Abused, beaten and betrayed

THE bleak house rose from the windswept peninsula like a tombstone to the dying innocence of each new arrival.

Childhood here was an endless ache of loneliness, fear and deprivation, deepened by the cruel consciousness that no one on the outside cared what went on within.

The boys placed in Baltimore Fisheries School were not wayward just orphaned, illegitimate or unlucky. The "offenders" among them had usually committed no greater crime than truancy.

One 10-year-old hauled before the courts and deported from a children's home in Dublin had been apprehended by an NSPCC inspector for begging.

Their collective punishment was to be condemned to an alien landscape and a regime that starved them of love, comfort, dignity, a proper education and basic nutrition.

Decades later, when they knew their worth, they came before the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse to tell their extraordinary stories of suffering and survival.

"The witnesses," the commission recorded, "recalled that the pupils were not merely hungry, they were literally starving.

"They were compelled to supplement their diet by eating raw vegetables and vegetation potatoes, turnips, mangolds, carrots and sorrel, by eating barnacles at the seashore and by scavenging, begging and stealing in the village of Baltimore."

Their thin and tattered clothing gave them no warmth, their bedding was flea infested and urine soaked. They ate where they prayed, drank from broken crockery and dunked tasteless rations into scatterings of salt thrown onto the bare table top.

They were beaten for stealing food, beaten for failing lessons, beaten for the rare occasions when they might share laughter or horseplay. They were raped by staff, by authority figures and by older boys conditioned by a culture of brutality and violence.

They were meant to be trained in boat-building, net-making and the other trades of the sea that surrounded their coastal prison but the boatshed lay mostly empty and the net loft idle.

When eventually they were released as youths to work for local farmers and factory owners, records would show how much they were paid a surprise to those who would toil for years without a wage for their labour.

Various epithets were used by the witnesses to describe the attitude and behaviour of those who ruled and ruined their lives: brutal, cruel and sadistic. The commission did not argue.