Suffer little chiLdren

I was in Dublin visiting as a ten year old Redneck up in the big smoke. Although my cousins never ever made me feel out of place.
Walking along the street we passed a shop selling Religious Garments. Clothes for Nuns, Brothers, Priests, Canons, Bishops. In short, the clergy.
All Catholic stuff and there, and there, RIGHT THERE in the window was a beautiful bespoke wooden display case with leather straps hanging from brass nails, each one lovingly crafted and sewn and smoothed and stitched by hand to perfection. The handles were so comfortable looking. True.

(OK you tell yourself a few jokes here. Everyone I tell this too has some smart comments to make about bondage or whatever.)

But to me, these were the actual devices that our teachers punished me and my classmates with. One of them was a centimetre thick and four inches wide with three separate fingers of leather extending beyond the top.
One of our teachers just used a thick drum stick which he secreted up his sleeve, shooting it out with rehearsed precision to only strike the tips of the fingers. If you had just come in from a snowball fight with cold blue/red hands you would really feel that sting for an hour. Bruises too. Tears. Or swallowed grief. Nobody to protect you.
The Pink Floyd song 'Another Brick In The Wall' would play on the radio when we were twelve. “Hey teacher! Leave those kids alone.. “ it kind of felt like a change was in the air. 1979.
1982 minister John Boland made it a prohibited sport to kick the shit out of children in the classroom. I remember it announced on the news. I remember it very well.

Imagine, if you have kids and they came home from school and told you that a Christian Brother had hit them six times on each hand , drawing a leather strap back over their shoulder , hefting into it ,to strike your child with full adult force on each tiny hand. For talking in class. Or beaten around the head neck and body down into the ground with their fist?

If I could go back in time to stand in the classrooms of my childhood to witness, as a grown man, what those psychopaths did to me and my friends, I'd be in prison still for the response I'd have.

Not all teachers but always men. Although just last week I was bringing out groceries for an Irish woman here in Australia and she actually cried from grief and rage as she spoke of abuse she and her little friends suffered under the Nuns. In a car park to a stranger on the other side of the world forty years later.

I remember one year it was in September and we had just come back from our long three month summer holidays. A Christian Brother called Brother Clavin started taking out his sexual frustration on one of his favourite whipping boys. A country lad. What Brother Clavin hadn't noticed was that Séan had been working on the farm all of that time and between throwing in bales and shearing sheep and throwing in the Turf and he had become fair swole.
Clavin starting swinging at Séan who quietly, quickly and gently upended him and slammed him onto the ground. Silence. Never happened again.
I still miss Sinéad.