Barry Clifford: Letterfrack’s Industrial Reformatory Institution in Clifden Co Galway

In Letterfrack’s Industrial Reformatory Institution in Clifden Co Galway, there is a small cemetery on its grounds. Buried there are 99 souls of which little is known; less is known of where others are buried in unmarked graves except one: a young child, an infant, aged 4 years old named Bernard Kerrigan who died in 1935. His grave was discovered in 2002.

The man that helped other institution survivors find that grave then was a 74 years old gentleman who had wished to remain anonymous. He was attending a ceremony with survivors and others who chose never to forget. He had come to pay his last respect to a childhood friend before he himself died for he was gravely ill. He said that he had played with Bernard the day before he passed away and had attended his burial the next day. The cause of the child's death was buried with him.The boys grave was just yards from the main buildings of the reformatory prison, in a place I could have been myself for I spent 10 years in another one in Galway since I was 5 years old.

There have been many changes before and since then in Letterfrack and little to do with remembering Bernard or the other children who were buried here because of disease, loneliest, starvation and  abuse, or indeed those others living or dead that number in the thousands from all the other institutions. One could be forgiven if you visited the Reformatory grounds today and not be aware what these oppressive looking buildings were or stood for in the not so distant past. The normal terror that children suffered here has been replaced today by an invasive normality that obscures and hides this most vicious past. Part of covering up and moving on in a more enlightened age does not give voice to these children still in perpetual spiritual mourning in the melancholy presence that always haunts this place. 

On the Connemara National Parks Visitors Centre they do not mention the Industrial prison or the boys cemetery. The visitor is told about a farm but not the child slaves that worked on it. At the Visitors Centre interpretive office in one of the prisons buildings, it is peppered with brochures informing the un-lightened and curious visitor about student projects, wildlife, walks, the fauna and a playground; again, there is nothing about the place of hell that is beneath and around its feet or its terrible secrets.

You have to ask searching questions rather than be given answers freely. There is an aerial photograph of the Centre which shows everything but the children’s cemetery. A road arches from the main natural entrance of the Industrial School that loops around its entire grounds circumventing and obscuring the cemetery itself. This road cost over 3,500,000 Irish pounds to build fifteen years ago. I asked a man working at the centre where is the industrial children’s cemetery only to be informed by him that:  “it was down in the Village.”

A nations conscience cannot allow this insult to the children that suffered and died here and to those survivors still living. Bernard Kerrigan and the other innocent spirits here will be forever silent to the sound of children playing in a playground at the Visitors centre right beside where they lay buried. He and all the other children, boys and girls, that passed through all the Industrial prisons should never be forgotten; least of all here and in this heartless way. To the living we owe respect; to the dead we owe justice; to history we owe the truth.

This Interpretive Centre is designed to miss-inform by omission of that truth. It is an arrogance and an abuse for this place to be here at all and is as ludicrous in comparison if you were to have a Polish Heritage Centre on the grounds of the death camps in Auschwitz in Poland without mentioning the Jews.

Barry Clifford