Orphan Des Murray's Story by Bette Browne

In memory of Des Murray

Please see free safe link to 3 page extract, page number 37 to page 39, true story of Des Murray.

See more about this book at tmppublications.com/Stolen-Lives-by-Bette-Browne-Second-Edition-2023-Revised-and-Updated-p566553132.

"The more survivors I interviewed and the more stories I heard, the more I recalled his description" says Bette Browne.

Others referred to them as being like “a concentration camp”.

That description about Artane Industrial School in Dublin, run by the Christian Brothers, came from Des Murray.

“Artane was a concentration camp,” he says quietly. “I was singled out by two Brothers, two sadists; my biggest regret is that I didn’t kill those two..."

“One was particularly savage. One fella I knew had a rheumatic heart but Brother B used to make him fill a wheelbarrow with stones and wheel it around the yard three or four times.”

Des had arrived in Artane at the age of 12 and a half in 1954, having already been moved through a number of institutions in Dublin.

He was the son of an unmarried mother and was born in 1941 in St Kevin’s Hospital Dublin (now St James’s).

Des witnessed sexual violence in Artane but did not encounter it directly himself. “I remember seeing a Brother on the landing and he was spotting the boys,” he says. “They carefully chose their victims. You wouldn’t see the boys going into the Brothers’ room, but sometimes you’d see them running out, screaming. They chose the vulnerable ones.”

www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/stolen-childhoods-and-blighted-lives--child-abuse-in-industrial-schools-270629.html.