Some 30 years ago, a family living on one of the main roads in a provincial town had a large Christmas tree in the sitting room window. Its lights cheered passers-by. But the family's two eldest children were never allowed into the sitting room to look at it. They caught glimpses of it from outside.
The two boys were confined to an outside shed attached to the house - it was known as the "playroom". It had a toilet, but no heating.
"P and I would always have to wait until the others had their share of the Christmas dinner at the big table in the dining room out front, and only then did we get called to the kitchen for our portions," J recalled.
He was describing his childhood Christmas in the town in the 1960s. It was a "childhood" marked by severe emotional and physical abuse. Unlike the McColgans and the girl in the Kilkenny incest case, he was not sexually abused, but he and his brother were frequently severely beaten and deprived of food, warmth and affection.
He also differed from these other cases. His family was well off; his father a bastion of "respectability" in the town. But what is most surprising about his case is that numerous people attempted to intervene - the ISPCC, the Garda and local clergy were aware of what was going on, but nothing was done to stop the abuse.
He was born in 1958, the second child of a doctor and his wife. His mother died five days later. J's brother, P, was 4 1/2 years old. "He was aware of life before and after my mother's death. The only knowledge I have of my mother is a Mass card."
His father married again two years later. His second wife was 19 years younger than the father. She had been his secretary in the clinic where he worked. Three children were born in the second marriage.
Soon, the two children of the first marriage began to be excluded. They spent their days in the outside shed known as the "playroom". They walked to school and the others were driven. The two boys of the first marriage carried bread and milk to school for lunch, while the other children were collected by their father and brought home for a meal.
Access to the house was restricted to the kitchen (where they ate by themselves), their own bedroom upstairs, the bathroom, an understairs cupboard where shoe-cleaning things were kept (they cleaned the family shoes for Sunday Mass) and the passages linking these areas.
Their days were spent in the "playroom" or at the bottom of the back garden. They dared not enter the house even for a drink. When they were thirsty they drank water from the cistern of the toilet in the "playroom". They were not allowed into the front garden except to cut grass or sweep leaves. Their holidays were spent working on the farm belonging to their step-mother's family, or, later, in local hotels.
They even attended different religious services. The two boys walked a mile to Mass at a church in the town, while the rest of the family travelled by car to another church closer to home. J did not even have any member of the family present for his First Communion, when he was dropped off at the church and they went elsewhere.
"I often ask why, because my father and step-mother and the other children never came with us, did no priest ever ask where they were, or did they go to Mass at all," said J.
They were always hungry. One neighbour, Mrs C, remembers them looking for food in rubbish bins. But she and many other neighbours tried to smuggle food to them. The next-door neighbours, the H family, devised a system whereby they would leave food under the hedge in a tin, and leave a football in their front garden to indicate it was there.
Any attempted contact with neighbours was punished. The boys' walk home from school was timed to the minute. If they were late they were beaten, so they could never visit the public library or friends' homes. Another neighbour had arranged to be driving up the road at the time they left school, and would give them a lift to her house, where they could spend a few minutes and enjoy unaccustomed treats, like fruit and chocolate, before leaving to meet the deadline for getting home.
It is difficult to fathom the motivation for some of the casual cruelty to which they were subjected. "At one early stage of my schooling I was apparently doing so well that I skipped a year and moved up," recalled J. "At the Christmas exams I finished second and got a prize of oranges and chocolate bars."
"My mistake was to bring them home to show daddy. While I was waiting for him the reward was removed from my open hands. I was sent into the `playroom' and some time later a few squares of chocolate were brought out to me. The rest of the bounty was divided up among the others. It sticks in my memory because it was important to me. It was 1965 and I was in third class."
He was seven years old.
There were the beatings. "We'd be called in for our supper, then ordered onto our knees for the Angelus. The other children would sit on chairs. Daddy would kneel on a newspaper. She would be standing by the Aga [cooker].
"After the Angelus was a favourite time for daddy to beat us. He used to beat the shit out of us with a heavy electrical cord he kept behind the calendar, on trumped-up charges dreamed up by her. After that we'd be sent up to bed, even if it was still daylight. The other children had the run of the house.
"I dreaded coming out of school. I never knew what she had in her mind to invent and tell daddy so that I deserved a beating."
One day the parents did not even wait for the Angelus. J had been into the kitchen without permission and had eaten a banana. He was severely beaten with the electrical cord, this time by his step-mother, and sent to bed. He wrote a note, tied it to a piece of string and threw it out the window into the nextdoor neighbours' garden.
A few days later he was attacked by his step-mother, who accused him of being in contact with the neighbours.
These scenes from his childhood are so vivid for J. he slips into the present tense when describing them: "I'm sent upstairs. She's taken the cord daddy used for the beatings. She strips off my trousers and pushes my face down on the bed and she starts beating. Daddy arrives shortly after. They take turns. She keeps me pinned to the bed. He goes downstairs and comes back with a broom handle. He keeps beating me with that on the back, the buttocks, the legs. The brush handle breaks and I remember daddy cursing. Then they go downstairs and leave me with no food.
"I find another scrap of paper and another letter goes out the window to the neighbours."
These neighbours have already tried to help the children, and this is the excuse they need for some official action. Mrs H. contacted the "cruelty people" - the ISPCC, which at the time had responsibility for acting on complaints of cruelty to children.
A few days later J was summoned into the lounge, a room he was normally never allowed to enter. There was a man there who introduced himself as from the ISPCC. "He called me over to him and asked me if I'd been beaten recently. I told him: `Yes, twice.' I was asked to take off my clothes. I undressed totally and he looked at my back. He had a notebook with him. He got me to move this way and that and then said: `You can get dressed now. Goodbye.'
"I went back to the playroom. That was the only time I ever saw this gentleman or anyone ever asked me about my welfare." Nothing further was heard from the ISPCC.
When contacted by The Irish Times recently in connection with this case, the ISPCC had no records of the episode, though it was told the name of the man involved. However, an official of the ISPCC said records from this era were not always complete.
This was not the only attempt made by neighbours to intervene. Another neighbour, Mrs C, went with a group of seven or eight women to the local Garda station and told them what was happening in this house, and that something should be done about it, but nothing was. "I did not know this until recently," J said. "No guard ever came to the house." According to Mrs C, the gardai said they did not think there was anything they could do.
One young priest did attempt to remonstrate with the parents. "I was a junior curate," Father S told The Irish Times. "I have a distinct memory of calling to the house and losing my temper about how the children of the first marriage were treated compared with the others. I was very friendly with the next-door neighbours and that is how I found out about it. My way of handling it was to lose my temper, which I regret. A priest would not do it now."
Father S stressed it was out of the ordinary for so many people to be so concerned about a family. But he feels, as do the women who attempted to get action, that nothing was done because of the social and professional position of the father. "It would have been normal to have a cover-up or a smoothing over of something like that," he said.
Mrs C not only went with a delegation to the gardai, she also sought out the children's uncle, a monsignor in the United States who was home on holiday, and she told him what was happening to his nephews. But he did not want to know.
"The show had to be kept up and the marriage had to be kept going. Keep the bright side out all the time. That's the way it was in those days," she told The Irish Times.
"He stuffed a £20 note in my pocket when I was leaving. I wanted nothing, but I thought I'd buy something for the lads, and the next day a neighbour went down the town and bought clothes for P with it.
"It's the saddest thing. I'm 80 years of age and to this day there's nights I twist and turn not able to sleep because we didn't get anything done. He was a flipping oul' doctor and he wasn't fit to look after a cow."
Eventually the children ran away. "P came into the playroom and said: `We're leaving,' " said J. "He had a plan - we'd go to Dublin, then Belfast, then Scotland."
The two, then aged about nine and 13, dressed in the warmest clothes they had, crept downstairs, took about £25 in cash from their step-mother's handbag and left the house. In the town they spotted a bicycle and P put J on the back and he cycled over 25 miles to another town to get a train to Dublin.
From there P phoned a neighbour to say where they were. They were hanging around O'Connell Bridge when they were spotted by a garda and they were taken to Store Street station, where they spent the night. The next day they were told to go out for the day and be back by 6 p.m. "We spent a lot of the day at the airport," J recalled.
The gardai had been in contact with the H neighbours, who had relatives in Dublin, and who had said they would take the boys. Later their father and step-mother arrived, but the H family would not allow them to take the children and said they were sending them home next day on the train. The train was met by a priest and a group of neighbours, who escorted them to the Garda station.
It might be expected that this series of events would have prompted some official action, but this was not so. "A guard asked P if he wanted to press charges against his father, and he said `no'. He asked him if we wanted to go to a home and he said `no'. The guard said: `You know that we can't prove that food or clothing or shelter has been denied to you and there's nothing else the law can do,' " said J.
The priest bought them a steak in the local Italian restaurant and brought them home. They were not beaten on this occasion, but otherwise "life" continued as before.
Soon afterwards P was sent to boarding school in a neighbouring town, and J followed him three years later. They were happy there, and both did well academically. Both now work abroad.
Their father is now dead, and J is taking legal action to bring what happened into the open, hoping to find out why, in spite of all the information that was available, nothing was done, and to seek some recompense.
In this he has the support of surviving neighbours. Ms H grew up next door to the family, it was her mother who contacted the ISPCC and her cousins who took them in in Dublin. "My mother is dead now. I'm looking at all those women on the road and all the work they put into it for years, and nothing was done. It's a big emotional issue for all of us."