St Patrick�s Day 1984 is one of those totally unforgettable days with every detail etched deep onto my memory. At about this time every year I find myself mulling over the details again but this year, with St Patrick�s Day falling so close to the weekend, it seems about time that I shared an account of a very memorable holiday. Why does proximity to the weekend prompt this account? Well, St Patrick�s Day 1984 was on a Saturday and that accident of the calendar was what brought about some very unhappy consequences for myself and my best friend, Cormac.

I spent a few years of my schooling at an Irish boarding school. It was a pretty primitive place with large dormitories and terrible food. In the winter it could be incredibly cold and the fact that we only had hot water once a week didn�t help much. But somehow a combination of schoolboy camaraderie, football (the Gaelic variety as well as rugby), and our ignorance of anything better meant that it was a happy enough environment. It was perhaps all the happier for the fact that some two years earlier the Irish Government had banned the use of corporal punishment in schools and so the infamous strap had disappeared from daily life.

In 1984 I was 17 years old and trying, without any great enthusiasm, to put a bit of extra effort into working towards the Leaving Certificate examinations that June which would be my passport out of school and into the world of adulthood. So the national holiday on the 17th March was something to be enjoyed as it provided a welcome break on the long and grinding haul between the Christmas and Easter holidays. With St Paddy�s day falling on the Saturday there was a bank-holiday on the Monday so we could look forward to a long weekend away from school, a chance to eat huge amounts of decent food and perhaps visit some flea-pit cinema or even get to while away an evening at some youth-club disco.

But three days off wasn�t long enough to justify me travelling to my own family home and so I headed off with Cormac O�Connor to his place. I had stayed with the O�Connors a few times before and really liked the whole family and felt very welcome in their home. They farmed about one hundred and fifty acres with beef and dairy cattle. It doesn�t sound all that big a farm now but back then, as I remember it, they were among the wealthier farmers of their county.

It�s true that the O�Connor parents were pretty strict but that was how things were back then and I certainly didn�t know anyone who could boast of having parents who were relaxed and liberal and didn�t use some kind of corporal punishment when their offspring stepped out of line. But that didn�t really effect daily life too much. We knew the rules and the limits and we never actually felt the need to test them too much. But the unspoken threat was always there and on St Paddy�s day 1984 the threat became something very real.

So how did the fact that St Paddy�s Day was a Saturday bring about our downfall?

Well it all began early enough that morning when Cormac and I were still lying in bed and quietly chatting about our plans for the day and the rest of the weekend. It might seem strange now in a world of greater affluence and bigger houses but when I stayed at the O�Connor�s Cormac and I would have to share his bed. It was just a matter of practicality, it was either share or one of us would have had to sleep on the floor. It was a bit weird but being boarders at school it wasn�t as if we had a huge amount of privacy most of the time and anyway, there wasn�t much about each other that we hadn�t shared. So there we were, lying under the blankets and working through our plans.

I�m afraid that I was the one who first broached the subject of Mass. Now you have to remember that Ireland in the 1980s was still a very Catholic country and the vast majority of people would go to Mass every Sunday, and being at a boarding school run by priests we got to do more than our fair share of church-going. The thing was that St Paddy�s day was itself a holy day of obligation meaning that we would have to go to Mass that morning as well as turning out of bed again the next day for Sunday Mass. Now I wasn�t exactly anti-religion or anything but two days in a row on what was a holiday weekend felt a bit oppressive and so I said something like, �shame we have to go to Mass�.

And Cormac obviously agreed because his response was to suggest that maybe we didn�t have to. And so our little plan was hatched. It was in fact usual for us two older boys to go to church later than the rest of Cormac�s family. Mister O�Connor preferred to get to the 8.30 Mass which was quiet and free of choirs and music. Cormac and I would join the younger crowd of the parish at the midday Mass when the folk-group with their guitars and more modern songs would lead the singing. So it was a really simple matter for us to wave goodbye to the rest of the O�Connors after breakfast and set off as if we were going to do our holy duty in honour of Ireland�s patron saint.

We went down into the town, passed the church, and then took a stroll along the river until an hour had passed and we could safely set off back towards what would be good old-style family lunch. In the house there were the usual pleasantries, �did you see anyone you know?�, �was it a good Mass?, �what priest did you have?�. Now we were not so stupid as to have not planned for questions like these. In fact we had even looked up a missal and checked the readings for the day, and we had agreed that it was safe to say that the young curate had celebrated the Mass because it was well-known that the old parish priest couldn�t stand the folk group.

But one of the hazards of boarding school life is that sometimes you miss out on details of life back at home. Our confident answer about the young curate was met with incredulity and then Mister O�Connor launched into a series of supplementary questions that culminated in his declaration that perhaps we were not aware of the fact that the young curate we had known for the previous two years had moved to another parish and his replacement was a priest who was nearly as old as the parish priest. In the confusion it became pretty clear that we couldn�t keep our story straight and soon enough we had to admit that we had skipped that morning�s Mass.

Now you can take it that Cormac�s father reacted to this discovery by losing his temper in a fairly spectacular way. I doubt that he would have been less furious if he had found out that his son was smoking pot and getting every second girl in the county pregnant. Missing Mass and lying about it was somewhere at the very top of his list of offences that could not be dismissed. He ended his rant by telling the two of us to get straight up to Cormac�s room and wait for him while he went out to cut some sallys.

I can�t remember if Cormac and I said anything to each other as we waited for his dad to come up with the dreaded sally rods. I had never experienced a thrashing with one of these myself but I knew that a thrashing with a freshly cut sally rod was the standard form of punishment for serious offences among the O�Connor children. Cormac had once pointed out the large cluster of willows growing in a damp part of one of the fields and told me about the lethal impact that one of those rods could have on a boy�s backside. Well I reckoned that there was probably no question that I would be getting to experience the pain for myself. If there was one thing that I had always appreciated about Cormac�s parents it was the fact that they had always treated me as a member of their own family whenever I had visited over the previous couple of years, and I suspected that Cormac�s dad was unlikely to spare me from punishment just because I wasn�t his son.

Sure enough when Mister O�Connor came into the bedroom he was carrying two sally rods, each about a yard in length, and he came straight out and told us that we were both about to get a �right royal hiding�. Cormac was going to be first and his dad told him to get his trousers off and bend over. I certainly hadn�t imagined that we would be thrashed without the protection of our pants but given the mood that Mister O�Connor was in I wasn�t going to dare an attempt at negotiation. Cormac dropped his trousers and underpants down to his ankles and then bent right over and touched his toes. He wasn�t arguing with his dad either and I watched in horror as the sally was yanked into the air and then whacked down over my friend�s bottom. It looked nasty enough but it wasn�t until about the fourth or fifth stroke that Cormac began to show evidence of real pain. The strokes continued to fall and soon enough Cormac was begging, �please Daddy, please stop. I promise I�ll never do it again�.

Well Cormac and I were both big enough for our age and it was pretty frightening to stand there and watch as the rod lashed into my friend�s skin and to see a guy who I knew could take a lot of pain on the football pitch being reduced to begging and sobbing. My parents were strict enough too and I had felt the wooden spoon plenty of times as a younger child before they decided that a length of garden cane was more appropriate for my age but I knew that nothing I had ever experienced was going to be close to the level of suffering that I was about to endure. Cormac�s thrashing seemed to go on for ages but looking back I guess that it was only a matter of a minute or so. Mister O�Connor didn�t pause between strokes and when he eventually stopped beating his son I realised that I had been sub-consciously counting each whack of the rod and that Cormac had just taken seventeen nasty cuts of that rod. And cuts is a good word for what he had just been through because there actually was some blood showing through a couple of the welts on his bottom.

Cormac didn�t even try to pull his trousers back up but just went over and collapsed face down on his bed and sobbed into the bed-clothes. I didn�t try to resist or argue when Mister O�Connor discarded the rod he had used on Cormac, picked up the fresh rod, looked at me and told me to drop my own pants and get ready for the same. I gripped my legs just above my ankles and tried to will myself to take the punishment as best as I could.

Later on I would think back and be amazed at how comparatively well Cormac had taken his own thrashing. I only managed to get through the first two strokes before I began to gasp out and really struggle to hold my position as the pain built up. The sally is a really flexible and whippy rod and it seemed to really dig into my flesh. At some point I found myself involuntarily begging Mister O�Connor saying something like, �please Sir, please, no more please Sir� as if it was some kind of mantra to help me through the pain. Of course I knew that I was going to get exactly the same as Cormac and that Mister O�Connor was not going to be swayed by my pleadings. I was a total wreck when at last he finished with me and left me to hobble over and join Cormac on the bed. I was in agony and it obviously was pointless to try and hide the fact that I was crying for the first time in years from the pain of the punishment to which I had just submitted.

Before he left Mister O�Connor said, �Let that be an end to it. You can take yourselves to the six-o�clock Mass this evening but tomorrow you�ll be up to join the rest of us for the early Mass. I hope I�ll see you downstairs in a few minutes for lunch and we�ll see if we can�t manage to enjoy something of the great day�. With that he left us to our suffering.

We eventually made it downstairs and at first there was a bit of an awkward atmosphere as other members of the family obviously knew that we had been deservedly thrashed. But Cormac�s youngest sister soon had us all laughing with her enthusiasm about the afternoon parade in which she and the other local guides were set to take part. Cormac and I made it through lunch and pulled ourselves together enough to go into town with the rest of the family for the parade. For once it didn�t rain and soon enough we found ourselves caught up in all the fun. I certainly had a strong awareness of the pain in my backside but it was dull enough now for me to ignore most of the time.

But that night both of us opted to sleep without pyjama bottoms. Not because we were concerned about the discomfort of cloth rubbing against our well-thrashed bottoms. It just made it easier for us to gently run our hands over each other and feel the welts and that bit of warmth that still radiated from the bruising. It wasn�t the first time that we had explored each other but that night we found a pleasant way to take our minds off the pain as we stroked each other to climax and fell asleep wrapped up in each other�s arms. I guess that something about the experience of being beaten with the sally rods had bonded us as blood-brothers. It was the most painful and miserable St Paddy�s day holiday I ever had, and also the most pleasurable. Strange, isn�t it, how things can get mixed up like that?

� Mike Ward 2006

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