Frank Galligan had a long career with the BBC. Back in the 1990s he presented the main Radio Ulster afternoon show, Frankly Anne Marie, with Anne Marie McAleese. It was hugely popular back in the day.
He was also a mainstay at Radio Foyle for years. When we sat beside each other doing Honours English in St Eunan’s College in Letterkenny back in the early ′70s, I doubt if either of us would have guessed we would spend most of our lives working in the media north of the border.
But that’s a side issue.
For more than a quarter of century Frank has written a weekly column in the Donegal Democrat, and recently he reprinted parts of a story published some years back which, he said, had got by far the most reaction during those 25 years.
It was about his days at Eunan’s.
He wrote: “I recall, as a 12-year-old in first year, giddy with anticipation the night before our Christmas holiday, getting my bits and pieces together in cubicle No 12, when the voice boomed: ‘Any boy out of his bed will stay exactly where he is.’ Fine, I thought, I’m not doing anything wrong, so I stayed on my feet. ‘Ah, Galligan, one honest boy,’ was the response. I pleaded that I had not been up to any devilment but to no avail. I was told that ‘no exceptions can be made’ and was asked to bend over in my pyjamas and received my first strapping.”
Just a few paragraphs later he added the following: “Those Christmas holidays were to end in tragedy with the death of my brother Tom in Carrigart on January 4 1967. Within a week, I was back in college and for the most part, the next few months are a blur except for the fact that I spent quite a while off sick – diagnosed with sinus and other ailments.
“In retrospect, probably manifestations of grief – not helped by the following incident. When I returned to one particular class, I recall pleading with the teacher that I had been off and wasn’t up to speed with the answer to one particular question. It was déjà vu. ‘We can’t make exceptions, Galligan,' and the strap emerged again.”
There are 33 of us from that year on a WhatsApp group and Frank’s article stirred up a real hornet’s nest of debate about those days. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
But first let me now tell you about a Derry man who used to visit me regularly during my time as editor of the Derry Journal. I always found him a difficult man to deal with, temperamental in the extreme.
Anyway, as usual, one day we got into talking about his time as a pupil at the local Christian Brothers' and he started waxing lyrical about the great education, the discipline etc and observed that whilst he got “many’s a beating” from the Brothers, “it never did me any harm”.
Not half it didn’t.
Obviously, self-awareness was not his strong suit in that it was abundantly clear something in his childhood had deeply disturbed him. My amateur inner psychologist understood that much from the outset.
Indeed, years later I was to meet his son and he told how his father, in his declining years, frequently talked about the heavy-duty corporal punishment he received in childhood. It seemed to play on his mind.
The son too believed that it effected – and affected - his father, and his children, big time.
Believe me when I say I have zero doubts about that.
And that’s the thing: what happens to us in childhood has a massive impact on what shapes us as adults. As the Jesuits used to say, give us the child and we’ll give you the man.
I have gone back over our WhatsApp group and I noted references to ‘brutality’, ‘sadism’, ‘lack of compassion’, ‘lack of empathy’, ‘fear of violence’.
That was the prevailing atmosphere in which we attended school and were expected to study. Hitler’s SS could have learned a few lessons there.
The outcome of all this, as you can probably guess, was pretty predictable. I cannot speak definitively for all 33 in our group but I know many are no longer practising Catholics. Most are virulently anti-clerical.
And since those school days, respect for the Church and its institutions has declined massively. It could even be argued the influence of the Church in Irish society is such these days that if the clergy say they are opposed to something, the people – particularly in the Republic – opt to go the opposite way.
If you need an example, look no further than the vote in regard to same-sex marriage.
It’s to be regretted that the work of decent priests, and there were quite a few, has been obscured, buried underneath the deluge of tales upon tales of sexual and physical abuse and lives destroyed.
In all honesty, I don’t believe there’s any coming back from that.