Colourful life with the ‘blue legs’ boys

AT the end of a beautiful West Cork peninsula, a simple plaque marks the site of a former industrial school that housed inmates known locally as ‘blue legs.’

Their unsuitably light winter clothing, even in the unusual cold of 1947, showed the lack of care at Baltimore Industrial School, a reformatory for orphans and young offenders for 44 years.

The head priest, a Kerryman, Fr McCarthy, spent two days incinerating the institution’s records before the building was abandoned in 1950. Alfie O’Mahony, now 80, survived that last bitter winter at Baltimore before he was farmed out to work as a labourer with a local family. His book, The Way We Were, is an account of his six years at the former fisheries school, which began taking in orphans in 1906.