The Laffoy Commission has found evidence of neglect, emotional, sexual and physical abuse at an industrial school in west Cork in the 1930s and 1940s.
In its first and only report into specific allegations, the investigation committee of the commission has concluded that "severe physical punishment was a constant feature of discipline" at Baltimore Fisheries School, which would be categorised as abusive.
The committee said it was also satisfied that there was one serial abuser on the school staff during the period, and, "as a matter of probability", other abusers.
The sexual abuse, which included buggery, was accompanied by "aggression and violence", while the committee also found that older boys abused younger residents at the school.
The committee was also "satisfied" that the living conditions during the period at the school were "so bad and the care of the children so deficient and neglectful as to constitute an abuse of children".
Some 21 former residents gave sworn testimony to the commission in which they outlined their experience at the Fisheries School which, the report says, "were so harsh and deprived by the standards of today as to verge on the unbelievable, were it not for the fact that a contemporaneous record is available to give evidence to the testimony".
During the period, the school was home to between 120 and 180 boys, who had been sent there for periods of up to five years from other children's homes and under court orders. Many were born outside marriage. The school was designed to provide them with occupational training in fishery related industries.
The findings of the report were welcomed by Mr John Griffin, from Skibbereen, Co Cork, who was a resident at the school between 1945 and 1950. "It's now there on the record for generations to take heed and realise what happened to us," he told The Irish Times yesterday.
The report outlined the "appalling conditions" that the boys lived in, including flea- infested and urine saturated mattresses, drinking vessels that included jam jars, lack of heating, and poor clothing. One witness told of living through the winter of 1947 - one of the coldest on record in the last century - dressed only in light clothes in a building with no heating.
The report says that the "most startling failure" related to the lack of food provided for the boys. The commission heard evidence from former residents that they were compelled to supplement their diets by eating raw vegetables and vegetation, and by scavenging, begging and stealing in the village of Baltimore.
The investigating committee also commented on the "lack of physical stature" of many of the witnesses, which many of the witnesses themselves attributed to their poor diet at the school.
According to the report, the former residents continue to suffer.
The industrial school, which closed in 1950, was unusual in that it was run by a local board of management, directed by the local parish priest, as opposed to a religious order which ran such institutions as a matter of course.
Verbal evidence of the conditions was backed up by contemporaneous inspection reports by the Department of Education's medical inspector, Dr Anna McCabe.
Along with the then inspector of industrial schools, Sir Rowland Blennerhasset, she recommended the closure of the Cork school.
The committee decided not to name specific individuals believed to have perpetrated abuse, for a number of reasons, including the fact that the perpetrators were not in a position to challenge or contest the findings.
It also found that there was no evidence that any official from the Department of Education had knowledge of sexual or physical abuse at the school.