Damien Dempsey’s anger over boys who died in Letterfrack
DAMIEN DEMPSEY has called for the Government to exhume the bodies of boys who died in the notorious Letterfrack Industrial School in Co. Galway. The singer visited the site to discover why his granddad was sent there at the age of 12 during the regime of a notorious child abuser.
In powerful scenes from RTÉ’s Who Do You Think You Are? the Dubliner revealed that he cried himself to sleep after hearing harrowing details of how his young grandfather was taken from his mother by a parish priest and condemned to four years in the bleak Christian Brother outpost for ‘wandering’.
The singer was only a toddler when Thomas Dempsey died but it emerges that his grandfather only ever spoke briefly to family friends in Mayo about his incarceration to describe Letterfrack simply as ‘Auschwitz’. The Dubliner is seen struggling to contain his emotions while standing in one of the bleak Letterfrack workshops as local historian Erin Gibbons details the vicious whippings doled out to young boys.
His great-grandaunt was a hero of 1916
The order of detention to take Thomas from his mother was signed nine years after Maggie Dempsey braved a ship journey back from America to bring her three-year-old son and his sister back to Ireland in 1910 without her husband. Now weeks on from the making of the RTÉ show which uncovered his grandfather’s fouryear tenure under the Christian Brother regime, Damien Dempsey says he would like to see an investigation into the deaths of the boys who died in the school.
He said: ‘I was fighting back the tears and I was angry. The viciousness and violence that was meted out to them every day. It destroyed a lot of them. The historian, Erin, said her granddad was there too. She was saying what went on and the kids killed there and buried up the back. To see them being killed and buried must have been terrifying for the other kids.’
In the documentary, Ms Gibbons lays out the full horror of what his grandfather could have endured. ‘There was an abuser of children in this institution from 1913 to 1940, he would have overlapped with your grandfather’s time.’ Thomas, who went on to have 11 children with his wife in Dublin, never told his family of the horror of his time from 1919 to 1923. The documentary also explores how Republicanism and freedom fighting is in the DNA of the Irish balladeer, with documents showing how his great grandaunt Jenny Shanahan was one of the women of the Irish Citizen Army handed a gun by James Connolly during the 1916 Rising.
Thinking the young woman was kidnapped by the rebels, the English forces believed her when she told them there were hundreds of volunteers on the roof of City Hall instead of just a dozen, leading them to retreat.
Another ancestor called Bridgeman – one of few Catholics made a Freeman of Dublin City – was accused of treason and rebellion in the era of the Young Irelanders.
In other scenes, he visits the cotton mills in Massachusetts where child relatives were forced to work under almost unbearable sweatshop conditions. Damien was also surprised to find a Protestant jeweller was an ancestor in the 1700s.
But after seeing the horror childhoods of Thomas and relatives further back, he has a new perspective on life. He said: ‘It made me feel I’m strong myself – because I have those people in me.’
Who Do You Think You Are? Episode 1 of 6, airs tonight on RTÉ One at 9.30pm