It Occurs To Me: The culture of violence and cruelty in religious homes

Last year, February 2025, I devoted this page to the remarkable if harrowing story of Jon McCourt, currently Chairman of the North-West Survivors Group.

His mother, from Dunree, near Buncrana, was pregnant with Annette, when a car collected Jon, Eddie and Andy and took them away to Termonbacca in Derry, run by the Sisters of Nazareth.

He was three years old and was sent to a particular section of the ‘home’, his brothers to a separate part. He would not see them for 10 years! One of his most vivid memories is having the soles of his feet whipped by a nun when he was four, as he had wet the bed.

Bedwetting was common because of the sheer terror…as Jon told me, “…the punishments were bad enough but the anticipation was just as bad.” Later, he was battered on the head with a wooden towel holder and suffered a subdural haematoma.

It was a culture of violence and many of the nuns seemed to relish cruelty. I’ve been in touch with Jon of late and he sourced the photograph below from The Derry Journal from August 1947.

The caption reads: “These boys, ranging from five to twelve years, will shortly leave St Joseph’s Home in Termonbacca, for Australia, under an emigration scheme which has the approval of the Catholic Hierarchy. In the land of their adoption most of the boys will be placed under the care of the Irish Christian Brothers, and the youngest ones will continue under the care of Nazareth Sisters.”

Note the word ‘care’ is used twice…God help the wee mites! Their suffering in Australia has been well documented and in 2009, I vividly recall John Meehan telling the Derry Journal: “I came out of a normal home in Donegal and entered Termonbacca at eight years-old.”

He still struggles with the sickening memory of an older boy attacking him and then callously paying him half a crown to keep quiet.

Fifty-two years later the image remains vivid for John, who spent almost six years in the Creggan home run by the Sisters of Nazareth.

“I told one nun what happened me but just two weeks later I got an unmerciful beating from another nun. I was up picking spuds as usual - because we were always taken out of school to do work for the nuns - and when I came back she beat me senseless with a square leg of a chair.

"I had a serious hearing problem in later life and went to see a specialist seven years ago. He asked me if my parents were rough on me. He said the bones in my ear were fused together and that it went back to childhood, around the 10 to 12 years mark. I knew right away when it had happened.”

The cruelty suffered by the youngster was not confined to sexual and physical abuse.

After the death of his mother when he was just eight years-old, John’s uncle asked the Sisters of Nazareth to take him and his brother and sister into care. Shortly afterwards, the family was torn apart.

“My brother Danny, who was five years older than me, was sent to Australia and my sister Betty, who was two years older, was sent to the Bishop Street home for girls. I saw my sister once more, six years later, at our confirmation in the Long Tower church.

“I walked across the pews to see her but was put back into my seat by one of the nuns. I didn't see Betty again until five years ago. Danny was sent to a Christian Brothers home outside Perth and I didn't see him again until 1988. The story about the whole thing is really sad. I lost a whole childhood, a whole life with my family.”

As Jon’s research shows: From 1922 until the late 1960s hundreds of children were sent to Derry from mainly County Donegal but also from County Sligo.

According to the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry Report released in 2017, one hundred and sixty-three children were placed between Termonbacca (75) and Nazareth House (88) of children born before 31/12 1949 (presumably from the opening of the Children’s Homes) up to 31st December 1989. All of these placements purportedly coming from Donegal.

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Eamonn remembers

Eamonn McCann recalls: “When I was growing up in the Bogside people talked in whispers about the suffering of the ‘home boys’—the ‘orphans’ held in St Joseph’s Home, Termonbacca, overlooking the Brandywell—and of the savagery being meted out to them day in and day out by the Christian Brothers. I remember a decade of the rosary being offered up in our house in Rossville Street for God ‘to take pity on the home boys’.”

This is one of many ‘survivors’ chronicled by Eamonn: “At two years of age I was transferred from Fahan to St Joseph’s, Termonbacca, Derry, and put in the baby section. At six years of age I was transferred to Termonbacca proper, where the ages ranged from six to 16. There were 72 boys there. Life was deeply austere. The nun I remember most was Sister J. She had the most violent, vindictive streak.

"There were plastic tops on the tables with rubber rods along the side which she would extract to come down on the children with if you stepped out of line. You would be beaten on the body, the face, the legs. Her second mode of attack was her fist. Her knuckles were always cut and scabbed and saturated with iodine from the beatings she handed out. She wore mittens in summer and winter. To hear the roars and screams of the orphans was terrifying.”

As regards Eamonn’s school experience, he recalls: “I attended St Columb’s from the mid-’50s to the early ’60s and, while there were good times, certainly, there also were days full of dread, when you walked to school knowing that at some point during classes you would likely be subjected to severe physical assault, and possibly to mild sexual assault.

"Physical assaults could be ‘provoked’ by a wide range of ‘offences’; mistakes in homework, giving a wrong answer, lateness, real or imagined rudeness, running, not running fast enough, looking untidy, neglecting to call a teacher ‘sir’, forgetting to close a door, closing a door too loudly.

"During six years at St Columb’s I was assaulted for all of these and other ‘reasons’, as were all of my contemporaries. ‘Assault’ here covers not only raps on the knuckles or slaps on the hand, but beatings with fists, sticks, straps, wooden instruments of one kind and another, and, on occasion, boots. I was beaten unconscious with his fists by a priest when I was around 13, for ‘rudeness’.

“Serious violence of this sort was by no means an everyday occurrence, but it was an everyday possibility. And sometimes, when a particular teacher was ‘on the rip’, for boys in his classes it could be taken as a near certainty. There were a number of teachers who regularly beat pupils for no reason at all, and who didn’t pretend a reason.

“One priest used regularly to pick somebody out, beat him with a strap on the hand and/or with his own hands on the head and face and then explain to the class that ‘that’s just to let yeez know…’ Of course, there isn’t or ought not to be, anything shocking in this. I’ve no reason to suppose St Columb’s was a more vicious institution than any other Catholic secondary school at the time. And I imagine the same goes for the sexual harassment we encountered.”

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Sausages for Tuesday!

Having been a boarder in St Eunan’s College, I was curious as to the experiences elsewhere, and when poet Brendan Kennelly introduced me to his brother Paddy in Listowel in the early 70’s, I was awestruck.

Paddy had written a controversial book in 1969 based on his experiences in St Brendan’s College, Killarney called Sausages for Tuesday, and I didn’t get my copy for another four years.

It mirrored my own experience and of my friends who had gone to St Columb’s in Derry…the awful food, watery potatoes, boiled beef and sausages forming a large part of the menu. You would have needed a chisel to break the crust of the ubiquitous beef pies.

Such a diet, in the words of one black-humoured professor in the college, tended to ‘promote alertness of mind and a lean muscularity’.

Paddy’s novel was strongly critical of the regime in the college where corporal punishment was the norm.

Fear was the common denominator… fear of school life, fear of society, fear of self, and of course, fear of ‘the Fathers’ – the teachers.

This scene of force-feeding from Paddy says it all: “‘I don’t feel like soup today, Father.’ ‘Well, you’ll have to feel like it, boss. Either you take the soup or leave the College to make way for a more healthy specimen.’ Christ! How could you take it? But, you would have to, because Fr Daly meant what he said ... You took your spoon and began drinking ... It did not taste too bad but the smell! ... Suddenly the guts in your stomach contracted and pushed the soup back up.

"Punishment for throwing up the force-fed soup for the hapless lad is a summons to the president’s office where he is treated to another bowl of ‘stinking soup,’ and informed that if he doesn’t take it, he can pack his bags and leave the college. If being force-fed is not enough to fear, there are beatings too, and initiation ceremonies."

In 1969, 23-year-old teacher and author Paddy Kennelly had to look over his shoulder at local Holy Joes, fellow teachers and the clergy. He soldiered on.

As John B Keane put it, ‘The book is bound to annoy some people and it will probably offend others, but then it is easy to offend these.’