Fostered from a county home to be beaten, abused and forced to work as a farm slave
Retired 69-year-old Kerry solicitor James Sugrue says the trauma of boys like him has been ignored
JAMES SUGRUE was just seven years old when his mother dropped him off at the county home in Killarney with his two younger brothers. Sitting for an eternity on a cold seat in the foyer with one-year-old David on his lap and a fearful six-year-old Michael alongside him, he remembers a nun in full white robes sweeping in and pulling his baby brother from his arms.
The 69-year-old, who is now a retired solicitor living in Ballybunion, Co. Kerry, recalls she did not utter a single word of explanation or comfort.
‘My God, she was frightening looking, she just grabbed the baby and walked off,’ James says. ‘He was screaming. We were left crying, in total shock.’
Less than a year later, all three of the brothers were separated.
James and his brother, Michael, were boarded out to two local farmers in Kerry at the start of 1960 – a system which began under the Health Act 1953 where families were paid for taking in children in institutions.
He believes children who endured abuse under this practice should have been included in Taoiseach
Micheál Martin’s apology this week in the wake of the report into the country’s mother and baby homes.
‘Farmers used to go out and pick children to come and work with them, and pay them very little and feed them very little. We were treated like slaves, slave labour,’ James admits.
‘I was dressed in rags. There was no running water or electricity in the farm. There were fleas in the bed, they would be jumping up from the floor biting my legs in the morning.
‘I had no toothbrush for 10 years. There was no bathroom, no toilet, I could just wash my face, hands and feet with soap.
‘It was like I was a child of the ’20s and ’30s.’
He remembers a happy early childhood in Essex with his English mother and Irish father until they returned to his father’s hometown of
Ballybunion in 1958.
‘My dad had worked for Ford, we had a lovely house with running water and electricity, and we had gotten a television, for the coronation,’ adds James.
Initially they had a few carefree months playing by the seaside with their relatives, but his father returned to England for work and their mother took the drastic step of abandoning her children in April 1959 in the county home which is now known as St Columbanus Community Hospital.
‘I think she had mental health problems; she could have suffered from postnatal depression. I remember her saying she was sick and going into the isolation ward in the hospital across the way from the home,’ James says.
Their first night in the county home, which was once a workhouse, was spent clinging to each other in a single bed in a geriatric ward where they would go on to regularly witness people dying.
‘I remember the smell of urine. We shouldn’t have been there. It was a horrible thing to see people being put in a sheet and carried down to the morgue.’
After a few days, the youngsters escaped across the road looking for their mother at the hospital reception desk.
‘We asked for her and they said, “Mrs Sugrue? She’s gone,”’ James recalls. ‘We were terrified and then the nuns came and got us and beat us. There was no comfort there, it was non-existent.’
One local lady in the home showed them kindness when she helped the boys find their baby brother who was behind a locked door in a room full of other children at the back of the home.
‘She was very nice to us,’ admits an emotional James, speaking this week from his home in Ballybunion. ‘I got in and saw him and that nun again found out and hit me for that, but I kept going in.
‘I always remember helping my brother to take his first steps.
‘Every time I had to leave him, he was crying. Then we had to leave him for good eventually. I didn’t see him again for 11 years.’
The parting came in February 1960 when he and his brother were told their uncle and aunt had arrived, but their excitement quickly dissipated into fear when they found it was two elderly strangers, a farmer and his sister.
‘They were in their 70s,’ James says. ‘The old man said I’ll take the eldest one and the other lady who
‘I had no toothbrush for 10 years’
‘Her son used to beat me with a whip’
had a farm in the village took my brother, Michael. We were kind of like cattle at the mart.’
They were taken on a bus to a south Kerry village, with Michael dropped off in the town with the sister while James continued up a boreen to a farm outside the town.
‘This farmhouse was in terrible condition. It was filthy. I remember staring and staring.’
In the months after he arrived at the age of eight, James said they ‘piled on the work’ even though they were paid by the State to look after
him. ‘I was dragging buckets of water from the well around a half a mile away,’ he reveals.
‘I was so traumatised I started screaming at night with nightmares but I would just get hit. They were supposed to be foster parents, they were old, there was no love. I remember hearing her tell one of their sons visiting from Dublin, “This is a little boy, we brought out of the home to do jobs around the house”.’
James recalled the woman of the house did show him some humanity during his decade at the farm as she tried to shield him from beatings from her husband and son, who have all since died.
He continues: ‘Her son, who was around 28 or 29, used to beat me with a whip. I had to sleep in the same bed as him and he sexually abused me.
‘His father used to put his hand on my leg and rub it up and down and if I pushed him away, he used to just slap me right into the face.
‘He was just grooming this child you know until eventually he also molested me. Nobody would hear your screams where I was.’
James breaks down when he speaks of one beating he witnessed being meted out to his younger brother at the age of nine when they returned to his brother’s lodging to find the youngster was being blamed for pigs escaping.
‘He was told to go to the orchard and get a stick to get beaten with,’ says James. ‘My brother was hysterical, he was told to kneel down on the steps in the backyard and take off his trousers and everything else – he was beaten up unmercifully.
‘I’ll never forget that in my life. I thought to myself, one day I will get my say.
‘Michael died when he was 40 in 1993. He never got over that time, he started taking drugs the year before he died, and I think he took too many either by mistake or intentionally.
‘A neighbour in the village came up to me after he died and apologised, she’d said they’d heard my brother’s screams and didn’t do anything.’
James now wants the State to recognise the appalling cruelty suffered by children like him who were boarded out, a practice that began in the 1950s.
‘I’m 70 this year and I’ve had to live with it all my life,’ he says.
‘I’d like the same recognition for the children outside the mother and baby homes, who were in the county homes, and believe me I sympathise fully with them.
‘It should be a blanket restitution and blanket recognition and apology to all children.
‘As recently as six or seven years ago a psychiatrist said I was still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
‘I can’t form long-term relationships; I’ve never been able to settle anywhere.
‘You never forget what they did.’