Founded on Fear
Founded on Fear: Letterfrack Industrial School, war and exile is a memoir, written by Irish activist Peter Tyrrell in 1959 and published posthumously in 2006 by the Irish Academic Press, in which Tyrrell recounted the physical and sexual abuse he experienced and witnessed while incarcerated at St Joseph's Industrial School in Letterfrack, Ireland.
Tyrrell had started writing the book in 1958, at the encouragement of Senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, and completed it in 1959; however, it was not published within either of their lifetimes. In 2005, historian Diarmuid Whelan discovered Tyrrell's manuscript in Sheehy-Skeffington's papers.
Summary
Format and introductory material
Founded on Fear, as published, begins with the introduction by Diarmuid Whelan, in which he summarised Tyrrell's life and provided additional information from Tyrrell's notes and letters to Sheehy-Skeffington. A subsequent "Note on the Text", also by Whelan, lists the corrections and revisions Whelan made to Tyrrell's manuscript; he fixed Tyrrell's idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalisation but kept the "grammatical infelicities" and misspellings in order to "allow the reader to hear his voice". After that is a foreword by Tyrrell in which Tyrrell explained his reasons for writing the memoir and the previous failure of his campaign to expose child abuse in industrial schools. The Transworld Ireland edition of Founded on Fear contains 352 pages, and there is an alphabetically ordered index in the back matter. Founded on Fears main text contains fifteen chapters.Ch. 1 (Background)
In 1921 the Tyrrell family received a visit from a distant relative, Costello. The Tyrrells, at that time, lived in a two-room house with holes in the roof, no windows and a cobblestone floor. Peter's father, James Tyrrell, told Costello about his plans to renovate the house, but Peter's mother then reminded him that he had repeatedly failed to do the repairs he had promised to do. James punched her in the nose and told her he would kick her out. Costello departed in the early morning. Peter proceeds to describe his living situation; he and his siblings would forage in the woods for fruit and nuts and steal crops from their neighbours' fields, and their mother would beg their neighbours for money.When Peter was about six, his eldest brother Mick obtained a job as a butcher; his wage allowed Peter and his siblings to attend school in Ahascragh. However, James Tyrrell lost his job and it became clear that the children, whose clothes had worn out, would not be able to go to school for much longer; new clothing from the United States was ordered but did not arrive for several months. After giving birth to another child in 1923, Peter's mother contracted rheumatoid arthritis and became disabled.
In late 1923, a social worker informed the Tyrrells that the authorities would remove all their children younger than fourteen and send them to a school where they would "be given a good education and taught a trade". The clothing arrived days later, and the children returned for what would end up being their last day at school.
In January of 1924 the authorities took Peter and his siblings to a police station in Ballinasloe. After they had dinner in the evening, Peter and his older brothers Joe, Paddy and Jack boarded a train en route to Clifden; his younger brothers Larry and Martin were taken to Kilkenny to live with nuns.
Ch. 2 (First Year at School)
Peter and his brothers were met on the train by Brother Dooley, whom Tyrrell describes as friendly. Dooley told them that they "may find everything" strange at Letterfrack but reassured them that they would settle into their new life quickly. They disembarked from the train and spent the night at a monastery of the Christian Brothers. The next day, Brother Dooley took them to and showed them around the industrial school. When they returned to the front gate, Peter watched several of the boys at the school play sport, but became frightened when he saw one of the Christian Brothers, Brother Walsh, "chasing young children with a... stick" and using it to strike their legs. He observed that most of the children at the school were withdrawn, pale, emaciated and suffering from chilblains; and also encountered a nine-year-old boy being beaten by another boy.Brother Walsh sorted the Tyrrell brothers into divisions based on age and then led them into the school, where they took their lessons. Tyrrell notes at this point that children were never beaten on their first day at Letterfrack. After the boys had lunch, they were taken to the workshops; Peter and the other young children were put in the "darning and knitting room" and instructed by a teacher how to prepare fibres for mattresses.
Background, composition and publication
Peter Tyrrell was born in 1916 to poor parents near Ballinasloe. In 1924, the authorities, alerted to the impoverished conditions in which the Tyrrells lived, removed Peter and his older brothers from the home and placed them in St Joseph's Industrial School in Letterfrack, Ireland. While at Letterfrack, Tyrrell and his peers were physically and sexually abused by certain of the Christian Brothers who staffed the school.After he was released from Letterfrack in 1932, at the age of sixteen, Tyrrell became a tailor, moved to England and enlisted in the British Army, where he served in the King's Own Scottish Borderers regiment from 1935 to 1945. Throughout the 1950s he wrote letters to government officials and members of the Congregation of Christian Brothers in an attempt to force them to address the issue of institutional child abuse, but his correspondence went without reply. In 1958, Tyrrell contacted Irish senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington at the behest of the London Irish Centre; when they met in Dublin, Sheehy-Skeffington advised Tyrrell to write an account of his experiences.
Tyrrell began to draft the memoir on weekends, and on evenings after returning home from work. He wrote as his thoughts flowed and made few revisions. Each chapter, once completed, would be posted, with an accompanying letter, to Sheehy-Skeffington. The process of writing caused Tyrrell to become lonesome and depressed, and his family and friends advised him to stop for the sake of his mental health, but his compulsion to effect change in the industrial school system motivated him to continue; he finished writing the book five months after he started. The completed manuscript was approximately 70,000 words long, or 300 pages. Tyrrell informed Sheehy-Skeffington that, while everything he did write into the book was factual, there were many incidents from Letterfrack that he found so upsetting to relive he omitted them. In 1967, Tyrrell committed suicide by setting himself alight on Hampstead Heath in London.
In 2005, 38 years after Tyrrell's death, Irish historian Diarmuid Whelan, while archiving Owen Sheehy-Skeffington's papers, came across the manuscript of Tyrrell's autobiography. He edited it to fix Tyrrell's idiosyncratic grammar, wrote an introduction to it and had the book published as Founded on Fear: Letterfrack Industrial School, war and exile by the Irish Academic Press in 2006. The book was republished by Transworld Ireland in 2008.
Reception
Founded on Fear received positive reviews from several authors and critics. In a review for The Irish Times, Mary Raftery, who produced a documentary series titled States of Fear about abuse in industrial schools, compared Tyrrell to Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor whose attempts to expose the Auschwitz concentration camp were dismissed. She called Tyrrell a "rare phenomenon of post-Independence Ireland... a genuine hero" and Founded on Fear a "document of enormous historical significance". Daire Keogh, also for The Irish Times, wrote that it was a pity that Founded on Fear had not been published during Tyrrell's lifetime.The Congregation of Christian Brothers lauded Founded on Fear and apologised for both the abuse their congregation had inflicted upon boys in industrial schools and their dismissal of Tyrrell's complaints in the 1950s.