Tale of a woeful Mom

Jersey man shares tortured Irish childhood

By Stephen Hagan

Ken Doyle.

‘We spent most of our lives locked in our bedroom. We never got to play as children.’

Ken Doyle

Readers need look no further than the title of the latest book by New Jersey writer Ken Doyle to see what kind of childhood this Irish kid had.

"Mother from Hell" pretty much tells it all.

But details in the 224-page paperback bring home the actual pains suffered by Doyle and his brother Patrick. Doyle said the abuses unleashed amounted to beatings every day and not being fed properly for years.

Every day, the boys were directed by their mother, Olive Doyle, to not only steal but scrounge for food scraps. Ken Doyle said there was little he learned from his awful experience as a child. The worst part was “waking up in the morning to face another day of it.”

“It was not knowing when you were going to get food again,” he said. “We survived on trash cans. In the evenings, we would go to the hotels and ask for food for our dogs. Then, we’d get a bag of food scraps and go down to the quarry to eat them.”

Ken Doyle has lived in Gloucester City, N.J. for 23 years but the memories of his childhood growing up in Tullamore, Co. Offaly are never far away. The abuse lasted from 1965 to 1980 and the boys stole whatever was available, from the neighbors’ laundry hung out to dry to expensive Waterford Crystal.

“You name it, we stole it,” said Doyle. “The only way we could get food was by stealing. The abuse was broken bones, starvation and we were forced to steal for her every day of the week.”

Doyle, 44, never married but worked for years in New Jersey painting the homes of area residents. Doyle is not working these days, finding himself disabled from the many injuries suffered when he was a child.

The abuse was so rampant the Midland Health Board checked up on the home on a weekly basis, documenting much of what happened to the boys. Doyle never understood what drove his mother’s behavior. He has been in counseling for years because of the experience.

“We still haven’t worked out why such a woman would do such things to her children,” said Doyle.

Olive Doyle is still alive and lives in Pierce Park, Tullamore, Ireland. Her husband, who left home for the United States during the boy’s childhood years, continued to supplement their income with frequent checks.

But the money was not enough.

“My father was well-aware of the abuse,” said Doyle. “We feel he took off because he couldn’t handle the situation. We had plenty of money to live on. We don’t know why we were sent out to steal.”

The stealing for the Doyle boys began at the age of 6, evolved from stealing milk bottles from the neighbors to taking “whatever we could carry home.”

“It didn’t matter what we stole,” he said. “We just had to steal to get money for food.”

Daily beatings

The boys were beaten on a daily basis, with the beatings so bad that once Doyle was hospitalized for 14 weeks with a broken right leg. He said out of a typical 120-day school year, he missed about 70 days because of the beatings. In addition, the boys were kept locked in their bedrooms for long periods of time.

“There were just fits of anger,” said Doyle. “She used to drag us out of bed and start the day by beating and punishing us. We spent most of our lives locked in our bedroom. We never got to play as children. We used to look out the window and see children fishing on the banks of the Grand Canal.”

Everything came to a head in 2002 when Doyle sought medical treatment for damage to his spine wrought by years of abuse. Medical personnel in this country sought and received about 300 pages of his medical files as a child, which chronicled the beatings, bruises and malnutrition.

The Doyles attempted to find justice in Ireland, filing a lawsuit in 2002 with the High Courts in Dublin. But attorneys for the Irish Health Board refused to defend the charges, putting off any legal action for about six years.

Last year, the board claimed they were not responsible for the damages the boys experienced but still offered to pay 50,000 Euros to the Doyles. But the agreement demanded the Doyles to sign a confidentiality agreement, keeping their experiences to themselves.

At this point, the Doyles knew they had to go public.

“The book was already written,” he said, adding Dublin’s O’Brien Press was close to a deal for the book. A contract was signed in March 2008.

“O’Brien Press could not believe the Irish government said they felt it was not responsible for my health as a child,” he said. “I’m hoping others will come forward with their stories of abuse. Nob