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Peter Tyrrell (16 October 1916 – 26 April 1967) was an Irish author and activist against child abuse. When he was eight years old, the authorities committed him and his older brothers to St Joseph’s Industrial School, Letterfrack, an institution run by the Christian Brothers, because of the family’s extreme poverty. He was physically and sexually abused by the Christian Brothers until he was released from the school when he was sixteen.

He became a tailor by trade, emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1935 and in the same year enlisted in the British Army. For four months in 1944, he was held as a prisoner-of-war in the German camp Stalag XI-B. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Tyrrell campaigned against corporal punishment and child abuse in industrial schools. In 1967, feeling that his efforts to enact change were unsuccessful, he burnt himself alive on Hampstead Heath in London. His remains went unidentified until 1968.

In 2006, his autobiography Founded on Fear, which he had written between 1958 and 1959, was published posthumously by the Irish Academic Press after historian Diarmuid Whelan discovered the manuscript in the papers of politician Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, with whom Tyrrell had conducted a correspondence lasting seven years.^[2]

Peter Tyrrell was born on 16 October 1916 to James Tyrrell and Mary Cronin near Ballinasloe in County Galway, Ireland. His parents had met at the October Ballinasloe Fair.^[3] Cronin, who was not from a poor background, hailed from County Roscommon.^[4][3] Peter had nine siblings including Jack, Jim, Joe, Laurence, Martin, Mick, Norah and Paddy.^[5][6][7] The Tyrrells were extremely impoverished because James Tyrrell held only an intermittent job, for 15 shillings a week, as a stone-breaker. He neglected to improve the family’s finances and living conditions, so the children stole crops from their neighbours’ fields and Mary begged to support the family. Relatives who were residing in Boston sent them money.^[4][8] The family lived on a farm, but their house (originally a stable) had a cobblestone floor, no windows and only two rooms. James Tyrrell neglected to make repairs or renovations to the house.^[6][2]

The Tyrrell children went to school in Ahascragh; Tyrrell recalled that their teacher, Mrs Kennedy, was a pleasant woman who provided lunch for them. However, after running out of clothing, they had to withdraw in 1923.^[3][9] In 1924, when Peter was eight years old, the authorities removed him and his three older brothers to St Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack, an industrial school operated and staffed by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, because of the family’s poverty.^[10][2] Tyrrell’s two younger brothers, who were too young for Letterfrack, were instead put in a Kilkenny industrial school for junior boys.^[3]

Tyrrell later recounted in Founded on Fear that many of the Christian Brothers who ran the school beat him and the other inmates daily, with the exception of holidays such as Christmas, and for no reason but the Brothers’ “lustful pleasure”.^[8] One Brother in particular, Vale (or Veale),^[11] made Letterfrack a “nightmare” for Tyrrell.^[12] The Christian Brothers usually approached the boys from behind in order to beat them, taking them by surprise, and used, among other implements, sticks, leather and rubber. Boys would be struck up to 20 times during a single beating. After Tyrrell’s arm was broken during a beating he was coerced to tell the doctor that he had fallen down a flight of stairs.^[13][2] Sexual abuse also occurred; the children were often stripped naked before being beaten, and Tyrrell reported that a Brother, who may have been Vale,^[14] had raped him.^[15]

Students, including Tyrrell, who came from poor families were both bullied by their peers and singled out for abuse by the Christian Brothers.^[2] The boys were forced to create goods for each other and for customers outside of Letterfrack. Although he wanted to be a shoemaker,^[16] Tyrrell was among several inmates assigned to the tailor shop, where he learned how to tailor. According to Whelan he “sewed a double seat into his pants” to make the beatings less painful.^[2] The food, sanitation and living conditions were poor: the boys, who were underfed, were malnourished and always cold, and many suffered from chilblains and periodontal disease. The staff neglected to wash the boys’ school uniforms regularly, and head lice was commonplace.^[3][17] Tyrrell related, though, that there were some Brothers who treated the boys kindly, and especially praised Brother Kelly, who was the superior of Letterfrack during Tyrrell’s incarceration. Tyrrell believed that Kelly, whom he described as “kind to everyone”,^[18] was unaware of the abuse but would have intervened had he been informed.^[8] Tyrrell’s parents lacked the money to travel to visit him and his brothers, though they sent him letters.^[19]

In 1932, at the age of sixteen, Tyrrell was discharged from St Joseph’s and returned home. James Tyrrell had renovated the house since his sons’ departures (a concrete floor had replaced the cobblestone one, and windows had been added); however, Peter’s eldest brother Mick built a new house into which the family moved sometime thereafter. Immediately after his return, Peter was hired as a tailor in Ballinasloe, where he sewed garments for a local mental hospital. Several of the mental hospital’s patients were former industrial school inmates who, a nurse told Tyrrell’s employer, would beat the other patients.^[20] Tyrrell reported that, for several years after his release, he startled easily, preferred to sit with his back against a wall out of fear of being beaten, avoided communicating with most people except for his mother and fell ill frequently. He remarked that he had a tendency to agree, out of fear that he may be harmed otherwise, with everything other people said. Because the people who mistreated him were men, Tyrrell stated that he had “never met a bad woman. I have not known many good men. I dislike and fear men”.^[21] He was beaten in his nightmares and thus had a fear of sleep.^[22] Tyrrell once confided about his past in a priest, who expressed appallment that he complained about the Christian Brothers, as they had provided for his necessities.^[23]

Tyrrell emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1935 because of prejudice by local people against former inmates of industrial schools, which prevented him from reintegrating into Irish society.^[2] Later that year he joined the King’s Own Scottish Borderers regiment of the British Army. According to himself, he was posted first to Scotland and then to various other regions, including Palestine in August 1936, where the regiment “protect[ed] Jewish settlements and… provided escorts for all trains”, and Tiberias, where he contracted malaria and spent two weeks in a hospital in Egypt. In September 1937 they took a ship to India.^[24] He wrote that in 1941, he and his battalion were attached to an Australian unit at Bombay with the task of escorting Italian prisoners of war, who had been transported to India, to Bangalore. He claimed to have been promoted to the rank of sergeant in June of the same year. In 1942, he began a romantic relationship with a woman named Angela Dennison, whom he met in India, but they ultimately broke up because of Tyrrell’s hesitance to marry her, as well as his emotional cruelty.^[25] For instance, he forced her to return to him a watch that he had gifted her a few weeks prior.^[17] While stationed in India he had a tendency to mistreat the Indians when he was upset;^[17] he later remarked that these behaviours of his were similar to those of the Christian Brothers at Letterfrack.^[10]

In 1944, the battalion was removed to the Netherlands and later to Geilenkirchen in Germany. On the front lines at the German border on 21 January 1945,^[17] Tyrrell incurred wounds to his right arm and to his legs, whereupon he was captured by the Germans and sent to the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag XI-B near Fallingbostel. He compared his experience at the camp, where he and other Western prisoners were treated humanely whereas Soviet prisoners were starved, favourably to his childhood in Letterfrack. He felt that there was civility between the Germans and the Western prisoners in the camp, and he attributed the meagre food to wartime scarcity, which he did not fault Germany for, rather than to deliberate withholdment.^[26][10] He and other prisoners were liberated in April 1945. He was demobilised from the military in December and officially discharged six months later.^[27]

Tyrrell’s military service had helped him recover from much of his trauma and gain self-confidence. After returning to England he learnt how to drive a car, ride a bicycle and swim. He lived primarily in London. In 1945, he obtained a job as a clothing inspector at the Ministry of Supply.^[17] He wrote that he “was beginning to really enjoy life. I was no longer afraid of people. I had learned to cast aside that terrible inferiority complex… Yes I had beaten most of my fears”.^[28] But he also faced both anti-Irish sentiment and, because of his outspoken criticism of the Irish people and culture, rejection by the Irish community in England.^[2] He held speeches in Hyde Park condemning the Irish people for Ireland’s faults; in multiple incidents he was physically assaulted and threatened for doing so.^[17][10] He resented the Irish for what he saw as their undying loyalty to religious institutions including the Christian Brothers,^[2] and for giving all Irish people reputations in the United Kingdom as “irresponsible liars and drunkards”.^[17]

After he was laid off from the Ministry of Supply in 1947, he started tailoring again, and began to travel extensively around the United Kingdom, frequently changing addresses, in search of work. By this point, individual tailors were no longer in demand in most places in the country, because of the advent of mass clothing production in factories.^[2] After encountering Tom Thornton, one of his old friends from Letterfrack, he became preoccupied with his experience at the institution. He frequented pubs, met many fellow former inmates of industrial schools and attempted, with varying success, to get them to tell him about their experiences.^[17] His inclination to take paper and pens to the pub gave him the nickname “the professor”.^[2] He wrote letters to newspapers (including the News of the World), government officials (including statesman Éamon de Valera), Catholic Church leaders and Christian Brothers, recounting the abuse he had experienced in Letterfrack and imploring them to investigate into child abuse in industrial schools. He usually received either no response to his correspondence, or a reassurance that his abuse had happened long enough to have become a moot point.^[29][30] In two letters, neither of which received a response, to the Provincial of the Order of Letterfrack, he accused three members of the order of physical and sexual abuse; in the Ryan Report these men were anonymised to “Brother Piperel”, “Brother Perryn” (real name Brother Vale)^[11] and “Brother Corvax”. In 1957 he met with the Provincial of the Congregation, who dismissed his allegations as blackmail, and then with the Superior General of Letterfrack.^[31]

In the autumn of 1958, at the behest of the Irish Centre in London, Tyrrell contacted Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, a Senator who was known for his stances on socialism and pacifism, and for his opposition to corporal punishment. Sheehy-Skeffington invited Tyrrell to his home in Dublin, Ireland and encouraged him to write a memoir, which was drafted between August 1958 and February 1959 and published decades posthumously as Founded on Fear;^[6] while that was the only time they met in person, they continued to correspond until 1965.^[2] Sometime in the early 1960s Tyrrell, due to worsening eyesight, quit tailoring and obtained a job assisting underground train passengers in London.^[2] In 1964 Sheehy-Skeffington introduced Tyrrell to Joy Rudd, with whom Tyrrell then co-authored an article titled “Early Days in Letterfrack”,^[32] which was published in Hibernia magazine.^[33] Rudd introduced Tyrrell into a literary and political group called Tuairim which published pamphlets on various issues, including corporal punishment in institutions. Tuairim accepted Tyrrell’s account of his abuse and put him on the committee that wrote Tuairim’s 1966 pamphlet (Some of our children. A report on the residential care of the deprived child in Ireland) about living conditions in Irish institutions for children,^[34] but, to Tyrrell’s frustration, did not incorporate his recollections into their publications; they thought that abuse in industrial schools had become less severe since Tyrrell had left Letterfrack.^[2]

On 26 April 1967, Tyrrell, disgruntled by the failure of his attempts to bring the issue of child abuse to the public eye, went to an area (near East Heath Road) of Hampstead Heath in London, poured petrol over his body^[35] and lit himself on fire.^[2] He was fifty years old. He suffered from depression and possibly bipolar disorder as a consequence of his abuse, and he had previously contemplated suicide in 1939.^[17]

His corpse, charred beyond recognition, was discovered, still smouldering, on 28 April by Robert Forsdyke, a member of the park staff.^[36] The body had abdominal wounds that may have come from a knife, though no weapon was found at the scene. Investigators initially believed Tyrrell to have been between 20 and 30 years old.^[35] The only clue as to his identity was a torn postcard, addressed to Sheehy-Skeffington, next to the body; the head investigator, Raymond Dagg, stated that written on the postcard was a suicide note.^[36][35][37] Scotland Yard opened an inquest into Tyrrell’s death and, in 1968, contacted Sheehy-Skeffington inquiring about the postcard. Sheehy-Skeffington sent them a letter from Tyrrell for them to use as comparison,^[38] and Scotland Yard positively identified the remains as Tyrrell shortly thereafter.^[37] Scotland Yard later reorganised its records and, in the process, destroyed the documentation of its inquest.^[3]

In 2005, 38 years after Tyrrell’s death, Irish historian Diarmuid Whelan, who was going through the archives of Owen Sheehy-Skeffington’s papers, came across the manuscript of Tyrrell’s autobiography. He edited it to fix Tyrrell’s idiosyncratic grammar (Tyrrell started random words with capital letters and used commas incorrectly),^[6] wrote an introduction to it and had the book published as Founded on Fear: Letterfrack Industrial School, war and exile by the Irish Academic Press in 2006.^[37][2] After Founded on Fear's publication, the Congregation of Christian Brothers apologised for the abuse in industrial schools and for ignoring Tyrrell’s complaints in the 1950s.^[13]

Tyrrell’s correspondence and meetings with the Christian Brothers were documented on 20 May 2009^[39] by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in the Ryan Report, a report of the Commission’s findings about child abuse in industrial schools in the Republic of Ireland, even though his case was out of the scope of the report (which mainly concerned incidents that occurred after the year 1936).^[29] The Commission included Tyrrell in the report because they thought the Christian Brothers’ dismissals of Tyrrell’s allegations to be noteworthy.^[31] The Commission found Tyrrell’s information about the identities of Letterfrack’s staff and residents, during his time there, to be accurate to the school’s records.^[22] Since the Commission decided that victims and alleged perpetrators needed to be anonymised for legal reasons, Tyrrell was referred to as “Noah Kitterick” in the report.^[40][6] In a column for the Irish Examiner, published three days after the Ryan Report, Whelan identified “Noah Kitterick” as Peter Tyrrell and, stating that Tyrrell explicitly wanted for his efforts to be appreciated under his real name, condemned the Commission’s decision to anonymise him.^[41]

On 26 April 2019, a vigil, organised by therapist Nuala Flynn, was held on Hampstead Heath in honour of Tyrrell. It consisted of a walk, lit by candles, across Hampstead Heath, from Parliament Hill to the civic hall of Highgate. At the civic hall, Flynn recited passages from Founded on Fear and from the speeches Tyrrell gave.^[42] The vigil commemorated the 52nd anniversary of his death and the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Ryan Report.^[43] Many of the attendees were themselves former inmates of industrial schools.^[30]

• List of political self-immolations
• Mary Raftery – investigative journalist who, in 1999, produced a documentary series States of Fear and wrote a book Suffer the Little Children exposing child abuse in Irish institutions^[44]
• Henk Heithuis – Dutch man who was castrated after accusing a Roman Catholic monk of molesting him in a boarding school^[45]

• Tyrrell, Peter (2006). Whelan, Diarmuid (ed.). Founded on Fear. Dublin: Transworld Ireland. ISBN 978-1-84827-023-7.
• Fagan, Sean; McConvery, Brendan; Lee, Margaret; Keogh, Daire; Prone, Terry; O’Malley, Tom; Dorr, Donal; Littleton, John; Maher, Eamon; Ryan, Fainche; O’Riordan, Joe; Keenan, Marie (2009). Flannery, Tony (ed.). Responding to the Ryan Report. Blackrock, Co. Dublin [Ireland]: Columba Press. ISBN 978-1-85607-673-9.
• Arnold, Bruce (2009). The Irish gulag: how the state betrayed its innocent children. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-7171-4614-7.