Man ‘taken off street and thrown into mental hospital’

A MAN who has spent most of the last 40 years in a psychiatric hospital was brought to the institution by a garda who found him wandering the streets of Cork in a dishevelled state.

Papers, seen by the Irish Examiner, relating to the care of 59-year-old Christy Smith do not include any formal admission form involuntarily committing the then teenager to the psychiatric unit.

His sister Mary, who only tracked the former Upton Industrial School resident after many years not knowing she had a brother, wants to know the circumstances behind her brother’s detention and why he has spent so many decades as a psychiatric patient.