NORTHERN IRELAND
Irish Times
Dan Keenan
Thu, Feb 27, 2014
A witness at the North’s Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry has told how he “had enough of the torture” from a named nun at a Derry boys’ home run by the Sisters of Nazareth.
However, he also insisted many people did their best for those at St Joseph’s, Termonbacca, and this was why he wrote a letter to the Derry Journal in 2004 praising those who “helped light up our lives”.
Struggling with his emotions, the anonymous witness told the inquiry’s senior counsel Christine Smith he could take no more beatings with an electric flex from a named nun and physically confronted her.
“I just couldn’t take it any more, I was beaten so severely with that flex,” he said.
‘Put up resistance’
“I put up resistance, stopped her, disarmed her, restrained her, let her break free. She came back at me with a dustpan brush.”
He continued: “At the end of it, she came at me with a pair of scissors, I was able to disarm her and restrain her. I told her, ‘you are not going to beat me again – ever’. She realised she could not get the better of me. I never got beaten again.”
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