Ireland's World Beaters

I think I know how Ireland could win more gold medals at athletics. The thought struck me as I watched the wondrous performances of the Kenyan squad at Stuttgart, and recalled both the role played in Kenyan athletic success by the Irish Catholic clergy and the rather different role played at home by the Christian Brothers.

The golden age of Kenyan athletics dates back to the late '60s when a group of Patrician Brothers at St. Patrick's High School at Iten noted the immense potential of many of their pupils and resolved to give sport in general and athletics in particular a new and much higher priority.

Iten is 7,900 feet above sea-level, built on the Elgeyo Escarpment, 2,000 feet above the great Rift Valley. Its people undergo "altitude training" every time they run for a bus. They would also appear to be brilliant "natural" athletes. Very quickly after the Patricians made sport an important element in the curriculum, St. Patrick's pupils came to dominate competition in Kenya.

In 1972 St. Patrick's made it first mark on the international scene when Mike Boit finished third in the 800 metres and fourth in the 1,500 at Munich. His success spurred the enthusiasm of other St. Pat's pupils - although the effect of this was not apparent to the outside world on account of a series of boycotts which kept Kenya out of the Olympics for 12 years.

So it wasn't until the Seoul Games of 1988 that the rest of the world really took notice of the phenomenal achievements of St. Pat's. Peter Rono became the youngest man ever to lift the 1,500 metres title, and told reporters at the trackside that he owed it all to "Brother Colm". This turned out to be a reference to Colm O'Connell, who had travelled out to Iten from Tullow in the '70s, and who, as reporters quickly discovered, had also coached eight other members of the small Kenyan squad.

St. Pat's has since produced the likes of world steeplechase record-breaker Peter Koech, Ibrahim Hussein, winner of three Boston marathons, William Koskei, steeplechase gold medallist at Barcelona and many more. Colin Welland, who wrote "Chariots of Fire", is currently working on the screenplay of the movie.

Could not the Catholic clergy who control the education of so many thousands of young people at home not emulate the success of the Patricians in Kenya, I wondered?

Of course, Ireland isn't Kenya. Nobody here lives "at altitude". We seem, for whatever reason, to produce far fewer "natural" athletes. Traditions are different. Most importantly, the teaching Orders here appear to see their relationship with the young people in their care very differently.

But that, I thought, could be the key to it. Perhaps what we have to do is to use that different relationship in a creative way, so to reproduce the effect on athletic performances achieved by the Patricians in Kenya.

I have been writing recently (in the Sunday Tribune, mainly) about the treatment of young boys in their care by the Christian Brothers, here and in Australia. As a result, a goodly number of people have made contact with me, to tell me about their own experiences. We have discussed how things have changed, if they have.

I have spoken at length with people who recall the treatment in the Brow of the Hill school in Derry of orphan boys from the Termonbacca Home in the city. These children, who had nobody to stand up for them, were kept in a state of constant terror by the Brothers, bullied, threatened and viciously beaten.

It seems to be their very helplessness which attracted this treatment. I had a phone-call last week from a man whose voice shook with anger and distress as, more than 30 years later, he recalled the sight and sound of "home boys" being made into sodden bundles of trembling fear by the brutal men of the Christian Brothers order.

Nobody else who sat in the classrooms ever really got to know the home boys, not to talk to, not as individuals. They arrived together in the morning, walking over from the Home, sat together in silent fear, whispered only to one another, left in a group together to go back to the Home. The home was run by the Sisters of Nazareth.

Some of boys from the Brow of the Hill school were transported to Australia under the British Government's Child Migrant Scheme, and there passed into the hands of other, mainly Irish, Christian Brothers. What happened to them and to other Catholic children from both Britain and Ireland who had been transported under the same scheme was the subject of a "mini-series", The Leaving of Liverpool, shown on BBC television a few weeks ago. As the series accurately illustrated, they were subjected to sustained physical, sexual and mental torture.

Last month the Congregation of Christian Brothers of Western Australia placed a large display advert in the West Australian newspaper admitting to serious physical and sexual abuse of children by the Brothers, and apologising for it.

The apology in a far-off place does not, however, draw a line under the story, and certainly not here in Ireland. In a communication to the Tribune (August 15th), a spokesman for the Christian Brothers in Ireland, far from announcing that a representative selection of Brothers would do a Donnacha-style trek around the land clad in sackcloth and ashes and imploring the forgiveness of the Irish people, instead made a three-course meal of a morsel of a mistake in my original story. I'd said that the Brothers had run the Termonbacca Home. Correcting this mistake is all that the Christian Brothers have been concerned to do in relation to the story.

And hence my suggestion of a way Ireland could win more medals in men's athletics. I do not suggest a new training regime or the relocation of schools to the slopes of Slieve Snacht.

My simple proposal is that every Irish competitor in a major international race should be allocated a Christian Brother to run after him. Thousands of Irish men would run far faster than anybody, including themselves, thought possible if there were Christian Brothers pelting down the track behind them, swiping at the flimsy-clad bum in front with a rod or strap and shouting encouragement along the lines of "C'mere, ya bowya!."

This proposal would definitely work, particularly in view of the strong element of mutual interest providing all concerned with high motivation. I'm sure it conjures up a most pleasing spectacle in the Christian Brothers' corporate mind.

POT LUCK

The latest example of the Great Cannabis Hypocrisy concerns my friend and neighbour, Hugh Brady.

Hugh was left with no option but to resign both from Sinn Fein and from Derry City Council earlier this month after pleading guilty to possession of about £100 worth of cannabis. The cops had discovered it on him as he crossed the border with some of his mates in a minibus on July 15th, off on a fishing trip to Donegal.

Had no option, not because possessing a middling-sized stash of cannabis should be grounds for resignation from anything, but because the Republican Movement in Derry, in the course of trying to demonstrate its essential respectability to the most boring and reactionary elements in the Catholic community and at the same time to impose its self-appropriated "authority" on young working-class people, had for years taken an ignorant, oppressive and ridiculous high moral tone about "drug-abuse". It was Hugh's misfortune to have been appointed Sinn Fein spokesman in Derry on the issue.

Inevitably, some of his political opponents were quick into print with gloating comments. The Belfast-based Irish News weighed in with a pompous editorial. The story made the front page of the Derry Journal three times - July 16th, July 23rd and August 6th - twice as the splash.

At a personal level I feel for Hugh. At a political level I think Sinn Fein had it coming. But that's not the main thing needing said.

In the middle of it all, another city councillor, more prominent than Hugh, in conventional terms more "respectable", was arrested, charged and convicted of a much more serious drugs offence. On August 2nd, Pat Devine, leader of the SDLP on Derry Council and a former mayor of the city, pleaded guilty on August 2nd of driving a car while drunk with alcohol. This story rated five paragraphs on page five of the Journal (August 3rd).

Pat Devine didn't resign from his party or from the council. Nobody suggested that he ought to. None of his political opponents has tried to embarrass him by referring publicly to the matter. There have been no newspaper editorials admonishing him. As far as I know, nobody, until now, has made any public comment at all.

And no other comment is necessary, except to say that we live in a society with very sick priorities and that if individual Republicans want to be part of the cure rather than part of the disease it's about time they began to take stock of their own movement's political outlook.