Founded on Fear Page 3
Many Irishmen in Britain live five or six in one room without even a place to hang up their coat. Many live in places like the Salvation Army Hostel or the Church Army ... where they sleep in huge dorms. They have no home life or comfort. Many go straight from work into the public house and from there to bed. As I have said before they have no ambition, no purpose in life, no personal pride, no thought of progress, no sense of continuity. They live for today only. Their education was to prepare them for the next life; the soul is saved at the expense of the body. We are taught in school that to be exalted we must first of all suffer a great deal. The more we suffer the greater will be our reward in Heaven. We are reminded very often that this world is a Vale of Tears.25
Tyrrell came across a great number of ex-inmates and encouraged many of them to recount their experiences. His efforts met with mixed results. Some people were willing to talk about their experiences but refused to take it any further. Others, including his brother and his friend Tom Thornton, were highly defensive on the subject. As he said himself, this line of questioning had to be handled very carefully; asking the wrong Irishman about his background was ‘dynamite’.26 From a few descriptions that he related, he had experience of some of these explosions.
Recently I was having a chat with some Irish men in a pub who were talking about our problems at home. I said the only way to end partition is for all Irish people abroad to return home and build up our country and therefore create a healthy economy and at the same time prove to our brothers in the North that we are a civilized community. At present there is no evidence that we are. One of the chaps had to be held by his pals until I left the pub, because he wanted to fight me.27
This is a minor theme running through the latter part of his account – the reactions of the Irish in Britain to any criticism of Ireland, the Christian Brothers, priests or the Irish government. In retrospect, some might agree with Tyrrell when he stated that he failed ‘to understand why thousands of Irish people express a hatred of England and the English in view of the fact that the Irish spend the greater part of their lives in England eating out of the hands of English people’.28 And while he understood the historical reasons for this, it was baffling to him that so many of these poorly treated Irish people continued to swear blind loyalty to the institutions, leaders and country that spat them out.
Tyrrell felt no such allegiance. While he never saw himself as an economic emigrant, he did feel that he had been very badly treated. Increasingly he became acerbic in his denunciations of the industrial schools and the Christian Brothers, but also denominational education, priests and religion itself. The problems of Ireland, in his opinion, were directly traceable to this. What sets him apart from the crowd, apart from his outspokenness, is that he also rejected a blind nationalism. While he was concerned about improving the Irish nation, he saw no role for the IRA in this. A large part of his rejection of the IRA seems to be down to the sea change in British attitudes to the Irish after the IRA bombing campaign of 1939. To Tyrrell’s sensitive and nervous soul the hostility he encountered when he returned after the war was particularly unwelcome.
I went to London where I heard wages were much higher than in the Midlands, and found great changes since 1935. In spite of the bombing, and the great shortage of houses, the population had increased by several millions. I spent a day in the east end, and found that whole streets had disappeared. Later I went to north London to find digs but was shocked and amazed to learn that the Irish were most unpopular. Most landladies simply shut the door in my face when they learned I was Irish. One landlady was more friendly and advised me to go to the Irish quarter. I said ‘I didn’t know that there was such a place’. ‘Oh yes’, she answered, ‘Camden Town is where most Irish people live. There they can get drunk and fight as much as they like. We always had Irish lads here until they started going about with bombs in their pockets, just before the war.’ ‘I am sorry’, she added, ‘I don’t wish to offend you, but your lads are too big a risk.’ Every word cut into me like a knife.29
To have rejected the twin salves of Irish abstraction – God and guns – was no mean feat. Naturally he paid a price for it, and on more than one occasion he was threatened, assaulted and even pulled down off a soapbox in Hyde Park for denouncing the ills of Ireland. As he said himself, the irony of this was that he was only quoting a priest.30 Other things he said were clearly too uncomfortable.
Before leaving London I made a habit of visiting the Irish public houses in the East End (Whitechapel) where almost all the customers are Irish, and I must confess that the behaviour of many of the men was a disgrace to any community. I was severely beaten up for telling them what I thought. I told them we were known abroad as irresponsible liars and drunkards. That the Catholic religion had kept us the most unhappy and the most backward race in Europe. Evidence of our ignorance and backwardness lies in the fact that only a fraction of our people can earn a living at home, and also due to the fact that there were hundreds going about with guns in their pockets. We were a nation of gangsters. I told them there were thousands of overfed priests living on the backs of the people. These parasites must be made to do some useful work. The priest is Ireland’s greatest enemy. He is doing untold harm.31
It was through the Irish Centre in London that he was advised to contact Owen Sheehy Skeffington, who at the time, 1958, was gaining notoriety for his stance on corporal punishment. Skeffington was the son of Frank and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. Frank was murdered in Easter Week 1916 after he characteristically attempted to prevent looting in the streets. He was, among other things, a socialist, a suffragist, a pacifist and an antivivisectionist. His wife Hanna was the well-known feminist, who was on Sinn Fein’s executive council, and who broke with de Valera when he took the oath. Their son Owen imbibed many of his parents’ characteristics, most notably his father’s socialism and pacifism. Like his parents he was highly outspoken and a seemingly lone voice against many aspects of Irish society. He was censored on several occasions and his papers are testament to the extent of personal abuse he sustained for his beliefs. Like his father he was also a committed educationalist and it was in this sphere that he began his criticisms of the brutal ethos of much of Irish education. From his position as Senator (1954-70) he was a consistent opponent of several Ministers for Education, most notably Richard Mulcahy, who refused to believe or investigate the charges of abuse and punishment that Skeffington had documented.
And this is how he came to Tyrrell’s attention in London. Skeffington saw that Tyrrell’s accusations about Letterfrack in his first letter to him had ‘the ring of unvarnished truth about it’. Skeffington invited him to his home and encouraged Tyrrell to write an account of his time in Letterfrack. Over the next five months Tyrrell put together a 70,000-word manuscript that is the text of this book. They communicated until 1967, and Tyrrell’s half of the correspondence is all that remains. After completing his manuscript, he wrote a great deal more of what he called ‘additional notes’, which amounted to extra narrative, some of which has been incorporated into this introduction. Much of the material was repetition, or thoughts on a variety of subjects that might not necessarily demand our attention. But from these letters we can see that Tyrrell relied on Skeffington’s original idea which was to write ‘a booklet’ to outline the conditions of Letterfrack and the industrial schoolboy’s situation, an aim he more than achieved. It certainly wasn’t easy for him, and it took both a huge effort and a heavy toll: ‘I was very tired and done very little this weekend. I rushed through the last year as I got sick of it, and became very depressed. There are many things I can’t remember, and there are things which are too terrible to put in writing, which I can remember.’ Along the way Skeffington sent him material relating to the debate back in Ireland on corporal punishment and some national school incidents.
Thanks for the newspaper cuttings which I am returning. I can see that people are getting worried. Am sending a few pages and will write again on Saturday ... The
present chapter ‘I join the Regular Army – chapter 13’ is going to be too long, so I will have to make it into two chapters, making 15 in all. This is really a life story, which I was not prepared for.
However, the feeling that he was out of his depth and a little at sea continued. He was writing very much in isolation, although he did run it by some of his family, like his ‘brother Joe ... [who] was the first to leave Letterfrack. He has verified everything I have written in the early chapters.’ Understandably, he felt the ‘necessity for a little moral support, as most people have advised me against what I am doing. Most say it would do more good to forget about everything. But I am determined to carry on in spite of the fact that my brother is a priest and my sister is a nun in the States.’32
What is perhaps most compelling from the retrospect of nearly fifty years after he began his account is the sense of urgency he felt when he first sat down to write it. He was convinced that his text would genuinely make a difference, and that it would lead to some positive changes in the industrial school regime. By the beginning of the 1960s Tyrrell knew that it was going to take longer:
Thanks for your card. Am glad you have made some progress. I know it will take a long time – another two years perhaps. The thing is that it will one day be printed. Anything written which you don’t like may be crossed out, as it will save time later. I am keeping fairly well thanks. It’s difficult to be well when one isn’t happy. All good wishes, Peter.33
By the mid 1960s there seemed to have been a tacit understanding between them that it could not be published in its current form, most likely because there was too much supplementary material that was written after the first 14 chapters. Tyrrell to an extent became exasperated at the idea of re-writing it all, as expressed in a letter to Skeffington dated 25 March 1964:
I regret that in spite of all we have said, I may not be able to rewrite the ‘booklet’ when it is arranged. It has caused me considerable worry for several years, all day and every day, and in recent weeks it has been worse. I fear that unless I get the whole thing off my mind completely, my health might fail.
As I see it the real purpose of the ‘booklet’ would be to provide the necessary documentary proof, before I launch a campaign in this country. What I am planning is public demonstrations, which I feel is the most effective method. This would be done, with or without police permission. I have already given full details of what is happening in the schools to the police in Leeds and London. I think that the threat of public demonstrations will bring about the necessary changes. I am a member of the ‘Secular Society’ and they will probably help. The work of arranging the manuscript would be enormous, and if you couldn’t do it last year, how can it be done this year? The cause of the delay is all my fault. I led you astray completely when writing the ‘notes’ which should have stopped three years ago. I was not thinking of a booklet but a full length story. For the purpose of a booklet, enough material was written in five months and completed four years ago. Much of what is written in the postscript notes could be omitted. I am returning your receipt which I don’t need. If you agree to drop the whole thing, you may keep the money for your work over there.34 You may keep or destroy all my material.35
After receiving this letter, Skeffington immediately replied and suggested that Tyrrell write a small article, which he would pass on to Joy Rudd, an ex-student of Skeffington’s who was in London and already known to Tyrrell. She was able to place this article in Hibernia magazine and in the interim Skeffington agreed to try to edit the text as best he could.36 After this the frequency of letters drops off dramatically, with just a few letters between then and 1967. A reason for this is that Tyrrell, through Joy Rudd, got involved with the Tuairim group in London. This organization was founded in 1954 ‘in order to bring together members of the Post-Treaty generation and to provide a platform for young people with new ideas ... who are able to give constructive views on Irish problems’.37 It published pamphlets on a range of issues including partition and unification, the United Nations, Ireland and Europe, proportional representation, planning for economic development and Irish education. Its members included a host of Irish political and judicial luminaries such as Donal Barrington, Ronan Keane, Miriam Hederman O’Brien, Garrett FitzGerald and David Thornley to name just a few. The pamphlet which Tyrrell contributed to directly was the thirteenth of the Tuairim studies, and it was entitled Some of Our Children: A Report on the Residential Care of the Deprived Child in Ireland by a London Branch Study Group. It was published in 1966 and Tyrrell was named as one of the contributors to the work of the group. His early associations with the group were entirely positive as a letter to Skeffington in November 1964 relates:
A meeting of Tuairim was held at the Irish Centre last night. The subject of the discussion – ‘Irish Industrial Schools’. Joy Rudd and others gave the history of such schools, during the last hundred years. I told them about Letterfrack. The meeting was a great success ... Our aim now must be for secular schools. Education should be in the hands of educated people who have been trained for that work.38
Unfortunately, it seems that they refused to incorporate his experiences, or to even mention any abuse greater than the routine and excessive corporal punishment.39 Even though some members clearly believed in his testimony, either for fear of legal implications of unproven allegations, or simply because they genuinely believed that the punishments of 1964 were less severe and frequent than in 1934, they refused to incorporate any of his testimony.40 In the end a mild rebuke was inserted into the text of the pamphlet.
If nothing else this incident illustrates just how difficult it was to get a hearing for abuse claims. When even sympathetic and progressive characters like Rudd and Sheehy Skeffington found it impossible, for reasons of legality or credibility, to publish his experiences, it should remind us how different an era the early to mid 1960s in Ireland was. A parallel from the year before Tyrrell died – 1966 – is instructive. In that year Skeffington made the firing of John McGahern a cause célèbre.41 It was easier to bring into the public arena a current case of a gross abuse of authority, which by virtue of McGahern’s dismissal was an indisputable fact. It could also be said that this particular case was the culmination of thirty-five years of opposition to censorship. In the Tyrrell case, his writings were an almost isolated example. It would take a whole catalogue of abuses, the testimony of many individuals, and the removal of the church’s own credibility before anything similar was possible in terms of child abuse in Ireland.
While it might have been expected that the Christian Brothers would stonewall him and contemptuously dismiss his complaints and allegations, it was possibly the disappointment of seeing his experiences set to one side by reform-minded people that could have led to his despair. The one thing which we should bear in mind before we jump to a conclusion about Tyrrell and Tuairim is that suicide was something that had been on his mind for many years, all the way back to Letterfrack. In letters he wrote over the years Tyrrell had hinted at taking just such an action. In one series of supplementary notes to his text, he explicitly talks about walking out into the countryside where he would commit suicide out of sight of anyone.
In the summer of 1939 I made up my mind that life was not worth living. I wanted to die. My death must appear to be from natural causes or an accident. My plan was to stop eating for several days, and then wander into the jungle ... When I seen John Kelly dead [a fellow inmate in Letterfrack], I no longer feared death, because he looked so much better dead than alive, he looked happy and perfectly relaxed, his face was no longer drawn in pain, as I had so often seen before, the lines had gone from under his eyes, he seemed as though about to smile. From then onwards I thought of death as a reward for having lived, something to be desired, a prize for having accomplished an ambition.42
Tyrrell suffered from depression and it is likely that he was manic depressive.43 The strain of what he was trying to achieve was crushing. The urgency of what had become a quest, even a m
ission, changed his entire demeanour: ‘I am often reminded by my old friends that I have changed, I was a much nicer person years ago. I was agreeable and friendly. Today I am silent and when I speak it is to find fault and complain. In the old days I was afraid to complain or comment. I was afraid to disagree, I knew people were wrong and yet said “Yes that’s right” when the answer ought to have been “no”.’44 Some thirty years after he first looked upon death as a release, he chose the route of anonymous suicide, albeit in the way of the anti-Vietnam protestors who burned themselves alive around the same time.45
Finally, is the text realistic? The simple answer is that individuals must judge for themselves, but in my opinion it is a very fair and keenly observed portrayal. Tyrrell’s claims have been borne out by time, and none of the details have been refuted by counter-evidence from the Christian Brothers at the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse module which dealt specifically with Letterfrack on 16 June 2005. Having interviewed the respondent for the Christian Brothers on that day, Br David Gibson, I can confirm that the named individuals, specifically those accused of abuse by Tyrrell, were all present in Letterfrack at that time, and all were removed from Letterfrack subsequently. While Tyrrell admits to some exaggeration when discussing Letterfrack with Skeffington, he seems to have been scrupulous when it came to actually writing down the events. ‘A few things which I told you (when we met) in Dublin were exaggerated, and I therefore did not write about them.’46