2,143 entries for Witness Testimony

Another complainant said that every day in Goldenbridge she used to imagine walking through the gates and leaving it. When the day came that she was going home, she was petrified. She recalled being brought into a room in Goldenbridge and being told by Sr Alida that she was going: She gave me a pair of rosary beads and I left terrified, you would never believe ... I went back to my grandmother’s from Goldenbridge. I didn’t know how to speak properly. We spoke our own language, I know that you will find that strange. We were only children, we didn’t grow up. We spoke differently to each other. If you were brought up for nine years in a home you all speak the same, you all speak the same language, I spoke this language. I was terrified of people. I walked, I had a stoop, my shoulders were bent ... I would not look at nobody. I would not look in your eyes, I couldn’t. I was afraid ... I was afraid of everything and everybody ... I didn’t know how to survive out there, this was a new world this was something.

One witness recalled: I kind of have memories of one nun looking after about 90 kids in the yard, or in the School, in very small rooms.

In their Opening Statement, the Sisters of Mercy acknowledged that at times they failed the children in their care: ... Cappoquin industrial school went through particular periods of difficulty and there were undoubtedly times when children in our care suffered. We deeply regret the situation, as revealed by the Department records, regarding the diet and health of the children in the period 1944–5 ... We acknowledge that there were management difficulties in the 1980’s, which must have impacted on the quality of care for the children ... As a Congregation, we are deeply sorry for our failings in the running of Cappoquin industrial school at these particular times and for the effect of this on the children in our care ... It is also true to say, however, that there were long periods of time when the school was viewed by the Department as being well run and the children well cared for.

Clearly frustrated, Dr McCabe informed the Department that she felt the children needed to be properly fed, and wondered what the ‘collation’ would contain. On 13th April 1944, the Department once again, wrote formally to the Superior, telling her the children were simply not getting enough food: ... The position is, however, that the dietary seems, in any case, to have been inadequate all along as evidenced by the failure of the children to put on weight in the normal way. What is required is an all-round increase in the amount of food given to the children and the Minister will be glad to learn that you have made arrangements to have this done ... It is noted that you have arranged for the issue of a collation before bed-time and I am to enquire of what it consists.

One witness, resident in the Institution for four years in the mid-1940s, recalled: ... Hunger, hunger was a big problem ... All the time ... I had a habit anyway and some of the other boys had a habit, if we got a crust for our supper or for our tea, we would divide the crust into small little pieces and keep it in our hand for the intervening period between the next meal and we would eat one of these things every few minutes. It was a small little crust. That’s what kept us going.

She said that, although the children in Group Home A were well provided for materially, and ‘all their basic needs were met’, they were not cared for emotionally. She said they were afraid of Sr Callida, and that she herself had witnessed a child with marks on her leg as a result of a beating from Sr Callida: ‘It was the first time I had seen marks on a child there. And it was a shock and it was a surprise to me’.

Ms Linehan said that at the time she did not feel she was in a position to question the way Sr Callida managed the home. She said there was a regime in place that she could not question, although she would have disagreed with aspects of it: ‘A lot of the time I would be afraid to speak out ... I was afraid to lose my job maybe’.

Everyday issues were handled harshly: I just felt it was too strict and just different things, every day things like that. You know, I mean when I look back on it it was again the time where – it was very, very strict being in care for kids, very, very hard.

Although she accepted that it was a different era and childcare practices were different, she believed the regime was unnecessarily hard: Looking back on it. But I think sometimes Callida could have made it a little bit easier for the children to be in care, because being in care was hard enough, being there without your parents, and then having somebody sometimes so strict on you, I think was hard.

This ex-staff member was concerned about three specific issues in Group Home A: She did not think that it was appropriate for past pupils to stay in Group Home A with the children. She believed that some of them were a bad influence on the children. Past pupils were not allowed to stay in either of the other group homes – only Sr Callida allowed it. The Department had been concerned snce 1976 about the practice of past pupils being allowed to stay over. They had been assured that the practice would cease and that lodgings would be found for the ex-pupils elsewhere. However, in Group Home A the situation was allowed to continue. Sr Callida went absent for days at a time, without giving any prior notice, and without leaving any contact address or number. The witness, who was in her 20s, was left in charge of up to 16 small children without any support from the Resident Manager or any other Sister in Cappoquin. Sr Callida regularly drank alcohol – usually whiskey – in the group home. She said that this occurred in the evening and was often in the sitting room in front of the older children. She said that Sr Callida would not be so drunk as to be ‘falling all over the place or anything, but I felt at the time it was drunk when she would slur a word’.

She did not believe that Sr Callida’s drinking affected the day-to-day running of the home, but it did affect her personality: I suppose not as the running of the everyday stuff, because the staff, I think, would do a lot more of that, of the running of the house and the caring of the kids. But I just felt sometimes that it probably affected her personality, maybe the day after or something that she would be a little bit hung over. Maybe that affected her work.

Ms Tierney11 started work in Group Home A in the late 1980s when she was aged 20 years. She had no experience in childcare, having worked in an office previously: [Group Home A]. My first impressions were of all these dirty scruffy children. That is an awful thing to call them but that’s what it was. It was just a chaotic house and there were just children everywhere. The first day I went there Callida was on her own and there were just small children all around the house, all over the place, and the house was very shabby as well ... At the time I started there, there were 10 to 12 children living in the house ... 6 months to 16 years. It was just a very chaotic place to work. I didn’t really understand the workings of the place or anything like that. As a staff team everyone seemed to be afraid of Callida. Any time I would answer the phone it was like "is she there?" That was the first reaction, "Is she there?”

There was no proper routine, no timetables and new staff just ‘fell in’ with the household duties and minding the children: We were basically there to mind the kids, a house full of children, and very young children. At one stage there was seven of them under five. You would be on your own with them. At the time there seemed to be really a lack of staff there. For a space of two months or three months there was two of us working on our own, back to back. We did a 14 day stint, back to back twelve hour shifts, with no support from anyone. I was often there on my own with 12 children ... I was on my own a lot there. You would have to get up and get a load of them out to school, get their breakfast and get them all out to school and then you had four or five toddlers at home all day. And you had to clean the house as well. It was very hard.

Ms Tierney said that Sr Serena,12 the Superior of the convent often stayed overnight in Group Home A with Sr Callida. This Sister did not interact with the staff at all but, she said, had a particular child whom she singled out for attention and whom she would keep with her during her visits to Group Home A: She just was around all the time. She was around all the time ... Every day after work she would come and she would call into our place most days after work. It was a regular occurrence. She would stay and wander around and she would be down to Callida. She had a little pet that was her little pet, one of the kids that was there, and she would come in and she would make a big fuss over this child and hold her hand and wander around and really make the rest of the kids feel very inferior to this one particular child.

She was not told where the children were or how long they would be gone: No. We might be told, maybe, to pack a bag for someone an hour before they went, but that was about it. We just weren’t important, we weren’t told anything. We weren’t told anything.