World of Politics with Harry McGee

I grew up in Galway City during the 1970s and 1980s. I’m not sure what the population of the city was at the time, certainly no more than 50,000.

We always thought of it as a city and I remember the self-satisfaction I felt when it replaced Waterford to become the fourth largest city in the early 1980s.

Other than that I thought it was a sheltered enough place where not a huge amount happened. When I was a teenager, I went for one Saturday to a film course in the Tech in Fr Griffin Road. We were asked to come up with a plot for a film set in Galway. I could not get my head around any film being made there. Real life happened elsewhere.

Galway was a grand place to grow up in, but in terms of life, it was a non-event.

What was the line used by Lady Macbeth? False face doth hide what false heart doth known.

It was only many years later that I learned of the hidden face of Galway when I was growing up.

To my shame, I only discovered it many years later, as an adult.

And it was not pretty.

Sure, we had seen inklings of it. There was an industrial school in Lower Salthill and we knew a lot of the boys who were there because some of them played hurling and football with us.

They were different from us. They were tough lads who wore unfashionable hand-me-down clothes and spoke and acted in a very different way. You would often see them being marched by the Brothers on Saturday to the cinema in the Claddagh Palace or out towards Palmers Rock for a swim. Some of them had been fostered out to people in the Salthill area and we got to know them as acquaintances and, later, as friends.

It was only when the reports on sexual and physical abuse in residential institutions were reported on that the full extent of brutality and abuse that some of those boys faced was made real to us.

It was beyond galling to think that these boys, who had nothing in life, were left to live their vulnerable childhood years in a loveless institution where they were preyed upon sexually and beaten up regularly.