NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph
BY STAFF REPORTER – 07 JANUARY 2015
The oldest witness to appear before the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry has recounted how he endured savage daily beatings with a leather strap from a nun in Nazareth Lodge – and how he was sexually abused by other boys at the Belfast home.
Speaking from his wheelchair, the 89-year old man shared harrowing memories of bed-wetting, physical and sexual abuse while in the care of the religious organisation his mother had trusted to look after him.
He told the inquiry session that his punishment for wetting his bed was to be stripped naked, placed in a freezing bath and be doused with buckets of water; he would then have to kneel, still naked, in front of one of the nuns, while she beat him with a leather strap.
Entering Nazareth Lodge in 1929 at the age of three, after his father had abandoned his family, from then on he only saw his mother for an hour each summer.
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