Niall says he would never have sent his children to a school like the one he attended
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Niall was sent to a Catholic school run by clergy who seemed to enjoy being brutal and abusive.
His experiences left him with a lasting aversion to religion and religious education.
Niall grew up in the 1960s in a staunchly Catholic family. He and his brother attended a secondary school run by the Christian Brothers.
He describes a harsh and brutal regime, with several teachers who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain on the boys. Beatings, with whatever implements came to hand, were commonplace.
Niall says that he and his brother were good looking boys who were clearly well looked-after, but they were also shy and naive. The headteacher, Brother Jones, began paying a lot of attention to Niall, sometimes parading him around the playground and stroking his hair, or challenging him to a game of football while the other boys watched and cheered.
Niall says he enjoyed the attention and was flattered by it. ‘If the headmaster gives you attention, there is kudos to it’ he says, but he adds that the teacher’s presence near him also made him feel uncomfortable.
One day, when Niall was in his early teens, Brother Jones called him into his office. ‘I had to stand outside and I didn’t know why’ he recalls. Then the headteacher called him in. He unbuttoned Niall’s blazer and shirt and tried to kiss him. Niall felt extremely uncomfortable and told Brother Jones he didn’t like it, and the man stopped.
However, Brother Jones continued to regularly call Niall to his office and carried out the same abuse over the following two years. Niall dreaded this happening, but he didn’t feel there was anything he could do about it.
Nor did he feel he could tell his parents or anyone at school, even though he realised it was an open secret among the boys that Brother Jones was an abuser. He says ‘they used to laugh and joke about it, because that’s the way it was then’.
Niall adds that he finds it hard to believe that other staff were not aware of this too, but most of them were not ‘nice people’. He comments that many of the Christian Brothers always smelt of nicotine and alcohol.
The abuse ended when Niall left the school.
Some years later, Niall and his brother realised they had had the same experience of abuse by Brother Jones, but he says they never really talked about the effect this had on their lives. Niall adds that he had pushed it to the back of his mind ‘to get away from it’ until that point. He feels that what happened to him was ‘relatively minor’ but could have been more serious.
A few years ago Niall contacted his old school to tell them what had happened to him and his brother, but received no response. He has tried to find out what happened to Brother Jones after he left the school but was unable to find any information.
Niall believes the abuse has affected his confidence and definitely affected his attitude to school and religion. ‘I didn’t enjoy my education. I’d never have let my children go to a Christian Brothers school’ he says.