The second programme in the States of Fear series, shown on RTE last night, highlighted the plight of hundreds of mentally and physically handicapped Irish children in "live-in" homes run by religious orders where chronic bullying, beatings and sexual abuse were commonplace.
Mr Christy McEvoy, one of a family of seven from Dublin's northside, was allowed home from the school to his family once a month. Recalling his first days at the school, he said he was "deeply shocked" by the screams in the corridors and the impact of swishing leather. He recalled a boy his own age being "beaten around the room" because of his inability to learn, not for disciplinary reasons. The visually-impaired boy was crashing into desks while the teacher cried out, "Mind the lovely furniture."
The Rosminians had recently expressed their profound sorrow and deep regret over the fact that young people in their care had been treated so badly, according to the programme.
"John", the name adopted by an actor who played the part of a former child resident of the Cabra School for the Deaf, run by the Christian Brothers, said the scenes there sometimes resembled a Nazi concentration camp. The boys were divided into two groups, the totally deaf and those with partial hearing. Any child with a totally deaf disability found playing with someone from the partially hearing group would be "brutally beaten", he maintained.
He was sexually abused at the school, he claimed, when he was only eight. It occurred over a three-week period when he was abused by one individual in the mornings "and sometimes in the evenings as well".
"They took the handles off the toilet doors," he said. "That's how we knew they took boys in there."
One brother had intimated that he was like a doctor to the young boys in his charge while he abused them.
Alan Carroll, a former inmate of Lola House, the Brothers of Charity home in Cork, described how he was sexually abused and beaten. The institution was heavily subsidised by the State, but in reality, said Mr Carroll, "education was non-existent". Many inmates were never taught to read or write, he claimed.
Mr Carroll said he had spent a lifetime attempting to come to terms with his experience at the hands of the Brothers of Charity: "If I don't forgive them, I'm just as bad," he said. He was no longer bitter, however. All he wanted was that his tormentors should say they were sorry for what they had done.
David Lane was a spina bifida victim, who was sent as a young boy to St Joseph's Orthopaedic Hospital, Coole, Co Westmeath, run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul.
He recalled the punishment meted out to boys by an arthritic nun who would delegate other lads to do the beatings. If these were not to her satisfaction, then the assailant would join the others as a "victim" and be forced to take his turn.
Bed-wettings were a constant nightmare. Marie Gallagher, who was in Clontarf Orthopaedic Hospital as a young child with a dislocated hip, recounted some vivid experiences in this regard.
