‘Starving boys lived in filth and were constantly abused’

BOYS in a Co Cork industrial school lived in filth and freezing conditions, were starved of food and suffered constant severe physical and occasional sexual violence.

Yet the Department of Education deliberately found extra boys to send to the Baltimore school, often from other homes closer to their relatives, after its manager complained he needed more pupils to increase his capitation grant.

The school catered for up to 170 children at a time from 1936 to its closure in 1950, and 21 former pupils gave evidence to the commission in what is to date the only complete investigation it has carried out.

It concluded: “Experience of life in the Baltimore school as recounted by the witnesses was so harsh and deprived by the standards of today as to verge on the unbelievable, were it not for the fact that a contemporaneous record is available to give credence to the testimony.”

The school was funded by the department and run by a local board of governors rather than a religious order, although its managers were priests. None of the allegations made by the former pupils were contested.

The committee found that the boys, mostly orphans or illegitimate children, wore tattered clothes and short pants all year round in an unheated building; were barefoot most of the year and constantly went hungry on a diet that consisted mainly of inadequate quantities of potatoes or bread.

“Even by the standards of the time, the lack of hygiene ... seems remarkable. On bathing day the bath water was changed after five or six boys had bathed.

"There were no toothbrushes or toothpaste, combs, soaps or personal towels. The clothing and the bedding was verminous. There were outbreaks of scabies,” the report says.

They were also subjected to regular physical punishment, including severe beatings, and 15 of the 21 reported sexual abuse by staff, authority figures or older boys.

While not naming anyone, the committee concluded there were numerous abusers at the school, including a serial offender, “a sexual predator, probably a homosexual paedophile, who systematically preyed on and sexually abused vulnerable children in a pervasive and indiscriminate manner”.

The committee said training for a trade was “illusory” at the school and training for life outside it non-existent. Many of the witnesses grew into men with psychiatric illnesses and psychological problems consistent with a childhood “deprived of any positive nurturing”.

Department inspector Dr Anna McCabe initially wrote generally positive reports of the school, but in 1946, she wrote: “It is easily the worst of all the schools and stands alone for inefficiency and neglect.”

She said the chairman of the board of governors had not the slightest interest in the place.