"Founded on Fear": Letterfrack Industrial School, War and Exile by Peter Tyrrell - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0716534037 ISBN 13: 9780716534037

Publisher: Irish Academic Press Ltd, 2006

Synopsis

This is a memoir of Peter Tyrrell's seven years in Letterfrack Industrial School in the 1920s and early 30s. It recounts his impoverished upbringing and the abuse that he and others suffered at the hands of the Christian Brothers. It gives an impression of the day-to-day life of the inmates in Letterfrack and the misery of their lives. In the final three chapters it also tells us what happened in his life after Letterfrack, his entry into the British Army, his time in a POW camp in World War Two Germany and his subsequent years spent travelling around England as a tailor to trade with his fellow Irish emigrants. The book is written in a fluid and often very childish style, but it is vivid and deeply moving. It engages the reader in its descriptions of the harsh regime at the school, the pen portraits of the children, staff and locals and the picture of life in Mayo and Galway in the 1920s. In addition to the story of Peter Tyrrell's life, the book is important for the story of the manuscript and its place in Irish history. Peter Tyrrell contacted Senator Owen Sheehy Skeffington in 1959 as a result of the high-profile condemnation by Sheehy Skeffington of Ireland's educational system, and its pathological reliance on punishment. Tyrrell wrote to him about his experiences in Letterfrack and he was encouraged to put it down on paper. The correspondence had tailed off by 1968 when Skeffington received a letter from Scotland Yard asking him to identify a half-torn card addressed to him in Tyrrell's hand. The card had been found next to the charred remains of an unidentified corpse of a man who had apparently burned himself alive on Hampstead Heath the previous year. This scrap of paper was the only means of identifying Tyrrell's body. His manuscript was never published and it remained in Skeffington's private papers until Diarmuid Whelan discovered it in 2004 when archiving the Sheehy Skeffington collection for the National Library of Ireland.Ã?Â?Ã?Â?

About this title

Product Description

This is a story of abuse and alienation from a pitiless society. The narrative is a fascinating mix of innocence and violence, honestly recounted in a vivid style. It begins as a poignant and harrowing account of Peter Tyrrell's time in Letterfrack with the Christian Brothers. It graphically relates the brutality of the industrial school regime and the society that fed that system. It reveals elements of Irish history previously unseen or long forgotten. As a story of exile, it goes beyond Irish shores to Palestine and India, the British Army, the Second World War and Tyrrell's experiences in a Nazi POW camp, which he compared favourably to his experiences in an industrial school. Peter Tyrrell contacted Senator Owen Sheehy Skeffington in 1958 as a result of Sheehy Skeffington's scathing condemnation of the Irish educational system's pathological reliance on punishment. Skeffington encouraged Tyrrell to write about his experiences in Letterfrack industrial school, as an emigrant in the UK and of the Second World War. The correspondence between the two ended in 1968 when Skeffington received a letter from Scotland Yard asking him to identify a half-torn card addressed to him in Tyrrell's hand. The card had been found next to the charred remains of an unidentified corpse of a man who had burned himself alive on Hampstead Heath the previous year. This scrap of paper was the only means of identifying Tyrrell's body and of linking him to the memoir he had sent to Skeffington over the past ten years. For nearly half a century his manuscript went undiscovered and unpublished until Diarmuid Whelan uncovered it while working on Skeffington's papers in the National Library of Ireland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Irish Academic Press Ltd
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0716534037
• ISBN 13: 9780716534037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Whelan Diarmuid