Cruelty of corporal punishment

One of the points touched upon in Brother Sleeper agent is the use of corporal punishment. The recent Ryan report from Ireland is shocking and disappointing. In the Christian brothers' schools in America, there was not so much violence inflicted on the students. But any is too much. What do students learn from being hit? The bigger, stronger person wins--not a good lesson.

Ira in Ireland in WWII

The nazis had a spymaster in Ireland during WWII trying to organize the IRA. Saying the IRA was "riven with enmity," the Nazi took his own life in frustration. The best source of information on the IRA is Tim Pat Coogan's The Troubles. Prime Minister DeValera kep Ireland officially neutral during the war and denied England the use of Irish ports. He did, however, return downed British pilots and planes to the North while imprisoning German flyers.

Roosevelt and the Jews

I just finished reading Rosen's Saving the Jews about Roosevelt and the Jews during the Holocaust.
Rosen convinced me that FDR did as much as he could during those terrible days. Bombing the camps or the trains would have killed Jews. In Israel Ben-Gurion urged FDR to not bomb the camps.
As Rosen points out, Roosevelt was one of the first world leaders to understand how evil the Nazi regime was.

English hatred of iIreland

People who don,t know the history of England and Ireland wonder about the ferocity of Ireland's hatred. During the Greet Famine of 1845-1850, one million Irish starved in ireland. A million and a half fled the country. Less that sixty year after the Famine, Irelan's population was four million, half of what it was pre Famine.

Christian Brother corporal punishment

One of the main characters in Brother Sleeper Agent launches a spirited debate in a seminary class about the use of corporal punishment. A native Irishman, now in an American seminary, Mick Slattery is all for rough physical punishment. That's how he was taught in the Old Country.
As a young Christian Brother, I slapped kids in the face every so often, a fact i deeply regret now.
After about five years of teaching, I found other ways of dealing with kids--cajoling them, faking being mad. The worst thing about using physical punishment was it taught the wrong lesson, that brute force wins out.

Irish hatred of FDR

Irish resistance to Roosevelt was really anger directed against England. It was not even 100 years from the start of the Great Famine to the beginning of World War II. For years Irish hate for England had been festering after her refusal to help Ireland during the potato blight. In Black 47 and Beyond, O Grada and others have documented a rich oral history of famine stories. In 1916 with the Easter Rising, Ireland warred on her old enemy only to see the country partitioned in 1921 into the South and the North--Belfast and Ulster. Is it any wonder that Roosevelt, friend and ally to Britain, stirred up resentment among the Irish in America?

Roosevelt in World War II

It is hard to imagine today the feelings of Irish in America and elsewhere about Roosevelt’s help to Britain in World War II.

Since Cromwell’s invasions in the seventeenth century and England’s callous treatment of Ireland during the Great Famine in the 1840’s and their war with England in 1916, the Irish have had reason to hate England. We now know of The Holocaust and Hitler’s other atrocities. That wasn’t the case in 1939. The Irish hated Britain and Roosevelt until Irish-American boys died in the war.

Jack O'Keefe
Author: Brother Sleeper Agent: The Plot to Kill F.D.R.