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they were barely providing shelter, with a very basic diet, for children whom they believed were paying, by their very existence, for the sins of their mothers. According to the Catholic Church in Ireland, the sin that their mothers had committed was that they became pregnant and had a baby, while unmarried. This sin was unacceptable before the eyes of God, everyone involved in religious life, and the decent people of Ireland. And so the vast majority of people shunned girls who admitted to such a sin. And worse, the children of these unmarried mothers were also shunned and considered to be an embarrassment. Industrial schools, often known as orphanages subsidised by the state and run by charitable orders of nuns, became the solution to the problem. Some of the children in the orphanage felt like they were in the army, others felt like it was prison.
    There was a timetable for everything and there were rules for every little thing. If the rules were broken, each broken rule had its own merited and rigorously meted out punishment. I remember that we had to clean all the skirting boards in the orphanage. It took hours and if you got even a tiny mark on the wall above, you were beaten. A lot of the nuns had a leather strap that used to hang beside their rosary beads and they would beat you immediately. You were afraid to cry. If you did, you were beaten more. You had to keep quiet all the time, like you were choking. You had to hold it in. You could never scream. Some of the girls couldn’t help it and the nuns would hit them with the strap again and again. There was high dusting as well, which was over the picture rails and then we would have to scrub all the floors. There was never a bit of dirt in the orphanage.
    I have not been able to banish from my memory the screams and suffering of small children who were punished for breaking some very flimsy and unjustifiable rules. Watching a punishment being carried out on another girl, particularly if she was younger than you, was very difficult. Sometimes there was a very fine line between a rule being broken and not being broken. Many children were punished for nothing and often too harshly. If a girl wet her bed, she had to stand at the end of the dormitory with the wet sheets and then wash them herself. Your hair was sometimes cut as a punishment so that everyone would know. Otherwise we all looked the same, with the one haircut, in the same second-hand looking clothes. If a nun shouted at you to ‘Halt’, you stopped dead in your tracks – obedience to the nuns was absolute.
    The nuns weren’t all evil. Some of them had a bit of compassion but they were afraid of the stronger nuns. We were told again and again that we had to suffer for the sins of our parents. I was told that I was damaged – ‘ruined for life’ – because I wasn’t even a virgin. I was used goods and I had to suffer for it. They all knew about my past.
    Some of them wanted to humiliate us. You would have to stand still for hours on end or you wouldn’t get any dinner or you weren’t allowed outside. Some of the special children, who had families outside the orphanage, got to do Irish dancing or to be in the choir, but I was never allowed. There was a press where children who had relatives on the outside were allowed to go to buy sweets if they had been given some money. They’d never share the sweets. I think they were told not to. I remember one time a girl was walking in front of me and she dropped the sweet paper. I picked it up and licked it until there was nothing left on it at all.
    An uncanny punishment I used to receive was the nuns’ attempts to make me feel guilty by asking, ‘What would your auntie nuns think of you now?’ If I heard this once, I heard it a hundred times. I had no idea what this meant as I did not know any ‘auntie nuns’. Consequently, in my ignorance, I escaped the punishment of the guilt complex they were trying to force on to me.
    But everything is relative. As