Bring back the birch? No, please heed this cry from a broken heart
I can agree that punishment must fit the crime, but birching is not an acceptable remedy for the failure of our penal system.
Our political system has long encouraged the revolving prison door to save money. There were no votes to be gained from promoting an enlightened correctional code and effective sanctions.
Are we going to reintroduce fundamentalist Talibanism in Ireland? Has civilisation lost all meaning?
No amount of money could ever compensate for the horror of an innocent person birched.
Given the revelations in recent years, who would trust any of our pillars of society to administer judicial punishment beatings fairly?
What decent human being could even think of accepting such a job? How do you ‘unbirch’ an innocent person? Yes, it could happen again. Our sham republic — where cronyism brazenly masquerades as a meritocracy — is so riddled with corrupt authority and privilege that it would be guaranteed to happen again.
Yes, it did happen in living memory. Little children were deliberately, systematically and continuously leathered, slapped, clouted, sidelock-tugged, cheek-gouged, humiliated, forced to kneel to kiss the floor and psychologically tortured in most schools by trained adults.
I saw it myself. I suffered it myself. I got an education, but at what cost? I was vulnerable. I was marked with fear mentally for life in the burning hell of my own mind. It was unforgivable.
To add shame to that abuse, we were brainwashed to believe that suffering was good for us; that we had only ourselves to blame; that we deserved our beatings; that we should take it like a man.
Fifty years later, I still believe that travesty of the truth. It was branded into my very soul. It would make an angel scream. Sixty years after their defeat, the world still hunts down the Nazis, but in Ireland the shame of abusive violence still skulks under a veneer of respectability behind a sinister code of silence.
The scale of abuse was so massive, so appalling, so immoral, so diabolical, that the nation is still in deep denial. Everybody knows the truth, but nobody dares say it. I will not be surprised when the sanctimonious brigade rush in to canonise the criminal child-beaters. Their self-righteous arrogance entrenches my bitterness towards the enormity of the wrong that was done to us. That manifest injustice was one of the worst possible crimes against humanity.
Bertie Ahern apologised in the Dáil to the Irish people for the violence in our industrial schools. He did not go far enough.
For 50 years, I have cried out to hear an apology that we were beaten when we were only little children.
If this letter from a broken heart shocks people, I ask them to acknowledge what it was like for an entire generation who were mercilessly traumatised for their whole lives.
I don’t want to be insulted with financial compensation. I am not litigious by nature. I just want the truth to be told, and maybe a hug. Please don’t beat me for my honesty. I’m still only a very frightened little boy.
I call on all honest men and women everywhere to make 2009 our ‘Year of Truth’. Let us begin to believe in the fundamental goodness in every one of us. Let us reach out the hand of compassion to life’s casualties.
Let us help one another to dry up our tears. Let us share our determination to do all this out of the stubborn conviction that, yes, we are worth it.
Do not even think of legislating to birch another human being ever again under any circumstances. Evil can never be legalised.
Michael Mernagh
Raheens
Carrigaline
Co Cork
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