Survivor

A true story of survival

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.