Most twelve-year-old boys are preoccupied with comics and playing with their friends. Twelve-year-old Frank Heeney, however, is about to start three years of hell at Ireland's notorious St. Joseph's Industrial School in Letterfrack County Galway.
St. Joseph's is an inferno of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of the administrators. Many children, some as young as four, die from such conditions and are secretly disposed of in the surrounding wilderness.
As Frank spends three years at St. Joseph's Letterfrack and two years at St. Patrick's children's prison, he is witness to the failure of the Irish State to protect the children of the country. Too many of the poor turned to crime just to feed themselves. Once they got caught up in the criminal justice system, it was too difficult to get out. Other children were sentenced to industrial school for the simple crime of being orphans with nowhere else to go.
This memoir and exposé of the long history of institutionalized abuse in Ireland will fill you with fury at the evils hidden by the government and the church. If you take anything away from this harrowing read, let it be a resolve to never let something like this happen again.
About the Author: R.F. Heeney encountered numerous horrors during his years as a child prisoner in Ireland in the 1960s. Born into poverty, he found himself caught up in a cycle of crime and punishment that took a tremendous toll of his mental and physical health. He eventually left Ireland in the early 1980s.
After spending many years abroad, he moved back to Ireland. He realized that little had changed in the country. The abuse was still happening to children, and too many men were eager to cover it up instead of changing the system. Heeney became inspired to write his story as a condemnation of the government's failure to take responsibility and a call to arms to reveal past injustices.
Heeney now lives in Dublin. He has also written In My Own Words (Still Running) under the pen name Mickey Finn and is currently working on a third title.
