There were more immediate personal issues at play too. At school my father and uncle witnessed and experienced terrible brutality. The local secondary school was run by priests, among them a notorious brute, Father Davy O’Connor. Under any normal state of affairs he would have been jailed but was instead treated with fawning respect by the cowed townspeople. It says much for the place that even a Catholic priest, writing in the still conservative early 1970s, described St Michael’s College as a place with ‘an unenviable reputation for strict discipline’.
When my father remembered his worst story of Davy O’Connor his mouth tightened. He carried the shame of it like a hump on his back. I heard it, how many times? It was as if by telling he might talk away the pain. But he could not. Even in his last years, the memory of what happened in that classroom burned within him. O’Connor screamed and beat; he used his fists and his boots and a leather strap. My father said that one of his favourite punishments was to take a boy and place his head on the windowsill, facing out towards the fields. He would then lower the window so that the boy’s head was jammed outside. With his victim trapped O’Connor would then pull the boy’s trousers down and thrash him on the backside.
So a boy like Éamonn would stand there facing the trees, hearing the noise of birds and the rush of the river only a field away, and be trapped as the leather slashed at his body, the class trapped too by the shame of it, the sheer terror that any wrong move or word could lead them to the same place.
John B told of how O’Connor had once asked boys during English class to recite any poems they knew. My uncle was already writing his own poems, and he stood and recited from memory a poem called ‘The Street’:
I love the flags that pave the walk
I love the mud between
The funny figures drawn in chalk.
When he had finished Father O’Connor asked him who had written the poem. John B replied that it was his own work. The priest immediately lashed out, knocking him to the floor. Another boy who tried to intervene was also knocked over. O’Connor proceeded to punch and kick my uncle before throwing him out of the class. On that day John B vowed he would be a writer and that no man would shut him up again.
Such incidents were not anachronistic. They reflected the dominant reality of the time. My father and my uncle were comparatively fortunate. They were not inmates of one of the Church-run industrial schools where children were not only beaten but raped as well.
It was in matters of sex that the Church really got to work and screwed up the minds of several generations. The physical and mental damage inflicted on children in the borstals has been well publicised. But the rest of the population was subjected to perverted brainwashing. Contemplate this extract from a booklet produced by the Catholic Truth Society, propagandists for the hierarchy:
…the pleasure of sex is secondary, a means to an end and to make it an end in itself, or deliberately do this is a mortal sin…Let a tiger once taste blood and it becomes mad for more…the poor victim is swept off his feet by passion, and decides, for the time being at any rate that nothing matters except this violent spasm of pleasure…Happier a thousand times is the beggar shivering in his rags at the street corner if his heart be pure, than the millionaire rolling by in his car if he be impure…the boy and girl have to avoid whatever of its very nature is morally certain to excite sexual pleasure. That is why they are warned about late hours; about prolonged signs of their God-given affection which cheapen so easily, about wandering off alone to certain places where they are morally certain to succumb to temptation.
The writer, in all likelihood a priest, went on to chastise girls who wore revealing clothing:
So girls of all sorts, the short and the stocky, the fat and the scraggy, the pigeon-chested and the knock-kneed, insist on exposing their regrettable physical misfortunes to the ironic gaze of the easily amused world around them…
His final blow is directed at morally suspect mothers. It is profoundly revealing of that twisted sensibility which governed the moral order in Ireland:
How any mother can allow her small daughter to romp and play with her brothers without knickers on is incomprehensible and quite disgraceful.
My father never talked about sex. That was not unusual for his Irish generation. Sex was the deed of darkness. But Éamonn was a romantic. He dreamed of loving the Protestant parson’s daughter. He went into the woods and wrote poems to her. But he kept these to himself. In Listowel, as in the rest of Ireland, love was something schoolboys sniggered about.
And God help the boy whom Father Davy O’Connor or one of his type found walking with a girl. These princes of the Church roamed the lanes with blackthorn sticks in hand ready to beat any would-be lovers. I think of them when I hear the snivelling apologists for our Catholic past. Sure it wasn’t that bad at all.
It was only a few years ago that I learned my father had suffered from a bad stammer when he was a boy. Fear had been the cause. Fear of Father Davy O’Connor. For my father who dreamed of being an actor the stammer might have been an impossible hurdle. But through force of will he overcame it. On his own in the woods or upstairs in Church Street he read the poems of Keats and Shelley over and over, training his voice until it was strong enough to leave the town and face the harsh judges of the Abbey School of Acting in Dublin. And when they heard him and accepted him it must have seemed to Éamonn that he could conquer the world.
When he came back to Listowel as an adult, my father was one of Ireland’s most successful actors. Walking down the main street with him, hand in hand, could take an hour or more. People wanted to stop and talk with him. Some of them were tourists who recognised him from television or the stage. But mostly the people we chatted with were locals. They called him ‘The Joker’ or ‘Ned’, two nicknames from his childhood. For all the tension that existed between him and his mother, he felt proud on those streets and I remember most of all the firm, confident grip of his hand. In those days he was going places.
The next planet was inhabited by a tippler. This was a very short visit but it plunged the little prince into deep dejection.
‘What are you doing there?’ he said to the tippler, whom he found settled down in silence before a collection of empty bottles and also a collection of full bottles.
‘I am drinking,’ replied the tippler, with a lugubrious air.
‘Why are you drinking?’ demanded the little prince.
‘So that I may forget,’ replied the tippler.
‘Forget what?’ inquired the little prince, who already was sorry for him.
‘Forget that I am ashamed’‘ the tippler confessed, hanging his head.
‘Ashamed of what?’ insisted the little prince, who wanted to help him.
‘Ashamed of drinking!’
The tippler brought his speech to an end, and shut himself up in an impregnable silence. And the little prince went away, puzzled.
‘The grown ups are certainly very, very odd;’ he said to himself, as he continued on his journey.
The Little Prince, ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
One day we were crossing the bridge over the River Feale. My father stopped in the middle. ‘Do you see