Tuesday, April 15, 2008
THE principal of a secondary school has rejected claims that at least a dozen first-year students were running a "fight club" and organising fights on a regular basis.
However, Anne Dunne, principal of Clonakilty Community College in west Cork, did confirm yesterday the school had handed out one-day suspensions to a number of pupils — believed to be 12 — after becoming aware of "incidents" that occurred in recent weeks. Footage of various fights between the boys, captured on mobile phone, was sent to several phones and eventually examined by staff in the college.
It is understood that some of the first-year students were involved in organised fights outside of class hours in a laneway behind the school and that the college authorities acted immediately when the news broke last week. The fights came to light on Wednesday, hours after RTÉ Radio’s Tubridy Show was broadcast from the college. All first-year students had to submit their phones for examination after being summoned via the school intercom. The parents of the boys involved in the incidents were called to the school. According to older students at the college, the people who ended up getting suspended were "very upset" when word spread of their actions.
One boy who saw a mobile phone recording of one of the fights said it consisted mainly of slapping, along with a lot of pushing and shoving, while another student said that a "challenge" to fight would be issued by shouldering a pupil, who would then have to fight back.
The fights were watched by groups of classmates from the college. According to one student, a number of people organised the fights over a period of time.
Nobody was injured in the fights and the gardaí were not called, according to Ms Dunne, who said that the incidents had nothing to do with "happy slapping", where pranks are played or assaults committed on people and recorded using mobile phones.
"In the overall scale of things, it isn’t something we’d be overly concerned about," she said yesterday.
"This is the macho nature of young men, whereby it’s cool to fight. It’s a cultural thing really. We’re attempting to stop that as a cultural issue."
The principal said that there were "incidents" over the space of about three weeks, which were discovered by the school staff last week, and that the "normal disciplinary process" was duly followed. "It wasn’t a fight club," she said.
A Department of Education spokesperson said discipline issues are a matter for each school’s board of management, but that the National Educational Welfare Board must be notified if a student is excluded from school for more than 20 days in a school year.
Any suspension or expulsion from school can be appealed to the general secretary of the Department of Education under the 1998 Education Act.
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