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	CBS Concentration Camp Inmates Still Suffer from the ‘holy Terrors’ By Ryle Dwyer Irish Examiner December 5, 2009 http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/ryle-dwyer/cbs-concentration-camp-inmates-still-suffer-from-the-holy-terrors-107120.html ELSEWHERE in today’s paper (News Analysis, page 17) I have reviewed Michael Clemenger’s book Holy Terrors, dealing with life in the industrial school in Tralee in the late1950s and early 1960s. It evoked many memories for me, having grown up within a mile of the school. Did we know what was going on there? No. But we did have a fairly good idea and local protestations of total ignorance ring about as true as claims by religious superiors that they had no understanding of paedophile abuse. Michael Clemenger managed to secure a position of some trust at the school. He was sent into town to collect the morning paper. "As I carried out my chores in the town my mind was continually asking questions about the people I saw," he writes. "Did their children have to put up with being pawed and slobbered on by old men?""Yes, we did" is the answer. The overwhelming majority had first-hand experience of the brother in charge of the CBS primary school. He was there from the 1940s to the late 1960s. I’m not sure why he was called "Snakey Dan", but I always suspected it was because of the way he would snake his hand up the leg of your short pants. Like just about everybody else, I got stranded with him alone in his office and had him slobbering over me with his hand up the leg of my pants and asking why I did not come around to see him more often. I never had the guts to tell him it was because I felt decidedly uncomfortable with him slobbering over me and feeling my arse. In fairness, it should be stressed that, unlike the industrial school, our abuse was always short of genital fondling, as far as I ever heard. I was too young to understand fully the implications of his behaviour, but we knew it was odd and wrong. In secondary school we often joked about it among ourselves. We all witnessed, and many experienced, physical abuse in school. As a 12-year-old I had an excuse for a Christian Brother who used his fists, but he mercifully left the order at the end of the year. By then I had had a real insight into what we heard was happening in the industrial school. Most of the Christian Brothers that we had were good, decent men, but a few rotten apples spoiled their barrel. If there was a serious complaint against a Christian Brother in a regular day school, the offender was often banished to one of the industrial schools. The parents of the children there had little influence and almost no contact with the school. Hence transfer there amounted to a virtual licence to abuse those children. We got to go home at 3.30 every day, but the boys in the Monastery, as the industrial school was called locally, had to live with the misfits for 24 hours a day. Michael Clemenger writes about being stripped and whipped with a bamboo by Bro Conor Lane. The boys were convinced he actually murdered Joseph Pyke in February 1958. Lane beat Pyke mercilessly in front of all the boys in the dining hall and burst a boil on the back of his neck with the blow from a leather strap. The boy died a few days later with blood poisoning. Joseph Pyke had no known relatives, so no one gave a damn. No postmortem, much less inquest, was ever held (Lane was formally charged with sexual abuse and physical assault in Tralee in 1999, but he died before he was ever brought to trial.) One of the girls who testified against Fr Brendan Smyth said he used to visit her at the orphanage in Belfast and a nun used to deliver her to a room where Smyth would lock himself with the little girl. After one such meeting the girl complained to the nun that Smyth had soiled her dress ala Monica Lewinsky. The nun belted the child over the head with keys for saying such a thing. Nobody should make the mistake of thinking that nun’s behaviour was indicative of some kind of innocence, any more than anyone can excuse moving problem Christian Brothers to industrial schools, or quietly shifting paedophile priests to other parishes. Such behaviour wasn’t innocence; it was criminal stupidity. Some of the boys in the Monastery in Tralee ran away, but they were returned to what was a concentration camp, even after telling gardai what was happening there. The boys also complained to the school’s chaplain, but they thought he only told the Brothers involved. Clemenger suspected the chaplain took a vicarious delight in telling him that he could never be a priest because he was "a bastard." A child born out of wedlock could not enter the priesthood in this country. Even though Mary and Joseph were married, Joseph was not the father of Jesus. So according to the Irish hierarchy, Jesus would not have been eligible to become a Catholic priest in Ireland. Just how hypocritical, sanctimonious and stupidly arrogant were our hierarchy? They had the cheek to call themselves Christians. This week the Archbishop of Cashel promptly apologised to the Revenue Commissioners after Fr Tadgh O’Donovan referred to them as "biggest shower of bastards on the planet." In the week that was in it, my initial reaction was that the archbishop knew that epithet was already pre-empted by the hierarchy . Bastard, of course, is pejorative term. So-called bastards are totally innocent, but no honest person with any intelligence could say that our Catholic hierarchy has been innocent in the past half-century. After surviving the industrial school, Michael Clemenger had to survive on the outside, largely unprepared for the world. It was the ultimate indictment of the Christian Brothers that – as an order supposedly dedicated to teaching – they not only sexually and physically abused the most vulnerable children committed to their care, but they did not even educate them properly. SURELY the final indignity was their conduct at the Redress Board. The Christian Brothers and the religious generally compounded their earlier heinous conduct by putting those who sought to tell their stories at the Redress Board through a "savage process of degradation." "The interviews caused a great deal more pain that only compounded the victim’s sense of utter betrayal," Clemenger writes. One of those who went through the process told him opposing barristers would eat him alive. His own barrister prepared him by going through the kind of hostile questioning he could expect. The barrister advised him to settle without going before the board. Fearing the whole thing would be too upsetting for him, his wife Mary also urged him to settle. "So with some reluctance" he forewent his figurative day in court, but he has told his story now in his book. Anyone who doubts the wisdom of his wife’s advice has only to remember Michael O’Brien’s anguish earlier this year when he complained on RTE’s Questions and Answers about the hell he was put through at the Redress Board. Ironically, Noel Dempsey, the minister who sat through the outburst that night in respectful silence, formally launched Holy Terrors last Saturday. "It should be compulsory reading for a lot of us," he said. This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, December 05, 2009
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