Child Abuse
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Mavis Arnold
'I am looking forward to re-writing the story. But should anything happen, i.e. an accident, or death (my death) I hope it will still be possible to publish the story based on my manuscript. The thing is that it will one day be printed."
Peter Tyrrell was born into poverty on a small farm near Cappagh, Ahascragh, Co. Galway in 1916. His mother had eight children, a feckless husband, and was crippled with arthritis. They lived in a one-room barn with no windows.
When the mother's begging, in desperation to feed her family, came to the attention of the civic guards, the authorities petitioned the courts to commit four of the children to St Joseph's Industrial School in Letterfrack. Peter was eight years old and he was to remain there until he was 16.
He wrote this book in the 1950s long before there was any attention paid to the horrific treatment of children in industrial schools. It took many more years before the neglect, the mindless cruelty, the dreadful conditions in which the children lived were thrust upon a public who, despite what they must have suspected over the years, chose to ignore the desperate plight of thousands of children in so-called 'care'.
Significantly, none of Peter's claims was refuted by the Christian Brothers at the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, in 2005, and all the Brothers accused by him were subsequently removed.
It was the reign of terror by Brother Vale which seems to have made the entire Letterfrack experience a nightmare that continued for Peter all his life, until his tragic death. (Vale was later sent to a mental institution and died there.)
The most violent of the Brothers, he was merciless, regardless of the age of the child, and delivered violent blows with part of a rubber tyre reinforced with a steel band for the most trivial of misdemeanours. His beatings were legendary and the sounds of children screaming and weeping permeated throughout the building.
The children's hands, covered with chilblains, were beaten; their heads were knocked against walls; they were kicked and battered. They were half-starved.
When Peter Tyrrell later joined the British army in 1939 and was taken prisoner he said that prison camp was a tea-party compared with his childhood. Letterfrack, he said, was "like Belsen".
But not at Christmas, New Year's Day or Easter when were there no beatings, and the Brothers (including Brother Vale) would stay up half the night cooking the dinner for the next day, and putting small presents into stockings.
It was as if an Amnesty had descended, and the children could be heard laughing and running about, without fear of violence.
It was Owen Sheehy Skeffington - a passionate campaigner against the brutal ethos of Irish education - who encouraged Peter to write an account of his time in Letterfrack.
But it was not until 40 years later that the manuscript came to light, as well as correspondence between the two of them, in Skeffington's papers.
In 1966 a pamphlet was published by a branch of Tuarim on 'The Residential Care of the Deprived Child in Ireland' with the object of informing public opinion. But, for Peter Tyrrell, too much of the reality had been ignored and he wouldn't believe the group when they assured him that things were better now.
A year after the publication of the Tuarim pamphlet, he committed suicide by setting himself alight on Hampstead Heath. The only clue to his identity was a torn postcard found next to the body with the words 'Skeffington' and 'Dublin'.
In a note on the book cover, the UCC historian Prof. Dermot Keogh says: "The text cries out to Heaven! It holds up a mirror to official Ireland, the Irish state and the Catholic Church . . . read it and weep."