This article seeks to trace the changing attitudes to the administration of corporal punishment to children, apprentices and servants in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Informed by the conviction derived from the Biblical injunction that ‘whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him’ (Proverbs 13:24), parents, guardians, masters and others long believed that it was necessary routinely to punish their charges. Much of the corporal punishment that was resorted to was applied with ‘due management’, but the prevailing permissive attitude also facilitated its injurious use. This article is grounded in a series of such instances spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, beginning with the failure to pursue the prosecution of Lady Frances Gore in 1711 for the death of her son, Robert, and continuing with sequence of cases that did proceed to trial. These permit the conclusion, commencing with the trial in 1762 of Vere and Neale Molloy for the abuse of their daughter, Sarah, that the combination of the preparedness of the law courts to hand down severe sentences and the disapproval of the public heralded an increased awareness of the issue before the end of the eighteenth century. This was insufficient to eradicate fatal and abusive punishment. However, mounting public disapproval in the nineteenth century of the mistreatment of apprentices, servants and children encouraged the newly established police to prosecute and the courts to penalise those who were responsible. It had less impact on the administration of corporal punishment in the school or the home, but the gradual acceptance that masters, mistresses were not entitled to beat apprentices and servants not just reduced the contexts where corporal punishment was permissible, it contributed to the appreciating sense that it was efficacious only when it was properly administered.