CORK ADDRESS:A CLERICAL abuse survivor yesterday urged the people of Ireland to call on the government to pay the maximum compensation allowed to every survivor under the redress scheme as a means of genuine atonement for the wrongs inflicted upon them in religiously-run schools.
Christy Heaphy said he believed no one is really listening to the survivors of the abuse.
Mr Heaphy was abused at Greenmount Industrial School in Cork, run by the Presentation Brothers in the 1950s.
He was aged just five when he and his brothers were taken from his father, when in 1950 the authorities deemed his father was unable to look after them when their mother died.
Yesterday Mr Heaphy addressed people on Patrick Street in Cork to explain what it was like in an industrial school in Ireland – afterwards many people went up to apologise to him for what happened to him. “We left the institutions with little or no conversation skills whatsoever having had it beaten out of us and therefore we had to spend a large proportion of our lives in solitude and loneliness, shunned by normal people because we could not converse,” he said
