RTE to screen 'Pray for Our Sinners' tonight

Sinead O'Shea film on story of Navan doctors, Mary and Paddy Randles

Filmmaker Sinéad O’Shea returned to her hometown of Navan to explore the impact of the Catholic church on the community in decades past in 'Pray For Our Sinners' which screens tonight (Wednesday) on RTE 1. Through first hand testimonies, the film reveals the plight of unmarried mothers; the horrors of mother and baby homes and the prevalence of violence against children in Catholic schools.

The film tells the story of Navan doctors, Paddy and Mary Randles, and their resistance to the cruelty of Irish religious orders on young people in the town.

Sinead O'Shea previously made ‘A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot’, about punishment shootings in the dissident republican community in Derry, and subsequently made 'Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story' with the late writer.

'Pray For Our Sinners' had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and won best documentary honours at the Hamptons Film Festival, before being screened in Boston’s GlobeDocs Film Festival and going on general release in selected cinemas in Ireland.

In May 1969, the now defunct British newspaper, the News of the World, created a storm in Navan when it highlighted allegations of beatings being meted out by De La Salle brothers to pupils at their school on Abbey Road. The two-page report on ‘Children Under the Lash’ was the first in a three-part series of reports on cruelty to children in Irish and British schools, and highlighted the concerns of local GP, the late Dr Paddy Randles about the beatings being experienced by young lads in the town. However, the issues of the News of the World covering the issue over the following weeks disappeared from outside shops in the town before proprietors opened up for their Sunday morning customers.

Dr Randles made the brave move of speaking out against what he saw going on in the town in the 1960s. As a local doctor, he had many mothers in Navan bringing their young sons to him, having suffered injuries at the hands of their religious teachers at the primary school.

The News of the World spoke to three of the young lads at the time, as well as Dr Randles. One young boy, who had broken an arm while swinging on a tree a year earlier, was hit on the same arm six to ten times a day by a rubber hosepipe.

When his mother went to the school to complain, she was told she was not a fit mother. The young boy’s parents eventually went to a solicitor in Dublin to get a summons issued, but nothing had transpired with that at the time or writing in 1969.

“It went to the school’s priest-manager, who said he did not know what was going on at the school,” she told the News of the World.”

Representatives of Reform, a society campaigning for abolition of corporal punishment in Irish schools, went to see the head brother, but he had nothing to say.

Dr Randles told the News of the World: “The boy’s father was so annoyed he was going around to see the brother,” he said. “I persuaded him not to go. I went and saw the head brother and asked if he was aware that a rubber hosepipe was being used. He asked me ‘Would you like to see what I use?’ and produced a strap and threw it on the table.”

Dr Randles, an expert on children with a keen interest in child psychology, described it as a form of sadism.

The News of the World reporter attempted to talk to one of the Brothers at the local showground, where he was refereeing a boys’ football match. He promise to talk afterwards, but cycled off and didn’t appear as arranged.

“Next day, we learned that another teaching brother from the school had visited the boy’s father at his place of work and tried to persuade him to have our report suppressed,” the newspaper writes.

He wasn’t the only one seeking to bury the reports. When they appeared on 4th May 1969 , the newspapers were cleared out of the shops in town before Mass-goers emerged from first Mass. Over the following Sundays, deliveries of the newspaper left rolled up outside newsagents in the town disappeared in the early mornings. A truck delivering newspapers to Navan was stopped at Kilcarn Bridge and the newspapers dumped in the river Boyne.

Drs Paddy and Mary Randles had contacted the newspaper in 1969, in an era when local and national newspapers in Ireland were much more conservative and slow to rock the establishment, as in evidenced in the Meath Chronicle reporting of the situation at the time.

A small story on the front page of the Chronicle on 10th May 1969 was headlined ‘De La Salle Brothers’ Work Appreciated’ and read as follows:

“It was unanimously resolved at a meeting of Navan De La Salle Past Pupils’ Union on Tuesday night (1) that we fully appreciate the work of the De La Salle Brothers for the past 52 years in Navan; (2) we reassure them of our continue loyalty and our confidence in their work for the boys of Navan, both inside and outside the school.”

The issue became controversial again the 1990s when a De La Salle school reunion was proposed.

Dr Randles died in July 2017, aged 93, and in May 2018, the council of the town which had previously ostracised his wife and himself honoured him with the unveiling of a bench in his memory, close to their practice on Watergate Street. It was around this time that Sinead O'Shea became aware of his story.

“When I left Navan at 17, I felt it was a conservative place. I discovered later it was a hotbed of resistance. I’d been oblivious,” she said following the Boston screening.

“A friend told the filmmaker about Patrick Randles and how he had “really stood up to the church in terms of corporal punishment. I met Mary, and she was emphatic about Paddy’s role but did not mention what she’d done or the mother and baby homes.”

While O’Shea was conducting interviews with Mary, a report came out in 2021 that cited atrocities in Ireland’s mother and baby homes where 9,000 children died over the decades all the way until 1998.

“I asked if she knew about it, and she said, ‘Oh yes, we used to hide unmarried mothers here.’ It was so amazing. She would never volunteer information, but if you asked her the right questions, she’d tell you. It’s part of the general modesty of the place.”

O’Shea wanted to highlight how these ordinary people stood up to the powerful Catholic Church’s injustice and mistreatment at a time when there was little institutional or community support. In addition to sheltering young girls at their home, the Randles dispensed contraception, which was illegal at the time, and helped Betty get her infant daughter back after she was illegally adopted. Ethna refused to go to a mother and baby home and kept her baby.

Pray For Our Sinners recounts the experiences of Mary, Betty, and Ethna about the brutal treatment of young, unmarried pregnant women who were separated from their families and placed in “mother and baby homes,” run by Catholic nuns, where girls were mistreated, many infants died, and many were taken illegally for adoption. A fourth subject, Norman, details how as a boy, he was routinely beaten in the De La Salle school. Norman was forced to leave school at age nine to work in a factory long before physical punishment in schools was eventually banned in 1984.

Pray For Our Sinners (RTÉ 1, Wednesday 30th July, 9.35pm)