Eleven-year-old Tom Sweeney
kept skipping school. Eight-year-old Mannix Flynn got caught stealing a
box of chocolates. And Christine Buckley, barely a month old, was found
guilty of being the child of an unwed mother.
In the morally rigid Roman Catholic Ireland of old, such sins were sufficient to land all three children — and more than 30,000 others throughout the 20th century — in Dickensian workhouses for girls and boys run with an iron fist by Catholic religious orders.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/30838320/ns/world_news-europe/t/catholic-church-shamed-irish-abuse-report/#.VDCHZBYpeUk
In the morally rigid Roman Catholic Ireland of old, such sins were sufficient to land all three children — and more than 30,000 others throughout the 20th century — in Dickensian workhouses for girls and boys run with an iron fist by Catholic religious orders.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/30838320/ns/world_news-europe/t/catholic-church-shamed-irish-abuse-report/#.VDCHZBYpeUk