I just wanted them to say they made a mistake: schoolboy’s mother
A MOTHER has revealed how the board of management of a school in Laois refused to accept her 12-year-old son had his good name tarnished when the principal allowed his schoolmates to nominate him as a ‘suspect thief ’.
In behaviour which a judge described last week as “unbelievable”, it emerged that the principal of St Joseph’s National School in Borris in Ossory asked pupils aged nine to 12 to nominate who they thought stole money from the purses of two teachers.
Children wrote the names of Luke Hanlon and a second boy on scraps of paper and it was on this basis that the headmaster questioned the two boys about the thefts.
Judge Karen Fergus criticised the boy’s treatment as “unbelievable” and “appalling” last week before approving €20,000 as “reasonable compensation” for damaging the boy’s character.
Marie Hanlon, Luke’s mother, has questioned why it took the school’s board of management two years to acknowledge that her son is a young man of integrity.
“I never wanted this to go to court. I just wanted them to say we’ve made a mistake. We’re really sorry. This is what happened and we’re sorry that Luke was dragged into it,” she said. “I hoped that was what was going to happen but it never did.”
Ms Hanlon said her son was an “easygoing, chilledout individual”, whose reports were always good. She said she was on her way home when she got a phone call from the school asking her to come in. “I was told Luke and another boy had been brought in and talked to about money that had gone missing in the school,” she told the Sunday Independent this weekend.
She said she asked the principal why Luke had been brought in. She said she was told he had asked the pupils in third, fourth, fifth and sixth class to write down whom they suspected of taking the money, and “Luke’s name came up”.
“I said, ‘We need to get this sorted, this can’t be happening. You can’t accuse my son of taking money. You’re telling me children wrote his name and someone else’s name?’” Ms Hanlon said. She asked to see the pieces of paper with her son’s name, but didn’t get to see them and requested gardaí be brought in to investigate the theft.
Luke walked out of school that day and remained out for 10 weeks. “I could not send my son back there,” she said. “I needed his name cleared and I needed an apology for what they had done to him. And it never came.”
In a letter to Ms Hanlon’s solicitor after the incident, the board of management acknowledged the principal had asked children in the four senior classes to write down who they thought stole the money that went missing from the staff room. However, the letter said he had been trying to resolve the issue without involving An Garda Síochána, and did not accept the boy’s reputation had been tarnished or that he suffered distress.
In May this year, the board of management acknowledged that the boy was “an honest young man of integrity” and apologised for any humiliation or distress it caused him.
Luke has since moved to secondary school and is doing well, Ms Hanlon said, although he missed his graduation, socialising with his school friends and was humiliated by the incident.
The court case last week has brought it all back up, she added. She was interviewed by phone on RTE’s Drivetime radio show after the court case settled last week, and Luke was listening in the kitchen.
“After I came off the phone, Luke came over and put his arms around me and said, Thank you, Mammy,’” she said.
Attempts to contact St Joseph’s School were unsuccessful.
The Department of Education declined to comment.