LET DOWN BY THE COMMISSION
‘Somehow I don’t really believe that apology by the Government’
‘I wet the bed all the time. I was put out in the shed until I was 24’
by Nicola Byrne
IT’S the little things Michael O’Flaherty remembers vividly. The hedges going backwards as he was taken in a car from the Tuam mother and babies home to be ‘fostered out’.
The way his foster father, who was 6ft 2in, would draw himself to his full height before punching him.
The fine clothes of the wealthy woman of his second foster home as she left one day for the Galway races, locking the door and shutting him out all day with no food.
Bending down to kiss the family dog goodbye when he finally decided to leave this home for the army.
Mr O’Flaherty can talk eloquently for hours about his experiences as a young boy and later youth, and how he was kicked and used as a punchbag, and as slave labour.
Like 548 other witnesses who gave testimony to the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes, he is disappointed with how his story was retold in the commission report.
Although he gave evidence to researchers for hours, the entire story of his young tragic life is given just 14 lines in the final report.
The language is dry and not his own and it mixes up details.
And importantly for him, his name is not on it.
‘They rang me and asked me if I wanted my name included and I said of course I did.
‘What’s the point reading a story if you don’t know who it’s about? And then when the report came, there was nothing in it, no name.
‘God, I was angry. Angry at the way we’ve been treated again.
‘Those people up there in the Dáil arguing about us. At least the bishops and the orders apologised. The Government apologised too but somehow I don’t really believe that apology. I think the man who made it, had to do it.’
O’Flaherty, who is now 73, has vivid memories of the abuse he suffered as a child where he was kicked and beaten by his foster carers for years.
‘I never had a childhood. My childhood was taken from me. But to read the report, well it doesn’t look all that bad.
‘But my God it was. I don’t remember anything about being inside the four walls at Tuam, nothing whatsoever.
‘I just remember getting into a car and as the car was moving along, the hedges on the road were going backwards.
‘They never said where they were taking me or to whom. I was five years old.
‘I reckoned these people they left me with must be my mam and dad, that’s what I was told to call them anyway.
‘But after a while, I realised that they couldn’t be my mam and dad because of the way I was treated.
‘I used to eat scraps meant for the pigs in the shed.
‘I used to eat an old potato the way you’d eat an apple. They had their own kids but they weren’t treated like that. The lady of the house, she was kind really and she loved me but the father would beat her too. She only came up to his shoulder and she was frightened of him too.’
O’Flaherty remembers he only went to school on days that it was raining. On fine days he was expected to work in the fields, all year round.
‘I remember coming down this one day and there were three bags by the door.
‘And my mam, my foster mam, smiled at me and the father said take them up the field. Use two of them to kneel on.
‘I was to pull turnips in the whole field myself. I started at 9 and at 2, he came along to see how much I had done. I was only about eight.’
In the official report, O’Flaherty’s experience with this family is described like this.
‘This next witness, who was born in the late 1940s, had 6 siblings in his foster family, the progeny of his foster parents. This new child was expected to fetch water from the well in the middle of the night if his foster father felt like a cup of tea – and had to supply tea for him and his friends who would come to play cards.
‘He would be fed the potatoes that were given to the pigs. In the mornings before school, he would take the hens’ eggs, place them in the fire and take them with him to school.
‘His teacher noticed this and would give him sandwiches and milk – but if he was late home from school, the father would whip him.’
‘To be honest, it’s not really a record of my life,’ says O’Flaherty now.
He recalls that then he was 14 and with no warning, another car pulled up at the drive just like it had done to collect him from the Tuam home nine years previously.
He was told he was leaving that house.
He was asked if he wanted to take anything with him and he ran upstairs to fetch his hurl and ball, his only possessions.
‘Here I was again on the move, with not an idea where I was going or why. I just did what I was told.’
His story as it appeared in the report said merely: ‘The new family were wealthy dairy farmers, with two sons already in University. He was paid £1 a week, and put sleeping in a shed, working from six in the morning [before school] and until midnight. pulling turnips, bringing in the cows, washing, milking and feeding them, delivering the milk door-to-door.
‘On one occasion, he was told to go into town on a bike to fetch groceries; a Garda noticed there was no light on the bike and summoned him to court.
‘The foster father “fined” him, taking his weekly £1 from him to “teach him a lesson”,’ the report says.
‘That was all wrong,’ says O’Flaherty now. ‘The court fined me.
‘And the conditions I was in there were terrible. On the first night I arrived, they let me in the house but I wet the bed. I used to wet it all the time.
‘That was it, I was put out in the shed and I stayed there until I was 24 with the dog. I didn’t mind it.
‘I never had a shower, a basin of water to wash.’
After he got away from the family and joined the army, O’Flaherty met his beloved wife Ann when he was in Dublin, aged 26, for a catering course.
On the night they met at a dance on Parnell Square, he walked her home and they stopped on O’Connell
Bridge and he recalls he said, ‘Ann, I’ve no one, no relations, I don’t know where I come from. I’m telling you that if you want to walk away now.
‘But she didn’t, she said, “I’ll help you find your mother”.’
O’Flaherty did eventually meet his birth mother Patricia Flaherty in 1998, shortly before she died. She was the eldest of 16 children and had had him when she was a teenager.
Her family had pushed her out for the ‘shame’ she had brought on them.
They tracked her down in Manchester but she was already ill with cancer.
They exchanged letters and the following year he travelled to the UK to meet her.
‘It was the best present I ever had. She said, “Michael a stór, I’m so sorry, I let you down. But I said, “You didn’t mam, you didn’t”.
‘She was lovely. She was a treasure.’ His mother died shortly afterwards in October 1999. ‘She was so delighted to have two grandchildren, our two children, as she had none previously.
‘She’d married a man from Co. Mayo, also called Michael, and I had a stepbrother, also Michael.’
Pre-empting survivors’ disappointment with the widely criticised report, its authors said it wasn’t supposed to include everybody’s full stories.
‘Given how many witnesses were heard, and at such length, as already implied this report cannot be exhaustive or give full details
of all disclosures to the confidential committee,’ it said. ‘Inevitably, though, there were major similarities in the disclosures as witnesses reported how they were treated while they were in care.’
For now, Mr O’Flaherty, who is chairman of the Tuam Home Survivors Alliance, is focused on excavating the mass burial site of babies at the former Tuam home. They have called on the Government to begin collecting their DNA ‘to eliminate any delay in returning human remains to relatives for dignified burials’.
‘That’s what we want to see happen as soon as possible and then the site should be concreted over and a monument put up there.’
Breeda Murphy, PRO of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home Alliance, says the report by legal expert Geoffrey Shannon shows the DNA can be collected from the babies’ remains.
‘The biological samples from relatives would then be stored securely until legislation is in place.
‘It is comforting to note that no DNA profiles can be constructed from the samples until legislation is in place and we are assured it is possible to generate DNA from the remains of the children.
‘Because of the age profile of our members, time is of the essence.’
O’Flaherty says the other big challenge facing survivors is getting redress.
‘Forget the report, it was a disappointment. What we need now is equal redress for survivors all over the world.
‘I would say to all survivors, keep fighting. We are all behind you.’