Head of the family.
Television Review.
Survivors of clerical abuse don’t come much more hard-headed than Paddy Doyle. The 58-year-old’s skull is a mechanical marvel of screws, staples and titanium plates, an armoured helmet of metal and bone.
One of Doyle’s most prized possessions is a cranial scan that reveals what he believes is cast-iron evidence of a succession of experimental surgeries illicitly conducted on his brain while he was a ward of the state. “It’d make a great cover for a book,” he declared, holding the x-ray up to the light. “It should be called Screwed!
With a provocative blend of black humour and cold fury, Doyle offered a guided tour of his head in Flesh & Blood, an impressively unflinching series that explores how familial ties can choke as well as bind.
While deeply disturbed about the hardware that was inserted into his skull, Doyle is even more alarmed by the nuts and bolts that were removed from his consciousness. Institutionalised at the age of four, he grew up knowing little about his parents and was misled about the fate of the man he mistakenly believed was his father.
Paddy and Ann - Flesh and Blood.
Doyle’s mother died from breast cancer. One afternoon five weeks later, Doyle was playing at the family homestead in Wexford with his two-year-old sister Ann when he saw his “father” dangling from a tree. It was 9pm before the children were removed from the scene of the suicide.
The Doyles had relatives in Ireland and England who were eager to raise them, but these prospective guardians were deemed unsuitable – either too old or too English – by the civic authorities, which claimed superior knowledge about what was best for all concerned.
Like many children who’d committed the unforgivable crime of being poor, the pair were brought to court and sentenced to detention at the state’s pleasure. Doyle was sent to St Michael’s Industrial School, County Waterford; Ann to an orphanage in Wexford. Nobody at either institution bothered to explain to them what had happened.
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