We were Children.

Letterfrack Industrial School.


    We were children.The Industrial Schools, Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries of Ireland, were just child brothels, rape rooms for the Clerics. A smorgasbord for pedophile Clerics and Christian rapists who preyed on and terrorised vulnerable children in all the religious run Institutions in Ireland. Floggings and nights of stark terror as Clerics took their pick of the frightened children as they hid in their nightmares. Vulnerable children whose childhoods and lives the Clerics destroyed and stole. The rape was worse for the girls, who were sometimes violently impregnated by their Christian rapists. 

    The screaming children were passed around, from pedophile Cleric to pedophile Cleric. The rapes would stay with the child for eternity, the Clerics would simply smile and confess their filthy sins, holy water was used to cleanse their foul mouths, sinful spite was used as a lubricant for their uncleansed members. The full magnitude of the children's suffering has yet to be entirely understood, but each child, now a man or woman, hides their delirium of shame, some bury their grief, in oceans of soothing alcohol. Others swam with psychedelic drugs, hoping to change their perception of their altered state of consciousness. Many vulnerable children, damaged as men, ended their hopeless lives of misery at the end of a crying rope, or a cocktail syringe of Christian hypocrisy, pumped into drug hungry veins, or a multitude of other sad endings, rough sleeping on cold, wet streets of despondency. Desolated streets filled with shame and wondering despair are full of dead humanity’s bones and everything unclean.

    Still tens of thousands of apparitions of children haunt and roam the ghostly mass graves, overflowing septic tanks and haunted Industrial school hallways. 150,000 vulnerable children passed through these forbidden gates, 21,579 survived today. Each minute, each hour, each day, each week, each month, each year, we die, stories are untold. Sadly our band of Survivors decrease, even as I write and record our collective history.  



    I walk daily with both the living and the dead, I recently walked in the soulless cemetery while in Letterfrack Industrial School with a six year old boy, a kindred spirit. Yet I knew his name, though unspoken was Sean. Sean whose brutal death he wore on his exposed back. The scars of a flogging and rape at the hands of endoparasite Christian Brothers, was still raw, raised welts and strafe marks crisscrossed his back.. Sean led me safely through the spiky evergreen hollies, he recognised our mutual  pain and suffering. Sean brought something else, his benevolent spirit to sooth me, a very angry man. Ectoparasite infestation was and is Christianity, which is a cancerous parasite feeding on the body of humanity. Clerical parasites with their snouts, buried daily, deep into the rape and murder of children. 

    God didn’t send this Kindred Spirit as I stood with Sean, as I witnessed the secret graves, beyond the giant evergreen hollies, used to guard the forgotten graves. The children’s stories, untold, their shame is engraved on any passing leaf, the murmuring wind carries a voice, their voices that pass through the drooping evergreens. The holly bears the crown of a child suffering, each spike carries a tear that drops into the crevices of this unswept earth. Beneath the carpet of wild moss rests charity and maternal love, the unwanted children hide, beneath a hundred years of brutal Christian hate, fed on superstitious fears. Many Winters of Conifers of fallen leaves, deposit and hide their suffering, but their brutal pain can be seen, if one looks, etched and felt in the surrounding air or hidden by a small clump of moss, lurking beneath a confused conifer. 

    The hidden cemetery floor is covered with 85 broken heart shaped stones, used as grave markers, each stone was engraved with a name, age, and passing year. The cause of the children’s death was never recorded- age 5 one read, name unknown, my tears of anger seeping into the crevices of their anguished graves. For here lies a genocide of crimes against vulnerable children. This forsaken cemetery while barely kept is guarded by a drunk, leaning Virgin Mary, she denies the horrors, the Mary Cult of death, now deny these horrors, their worthless clerics and their religion caused the rape and murder of the innocences, the children, now unfolding in her name. While a few feet away one large granite stone obelisk, covered, partly in creeping fine moss, now cracked, listing the names of 61 children disposed of, beneath the corrupt obelisk. The front panel reads —--

“ Dear Lord Grant Eternal Rest to all our Deceased” You are all Remembered by The Brothers, Lay Staff and Pupils of St. Joseph’s


    How insulting that the 210 plus children, now dead, were in the care of the Christian Brothers, who flogged, terrorised, raped and then murdered these vulnerable children, and disposed of into these thankless mass graves. Only to be remembered by their pedophile tormentors, chiselled in cold stone on a stone obelisk by their rapists for eternity- These degenerate clerics, these murderous pedophile Christian Brothers. This is truly outrageous. 
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    No amount of fresh colourful paint on the cold grey stone walls, can hide the stench that percolates the suffering and pain, of floggings, rapes, torture and murder of vulnerable children, that took place within this godforsaken hellhole of Letterfrack Industrial School. Now the brilliant red colour to the front of the Industrial School outer walls, acts as a flash beacon in the lush wild Connemara landscape. In reality the red colour of hell is a bleak reminder that it was a real hell on earth for the thousands of vulnerable children who resided there, a living hell and a continuous nightmare on a daily basis for its few remaining Survivors.  Owen Felix O’Neill 

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