Peter Tyrrell

Peter Tyrrell was born in 1916 into an impoverished family in the west of Ireland. Sent at the age of eight into the care of the Christian Brothers at Letterfrack Industrial School, he suffered appallingly from the brutality of the school's regime. This was to be the defining period of his life and informed everything that followed. His account of his time in Letterfrack and his later life was originally told in a series of letters to the sympathetic senator, Owen Sheehy Skeffington. Having never fully escaped the horrors of his childhood, Tyrrell tragically ended his own life in 1967.
His compelling memoir, Founded on Fear, was edited by Dr Diarmuid Whelan.