‘We still feel we’re just numbers, It’s time we’re seen as people’

BOYS number 117 and 146 hadn’t been in touch for over 40 years but when they spotted each other in the crowd, they were instantly back in the childhoods they had tried hard to forget.

“Remember the day you took my piece of bread – an oul’ bit of heel – and I had nothing for breakfast?” 117 ribbed his old pal.

“I remember the day you got the terrible beating from Brother...” 146 replied. “You were black from it. I thought he’d killed you.”

Their memories of St Joseph’s Industrial School, Salthill, are of hunger, hardship, fear and abuse, physical for both and for 146, also sexual. For 146, it was all the harder because he had survived the horrors of industrial schools in Kilkenny and Artane and thought things couldn’t get any worse.

What made it worse for 117 was the fact that he had known tenderness in the care of nuns in Drogheda as a tiny child and had little idea of the cruelty that awaited him when he outgrew his toddler clothes.

Even after more than four decades, 117, aged 59 and from Offaly, and 146, aged 58 and from Cavan, don’t feel able to make public their identities. For all their adult lives they lived in silent pain.

“We still feel we’re just numbers. I was a number in St Joseph’s and when I went to the Redress Board – which didn’t believe most of what I told them – I was given another bloody number. It’s time we were seen as real people,” 146 said of his reason for marching.

Separately, his pal had come to the same conclusion and, unknown to each other, both men had travelled alone to the March of Solidarity with survivors of abuse in religious run residential institutions to let their presence in the crowd do the talking.

It was supposed to be a silent march but through chance meetings and overdue reunions like that of 117 and 146, the crowd of 7,000 buzzed with reminiscences, revelations and resolve to never be kept quiet again.

By the time they reached the Dáil, there were cheers, jeers and tears. Anger and frustration boiled over in the heckles of some, sorrow seeped out in the weeping of others. The organisers, themselves survivors, acknowledged them all.

Bernadette Fahy, who survived Goldenbridge Industrial School, said their presence spoke volumes to those who had refused to listen or tried to stifle their stories.