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'When I heard about my father being taken to a small room in the basement at Letterfrack, I cried. It broke my heart. I kept sobbing' Mark Sweeney (38)

His father Tom Sweeney was sent to industrial schools, in Artane and Letterfrack, in the 1950s and 1960s

'We kind of always knew my father had had a hard life because he used to talk about the Christian Brothers a lot but we never knew he was molested until he went on hunger strike outside the Dáil in 2004.

He was in Artane first and then they took him to Letterfrack. They said it was for truancy but his mam had a letter from his teacher saying he was good at school. The Christian Brothers used to make him run around the yard and dig potatoes until five in the morning. The travellers got an even worse doing. If they wet the bed they were made run around with the sheets tied around their heads, until the bed linen dried.

My father has a bad temper and was very hard on all six of us. He wasn't an affectionate dad. He didn't know how to be because he was never shown any affection. That really impacted on us. My brother turned to heroin and is in Portlaoise prison at the moment. I did a lot a lot of hash and pills but copped on in time and got into fitness. I boxed until I was 28.

I must have been around 10 when detectives from Salthill in Galway came to our house in the 1980s. My father was one of the first to be interviewed about Letterfrack. We were told us to get out of the room so we knew something serious was going on.

I only found out he was on hunger strike when my mother rang me and asked me to go down and support him. She only meant me to stand beside him but I decided to join him on the hunger strike. I did 21 days with him and he did 22.

It wasn't down to money. He just wanted to speak about what had happened to him and not be penalised for it. He also wanted an apology from the Christian Brothers, which he never got.

Being on the strike was tough. My hands bled with the cold. It rained for 10 days solid. After the seventeenth day, my father told me to start making his funeral arrangements but he held on. It was only during the negotiations in Leinster House that I found out properly about the sexual abuse. None of us had known about it.

When I heard about my father being taken to a small room in the basement at Letterfrack, I cried. It broke my heart. I kept sobbing afterwards but I never told my sisters or brothers the details of what I heard.

When I heard about my father being taken to a small room in the basement at Letterfrack, I cried. It broke my heart. I kept sobbing afterwards but I never told my sisters or brothers the details of what I heard.

I've got a daughter of 11. Her mother and myself aren't together but I see her nearly every day. She's my little princess. I tell her how much I love her all the time because my father wasn't able to say that to us.
I love my dad but it's difficult because he's still so tortured."

'Dad has suffered from bouts of depression all his life and still drinks to forget and to sleep but mainly just to get through the day' June Jordan (41)

Her father Joe Jordan was sent to St Joseph's industrial school, Tralee, Co Kerry in the 1950s

I'm the eldest in our family and always spent a lot of time in my dad's company. When I was around seven or eight he told me about being sent to St Joseph's in Tralee – an industrial school run by the Christian brothers. He said he was sent there because he was an orphan. I thought it was so sad for him and for us that he didn't have any family and didn't know where he came from.

My father wasn't sexually abused but he suffered plenty of physical and emotional abuse that has scarred him deeply. Some of the stories he used to tell us about his time at St Joseph's were very traumatic. He frequently spoke about a little chap that was in the school called Joe Pike, who was a great Irish dancer. I remember dad would frequently get upset at the memory of Joe being badly beaten and afterwards lying dead on the ground.

My dad has always been a drinker, so we didn't have much growing up and we did go without. He has suffered from bouts of depression all of his life and still drinks to forget and to sleep but mainly just to get through the day, which has damaged us as a family but I suppose it has helped him cope. I remember when I was very young he would come home from the pub drunk and I'd be up waiting for him with my mam. He'd start talking about the mother he never knew and get very upset. Being the eldest, I knew the most about dad's story and it made me the strongest member of my family. I became very protective of them. My mother was very caught up with my father, with his drinking and his problems, so I took on a lot to help my siblings. I became old before my time.

Dad didn't know how to deal with us because he had no one to teach him how to parent but he's a gentle person and we knew he loved us, even if he couldn't always show it.

When dad was 50, we found out through Barnardos that he had a sister. It turned out his mam had died in 1968, which was the year he got married. That was devastating for him but meeting his sister, who lives in Gloucester, about 15 years ago was a dream come true. My aunt had been sent to a school in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, and my dad was fostered out a few times before being sent to St Joseph's until he was 16. They were never given any details about each other's existence and were allowed to think that they were entirely alone in the world.

Dad has found help through the Alliance Committee but he still wants recognition from the authorities of what want went on. They created a damaged generation and the knock-on effect is that families like ours have borne the brunt of what our parents suffered. It doesn't stop with them. My father is a very good person and I love him to bits but because of what he's been through it's like I'm parenting him at times."

May 23, 2010