IRELAND
Paddy Doyle – The God Squad
This piece was written by Fergus Finlay many years ago. I did have it on my website but lost it. Fergus was kind enough to send it to me. I’m pleased to publish it on my website again, not because it’s about me but because it reflects on what happened to thousands and thousands of Irish Children.
I can remember a lot of the things that happened when I was eight years old. Times were tough. We had just moved to a new house in Bray, it was a very hard winter, and my father wasn’t finding the going easy in relation to work. I can remember that pocket money was in short supply, and we had to make a lot of our own entertainment.
But it was a happy time. We all got on well in school, and we had friends. I didn’t know Paddy Doyle then – I was only to get to know him, and to come to regard him as a friend, many years later.
While I was complaining about the lack of pocket money, Paddy was standing in the dock in Wexford District Court. According to the Court records, he was the defendant. He was four (not fourteen or twenty four – he was four), utterly lost and utterly alone. And he was guilty – guilty, according to the Court, of being “found having a guardian who does not exercise proper guardianship”.
Because he was guilty, he had to be sentenced. This lonely four year old boy was sentenced to eleven years incarceration in an industrial school in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford. Cappoquin was picked because “the religious persuasion of the said child appears to the Court to be Catholic”, and Cappoquin was “conducted in accordance with the doctrines of the Catholic Church”.
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