Kids the state was meant to protect were subjected to horrendous abuse

Kids the state was meant to protect were subjected to horrendous abuse

20 May 2015

SAM Adair is aware of the state’s involvement with his family from around the age of four. Suffering serious neglect at home, the early years of his life were a feral existence, a seriously neglected home life seeing him “running the streets” with his siblings and rarely at school.

He describes his mother as “drinking, prostituting and living in bars” while the rest of the family fought for survival.

“We would get on buses and get lost and the police would bring us back to the street and leave us with neighbours,” he recalls of their many travels.

Being “treated like vermin” is one of his earliest memories.

One day he remembers what he calls being “kidnapped” by a woman.

“When she drove she told us we were were getting a holiday and drove for what seemed hours to the airport,” he said. “I know the place she left us in was the girls’ home at The Convent of Mercy, Kilmurray Street, Newry.”

The convent is not under investigation by the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry but it was not a happy time for Sam.

“From the minute we went in we were treated like animals and told that we were scum from Belfast and that we were reared on fish and chips and that from now on we would be getting proper food,” he said. “Two female members of staff abused me physically and mentally the whole time that I was there. I was force fed. I remember being beaten by these two women until I ate my soup and dinners. If you were sick into the food they still made you eat it.”

Split from his siblings, Sam was also in and out of care in Nazareth Lodge from 1968 to 1973, and then settled in Nazareth Lodge for a period.

He recalls a complex relationship with one nun, who he describes as “strict and very religious” — at times Julie Andrews-like and a mother figure, but on the other hand a “bad tempered” woman.

“We got on well. So did a few other girls in my group on the top floor. Her word was law. She was like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music except she had a vicious temper and punished trivial things with prolonged punishment.

“I remember on one occasion she slapped me on the face from behind, knocking me into the wardrobe…Another time she gave me a beating for swapping an altar duty with another boy.”

“It was boring at times but I did everything to please her,” he added.

Elaborating further on his relationship with the ‘Julie Andrews’ nun he said he was allowed to go out on Saturdays, go to parties and clubs and events and get “anything I wanted” because of his favoured position.

“I had no limit to toys, presents and was her assistant…”. On other occasions “I got a few beatings for absolutely nothing. I have described them, yet I felt bad I had disappointed her. I was 100 per cent innocent on these occasions.”

He goes on to describe how this nun had him working in a trusted position at the front parlour at the home, which involved contacting the nuns when someone called at the door, brushing the grounds, feeding beggars and seeing to the priests.

And it would be from his duties at the entrance to Nazareth Lodge that Sam first met Fr Brendan Smyth. 

“I was about 10-and-a-half years old at the time,” he said. “Within five minutes he abused me. I remember him coming to the door. I carried some items from his car. When he opened the boot of his car I could see sweets and money, both paper and coins in a pile, stacked. I took items for him into his bedroom and he had given me a pile of sweets. As I was eating the sweets he proceeded to be affectionate to me.”

Sexual abuse followed and would occur again on several visits from Smyth, becoming “much more serious”. It was the same for many other children he said. And for Sam it wouldn’t end there as the priest followed him to Rubane House in Kircubbin, where such abuse was “part of the culture” along with extreme violence.

“Fr Brendan Smyth was like a Santa Claus figure,” said Sam. “It was the first time I had been shown any affection from a priest. He was not violent in any way. All the kids liked him, he gave us money and sweets.

“He was always persuasive in a nice manner. He would never say anything that offended me. He would tell me what a good boy I was.”

He is also critical of some of the lay staff, and described one woman as “very violent”.

“One day I called her a ‘country yokel’ and she flipped. She ran after me along the corridor and I ran into one of the bedrooms where she cornered me. She bent me down over the bed and twisted my arm that I heard a wrench and she was screaming for me to apologise. The wrench was like a muscle tearing in my upper arm and it seemed like she was going to break my arm. I had no choice but to say sorry to her. To this day my left arm has been physically affected by this. I still find it painful lifting my left arm.”

Despite such painful incidents Nazareth Lodge was not somewhere Sam wanted to leave when he became settled.

Things went downhill when the Julie Andrews nun “dumped” her group of children in the home when she moved to another post and “two bad nuns came and tortured and beat me until I was conned into going to De La Salle Boys Home”.

Sam would spend his early teenage years at the Christian Brothers run home in Rubane and his troubles there are well documented. Pouring over the paperwork attached to his case he is highly critical of the role of Social Services in sending him back to his mother’s bedsit aged 16. Meant for one, he says the bedsit slept four. He is also critical of the unsupervised day trips he was sent on before his release — often left to get the bus back to Rubane on his own in the dark.

The government would remain responsible for his welfare until he was 18.

“The front sitting room had two beds in it, one for xxx and one for me,” he said of his mother’s bedsit. “An electric two bar fire. The place was freezing. My biological mother took herself off every morning and took nothing whatsoever in the whole wide world to do with me. I got £12 per week on the dole. She took £10 pounds.” The other £2 was for Sam’s dog.

“I had to steal food and clothes until I was 18 to survive,” he added.

He told the inquiry that a social worker “wrote of my thinness and rags I wore in his reports and how he lent me £50 to get the electric on in the bedsit and how hard it was to get it from his bosses”.

Sam believes his account will ring a chord with many former residents in care who were “thrown out” and left to fend for themselves in hostels or substandard accommodation.

When asked how he ultimately apportions blame for this very blighted childhood he says it is “90 per cent the state’s fault”.

He holds up a thin folder of social services records, which he says was initially given to him when solicitors made a request for his records, and then points to a much larger pile of files which he said was accumulated by knocking doors, trailing around government departments and refusing to take no for an answer.

Moving on to the Historical Institutional Inquiry itself, Sam has a number of criticisms, namely the close proximity between those claiming to be abused and their alleged abusers, and the lack of legal assistance for victims, though he has praise for lawyer to the inquiry, Christine Smith QC.

He says he is pleased to have found the strength not only to have given his own evidence but to have successfully challenged other accounts and been able to submit the inconsistencies he finds to inquiry chair Sir Anthony Hart.

Others victims he said, have not had the strength, “screaming and running out” in one case — their very fragile mental state obvious.

He said there was a Lifeline counsellor present for anyone wishing to avail of it at the inquiry but little other help.

“She is a lovely girl who has been my company on a daily basis,” he said of the counsellor. “She is very, very helpful.”

Other witness support services are poor he says.

Giving evidence in Banbridge has also not always been easy for witnesses, he argues.

“How can someone get kids to school, get a minder, a city centre bus to Banbridge for 9am. If you live in England and you are coming over to the inquiry, you get planes, trains, steaks, the lot,” he said.

“I saw a man near 70 coming out of the inquiry and I said, ‘Where are you going mate’, I was going to offer him a lift. He said he was heading down to get the bus to head back to Enniskillen.”

Having being persuaded to take part in an RUC investigation over several years which ultimately never went anywhere, Sam said he had finished with the police side of things.

“The only road open to me against the Catholic Church is a civil action,” he said. 

He firmly believes, however, that when it comes to any compensation Stormont will be holding on hard to its purse strings.

“Well, they managed to pay out the victims of the Presbyterian Mutual Society collapse £232m,” added Sam. “So they can manage something for these victims — children the state was meant to protect and who were instead subjected to the most horrendous physical, mental and sexual abuse, and then left to fend for themselves.”