If you are still reading this I am sure you want the answer to that question as to what happened to many of these characters in this story. Well, I met Derek, my cousin, a couple of years later. When our grandparents died he returned to England to live with his father in a one room bedsit and Derek got the bed. He was twelve years old and when another twelve summers passed away so did his father. Thats when he met his mother for the first time since he was a child. She had not come to meet him only the money his father might have left behind. She turned out to be right. Dereks father had scrimped and scraped in his lifetime of fifty six years the price of a good house, intending this money to go to his only son and child.

Only half of it got there. Derek's mother got the rest for she had never divorced his father, and under that great word called 'law', she was entitled to it. Derek is now happily married with two grown children.

My Aunt, Bernie, lives in England happily on her own.

My Uncle, Jerry, lives only a couple of miles away from her and lives happily on his own.

Susan, the girl with one eye, I never saw again or my first love Marie.

The Coyle brothers family are still being devastated by Huntingtons disease for it never takes time off. Tommy is still with us though several of his brothers and sisters are not, and that includes Dennis. Tony is fighting for his life as of this writing.

Johnny Doran is still haunted by the memories of the industrial prison leaving him a single man. An unrealistic fear has stalked him all his life that the same nightmare could happen to his children if he had any even though these children's prisons no longer exist.

Larry Sullivan or the Cleary brothers I never saw again Br Gaynor had hell come to him before he got there after dying in a fire of his own making. He had fallen asleep in his armchair dropping his still lit pipe onto it. Smoke kept him asleep and the fire made sure he did not wake up.

Br Hourigan died of cancer in 1982 at the age of seventy six. His sixty cigarette a day habit had finally caught up with him. He left behind one of his most precious possessions, at least to me. A pair of rosary beads and a letter, and I got both. In his last writing he told me how much my friendship had meant to him for I had never stopped going to see him in the last years of his life. He also wrote that the rosary beads was all that he had left and they would help me keep safe. A good man had passed that day.

Grants later life and his retirement would be spent fighting off sexual and physical abuse charges but he had friends in high places. Over thirteen years was spent trying to get him into court and every legal loophole was spent trying to keep him out of it. The day of reckoning came with the police testifying against the victims after years of tea and biscuits in the corridors of courtrooms with the defendants, with blunt testimony that we probably had made the whole thing up from the power of suggestion. There was a few more tricks up their sleeve as well. I was a strong witness but was told by one policeman that I was not needed, with nothing in writing then or now to tell me that. It turns out that this policeman was the only one privy to this information for the courts believed I just never showed up. The whole pantomime that was sometimes called a trial was stopped half way through with no verdict, though Grant still carries the mark of Cain. No one considered at any time that we mighty actually be telling the truth and that Grant might be telling lies.

Br devanney is retired and deserves it.

Br Mc Gettigan wished he had not become a Brother. He is now a college lecturer, giving up his weekly pay check to a fraternity of avowed celibates he does not trust anymore, believing instead that life has passed him by to do much else.

Ching Chong is a legally blind marriage councilor.

Fr mc loughlin denied he knew anything about any kind of abuse in the prison. He did concede he might have been told something in a confessional sense making him believe that he was above the law, and on that he was right. By then they had made him the bishop of Galway.

Michael Lyons passed away at the age of fifty eight. I will always remember him in helping me to believe in 'me' too.

Anthony, my half brother, passed away in 1982 at the age of thirty two, showing more courage than anyone I knew, facing down a disease with no known name. Before the decade had passed it had got one.

A long widowed Dilllie outlived Anthony by twenty four years leaving this world after eighty seven of them.

Brian inherited everything from Dillie and lives somewhere in London with it all.

My brother, Michael, passed away from pancreatic cancer in November 2003 at the age of forty eight without ever been kissed by a woman before the last week of his life.

My aunt, Bernie, helped his passage and gave him that kiss days before he died. A redress board set up months before for institutional abuse, refused to see him even as he lay in bed fighting for his life and any compensation that might help him redeem it. This government body had lost its conscience but the media helped them find it when at last they did come over to see him at his bedside. Michael refused the paltry offer they made a week before he passed away and no one ever said sorry to him that it had happened at all.

His life long battle with depression was at last over and the memories from a past he could never forget. I was happy for Michael as I looked at his sad face for the last time and thought again to myself, 'this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you'. Thank you Don Mc lean for I could not have sung or said it better myself.

Sammy phoned twenty one years after the first twenty. When I picked up the phone I really thought I was talking to a dead person only to find he was very much a live one. Time had not been kind to Sammy. The glasses were still there, the restless spirit, the beautiful mind, but the ghost of his past were fires that he could not put out and I still did not know which one was burning. When we met again after all those years he had served his time and been in prison longer than he had been out of it. At last I found too what had stalked and eaten away at him above all else, Dalton. For the first and only time in his life, Sammy cried the tears of the innocent. I gave him a warm embrace, one of the few he ever got. He did not offer up much about those intervening years and I did not ask too hard either. Some things are best left unsaid.

After a couple of days he disappeared again looking for something I felt he could never find, a normal life. For me, I believe I have come close.

I now life beside a river in the village of Oughterard just outside Galway, struggling with the credit crunch and a mortgage like everyone else. I married again and happen to be the oldest dad in the street, being a fifty two year old father to a three year old girl. I have the love of three grown up children also. They have known a better twenty one years of life than I ever had and as it should be, trying to make things better for them than what went before. Change is forever whether I am in this world or not, and what went after those years is mixed though overall positive.

My story is only that, mine, and cannot feel the pain or joy of others as only they can. I wish the best for all those who were a part of my story and hope that they made a positive life for themselves. That hope is there for those that could not, and for the ones still trying. For the others may they rest in peace for that was the only place they could find it.

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