Nobody cared

Children should have a mum and dad, that's a basic human right. Sadly, they don't always have two parents and sometimes they don't have any at all. In some cases, family will provide for these orphaned children, aunts or uncles take them in and rear them to the best of their ability. But no matter how hard they try they can never take the place of a mum or dad.

So can you imagine how horrific it must have been for children to be reared in heartless, cruel, violent and depraved industrial schools, where nobody even bothered to pretend to love or care for them. The objective of many of these children was to get through the day without a beating or worse still being buggered or raped. The best case scenario for many children in Ireland's stark industrial schools was to live a loveless life without violence or depravity, but while that might have been the better of both evils it is still horrific.

Some of these children never knew what it was to be kissed, hugged or loved; the only sort of intimacy they would have experienced would have been the evil and unspeakable type. They would never have known a kind word, a kind act, many of them would never have known what it was to have had their Christian name called, instead they would have been referred to by their surname or even worse – a number. Who would these children have had to turn to when they were being beaten, tortured, raped, humiliated and neglected? No-one! Nobody cared, nobody wanted to know. They were deemed second class citizens who were being reared for the scrap heap.

By day they went to school and learned all about God and prayer, the great merciful, all-loving and all-forgiving God, and they came home to school to be brutalized by his agents on earth. How hypocritical was that, they couldn't even find comfort in prayer. Even their hope was robbed from them. How could any God have watch these little children suffer, and in his name?