Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)

Despite the novel's focus on the Brady family itself, The Butcher Boy also
enacts a critique of Irish society at large and of its "institutions of
containment" in particular. As James M. Smith argues, "In a landscape offering no
shortage of institutional alternatives, Francie's community chooses to confine
rather than provide treatment or support." Through Francie's progression from
industrial school, to mental asylum, to prison for the criminally insane, McCabe
"interrogates society's sequestering of thise it deems socially aberant."39
Moreover, time and again "respectable society turns its back" on Francie, and "in
so doing repeatedly fails to acknowledge the consequences attending childhood
institutionalization. "40 As Tom Herron concludes, it is not merely the Brady
family but the "notion of community" itself that is the target of The Butcher
Boy.41
Francie's first experience of incarceration, in an industrial school, occurs
after he has broken into, stolen from, and defecated in the Nugent home. Upon
entering this "school for bad boys," Francie begins "a terrible repetition of his
father's career as a terminally damaged borstal boy. Here, supposedly in the safe
arms of the Catholic Church, the iniquities of the fathers are visited upon the son
with dreadful force."42 Specifically, Francie is sexually abused by Father Sullivan
(whom he calls Father Tiddly), a "pederastic priest recently returned from the
missions," 43 who uses Francie's feigned "religious visions and his anecdots of his
homelife, which are actually fantasies of being at home with the Nugents," for
purposes of self-gratification. 44 While the "juxtaposition of religious and sexual
ecstasy" may be humorous,45 the implications of this sexual abuse are serious and
considerable: the industrial school, while ostensibly seeking to in still "a sense
of moral conformity, religious faith, and individual responsibility" in Francie,
instead encourages his "delusional tendencies"46 and puts him in contact with yet
another abusive "father." When school offcials catch Father Sullivan professing
love to Francie, Sullivan is transferred rather than punished, and Francie is
rewarded for not speaking out : "after the Tiddly business" I "knew they were going
to let me go the first chance they got I was like a fungus growing on the walls
they wanted them washed clean again"(102). Its is only the fear that Francie will
blow the whistle on Father Sullivan's sexual advances that prompts school officals
to offer Francie an exit visa.
While incarcerated at the industrial school Francie receives a visit from
another abusive father, his own. Benny Brady arrives, revealingly, with bottle of
whiskey in hand, and blames his son once again for what he "did" to his mother
(91). Another neglectful father figure, Father Dom, the priest in Francie's
village, furthers the novel's critique of Church blindness toward Francie's
suffering. After his return home from the industrial school Farncie runs into
priest, who says to the obviously troubled Francie, before going

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