The unbiquitous implement of discipline in Irish schools from age 7 was the strap.
no, not a belt strap, it was made of 4 layers of fine hard hide, 16” long, 3″wide and 1/2″ thick, narrowed down to a handle at one end. It was common for pennies to be sown into one or more of the layers of leather to add more heft.
liberally applied in doses of 6 at a time to hands and the back of the legs for all and any infringement, the damage a good strapping did would at best leave you with very stiff bruised hands for a day, but could and often did lasting physical damage.
my cousin Mary is a phychiatrist in Ireland, shes a busy sort. Statistically Ireland has an astonishingly high level of PTSD amongst older people who lived during the endemic State condoned violence and sexual abuse during DeValera Regime. She says the nearest analogue she can find is the sort of behaviour noted in Concentration camp survivors at the end of WWII. While it was bad enough in the 60’s, and quickly ended from the 70’s, the levels of abuse and coercion the population lived under were worse in the late 30’s to 50’s when Irelabd was very much a closed country with the a Church busily crushing the people to theirs and DeValerie will.
In 1922, Ireland was a comfortable and wealthy country, noted for its excellence in the sciences and arts. Dublin was one of the finest cities of Empire with a world leading reputation as a seat of learning.
within a generation, the Oirish-American gobshite and the church had dragged Ireland back into a post medieval squalor, where ignorance was inculcated by the church, while the State furiously deindustrialised the country into DeValeras dream of an agrarian idyll. They even had home radios made that could only receive Irish state controlled stations - you May even be old enough
@Gary Cooper to remember Devs little fireside homilies on RTE radio telling us how lucky we were to have Mother Church caring for our spiritual needs, and how free from worry having nothing made us.
Even a crude form of church supported eugenics was practiced. Us Irish from the old days are a strong and robust people, we had to be to survive. the Church only approved of breast feeding, bottle feeding was very much the devils work, mother couldn’t give enough milk? The child often simply starved to death.. Ditto sick babies, ‘it’s Gods will, we should let nature take its course’, so sick babies were simply not cared for - all done Under the watching eye of some nun. Under 5’s had a 20% attrition rate At one point...... on the death certificates, the cause of death was listed under the euphemism ‘failed to thrive’.
fallen women? Aka raped or abused young girls and women - Plenty of them, if you're family didn’t stick by you and get you out of the country to England ASAP, it was the Reform schools and Magdalene laundries for you. the babies, if they survived, they were either sold off to anyone with a Fiver outside the State, not a good looking baby they could sell? it ‘failed to thrive’.