Chapter 9 — Clifden

Emotional abuse

The Sisters of Mercy described this witness, who was in Clifden for just over a year in the 1960s, as ‘essentially a reliable witness’. The complainant was born in the late 1950s in the Midlands.

He had previously been in a residential institution in Lenaboy, County Galway and had very happy memories of his time there. He recalled spending some time at home after being discharged from Lenaboy. He had always had enough to eat but recalled his mother crying a lot. When she told her children that she had to go away for a while because she was ill, he stated, ‘we took it we were going back to Lenaboy because we liked Lenaboy, Lenaboy was very good. We were actually looking forward to it, believe it or not, it was going to be a bit of a holiday but it wasn’t you know’. Instead, he found himself in Clifden. He found Clifden a very different environment: ‘I was cold, I was hungry, I was lonely, you know, miserable ... I thought it was a cruel regime, that’s the way I would have looked at it now, very cruel’.

He recalled being barefoot for what felt like a year. They were given footwear but it would go missing. He remembered his feet being cold and having a boil on his foot. It was generally the boys who were barefoot.

He recalled another boy who was stronger and faster than the rest: ‘It was the law of the jungle’, and he would rush down in the morning and steal food from the other children’s plates. He blamed the system which allowed this type of bullying to take place rather than the culprit who, he accepted, was also hungry. The food was not bad; there was just never enough of it. He was always hungry. They had bread with jam and a cup of tea in the morning, if another child did not get to it first. There was a bakery in the School and he remembered the smell of freshly baked bread coming from it. The children used to sneak in and steal bread from the bakery.

He said that they did not receive any toys at Christmas, although the Christmas dinner was very good and in particular the plum pudding. The School put on a play each Christmas which was regarded as a big event. If you misbehaved, you were excluded from participating in the play.

Amongst his chores was mopping up urine in the dormitories after children had wet the bed at night-time. His brother would clean any faeces from the beds.

He recalled sleeping on rubber sheets, and bed linen only being provided when the Departmental inspections were due to take place. In general, there were no sheets or pillows on any of the boys’ beds, only a rubber mattress. The boys slept two to a bed.

The witness said that one of the ISPCC inspectors forewarned the nuns of the fact that a Departmental Inspection was imminent. The witness described the change in regime when the inspector visited: The thing about it is what I used to remark was that when the inspectors would come, and the inspectors did come, that everything would improve for that time that they would be there. Dinners would be good, sheets on the beds, pillows, you know.

He went on to say, ‘You would be kind of bulling that the inspectors had left because the good times were over’.

He was never permitted to go home on holidays. His mother sometimes came to visit, if she could get a lift, but she was never allowed in. She had to sneak in the back entrance to visit her children and, when the nuns discovered the fact that she was there, she would run away.

He stated that he learnt little at school because he was taught through Irish. He could not keep up with the class because he had a poor aptitude for languages. He received extra tuition from one particular Sister, Sr Magda,21 who showed him great kindness. She also gave him treats of bread with butter and sugar.

Regarding nuns who lived in the convent, he said, ‘The nuns lived in a different area of the School and there was a lot of nuns that you wouldn’t get to meet’.

He described the Resident Manager’s deputy, Sr Veronica, as ‘... a tyrant. Very very cruel, very tough. Very very tough...She would be the one – if there was any corporal punishment she would be the one to dish it out and Sr Roberta as well’. He could not remember being beaten by any other nuns other than this particular Sister and the Resident Manager. He remarked that, in hindsight, the corporal punishment administered in Clifden was probably no more severe than that administered in other schools at the time. He said: Well, when you are being punished, it is like everything else, you will always take it that no one has ever been punished as hard as you, it is human nature... . The corporal punishment, when you look back on it now, probably was no different than other schools. It was just the hunger and the cold.

He was transferred to the Christian Brothers’ Industrial School in Salthill in the late 1960s. He was fed and treated better in Salthill. He recalled: as tough and all as Salthill was we got well fed and treated that good bit better really in Salthill ... There was a difference, believe it or not, between Clifden and Salthill. A good difference, a major difference.

Of the three institutions he spent time in, Clifden was the toughest, mainly because of the cold and hunger. In particular, he recalled being treated with kindness in Lenaboy: But all I can remember from [there] was the kindness. They were very, very kind to us ... The kindness, they were very, very kind [there]. When we were being taken out of [there] to go home I actually missed it.