Liveline With Joe Duffy - Mod Note in OP

Can't have been that poor so.

Why did your parents send you to an all-Irish school and you not having a word of it?

we still had the corporal punishment in school when i started, was gone by the time I finished. I was big and strong young, so no one laid a hand on me through out school. priests, teachers or pupils.

'i don't know how you go home at night Joe with all these stories'

the caller would rather not know what Joe does with all these stories he has in his head

I'd rather not know either.

This should be handled by a Nuremberg style inquest. Not some fat headed IDIOT who will slap the phone down at 3 then that dope Darcy to tell us about the new type of clay he likes to eat..

In my mother’s time in the 1950s they were taught exclusively in Irish in school. How you were treated in school definitely depended on your family’s status in society- or perceived status. My parents were treated ok as they were bright, reasonably well off and had articulate parents who would have gone ballistic if the kids were beaten.
I’m nearly 62 and very luckily never experienced anything like all of those on air today. The worst I ever experienced was being slapped one time when I nodded instead of answering yes. I was told only donkeys nod! I’ve never forgotten that. I was about 5 or 6. I’d never been slapped in my life before that.
Funnily enough I came across that teacher many years later when I found out my parents in law knew her and her husband. The husband was a lovely man from what I heard and she was an ex nun. Coldest person my husband ever met he said. My mother in law didn’t like her I think!

A new lay teacher came to our school she was young, goodlooking and wore lovely clothes and knee high boots. She'd get wolf whistles - when it was fashionable - when she'd walk down the town.

On her first day in our class she threw open a question to the class. The whole class knew the answer and eager to please the new teacher we all put up our hands and in unison repeated 'Oyster Oyster Oyster Oyster Oyster'

The new teacher nearly dived under the desk with fear I think. Thirty plus pupils yelling 'Oyster' at her must have scared the s*it outta her if she hadn't heard it before.Oysters are fish she told us. I'd never heard of Oysters then but I had heard of and eaten lobsters.

When she found out that we were saying 'I sister I sister I sister I sister' she forbid us from saying it anymore in her class. We were just to raise our hands in silence if we know the answer to a question. It was very hard to change the habit of a lifetime.

It didn't take long for her to learn the ropes so to speak for within a month of starting her teaching job she was dishing out slaps for anyone putting up their hand and saying 'Oyster Oyster Oyster'