Patrick Walsh was two years old when he was taken to court with his two brothers aged three and four, and a sister of six months. The crime: their mother was in an unhappy marriage and had left her husband.

“She was viewed as the guilty party by Church and State,” Mr Walsh said. “My father denounced her because she wanted a divorce, which was illegal. We were put in the dock, charged and sentenced for ‘having a parent who does not exercise proper guardianship’.” With that decision Mr Walsh lost his childhood. His memories of the next 14 years are of physical and sexual assault, hunger, fear and privation at the Artane Boys’ School near Dublin run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a Catholic organisation.

“They were men of real violence. When I arrived in Artane in 1963 there were 450 boys and it had a stench of violence about it. The home was also used as a detention centre for young offenders, so we were preyed upon not just by the Brothers but by feral gangs.”

He said that he was also sexually abused twice by a specific Christian Brother. His mother’s repeated efforts to free her children were unjustly refused by the authorities. “For years we wouldn’t believe that she had tried to get us out but she made numerous attempts and was told it was impossible. She had to go back to her husband if she wanted her children.”

Throughout his incarceration in Ireland he saw his mother only once — in 1959. The next time they met was in Blackpool in 1966 when he was playing in the Artane Boys’ Band.

“I remember seeing this woman staring up at me from the audience, smiling. It sent a cold shiver up my spine and I asked my brother, who was also in the band, who was the woman who stared so intensely at us.

“After the concert we were introduced backstage.”

Mr Walsh, 53, described the system that abused him as a marriage of convenience between Church and State. “Ireland was a theocratic state. The Church received grants which were the lifeblood of the religious orders and the children were used as the means to fill their pockets with cash. I learnt in later years that Artane would get a cheque, say for £10,000, every month from the Government.

“Artane would send £8,000 to Rome. As a consequence we were badly fed and we worked 12-hour days in the fields and workshops. I was put to work in the shoe shop. Hunger was a constant companion. We were child slaves.”

Tom Hayes, 63, was committed into the care system at the age of 2 because he was born out of wedlock. He, too, suffered at the hands of the Christian Brothers. “I was told my mother had died when I was born but in fact she went to England. I didn’t discover the truth until 2003.

“Sexual abuse took place on a large scale, operated by gangs who had the protection of the Christian Brothers. After I complained to a priest outside the school about it I was threatened with being sent to a reformatory school in Letterfrack, which had an even more notorious reputation.”

Both men hope the report brings out the whole truth. “Ultimately the bishops, the Government and the cardinals in the Vatican knew what was going on. It’s an opportunity for the hierarchy to make a fulsome apology for their failure to put an end to the suffering of the children,” Mr Walsh said.

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