2,143 entries for Witness Testimony

She added: I just want to know why, why I wasn’t educated and why I wasn’t looked after as a normal human being, you know.

She explained further: I was going to go on for nursing but the education stopped me, the reading and writing. The barrier was – I couldn’t cope at all with it. I was failing all the exams and it just was dreadful. And that was something I wanted to do in life and I didn’t get the opportunity.

Sarah, the witness who was beaten with a ruler for using her left hand, said that as a result of this treatment and her consequent fear, she was unable to learn anything in school and was put sitting at the back of the class: Because I was left handed and I really couldn’t learn nothing, I was just living in fear in that place, you know. That is all I remember about school, sitting in the back of the class, not with all the other children in the front.

At Phase I, Sr Casey acknowledged that the children were engaged in ‘significant amounts of domestic work, as well as other work in the laundry, in the farm, in the bakery, depending on their age’. She acknowledged the effect that this would have had on them: So this undoubtedly would have impacted on the children. In fact, the children could easily have felt that their lives were thwarted and stunted by this type of regime.

The chores which the children were required to do were, according to the Sisters of Mercy, ‘perceived as being part of their industrial training’. The main complaint of the witnesses was the vast amount of physical work that they had to do. The argument put forward by the Sisters of Mercy was that such work formed part of the Domestic Economy Course, which each girl from 14 years of age was required to undertake. The course included subjects such as needlework, cookery, laundry, housewifery and dressmaking. The Reports of School Activities which cover the years 1938 to 1958, which were submitted to the Department of Education annually by the Resident Manager, make reference to these subjects. The 1948 report said: These girls take their turns in assisting in their own school kitchen and dining hall, prepare trays up for their friends. Assist under the direct supervision of a nun in the bathing and toilet of young children. Also in sweeping, dusting of convent parlour and halls, washing tiles, answering hall doors to prepare them for their future employment.

Hannah gave detailed evidence of the daily routine, involving the various chores which she was required to do. From the age of 11 or 12 years, her job was to make the bread in the bakery, early in the morning before going to school: A particular day, would be you would be up fairly early and you would have to get up to make the bread in the bakery. We were quite young at that time, I am not quite sure of the age but we used to have to make bread at quite an early age. Some of the girls were quite small. They had to stand on stools to go in to make the bread, like troughs, to make the bread.

The Sisters of Mercy, in their Opening Statement, conceded that ‘the individual needs of each child could not be addressed; that each child’s potential could not be known or realised’. They acknowledged: It is undoubtedly the case that the children being placed in industrial schools were a particularly vulnerable population, not merely because they were children, but also because, in many cases, of the deprived circumstances from which they were coming. We recognise that there was no identification or understanding of many of the special or particular needs these children must have had, and that this lack of understanding showed itself in many aspects of the running of the schools.

Sr Francesca noted that the children in Newtownforbes did not get many visits from their families. It was rare that a child would get a visit. They did not get letters from their families on a regular basis, and some of the children did not hear from them at all. She said that, when she was working in the School, she was not aware of this need to belong to a family. She only realised with hindsight the yearning the children had to belong to a family: in hindsight again, we tried to give them everything, we’ll say, materially, spiritually, physically, but we couldn’t give them what they were longing for and that was family.

Sr Elena commented on the longing for a family and the effect of the break-up of the family unit on the children. The industrial school children ‘longed for affection’: Well, I remember school time, 3:15 or whatever, when we’d close the school, they’d hold on to you and hold your hands and come along with you. To me, that was they were yearning for affection.

She also noticed that: I saw all these children confined, you know, to a very small area and they looked forlorn, many of them.

Rachel referred to the break-up of the family and the fact that, although the family home was in Dublin, she and her sister were sent to Newtownforbes: I was taken away at three years of age ... My sister was eight and I was three years of age ... I want to know why we were sent, myself and my sister were sent 80 miles away where we had contact with nobody, no family, no nothing. So with the result I lost out on a family.

The death of a child that Rachel used to look after had a very traumatic and distressing effect on her. One morning, the child was not well and she knew there was something wrong with her: because she was just lying around and I took her on my lap and I hugged her and tried to comfort the child, although I was only a child myself. I sent up word to say that the child wasn’t well, but nobody came down.

She heard that the child had died when she returned from school: So when the school was over that day we heard that she was after dying, and I still see her on the bed with her little long dress laid out and we all queued up to see her. That lasted with me for my life, I always wondered where the child was buried.

The death of this young child was very distressing for her, particularly because of the lack of information provided and the fact that she believed no funeral took place: It haunted me all my life wondering where that child was buried because there was no funeral.

The location of the School on the main street gave it the advantage of being close to the local community, unlike other industrial schools. The Provincial leader of the Sisters of Mercy of the Northern Province, Ireland, Sr Ann Marie McQuaid, summarised these advantages in the first public hearing: they were out regularly, both on walks and whatever activities were on in the town. Way back even, I saw it in the Punishment Book of the 1930s, they were getting out to the pictures which were being held in the town hall. The older girls got permission to go out to do messages, to bring the little ones on walks. Also, the people of Dundalk ... seemed to have embraced the children because there was tremendous interaction, there was a lot of support and care from the people of Dundalk for the children right through the 100 years including a god-parenting programme where people god-parented each child within the Institution.