Documents, including contracts
that showed children being “effectively sold into slavery”, are at the
centre of a dispute between the Christian Brothers and a former industrial school resident who retained the papers for more than 40 years.
Tom Wall,
a former resident of St Joseph’s industrial school in Glin, Co
Limerick, obtained the documents in 1973, when the Christian Brothers
who were leaving Glin asked him to burn files on every resident. Mr Wall held onto his own file as well as a significant number of files on other residents. In 2015, he donated them to the University of Limerick so they could be maintained and catalogued.