There are few things more satisfying than seeing one of my author’s books published and available for purchase. Last week Mickey Finn’s (a pseudonym) book, In My Own Words; Still Running was published. There was nothing of note in Mickey’s contacting me except to say he seemed to be unnecessarily cautious. He had a soft Irish voice and living near Villa Martin we arranged to meet at one of the attractive square’s pavement restaurants.
Mickey relaxed a little in my company; we had much in common apart from nationality and my knowing Dublin reasonably well. It was agreed that I should make a start and I received its first chapters. I guarantee you that it will be a book you will remember reading for decades to come. It is hard to believe such horrors could take place in the 17th Century, let alone during the 1960s.
Ghost-writing In My Own Words; Still Running was one of the most emotional and distressing things I had ever done. There were parts that left me aching; I needed to break off; get a grip. I was constantly moved to tears.
Please don’t read this true account as a horror story; read it instead as a child’s victory over a state apparatus as wicked as that of the Soviets. Read it as a child’s triumph over depraved sadists; a child who did survive but is still running.
IN MY OWN WORDS: STILL RUNNING
In June 1964, a twelve-year old child was summonsed to appear at Dublin’s Children’s Court; an oak-panelled court located in the sinister Dublin Castle. The offence for which he was charged related to an amateurish break-in under the leadership and influence of older boys. In terms of seriousness their misbehaviour was no more than a childhood prank.
In the harsh surroundings of the court, deep in the bowels of Dublin Castle, the child was sentenced to serve three years hard labour in what was then known in Ireland as an Industrial School.
Letterfrack Industrial School, to which the boy was sent, is situated in Connemara. It is one of Ireland’s most inaccessible counties; a bleak county facing the North Atlantic. For children the awful place’s remoteness found its equal only in a Siberian gulag; the likelihood of escape less than that from the notorious Alcatraz Prison in South Francisco Bay.
The industrial school’s isolation was a major factor in the institutionalised abuse of the child inmates by the Christian Brothers with whom these unfortunate waifs were placed. Many of these ill-fated children had not been convicted of any offence; their only crime was that they had been orphaned; many were victims of dysfunctional family life.
During his sentence, Mickey, and the hundreds of other children who passed through this den of depravity, were methodically physically and mentally tortured and abused. The Irish State was instrumental in providing this depraved band of brothers with a constant stream of child victims.
With Taliban zeal the brothers, practiced in the dark arts of sadism, methodically administered savage beatings and tortures merely on a whim. Child sufferers were randomly selected and the injuries inflicted witnessed by the institution’s children.
Many of the children died or disappeared. In the institution’s gardens today may be found the markers of well over 140 children known to have been murdered. Many more are simply unaccounted for; they simply disappeared. No one had any interest in tracing them.