During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s order and discipline within the institution, rather than the emotional needs of the child, was the priority at Kilkenny's St Patrick's industrial school for boys under 10, the investigation committee of the Committee to Inquire into Child Abuse was told yesterday.
Sr Una O'Neill, superior general of the Religious Sisters of Charity, which managed St Patrick's until its closure in 1966, also agreed that boys there were beaten for bed wetting. Asked by Marcus Dowling, for former residents at St Patrick's, whether she considered such punishment for bed-wetting unacceptable, Sr O'Neill said "I think everybody nowadays would accept it as unacceptable and wrong."
Asked whether it was explicable by the norms of the time she said she couldn't comment.
She agreed it was very easy for boys to fall out of line at St Patrick's, coming there, as many did, from "heartbreaking" family situations, some "traumatised". She agreed they could have experienced the discipline at St Patrick's as harsh which, she said, is " different from saying it was harsh".
Similarly, when queried about allegations by former residents of excessive corporal punishment at St Patrick's, during the private hearing phase before the committee, she said Sisters there "never saw a child being badly hit or beaten". As to a specific allegation that a former resident saw another child being beaten "with an instrument" [ a hurley stick] Sr O'Neill said none of the sisters witnessed that either.
However, she accepted that it was what was in the memory of the man who made the allegation, but that the sisters had no memory of it. Slapping was the form of punishment used to discipline the children, she said, that and deprivation of rewards and privileges. She agreed there was no punishment book kept at St Patrick's, as required.
A letter dated November 11th 1944, to St Patrick's from the Department of Education, queried why so few children went home on leave.
In a reply, reasons ranged from illness to destitution, with 80 boys "illegitimate" who Sr O'Neill suggested, "were handed up by their poor mothers and presumably had no homes to go to".
