Visiting those gentle ghosts in a tiny Letterfrack cemetery

A suggestion has been made recently that a special occasion might be held in Letterfrack in memory of the children who were incarcerated there – the school was in existence from 1887 to 1974, and was the subject of a searing indictment in the report of the Commission on Child Abuse.

Senator Niall Ó Brolcháin has put forward the idea that, perhaps, the Senate might hold a sitting in Letterfrack, as some sort of official recognition of the institutionalised injustice and crime against children which took place there over many years.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.

In recent times we have, as a people, become a little more comfortable in dealing with some things in our national past. Certainly, in the case of Letterfrack, we have a long-running episode of extraordinary mistreatment of children which cries out for a communal response – other than a handful of convictions of some of the more notorious offenders who worked there.

The recall of children who were in care – and especially those who died in care – is becoming much more high-profile, but the recent spotlight on the youngsters who died in Letterfrack is more than merited . . . though, for some of us, the haunting memory of those children was not born today, nor yesterday.

Some of us have been a long time visiting that tiny graveyard in Letterfrack, with the memorial plaques which were set up by an ad hoc support group some years ago. Each memorial carries the name and the age of the boys buried there. They range in age from as young as four, to the early teens.

Some have remarked that they feel a brooding presence when they open the gate to this cemetery on a hillside overlooking the village of Letterfrack. I have certainly felt a powerful presence, but one that is not at all intimidating. Others have spoken of a similar instant emotional overload.

There are regular visitors to the cemetery. Some are just passers by, but there are callers who spend just a little time sitting on a seat alongside this communal burial plot. As one woman explained a few years ago . . . “they had no one to visit years ago, no one cared, I want to show them that I care and want to spend time just sitting here with them”.

You enter the cemetery precincts by a gate and a twisty hillside footpath and that atmosphere is there once you move into the cover of trees which shelter the pathway. Perhaps it’s the natural chill of the shade imparted by the trees. There is a coolness, though I stress that it is not threatening, or forbidding, or at least I don’t find it so.

It would indeed be a pity if the only lasting official recognition of the suffering endured by children in the years right up to the ‘70s were to be a few plaques on a hillside and the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Sexual Abuse.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.