2,143 entries for Witness Testimony

She added later: [Roberta] never liked any of the nuns to have any pets. But she had her own, don’t get me wrong, she had her own.

The relationship between Sr Roberta and the rest of the staff, particularly Sr Veronica her deputy, was always authoritarian. She said: Sr Veronica had to do everything the way that Roberta wanted it. Roberta would scream at her the same way she screamed at the kids. She screamed at all the nuns the same way.

Her recollection was that the nuns were not permitted to show the children any sort of physical affection. ‘No,’ she said, ‘there was absolutely no affection’. She added: If one of nuns put their hands around you and Mother Roberta found that out, forget it, they were in real trouble. There was no such a thing.

She described a particular occasion when one nun, Sr Maria,20 took pity on her: I remember one incident where Sr. Maria had us all lined up and she asked us all what we would really – she was asking something, you know, about ourselves what we really thought. I know I was at the end of the line and she asked me, I said, "I really want to find my mother." She really took that very, very bad. She went out – it really bothered her. At the end, she told me to stay behind and she says, "take anything you want from this press." She says, you know – she kind of did it like this, not a thing. But she did give me a hug and she says, "oh", she says, "one day you will and you are a special child of God", and something like that. But now she would make sure that nobody else saw her and that was it. So, no, they were no way affectionate, no way, no how. If you left and you came back a nun would give you a hug. But not while you were in the school, no.

Similarly, the older girls looking after the younger children would not dare to show their charges affection. She was asked about looking after the babies, if she would have shown affection to a little child of three or four. She replied: Yeah, you might, but it wasn’t something you really kind of got yourself really into, that – you know. I never saw anyone really cuddling, you know. Maybe a baby trying to keep them quiet or something, but other than that you wouldn’t pick a child up ...

She was often chosen to run errands in the village. She stated that Sr Roberta tried to take this job away from her several times, but she had struck up a good relationship with the town’s people and, at her request, they would write to the Resident Manager asking her to make sure that she would be the one coming for the messages. She believed that the Resident Manager had to keep in with the town’s people and so would do what they said. She added: she kind of resented me for that, she would say, “you old pet, get out of my sight, you old pet”.

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 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.

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 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.

A former nun, Sr Elena, who had taught in the primary school for a period of approximately 16 years, provided useful information on the workings of the Community and the interaction between the Reverend Mother and the Sisters: ... We ... had no say in anything in the Community. It was ruled, it was governed from the top, just a select few that’s all.

The upper echelon of the Community, she said, consisted of four nuns: the Reverend Mother, the Mother Assistant, the Bursar and the Novice Mistress. She referred to them as the ‘elite’. These four nuns, it seems, governed the workings of the entire Community of the Sisters of Mercy at Newtownforbes. The remaining Sisters outside this inner circle had no voice or authority regarding the operation of their Community. Sr Elena described the role played by the remaining Sisters as: ‘you followed blindly and dumbly’.

The Sisters of Mercy in their Opening Statement and in evidence at the Investigation Committee Phase I public hearing conceded that ‘corporal punishment was a feature of industrial school life’. They also acknowledged that: Slapping was the principal form of punishment administered with a cane or a stick by the sister in charge or on duty or in more extreme cases by the Resident Manager.

Furthermore, it was accepted that ‘most children would have experienced corporal punishment at some time during their time in the industrial school’. This, they conceded would ‘undoubtedly have had a traumatic effect on the children’. The Provincial of the Western Province of the Sisters of Mercy, Sr Casey, who gave evidence at the Phase I public hearing, also conceded that the regime in Newtownforbes was harsh and did not take into account the individual needs of the children. She said: We also accept that some of the children who experienced this regime, not merely as harsh and impersonal, but that they experienced it as abusive and humiliating. We are deeply sorry that this is the situation and we would like to add our and share in the public apology already made earlier this year by our Congregation leader ... to the children who were in our industrial school and who are now adults if what they experienced was this.