453 entries for Historical Context

In the 1940s, because of the Emergency, there was a period of deprivation and food shortage. One witness described the bitter cold they had to endure: There was a big freeze up and the children, including myself, we got chilblains between our fingers, on our fingers, on our toes and they swelled up. Some poor kid – they burst and the cold was bad enough, but the pain from those things when they burst made it ten times worse ... At no time were they put in any place warm, they were put in that old recreational place beneath the classrooms. There was a doorway but no door on it ... The Prefects would tell them to keep moving, they wouldn’t let them stand still; keep on moving to try to get the circulation going.

This witness was lucky, in that he was given a job in the kitchen, where there was warmth and more food. He explained: Naturally I could eat more than the other kids because I was cooking it ... I was protecting myself, they could not protect themselves ... I have a lot of feeling for those little children. I didn’t suffer half as much as a lot of them did. Don’t forget they were hungry, not just for the six months I was hungry, some of them were there nine or ten years, they were hungry every day for nine or ten years.

His guilt about hiding in the relative comfort and warmth of the kitchen was worsened when, in his last year there, he was given the ingredients to make a Christmas pudding. There was some left over and he was told to put it away for 6th January. When he took it out on that date, it was covered in mould. He was horrified, but he was told to cut the mould off and serve it to the boys. It was the first time ever they had been given Christmas pudding, and it went mouldy. It was terrible, ‘if you look at something like that and then you think of children going to eat it’.

Fr Antonio described the refectory as follows: One of the earliest nightmares you would have was being in charge of the refectory because you knew the food wasn’t good and even the tables were coming to the sides and they used to use what they called hods, which was plastic bowls and plates and stuff like that. It was – nearly I would regret an awful lot, hindsight is a great thing but at that time it was a very cruel situation. And because there was only one person in charge of the 150 there would have been a lot of bullying ... I remember one occasion where the older boys were kind of selling slices of bread, which they used to call “skinners” to other lads. “I will give you a slice of bread for two sausages”.

He singled out the conditions of the refectory for special criticism: I remember the tiles in the refectory were slippery and if the steam rose up you would slip and break your leg or anything on the floor there ... Let’s be honest about it, there was a chef there that used to stir the pot of stew with the handle of a brush. These things happened and I can’t deny them.

At one point, he made clear the abhorrence and disgust he felt, in retrospect, about how the boys had to eat. He said: For obvious reasons looking back now ... it was horrific. The question I would have to ask myself is, would I have eaten the food out of the bowls the boys were eating out, no, I wouldn’t and I didn’t.

On the other hand, he admitted, ‘It was a hell of a lot different’ for the members of the Order. He told the Investigation Committee, ‘The quality of the food would have been better for a start. You had people serving you’.

He had grown up as a child in Clonmel, so he knew of the School before he went to work there as a member of the Order. He recalled: My understanding of Ferryhouse at that time was as a child growing up in Clonmel. We used to see them going through the town in lorries with black stockings and red tops in lorries going through and the threat of my age group, and indeed everybody else at that time, was that you would be sent to the monastery if you misbehave. Ferryhouse at that time was known as the monastery. I would have visited and played football against the Ferryhouse boys at that time.

When he went to work there in the 1970s, he had found the physical conditions even more stark and primitive.

The Department of Education’s Medical Inspector, Dr Lysaght’s report of 1966 described the dormitories as the worst he had ever seen. They bordered on being overcrowded, and had ‘a depressing air of mass communal living’. There were no lockers or wardrobes and ‘as is usual then the boys store personal belongings under the mattresses and of course destroy the springs’.

Almost a year later, a Public Health Inspection found the conditions overcrowded and ‘a hazard to the health of the child’. As a result of this report, the Department of Health withdrew their children from the Institution.

In his evidence to the Investigation Committee, Fr Antonio, a former Resident Manager, spoke about an experience he had dealing with boys who were sent to Ferryhouse from Artane: One of the – I suppose one of the things that made me angry ever since was that I was sent up on a bus to Dublin to collect the Artane boys and the instruction I was given at the time, go up – the Artane boys were told, I don’t know where they were told they were going but they weren’t told they were coming to Clonmel. My instructions were go up on the bus and don’t stop the bus or let them out because they will run away. I stand very guilty of that that I hadn’t enough courage at that time to say this is not right. I remember well, coming down on that bus and they were arriving in Ferryhouse. From what we heard at that time, I couldn’t swear by this, at least there were nuns cooking in Artane, their standard of food was a lot of better. Certainly their standard of clothes were a lot of better. Because I remember them coming down and they were all given three khaki pants and three T-shirts and whatever and they were light years to what our lads were doing. That would have made me quite angry at the time that I was going up to bring all these lads.

The boys from Ferryhouse looked different. Taken from homes that were deemed to be poor and unable to provide proper care, they were placed in an institution that made them look poor and in need of proper care. It is no wonder that they resented the experience.

A witness who was in Ferryhouse in the 1940s came from a family where illness, poverty and death led to social upheaval. He was the eighth in a family of 13 children. His mother died of pneumonia. Her youngest child at the time was just one month old, and the complainant was seven years of age. The entire family was placed into various institutions. The four brothers were initially sent to Ferryhouse, but then were split up and the younger two were sent elsewhere. He was unaware that one of his brothers was later returned to Ferryhouse. The witness explained: After he became a certain age, five years of age or that, he was sent to Ferryhouse. But the point about it was he was two and a half years in Ferryhouse before anybody told us he was our brother. So he was in the school for two and a half years and nobody knew he was – well, at least we didn’t know – we knew he was [names the boy] but that was it. We never knew he was our brother.

He was frightened and confused on entering the School, and he was ‘never prepared’ for leaving it. He recalled leaving the School and meeting his brother-in-law who took him into his flat. There was no job found for him, and the Rosminians never checked on him after leaving the School. He lived in dire circumstances with his sister and brother-in-law until he joined the Irish Army.