Big Ideas and Pointy shoes

The local Christian Brothers school was launching it's 150th anniversary booklet this week. As I contemplated the invitation to attend I realised that I was still very angry with the Christian Brothers even 30 years after I'd left the school and I couldn't quite work out why.

Was it because the Head Brother called me into the office to "count the compasses" and then fondled my knee?

There were many stories told on the night of the launch about the Brothers' time in Drogheda and I remembered a couple of my own.

There was the time the GAA-mad Brother took me off the school team because I had kicked the ball the wrong way up the field. We had just the bare 15 players and there was no-one to come on as substitute in my place. In other words they were better off without me. That was the last game of GAA I played for a while.

I remembered some other incidents which are probably best forgotten. They concerned the Brothers' fondness for corporal punishment and the consequences for the poor unfortunates at the receiving end. On reflection it is the memory of the naked violence which sticks in my throat and still makes me angry. The dark side of the Christian Brothers experience which I witnessed and which shocked me to my core.

As I listened to the stories unfold I was reminded of my own parents' struggle to bring up 14 children and what a blessing it must have been for them to have the Brothers and Nuns - who did not turn children away for want of money - in the town in the days before free education came in in 1968.

I realised that I saw the Brothers through the prism of my own personal experience of their worst excesses whereas my parents would have seen the positive aspects of their family receiving an education. I came away from the night a little more reconciled with the demons of my past.

....One last story of mine on the Brothers concerned the sixth of my eleven brothers when he turned up for his first day at school in the mid 60's. The Head Brother, a powerful man with a Kojack haircut walked down the line of new boys and stopped in front of my brother. "Aaaahh Mr. Murray", he said to the diminutive boy. "Your brothers were here with their big ideas and their pointy shoes".