to take our sheets to the laundry where we had to load the sheets into the drum. Then we had to scoot along to our first helping of bread and dripping but, because we had being in the PUNISHMENT LINE in the dormitory, we had missed this and so we were put into the PUNISHMENT LINE in the refectory where the CYCLE OF PUNISHMENT continued. Hungry and beaten we scooted then to our "classrooms" and because we were late we were placed in the PUNISHMENT LINE and at the end of "lesson" we were caned.

So when we hear of the phrase PUNISHMENT BOOK think PLURAL. The sisters of charity and the christian are NOT missing A PUNISHMENT BOOK, they are BEREFET OF PUNISHMENT BOOKS - SEVERAL VOLUMES of these E&OE BOOKS PER MONTH.

Yes I believe that SHELVES AND SHELVES AND SHELVES of these PUNISHMENT BOOKS are deliberately "missing". How these orders could attempt justify the MINUTE AND EXACT DETAILS carefully written into into these VOLUMES and at the same time claim lack of funds and lack of staff is something we will never learn because THESE BOOKS ARE MISSING.

Allegedly ..........

Time to look at writing an entirely new constitution

Monday June 5th 2006 Irish Independent

SOMETHING more troubling than a statutory catastrophe was triggered when the Supreme Court struck down the 1935 law on the rape of minors. It has proved to be the catharsis for a plague of ills long festering and long ignored in Irish society.

In Leinster House last Friday, the government was brandishing a legislative palliative to sedate its own backbenchers' electoral panic as much as the people's anxiety over the legal repercussions of the court's ruling. This was a government-in-crisis, reacting on the hoof to public rage but, once again, failing to see the bigger picture. The thousands of citizens would abandon their plans and routines on a rare sunny bank holiday Friday to participate in hastily-organised protests across the country indicated something seriously rotten in the State of Ireland. What many of those people had to say should have the politicians very, very worried.

"They're more interested in the pay talks in Dublin Castle," complained one young woman who had been serially sexually abused as a child. Another accused the government of being more concerned with SSIAs than people. Somebody else thought Bertie Ahern's make-up budget could be better spent on caring for the aged.

The protesters - mostly women and children carrying white flowers of innocence - decried the deaths of children on school buses, the pension abuse of elderly care residents, the horrors visited on the sick in A&E units and the general impression that the most vulnerable sectors are meted out second-class treatment. The people who said these things looked healthy and wealthy - proper Celtic Tigers - but theirs were the voices of the dispossessed.

Was it only six or seven weeks ago that we were celebrating the proclamation of the Republic with a parade of shiny soldiers past the GPO? Those who celebrated with self-satisfaction that day ought to think again because, judging by the articulated isolation of those people last Friday, we are living less and less in a Republic. And more and more in a fool's paradise.

There have been disparate calls since the Supreme Court judgment for a referendum to insert a guarantee of child protection in the Constitution. But why stop there? Why not take the bull by the horns and review the Constitution in its entirety? Bunreacht na hEireann is the blueprint of the nation, of this supposed republic of equals. While the nation has galloped beyond the horizon of recognition in the last decade alone, the Constitution has been our Lot's wife, looking back and frozen.

We need to rescue it from the deep freeze of history for, in many parts, it no more reflects us than does Dorian Gray's picture. Ireland, like it or not, is a secular society of many religions and none but still Article 44.1 acknowledges that "the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God."

The preamble is written in the name of the "Most Holy Trinity" and the president's oath genuflects to God. The Constitution espouses paternalistic, Catholic social thinking. It is invoked to deny children at risk the right to directly access State services. It is haunted by the ghost of the X Case and asserts the traditional nuclear family as the only acceptable model even though gay partnerships are long past being curiosities. Article 41.2 (1), over which many women fled Dev's Fianna Fail in the 1930s - before the advent of the microwave and the centralised vacuum cleaner - is the handcuffs tying women to patriarchal stereotype.

In its day, the Constitution was a noble document. But, by the yardstick of modern Ireland, it reads like a hybrid of Home Rule and the 10 Commandments.

Bertie Ahern's commitment to the ethos of volunteerism appears genuine but it is never going to work as long as large numbers of apparently have-it-all citizens feel that some of us are regarded as more equal than others. Bunreacht na hEireann is our mission statement. Let's dust it down and make a re-declaration of the standards by which we want to live.

It's time we punished the Brothers for their crimes

A CHILD has his jaw fractured; another is beaten with a stick; yet another receives a black eye. Not the result of a gangland attack, but the result of "punishment" meted out by one man who rejoices in the title of "Christian Brother". And a contemporary colleague, a Brother Seamus Nolan who is a member of the Order's leadership team in 2006, says he "can't understand it".

There are other things Christian Brother Nolan can't understand: no sanctions were ever applied against the many Christian men who brutalised children in a manner that breached the then State regulations on punishment. A punishment book was supposed to exist: in St Joseph's Industrial School in Tralee, none existed at all. Christian Brother Nolan, a senior member of the order, agrees that children were "treated indefensibly" abused physically to the level just short of their having to behospitalised. It's the sort of thing that makes one understand why so many people think that the Brothers were and are a bunch of thugs, uneducated, brutal, sadistic and incapable of teaching children.

A senior member of the Order "can't understand" something that would be obvious to the average halfwit: that the Christian Brothers thought it their God-given right, indeed their duty, to reduce children to the level of terrified animals, incapable of independent thought or action. Members of the religious orders who ran our infamous industrial schools in the past have been giving evidence in public recently, and last week it has been the turn of the Christian Brothers. The public hearings are being held by the Investigation Committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.

The Commission was set up following the State apology to the victims made in the Dail by the Taoiseach in May 1999. As part of that apology, the Taoiseach announced a Redress Board which offers some level of compensation to surviving adults who have had their lives destroyed by their childhood experiences at the hands of the men and women who were given control over them by the State. Since then, the Commission has been working quietly, slowly, and tortuously, hand in hand with the Redress Board. The module of the public hearings which concerns the Christian Brothers has been sitting during the week. It began with an interesting bang: Christian Brother David Gibson, Provincial of the Northern province, suggested that prior to the existence of the Redress Board, there had only been three complaints of abuse received by the Order. After the Order apologised to those who "may have" suffered abuse, there were a further nine complaints. After the Taoiseach's offer of redress, there were a further 449 complaints. "We must wonder at that," said Brother Gibson.

I'm glad I wasn't present at those hearings. I am a very well-trained journalist; but I also have a temper, and my gorge rises when there is a question of cruelty to children. Instead of wondering at the claims as Gibson suggested, what we might be rather more inclined to wonder at is why somebody didn't stand up at those hearings and shout "smug bastard" at Brother Gibson. He also suggested that the legal profession was "ambulance chasing" in taking up the cases of the victims. There was evidence, he said, that solicitors had organised meetings in pubs, handed out taped copies of RTE's States of Fear programme, and distributed lists of names of Christian Brothers who had worked in industrial schools.

I just hope somebody organised such meetings, instead of leaving the lost and lonely unsure about how to get redress. Equally, it doesn't seem to have occurred to Christian Brother Gibson that if people were motivated by the hope of some financial compensation for what they had been through, they were more than entitled to it. Then we had Christian Brother Michael Reynolds, current Deputy Principal of the Northern Province, who told the Commission hearings that it would not be fair comment to say there was a culture of excessive punishment in the industrial schools.

One can only wonder with a certain amount of malicious glee what Reynolds felt about his colleague Christian Brother Nolan who pulled the rug from under him only two days later, admitting on Wednesday that a brother who had committed serious physical assault was permitted to continue teaching. On another occasion, a Brother emphatically denied administering brutal punishment. He had "merely" beaten a child with a leather strap "on the bottom where nature intended it to be used".

And these beatings were administered to children committed to the schools because they were neglected, orphaned, or abandoned. They were sad, unhappy, disturbed little boys; not criminals, or embryonic criminals. Although we know that many of them grew up bitter, maimed, and illiterate. What was left for them but a life of crime? There is an alarming pattern emerging at the hearings, which will be resumed next Wednesday. The arrogant brushing-off of evidence that makes the blood run cold in favour of self-justification and self-protection bears the imprint of a concerted campaign.

There may be many possibilities.

One, those who betrayed trust and destroyed childhood do not accept that they or their colleagues did anything wrong.

Two, they still believe that the protection of the Church is their primary responsibility under Canon Law, and to hell (maybe literally) with everything and everyone else.

Three, the corporate Church has instructed them to start fighting back, using denial as their tool.

If the third is true, they don't need it in Ireland: we, unfortunately, have limited their financial responsibility for the crimes committed against children. In other parts of the world, notably the United States, the Roman Catholic Church is threatened with bankruptcy concerning redress for its crimes against children.

We have a long way to go in Ireland to pay for Church/State crimes against children. Let's start by forgetting the word "but" when we render judgement on the disgusting people who carried out these crimes.

Emer O'Kelly

Sunday Independent May 28th 2006

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Blood Daisy