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Post published 30.9.2023
I was a pupil at De La Salle Ballybough Kilkenny from 1973 to 1978. That's me at my First Holy Communion when I was in third class at De La Salle.
'The De La Salle Brothers ended their connection with the Boys’ School in 1984 when Br. Norbert retired. Dan Kennedy then became the first lay principal. '
On the 40th anniversary of the roll out of the ban on corporal punishment I would like to put the following on the record in respect of my experience as a pupil at De La Salle Ballybough.
Physical Abuse by Brother Norbert
One day when the district nurse was visiting De La Salle school I had joined in with a group of children spitting at each other in the playground. The headmaster Brother Norbert and the nurse saw me doing this and the nurse said that is a very bad thing to do from a health point of view. Brother Norbert was very angry at having been embarrassed in front of the nurse. Brother Norbert dragged me into the lunch room (which was between second and third class rooms) and beat me very hard around the head shouting -
“We look at the window and what do we see, the fine Mr. Costello spitting on other children, a lovely sight for the district nurse to see”.
“We look at the window and what do we see, the fine Mr. Costello spitting on other children, a lovely sight for the district nurse to see”.
His face was very close to mine during this assault and he had a very nasty face on him while he was doing this, his mouth puckered up and spittle was coming out the side of his mouth from his exertion in beating me. When Brother Norbert had finished beating me he told me to write down all the names of the others in the group that were spitting. Brother Norbert left me alone in the lunch room but I couldn’t write the list of names as I couldn’t control my hand as it was shaking too much after the beating. Brother Norbert then sent me home.
Brother Egbert
I never played chess and thus avoided the sexual abuse of Eamon McAteer who received a suspended sentence for abusing three students at the De La Salle school. When we were pupils we warned each other not to play chess as the Brother would grope the pupil’s genitals under the table of the chess game. I believe he was moved from the school in 1975.
Psychological anxiety created by the teacher nicknamed 'Butcher'
Due to the above moving of Brother Egbert I had a lay-teacher who was known as 'Butcher' amongst the pupils two years in a row. One of his classroom habits was to ask a complicated question on one side of the classroom (for example 25 times 3 multiplied by 4 minus 12) in a quiet voice and then go to the opposite side of the classroom and demand an answer even if you hadn’t heard the question clearly. In advance of writing this letter of complaint to the school I contacted a number of my classmates from that time and they confirmed my recollection was correct, i.e. that this was what they had also experienced.
When the child wasn’t able to answer his question he pulled out a stick which he called his “lollywalloper” and you got “4 of the best from the lollywalloper” in his words. Due to my learning difficulties I frequently received corporal punishment from the 'Butcher’s' “lollywalloper” which meant that 'learning' for me was filled with more anxiety than learning.
For me personally the long term impact of this teacher for two years was that when I was asked challenging questions in a charged environment (like say a job interview) I sometimes felt rising anxiety, the emotional walls of my mind closing in and unable to speak up for myself.
Bullying at De La Salle
Hurt people hurt people - The seventies were a tough time for a lot of people. Three pupils from nearby Newpark, Christy X, Larry Y and Poncho Z, and two pupils from Ossory Park, Paul A and Michael B, struck fear into our hearts. I was terrified of those boys because if I stood up to one of them, then 3 of them would get me at the school gate at the end of the day or split up and wait for me at both the school gate and the end of the lane to prevent me escaping.
They used to use my younger brother Oisin to pass on messages that they were going to get me after school. “Tell your brother we’re going to get him after school” Christy used to often tell Oisin. Being ‘got’ meant being grabbed by the hair by one of them until I was bent double and then dragged by the hair by that boy while two or three others kicked me. This would have been accompanied by me pleading for mercy by asking them to ‘stop messing lads’ to which they always replied ‘we're not messing’. It was frightening and humiliating to me as a child as it was to many of my classmates who experienced the same treatment.
When I got warnings like above then I would feel sick all day watching the clock with increasing dread until the school finished for the day trying to decide which gate I might escape through at the front or back of the school. I often went out the gate scared of what awaited me.
Sometimes I would panic and run out the back gate of De La Salle and along the laneway at the back of the houses to try and escape them, sometimes it worked.
There were 2 ways to walk to De La Salle school from my home in Meadow Way. I often avoided the Newpark Close route to school and went along the army barracks road instead. The only problem with that way was that there was nowhere to hide, it was a long exposed road with the army barracks wall all along one side and the wall to the cattle mart on the other.
The Newpark boys could see me from miles away if they were looking for me on that road. Sometimes when I was chased from school I could try and get over the wall into the cattle mart. One day they chased me almost all the way home from De La Salle, I ran and ran and hid in the cattle mart and they didn’t catch me that time.
One day Larry hit me one morning in the school yard. I shouted at him to stop. Larry said “go on then, hit me back”. I hit him as hard as I could. Larry ran away and came back at school finishing time with Adrian Walsh from Newpark. Adrian was in secondary school and everyone was scared of him because 'everyone knew' that he had been arrested by the police once for stabbing someone. Larry came in and told me that Adrian was waiting at the gate for me because I had hit Larry.
I went into Brother Norbert’s office for help, I was crying, I explained what had happened. He came out to the front of the school, shouted at Adrian Walsh to go away, then turned on his heel and returned to his office leaving me to face them.
I didn’t escape them that day. As part of my therapy work I outlined how the 10 year old me experienced this incident in a drawing I did.
The chronic anxiety caused by these regular occurances meant that my health suffered, our family GP referred me for a tonsillectomy due to 'very frequent bouts of tonsillitis'.
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