MUSIC Rising from the Ashes of Abuse

By Frank O'Shea
Eureka Street
October 23, 2012

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=33783

the story of one such boy recently. Danny Ellis was an inner city kid, his father in America for work, his young mother not able or not willing to look after him and his four younger siblings. These were taken away to be cared for by nuns and finally his mother took Danny to Artane, telling him she had to go to hospital and would come back for him at Christmas. He never saw her again.

At the time, the school had some 800 boys in close dormitory and refectory quarters. It was no place for the timid or the weak. Discipline was primitive and based around liberal use of the strap, something that was widely known in society if only because it was common in all schools, if not always as enthusiastically.

Come the first Christmas, eight-year-old Danny opts not to go to a film in the city with the others, deciding instead to wait at the gate for his mother. He is seen by an old brother, long retired and given to praying aloud in the chapel, to the amusement of the boys. He knows Danny's situation and tries to break it gently to him.

He takes him in from the cold, gives him something to eat and drink. 'In one sacred moment that I would spend most of my early life fighting against, that saintly man carried me across the divide between my infinite soul and my tiny, tortured identity,' he writes.

In time, Danny was saved by being given the chance to join the famous Artane Boys Band, where he played the trombone. In their stylish red and blue uniforms and short flowing cloaks, they were a central part of big football and hurling games of my youth. They played before the game and at half time, leading the teams in a formal march, 60 or more kids blowing brass and beating drums, followed by brawny hyped-up athletes.

The thousands in the stands were unaware of the harshness that these boys were faced with every day.

Some of the brothers probably knew older brothers who had known Edmund Rice himself. The Catholic educationalist who founded the Christian Brothers was strongly against corporal punishment; two generations separate a saint from followers who brought a reputation for cruelty everywhere they went.

The Ryan Report of 2009 opened the eyes of the country and the world to a still more upsetting form of cruelty; criminal behaviour that has forever trailed anyone associated with Artane. Even the brother who ran the band and was synonymous with it around the world was accused of sexual abuse.

Now in his 60s, Danny Ellis has made his livelihood out of the music he learned in Artane. He says that though there were always whisperings, nods and winks about sexual abuse, 'I never came across it while I was there.'

There is no upside to the stories of abuse in church-run institutions. There is only deep shame and anger. But I think of that old Christian Brother, nearing his dotage, trying to help a lost eight-year old child in the way that Edmund Rice would have done or De La Salle or Marcellin Champagnat.

And I know from my own experiences that there were many more of him than of the other kind.