SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland
Stephen Naysmith
JIM BUCKLEY has been campaigning for 19 years for an inquiry into the abuse he suffered in care, he said.
But the 72-year-old has waited more than six decades for an apology from the Sisters of Nazareth, to whom he and his three younger brothers were entrusted when he was just seven, after leukaemia left them without a mother and with a father who couldn’t cope.
When the apology came, he was stunned. “I can’t describe how I feel,” he said outside the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry yesterday.
“I was quite surprised by some of the things Sister Doolan admitted. It was an apology, and it’s the first time I’ve actually heard that. It meant a lot.”
As a Glasgow family sent to the Nazareth House in Aberdeen, all four boys were told they were the “lowest of the low”, he said. Bed-wetters were humiliated, he claimed, and nuns were liberal with the use of sticks which they kept up their sleeves.
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