Patrick Rice

Lonesome Stray Patrick Rice

The story is based on my life in Institutions in Ireland in the 1930s and '40s, and my subsequent disposal (their word) to a strange woman who took me to an even stranger outside world. As a seventeen-year-old, free for the first time I made my way to the UK to join the forces. Christmas and free time I spent on camp or travelling to different parts of the country, staying overnight at YMCAs and Bed and Breakfast places. That was until, at a small mining village in Co. Durham, I'd found love I'd never known, in the form of an eighteen-year-old factory girl whom I married three years later. It was not until 2006 did I discover why I'd spent my formative years in State custody. Under the Freedom of Information Act, offical documents revealed, I was charged as a two year old at Dublin District Court with receiving Alms. The named judge ordered that I be be detained till my sixteenth birthday. First placed in the custody of the Sisters of Charity in Co. Kilkenny until the age of ten, when I was considered old enough to start work. As a lone child I was transferred to the custody of the Christian Brothers at the notorious 'Artane' Industrial School on the outskirts of Dublin City. Those six years stained my very soal.