In My Own Words [Still Running]

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Foreword

As an Irish national it gives me no pleasure to assist in recording an account of the heartbreaking tribulation of those boys who, largely through no fault of their own, were sent to St Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack, County Galway. The road to hell being paved with good intentions this monstrous and now notorious penal colony; let’s call a spade a spade, for children began life and for some, death, as a Quaker-inspired school in 1887.

Through the passage of time it transformed into what was euphemistically called an industrial school (

Scoileanna Saothair) for young boys. Today they are called Children’s Detention Schools. Under the Industrial Schools Act (1888) their purpose was to ‘care for neglected, orphaned and abandoned children.’ In essence they were a dumping ground for children who found themselves on the fringes of society. In 1954 there were three classes of boys placed in Letterfrack’s St Josephs: The Homeless and those guilty of criminal offences, the destitute sent by local authorities in accordance with the Public Assistance Act; those voluntarily admitted by parents and guardians. From its conception St Joseph’s Industrial School was mismanaged by the Congregation of Christian Brothers.

In respect of those committed for criminal acts it should be remembered these unfortunates were

extremely young and their ‘offences’ petty in the extreme.

It is a sobering thought that within our lifetime conditions at this school find their equal only in 18

th Century English judicial barbarism. The nearby Fields of Athenry are poignant enough for most people’s stomachs.

For many of the unfortunate boys who endured St Joseph’s transportation might well have been a blessing.

The ‘school’s’ notoriety was founded upon the abuse and extreme physical and mental punishments inflicted upon defenseless children by a largely psychotic mob of cassocked ecclesiastic wardens. No fewer than 147 children died whilst under their tender mercies. Many of these brothers may be presumed to be practitioners of the dark arts. Only the devil could have been inspired to inflict such miseries on defenseless waifs; only darkness have conspired a whole community to turn aside from the wailing of hundreds of children through those dark decades of its existence. Some of the dreadful scenes are reminiscent of the scenes depicted in medieval tapestries in which the excesses of hell are defined.

In My Own Words Still Running is the testimony of Mickey Finn, himself an inmate from the age of twelve to sixteen. It is also an authentication, a memorial and recognition for each of the adolescent

victims of those men of the cloth and their collaborationists. His account of life in this dreadful institution will give many pauses for thought as to the iniquities of man. It immortalizes the cold ethos of the judiciary. They will also be inspired by the selfless acts, rebelliousness and inborn stoicism of young boys in the face of extreme hostility.

Mickey Finn

CHAPTER 1

"Jesus!" I thought to myself as I awoke during the dark hours of the early morning; "What is that sticky stuff on my leg?"

The smell in the airless room was fetid; hardly surprising as it was home to an entire family. I was in bed between my two brothers; still fast asleep the both of them and I could feel something on my leg which my mind interpreted as skutry shite. Has someone shit the bed I mutter to myself in the darkness?

Like a foul-smelling blanket the oppressive night air desensitized my senses. Drifting off again was the preferred option given the only other thing I could do was check the unwanted sensation out. I am so tired; ‘fuck it,’ I thought: ‘I will see what it is in the morning. As I drift between wakefulness and slumber I can hear someone moving about in the darkened room. Someone is going to use the piss bucket. Psssssssssssssssssssss, you could clearly hear the stream gushing out of my da’s bladder. His dropping the bucket’s lid did nothing to remove the stench of urine and body odor. I am struggling to get back to sleep but eventually I drift off.

Our family lives in one-room in a terraced tenement situated in North Great Georges Street in Ireland’s capital city, Dublin. It is a four storey building with the ubiquitous basement somehow holding it all up. There’s five of us; children that is;

then there is me ma and da. Where we are living or rather existing now is probably the sixth place we have lived in since I was ushered into the world and I am not yet eleven years old.

This place is what you get when you have been evicted from your home by Dublin Corporation, the great Irish housing authority who is a law unto its self and is controlled by lowly civil servants, who do not seem to answer to any authority outside of their own little circle.

This is rejects Ville with all its attendant baggage of poverty; the bowed and the broken; the debris of Ireland’s lower classes.

The foul and cramped tenement is owned by one of the largest estate owners in the Irish Republic; the religious orders of God. Could there by anyone on earth so religious as to consider their charity so generous; charging rents for a single room accommodating no less than seven impoverished family members? A manger in a stable would be a major step upwards; anything but this. Here they expect the grateful pious residents to live not in squalor but in harmony. Yes, for them it is our privilege to be able to get to our feet when the first bars of the Irish national anthem are played following the 11.30am mass. Suffer the little children, from those pious brethren who afterwards retreat to their overburdened tables in the opulent mansions of ecclesiastical benevolence. Wouldn’t your heart go out to the piety?

Our room is 16ft by 12ft; wall to wall just four strides apart; the room’s bleak landscape is broken only by two burlap flour sacks keeping the light and the cold winter air on the outside. If you do pull the sacking aside and peer out you will gaze out over a tiny backyard set against a factory wall. In the room itself there are three beds, two chairs, a small table, and a sink unit with a couple of presses atop it.

My two brothers and I share a single bed. One of them is much older and has recently returned from an industrial school; a euphemism for a house of correction for juvenile offenders. I have just a vague recollection of seeing him on earlier occasions; I think when I was about six-years old. There was little bonding between us. I hardly understood the brogue he had adopted, which hadn’t improved since his return.

He I was led to believe was taken from his mother at birth by the heavenly Nuns, and placed into various institutions’ for the first sixteen years of his life. My other brother is about five-years old.