So Pope Francis may be the advocate of change but he hasn’t a problem with people who hit their child the odd skelp. But never in the face, the Pope adds: that would be to take from the child’s dignity.
Before you could say “Be-have!”, the experts on child-rearing and human rights were on his case. One example: Mary McAleese has a very long letter in today’s Irish Times, where she reminds the Catholic Church’s main man that the Holy See has signed up to the Convention on the Rights of the Child which means no skelping, on the face or anywhere else.
It looks like she’s caught his Holiness dead to rights. But is there a prior question to be asked here, which is: “Does skelping help or does it harm?” When I was growing up, the occasional skelp was part of the hazards of being a child. I was skelped by my parents (my father used to keep a correctional rod propped, ironically, behind a picture of the Sacred Heart). I was skelpted at primary school by the Christian Brothers and the lay teachers. At St Columb’s College in Derry, I was skelped on a regular basis by the priest who oversaw discipline for everything from unpolished shoes to talking after lights-out. In class I was whacked about the face by the consecrated hands of a priest who was a lover of the Irish language and whose pedagogical approach consisted of bating into us a similar love. I was even beaten about the head by a Nobel Prize-winner-to-be, on the grounds that I’d been talking quietly when I should have been schtum.
Now the usual line that should follow here is this is that it never did me any harm. By and large I’d cautiously agree it didn’t. On the other hand, it certainly did me no good. Skelping teaches the child a lesson all right: that the way to get those smaller and/or weaker than you to do what you want, is skelp them. I’ve made many mistakes in life but, with one exception, I haven’t skelped my own children or, as a teacher, anyone else’s. I say that with no smugness, for there’ ssuch a thing as verbal violence and to my shame I was frequently guilty of that.
But to come back to the Pope and Mary. Doesn’t it depend on what you mean by giving someone a skelp? That could mean anything from a light tap on the back of the hand to an attack that brought the child to his/her knees. And do we really need to have something so obvious enshrined in a United Nations document? And finally, is Mary McAleese, a woman I have a real respect for, going to spend her post-Presidential days keeping a beady eye on the Catholic Church’s leader and informing the rest of us when she believes he hasn’t come up to her standards? I don’t know why I find that slightly condescending of Mary. But I do.
Great picture at the top. Im inclined to agree with Mary this time. There is never an excuse for smacking a child.
A great verb there Jude…..i skelp, you skelp, he skelps!! Great to hear it being used again .Even to utter the word in these PC times might get you a metaphorical skelp.Like yourself, a whole generation of us were brought up similarly but thankfully my own children did not have to deal with any of that .For us at school there was the bamboo cane or those specially made short ,stiff but flexible, leather slappers like short Roman[there you go again!} swords. They were made locally by the saddler who stitched saddles, school bags and shoes when he wasn’t churning out these taws of vengeance .Legend had it, that concealed within the two thick stitched layers of leather ,were secreted a neat row of old, fat , golden thrupenny bits ….this was just a few years before Decimalisation took over and put -paid to threepence pieces forever. One teacher even called his little leather tormentor, “Felix”, whose Latin moniker translated as “Happy” or somesuch. It was the obvious seat of this teacher’s happiness too because he obviously enjoyed his work. Six good whacks on the fingers of the left-hand [if you were a “righty”}, left you well warmed and throbbing but still able to write with your fountain pen.
Did it do us any good ? Well it certainly scared the bejabers out of us and up until Senior years it would probably have been bedlam in a class full of hormonally active boys without something to frighten us.We resented it , of course but I don’t believe it turned most of us into self-flagellants or sado-masochistic freaks….of course , there may be a few out there …ha ,ha…
Those were different times , of course ,and parents expected their children to be disciplined at school in some way….not to the point of crucifixion, mind , but they’d have said and believed that if you got the odd skelp, you probably deserved it.Most people would argue that the best teachers have the power to engage their pupils without the need for violent discipline anyway and that’s probably mostly true.I think , what the Pope means is that a little discipline can sometimes work depending on the situation, sometimes a cattle -prod might be needed!!!… but he has started shooting from the hip on several other occasions…I’m not sure how he stands on turning the other cheek either..
Jude, now we know why you’re such an oul curmudgeon!
You’ve had any brain or decency bate outta you.
I’m sure poor Neill will read your confession and finally understand what it is that makes you so carnaptious.
But I do understand your reference to verbal violence. It was probably my late mother’s only fault in life.
When having my head done in for what seemed an eternity on a number of times think to myself: ‘Mother, for God’s sake just hit me and get it over with’.
But then when my father would exact his brand of punishment I remembered why I preferred the verbal variety.
Your aversion to Blessed Mary’s nagging of Il Papa is understandable I’m sure, to most men.
In this automated age, any machine or equipment giving instructions is invariably using a female voice.
Don’t you just hate that self-righteous female voice you have to suffer when using the satnav in your car, or at the automated check-out machines in supermarkets.
‘Please start, check in your first item, have you used any bags, how many, how do you wish to pay, please take your change. put your items in your bag’.
Such nagging is bound to drive even the most patient customer round the bend.
It suddenly all becomes clear….: )
Wow !
So, it was actually our former President who penned that stern encyclical to The Unionist Times in which the Pope gets a strict rendition of the great Guy Mitchell hit back in the fifty shades of the Grey Fifties:
Feet up, pat him on the po po
Let’s hear him laugh ho ho.
The folksy Guy Mitchell incidentally is not to be confused with the grim Gay Mitchell, TD.
Sorry to hear of your own less than pleasant experiences as a minor, Esteemed Blogmeisters, and would that one could empathise more fulsomely (which is Dail-speak for ‘most sincerely’) but truth to tell, the Guy Mitchell song on the wireless was the nearest Perkie ever got to corporal punishment in Warbeck Towers.
This was in keeping with the child-rearing philosophy of the Dowager Dame: ‘the spoiled brat invariably grows up to be a spoiled Brit’. How true, how true. The Old Dear could well have been a spokesperson for the Spock Method, a spindoctor for the Doc.
‘Ain’t seen a babe like this before
He’s so good looking gonna have some more
Feet up, pat him on the po po
Let’s hear him laugh, ho ho’
The reason why it took so long for dime to rhyme for Perkie re. the authorship of the letter was that it was so modestly, so self-effacingly signed thus: ‘Mary Robinson, Roscommon’. All other letters in the letter bin, marked ‘Bosca Bruscair’, came with more detailed addresses, hinting at the postal codes to come.
Or did they? Not quite. There was a companion piece. Cometh the Butch Cassidy, as it were, cometh the Sundance Kid. He too signed himself, so modestly, so self-effacingly, with nothing between him and his county: Cork.
That was the Wow ! moment for Perkie.
Feet up, pat him on the po po
Let’s hear him laugh, ho ho.
The Sundance Kid in this case being , yes, none other than Jonh A. Murphy, Professor Emeritus of Reptilian Studies, Queen’s College, Cork, like. He hasn’t exited the premises, you know. He was expatiating on a different, though not, oddly enough, totally unrelated, topic: to wit, the sheer fatuousness of referring to the ‘British Aisles’ as anything other than the ‘British Aisles’.
‘He, he’s as tiny as a peanut
Yet I do declare
Some day he’ll look at me and say
‘How, how you doing down there?’
What next: Mary, Roscommon,. John A.,Cork?
Speaking of ‘British Aisles’ our former President, Modest Mary (not, not that one) is not unfamiliar by all accounts with the ‘British Aisles’ of the Church of Ireland (sic) Cathedral of Christchurch in Dublin 2.
Perhaps, with time on her smack-repellent hands she might genuflect her censorious way with censer in hand solemnly swinging to and fro on its chains into the odour of sanctity which suffuses the ‘British Aisles’ of the sister Church of Ireland (sic) Cathedral, St. Patrick’s.
Being in Dublin 2, these things tend to come in two. Cheek by jowl, even.
And there she may allow her beady-eyed, beatific vision to dwell lovingly on the flags of civilisation as they hang limply from their niches of honour in the time honoured military position known as ‘brewer’s droop’, ever since Sir Benjamin Guinness paid handsomely for the restoration of this ecclesiastic edifice in the 1800s.
The flags which used to be known as the ‘Union Jack’ but are now called, in these enlightened days of equal opportunity, as ‘Union Jills’. (Art thou listening, Pope Frances?).
There she may whisper the litany of faraway places with strange sounding names where these regimental flags once flew so modestly and so self-effacingly to announce the arrival of (gulp) civilisation; places like Amritsar, Kamaritio and So-ongo.
Who knows, Modest Mary might even chronicle the trimmings of this particular litany and list the names of the numberless children who would not behave themselves and were compelled (for their own good) to write out a hundred times: ‘Eggs, omelettes, old beans’.
Perchance, The Unionist Times, always happy to receive correspondence from Mary of Roscommon, might see fit to publish the list, even if runs to numberless pull-out supplements.
Feet up, pat him on the po po
Let’s hear her laugh, ho ho.
Wow !
Condescending? Really Jude, that is precious coming from you. What has you concerned by a former Irish President and canon law expert holding the Pope accountable as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child? You see, that UN thing is an internationally agreed standard, not President Mary’s personal one.
Her well reasoned rebuke is entirely appropriate and very welcome. Your dismissive rant seems more concerned with her right to comment than with the welfare of children. We should all be keeping a beady eye on those in power, and speaking out when they miss the mark.
Well thank you, B old bean. I agree with you completely that Mary Mc has a right to comment, just as I – and you – have a right to comment.It’s a free…OK, scrap that one, but you follow my drift. I wouldn’t call that blog a rant – you should see me when I rant, B. Think Green Hulk. Ironically, I agree with Mary and not Francis – but I get a bit twitchy when the UN is cited re giving a child a skelp. Can’t help it. I put it down to all those beatings my mother gave me…
Oops, for Mary Robinson, please read Mary McAleese in Par 7.
Mea culpa, Esteemed Blogmeister.
Truth to tell, one continues to find it increasingly more difficult to distinguish between one Mary and the other Mary.
Up to this, one found the following simple mnemonic sufficient to tell the difference: ‘One Mary merely jumped ship’ while ‘the other Mary jumped all the way into the Holy See’.
But not any more; time to update one’s Marian mnenomics.
It all brings Perkie’s inner spoiled brat back to the dim and d. days when he used to clandestinely read his bossy elder sister’s ‘School Friend’. (That would be Petronella Warbeck).
The first green shoots of Perkie’s proto-feminist could be traced to this risky biz of taking sneaky peeks at big sis’s comic behind her broad-haunched back..
His favourite story (by far) concerned The Four Marys: the same four who ‘were always there for each other’, long before the concept had even been conceived: Mary Simpson (Simpy); Mary Radleigh (Raddy); Mary Cotter (Cotty) and Mary Field (Fieldy).
It would be untrue to suggest Perkie encountered no difficulty in telling the 4 M’s apart -at first. But, gradually, as he began to surreptitiously bond beneath the bed clothes with the four jolly hockey sticks of St.Elmo’s the telling apart of them was rendered possible by their distinctive hairdos and by dint too of hair tint: from dark and curly to blonde, from plaits to bobbed.
Alas, in the case of the Two Marys, things have become more confusing even as they continue to re-invent themselves as they approach the status of Elder Statespersons and their political personae have increasingly merged to the point even unto morphdom.
The final straw that broke the c.’s back (and both have a thing about lands that are sandy as it seemingly gives the Marys an opportunity to veil their heads thereby ticking the correct cultural box, an option not available when it came to putting one over on Old Red Sox) was when one Mary opted to get her hair close-cropped in the style once popular among sheep-stealers on the one-way deportation special to Tasmania.
Goddess tempers etc.
Between the hairstyle of one and the bass baritone tones of the other, poor Perkie doesn’t quite know where to turn these days, except of course to a new,updated, more fit for purpose mnemonic. (Mnemo to self: must consult Agamemnon McMenamin’s Mnemonics, the lead read in this sub-genre).
Btw, Esteeemed Blogmeister: should future pastoral letters be published on the topic in q. in the letters column of The Unionist Times during the forthcoming Lenten season,, might this lead to their being issued eventually as a collection?
With, possibly, the title ‘Booing the Bishop of Rome’ ?
It might well be advisable to check out the copyright laws on this one.
Beir gach bua !
I do not pay any heed to Ms Mc Aleese, not since she went on record as saying she had never voted for Sinn Féin, you know, that Sinn Féin, the largest Nationalist party on the island.That and her cringe worthy reaction to Queen Elizabeth speaking a couple of lines in Irish. As for hitting children, I do not have any but I do have nephews and neices and I would not dream of smacking them. However, being a good uncle is not the same as being a good parent.When I was a schoolboy teachers used the `strap`, a stocky little belt type thing (just wondering, there must have been a company that mass produced these things, I would love to see their promotional pamphlet from back then, `The deluxe 1972 Strap Meister keeps those little devils in their place, guaranteed NOT to break the skin…`) I have no doubt some teachers enjoyed inflicting pain on children but I do not think Pope Francis is talking about that.
‘Some teachers enjoyed inflicting pain’.
One of my teachers used the four-foot bamboo with the crook on one end.
But the other end he split into four strands and then aimed, not at your hand, but at your fingertips, and if he missed a stroke that didn’t count as one of your six.
But if you were particularly deserving of his chastisement he aimed for your wrist.
That b’stard really knew how to enjoy himself!
I’m not against a parent hitting their child (obviously only if the child is misbehaving and nothing excessive). My mother hit me, usually a smack across the behind, whenever I misbehaved as a child and it never did me any harm at all, it taught me when something was right or wrong and today I would say my mother is the person I’m most close to, so no, I don’t have a dart board with a photo of my mother on it just because she smacked me as a youngster.
In fact I think verbal attacks from a parent is far more damaging to a child than a 3 second smack across the bum. If parents want to physically discipline their child but don’t due to fear of the law then more likely that parent will resort to verbal abuse, out of frustration and built up anger, etc
Our society is in danger of being a real nanny state. I understand Child Protection is extremely important and I support that but to step in and tell parents how to raise their children is ridiculous, especially when it comes to simple discipline. What next? will children no longer be allowed to climb trees in case they fall? Will it be law that children must wear a helmet and protective garb when going out to play with friends? After all, safety first! Its absolutely mad lol. I cant remember how many times I fell out of trees and fell and cut my knees and arms as a kid but its a very important that kids are allowed to experience that because life isn’t a nice cosy, soft drive, it has its serious rough and hard knocks and children learn that very early on.
I attended secondary school in the 70’s when corporal punishment was in full swing.Straps and even fists were used on occasion and there was also a tactic inherited from the Nazis of mass punishment (ie) if nobody owned up to a particular crime, the whole class got the works.Ironically the worst offenders were nearly all SDLP members and supporters to a man.Some even went on to hold elected office and regularly issue statements about “the evil men of violence.Did it have any effect on me? Damn right it did and is one reason of many that I would’nt give a Stoop a tenth voting preference !