The institutions I am about to describe were known to the general public with their fairly simple and seemingly harmless common name: “Industrial Schools”. They were established with the “Industrial Schools Act of 1868” of Parliament. In retrospect; they were aptly named since, in the eyes of the state and the Catholic Church, orphaned children were hardly anything but industrial farm animals existing with the sole purpose of slaving away, enduring relentless abuse in the process. Needless to say, they were certainly a grim legacy of Ireland’s colonial past.
I don’t remember much about my early life in the countryside of County Monaghan. I don’t remember much about my mother either. My father, “da” as I used to call him, had always said that she caught a fever one winter, went to sleep at night, and never woke up. I must have been a couple of years old at most back then because I don’t even remember her face.
From an early age, I was used to doing whatever I could in the countryside to feed my hungry belly along with a dozen other poor kids in the region. Because da rarely ever worked and when he did, that money mostly went to whiskey. One day I came home and found him dead on the couch. At first, I thought he had one too many bottles of whiskey as usual, but he didn’t wake up after a week. So I packed the few things I had in a straw bundle and made my way to Dublin to start a new life. Though I only lasted a month there before the guards got to me. The next thing I know, I found myself in an Industrial School.
The guards brought me to the entrance of a huge, dark building with many windows surrounded by an iron fence and barbed wire. I still remember their faces in the car. To them, it was clearly an everyday occurrence, bringing orphaned children here. A tall and fairly imposing man in a black cassock showed up at the outer gate. He had a blank, emotionless expression on his face. The guards referred to him as “Father Sullivan”. He approached the car and greeted the guards but not me. They talked for a short bit before he left. A few minutes later, two other priests came and told me to get down and follow them. I looked back in silence as the car drove off.
I was brought into a huge dormitory with about forty other kids. The oldest of them was about fifteen and he introduced himself as “Danny the Pitch-black”. I would soon learn why they called him that. The youngest must have been about seven and they called him “Mickey Mouse”. He was little more than just skin and bones and his left eye socket was completely dark. He never spoke and mostly just laid down on his bed, when the other kids or the clergy left him alone that is.
The first night was the hardest. They told me that I had to “earn” a blanket so I had to bear the cold. I still remember that night. I barely had any sleep because I was shivering the whole time. The next day was Sunday so they woke us up before sunrise for the mass, in the afternoon we had Bible study and by 8 pm, all kids had to be in bed. Most meals usually consisted of tasteless porridge and occasionally a potato.
Mondays were when the real hell began. We would be once more woken up before the sun and taken to the bog after the porridge breakfast. Now, in Ireland, coal is nearly absent and the primary resource harvested for fuel was the bog peat. So, turf farming consisted of an important segment of manual labor. We would be forced to cut peat all day every day until Sunday, under the sun without receiving any food or water. Those who attempt to take breaks, including the kids who simply fell unconscious from exhaustion, were punished with beatings, and not receiving their dinner porridge and/or the blanket at night. But those punishments, as I would later learn, were absolutely nothing compared to the rumors of what Father Sullivan, whom I learned to be the headmaster, did to those who got under his skin.
They said that Mickey once had both eyes intact when he first came to the institution, but he supposedly stole a single potato from the kitchen, an act which Father Sullivan, for some reason, despised unreasonably harshly. Danny was then subsequently ordered to bring Mickey to his room. Danny returned a few hours later without Mickey, who returned after three days. They say Father Sullivan, with the help of Danny the “Pitch-Black”, poured boiling tar extracted from peat into Mickey’s left eye, half-blinding him and permanently turning his eye into pitch-black. Many other “misbehaving” kids from other dorms had supposedly suffered the same fate. Some others had their pinky fingers chopped off because “Father Sullivan liked to keep souvenirs.” And some kids were brought there in the middle of the night and simply never returned, with no one knowing anything about their fate. I had initially dismissed these rumors as mere rumors, until one day they took Sean.
Sean had always been a quiet kid. He mostly kept to himself and only spoke when he needed to. He and I had quite in common. When his mother committed suicide, the Catholic Church refused to hold a funeral for her, and instead, the priest of his local parish humiliated her and Sean by telling everyone in the town that she didn’t deserve to be paid any respect and was going to hell. Sean had a deep distrust and resentment toward clergymen since, and this had manifested itself in anger.
One day, while in the bog, he suddenly stopped working and sat upon a rock. When Father McKinley told him to get up and resume working, he ignored that. The priest then hit him once with his stick, but Sean continued to sit there. The priest continued to hit him a few more times and yelled at him to get up, but Sean once again did not respond. Father McKinley then landed a blow on Sean’s back with all his strength, breaking the stick in half. This caused Sean to finally snap. He lunged at McKinley, unleashing all of his built-up anger and resentment in an instant. He landed blows left and right, and the priest, in his shock, could not do anything to restrain the enraged orphan. Sean then proceeded to bite McKinley in the neck, sinking his teeth all the way in. The ear-piercing shriek of pure agony and terror emanating from the churchman in that instant was unlike anything I had ever witnessed. It took about five or so older kids and other clergymen to break him off, and when they did, blood poured out from the priest’s neck like a fountain. We never saw him after that.
Sean was little more than a beast at that moment, acting not with rational thought but with pure instinct. It feels terrifying to think how quickly a human being can revert to their animalistic self when they are pushed to the brim.
Sean was restrained and brought to the back of Father Sullivan’s car. We didn’t see him for several days after the incident. Then he returned to the dorm one midnight. I looked at him carefully with the little moonlight shining in through the window. His left eye was pitch black. His left pinky finger was gone, and a bloody piece of cloth was attached in its place. He did not speak. He did not answer. He sat on his bed and remained there. Like Mickey.
There was great distress among the kids after that incident. Everyone was whispering about it and its aftermath. A chilling aura of fear possessed the dorm and even beyond. Up until this point, the case with Mickey was mere rumors and hearsay, but with Sean, we had seen everything with our own eyes. After the next Sunday mass, Father Sullivan gathered all the kids in every dorm to the courtyard and gave a chilling speech about the importance of obedience, because “God inflicts tremendous punishment on those who dare to rebel against his will, the scale of which is cannot be imagined by mere humans”. I still remember those exact words.
His speech worked to ramp up the increasing fear dominating the orphans of the institution, and almost every child showed extra effort not to “misbehave” after that. Everyone but one child: Sean.
A few weeks passed after the incident and things were mostly quiet, everyone had resumed normal routines with extra caution. Sean didn’t do anything else at first, which caused the clergy, now believing him to be completely subjugated, to relax their eyes on him. One night, he stole a bit of bread and a few potatoes from the kitchen and snuck out of the institution. Unbeknownst to everyone, he had been secretly digging the ground near the fence in the backyard, under the barbed wire bit by bit every night with a wooden spoon, in a corner rarely visited by anyone, until it was just big enough to fit under, which wasn’t much since he, just like every other kid, was scrawny to the point where was a little more than just skin and bones. He snuck out one night, and nobody noticed until the morning.
It was ultimately a futile attempt though, as he failed to blend in with other people. He was caught in Dublin by the Guards a week later, who were apparently on high alert, searching every corner due to a recent car bombing attack in Dublin and Monaghan, which was all over the newspapers. Sean was then brought back to the institution. Upon his return, he was once more returned to Father Sullivan’s room, and then taken to the infirmary. No one saw him for about a month, then he was returned to the dorm room, on a stretcher.
Both of his legs were amputated, apparently his “punishment” for trying to escape. He did survive a few more months, sitting on his bed all day since he could no longer work. He did not speak a single word after that. One morning, he was found dead in his bed and was taken somewhere where he was probably disposed of.
I don’t remember much else about the rest of my stay in that institution. I guess my brain just sort of turned itself off to protect itself or maybe erased the rest of those painful memories after many years. When I somehow reached 16, I was released from the institution and returned to Dublin and later County Monaghan. But the memories were so painful, that I knew I couldn’t stay in Ireland anymore. I emigrated to Northern Ireland first where I lived for a few years in Belfast, but found no peace there either, partly due to the political turmoil in Ulster and partly because the memories persisted so long as I did. Then I moved to the US. It has been more than four decades since. I still haven’t set foot in Ireland since then and don’t ever plan to do so for the rest of my life. I don’t know what happened to that institution or Father Sullivan or anyone else in there. I doubt they received justice given how easy it was to erase evidence back in the 70s. All I know is that the government started an investigation in 2000 regarding the systemic child abuse in industrial schools. Most of those schools are now closed, but some of them continue operating under the rebranded name “reformatory schools”, albeit they are mostly state-run and/or secular now.
Aside from getting this off my chest, I hope this serves as a cautionary tale to keep children away from such organized institutions because you never know what might be happening behind closed doors.