2,143 entries for Witness Testimony

When well-trained, the band was a source of great pride. One complainant recalled that the band members were the only boys allowed out of the School, other than to go on the school walk on Sundays. The band was in many respects the public face of the Institution, and it would have presented a reassurance to the local people that the children in St Joseph’s were receiving a very high standard of care. A follow-up letter to the Resident Manager after the 1963 Visitation remarked that the band and the dancing troupe were: a credit to their school. Their public appearance should be sufficient answer to those who make disparaging references to Industrial Schools.

The fact that boys were separated from their families created major problems and had an emotional effect on the boys. They felt alienated from their roots, their family and friends, and suffered a loss of personal identity. For example, one witness told the Committee: The biggest abuse really is being denied any information about my family. Outside, the abuse I suffered, that has gone. You have your abuse, you have your beatings, you take it and you go. But the abuse that stays with me, and it stays with me to this day, I am now 76 years of age, is that I can never prove ... I don’t suppose there is one here in this room who doesn’t know who their mother was, right? I never knew who my mother was and why take me away from my mother, take me away from my brother or my sister and my friends and, take me and put me away? I had done no wrong to anybody and I have been put away, sentenced to all those years for nothing.

Br Seamus Nolan, a member of the leadership team of St Helen’s Province of the Congregation of Christian Brothers, provided the Investigation Committee with an Opening Statement in regard to Carriglea. In his statement he described life in the Institution and outlined the Congregation’s view as to how the Institution operated. Br Nolan submitted that Carriglea remained in the shadow of Artane for a significant part of its existence and was compared unfairly to Artane. He added: the strength and individuality of Carriglea Park lay in the fact that it was small by comparison with its supposed parent, and while it practiced the same type of control, the staff, mainly Brothers, were accessible to the boys, befriended many of them and remained their mentors long after their stay in Carriglea Park.

Br Nolan referred to the various inspections carried out by the Congregation and the State, which ‘brought every aspect of life under scrutiny’. He stated that Carriglea fared well in these inspections and that ‘general provision for the pupils, medical care and especially education were highly praised’. Br Nolan referred to the annual Visitations to the School by members of the Provincial Council, which he believed were the most thorough and insightful of the inspections. He stated: ‘here again satisfaction and praise were the most common outcomes of the visits but censure and demands for improvement were not spared if failures were noticed’.

As anticipated, the application was refused but the ploy did not have the desired effect. Br Rene was resolute in his determination to leave the Congregation. He wrote to the Superior General in June 1947 on receipt of the refusal of his application. He blamed his inability to articulate convincingly his reasons for seeking the dispensation for the refusal. He made a further poignant attempt to set out his reasons for making the request. He stated that he was profoundly unhappy and was in a constant state of anxiety and worry. He feared that he was on the brink of a nervous breakdown, having lived with this torturous state of mind for over 30 years. He argued that he was and always had been a hopeless failure at his work and that he lacked the ability to teach. He described himself as ‘a misfit in life’, becoming increasingly reclusive. He added: To my years in Carriglea I attribute my broken health principally and any thought of renewing contact with residential school work would only hasten the breakdown which I so much dread. Tis not that I despise such work, though this is the all too common attitude of the would-be snobs of the Congregation who regard such work and the men who do it as beneath them.

Br Maslin supervised the washroom in the evening time and would beat the boys with a strap if they were too slow. This former resident described the daily scene in the washroom as follows: In the evenings if you had to go up to the washroom, there was a big washroom with all the taps and all that, and everything was cold, it was all cold, there was water in them. What you used to do was the kids used line up in two, one and then one behind him, and what you had to do was he just roared first ‘right leg’, you put your right leg in and you got the soap and you washed it and then he would say ‘wash off the soap’. Then you had the stand back and the next kid would go in and he would put his right foot up on the thing.

The Christian Brothers in their Opening Statement referred to the crisis that came to a head in 1945. On the one hand, they conceded that: When a strengthened staff was put in place in 1945 it may be assumed that the reform brought about by the new arrivals involved a certain amount of firm measures that would have been viewed with reluctance by the boys.

This complainant also alleged that Br Vic18 inflicted severe punishment on the boys while he supervised them in the washroom. This Brother was one of seven Brothers transferred to Carriglea in 1946, in an attempt to restore law and order. The witness stated: When we used go up to the wash house at night-time in the young dormitory, we used go up to the washroom and he used to have a whistle thing. It was like a military thing. “Everybody go to the sinks, wash their hair”. When he blew the thing he said stop. And if you were last to come back into line again he gave you a good walloping. He was physical with anybody who was there, he would get you back in line again. Between the two dormitories there was an alcove there and if he was giving a young lad a good slapping, the young lad would be screaming and we would be all standing in the wash house saying, “we hope he doesn’t come back in for us”.

The leather strap was normally used to inflict punishment but a witness who was in Carriglea from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s alleged that a T-square was also used. He described how Br Luc19 inflicted punishment with this implement: He would tell him to bend over the stool. He used get the T-square, T-square that you had on the thing. Then he would pick out a match that was played that particular weekend, and it would always be the hurling, always the high scoring games used to with in the hurling in them days with the Tipperarys and the Corks and the Wexfords and all that, what he would do he would take the T-square out and he would ask the class what was the score of the game yesterday. It was 2-3 to 1-15 or whatever it would be where you got – he used to – I don’t mean just tap you, he used to just swing it like a hurley stick at the boy’s backside and he would give him a smack for every point and three for a goal. Now, that’s what it was.

The documents revealed a high level of sexual activity between the boys. These records have been dealt with in the section ‘Management Issues’ The Christian Brothers submitted in their Opening Statement: The phenomenon of sexual activity of one kind or another among the pupils in industrial schools and indeed in boarding schools generally seems to have been a feature of life in these institutions and called for constant vigilance on the part of the staff.

The complainant confided in a priest and, somehow, the allegation made its way back to Br Vic, who punished the boy for telling the priest. While the sexual abuse never occurred again, the boy lived in permanent fear of it recurring: ‘It wasn’t the fact that it didn’t happen again, it was the fear that it might. And when you live with that fear it is worse really than the act itself’.

The second complaint was made by a former resident who was present in Carriglea from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. He was 10 years old when he was sent to Carriglea, and the abuse, which involved masturbation, began shortly after he arrived there. He alleged that he was sexually abused on three or four occasions by an older boy aged approximately 15 years. When the perpetrator left the School, the abuse stopped. The witness stated, ‘I just kept it quiet. When you are institutionalised you don’t tell anybody, you keep it quiet’. It was significant that the alleged abuse occurred during a time when Visitation Reports indicated that immoral practices had been stamped out in the School.

A third witness also complained of not receiving enough food in Carriglea during the period of his residence from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. He recalled that breakfast consisted of a loaf of bread known as ‘Boland’s loaf’, divided between four boys, together with hot dripping. He recounted to the Committee the manner in which the loaf of bread was divided between the four boys: On our table sometimes if you had four fellows you had to spin a knife and whoever the knife pointed at he cut the bread up and if I didn’t like you I would only give you a quarter of it but it worked vice versa so that’s the way we worked it.

When questioned on the reason for the discontinuation of sending boys to the secondary school, Br Seamus Nolan who gave evidence at the Phase III public hearing, stated: We have not got any reason for it. There are suggestions that the social gap was a bit much for the school to take, because they withdrew. I think it was at that time that an alternative method of doing something for them after primary school, in a school sense, opened up the possibility of the post office exams. That’s the boy messengers that in the long term could lead to permanent, pensionable employment.

Another witness who resided in the School in the early 1950s spoke of working in the knitting shop: First of all they took me on darning socks and I became an expert darner. They taught me to knit on four needles and I could knit socks and taper toes at the age of nine and a half.