A cruel and neglectful childhood made Wayne Dignam determined to be the best father he can, writes Sheila Wayman
WAYNE DIGNAM used to find his young children's birthdays upsetting. He would be filled with conflicting emotions as he watched the excitement around the cake and the candles. For him, the joy of the present contrasted sharply with the pain of the past.
As a child, he had never liked a fuss about his own birthday. “It reminded me how unnatural my life was,” says the 32-year-old father of three from Dublin, now living in Limerick.
It was this “unnatural” childhood which makes him think deeply about what sort of father he is to his three children, aged seven, five and two. “I am constantly making up stories for them so they are happy memories I am giving my kids, because I know the importance of happy memories.”
He has precious few of his own. The comfortable upbringing his children enjoy bears no resemblance to his early childhood. For him there were years of appalling neglect, during which his youngest sister was killed, before a loving foster family stepped in and turned his life around.
His birth parents, Bob and Valerie, had split up when he was three. Initially, he and his siblings stayed with their mother, even though she was unstable.
"At that time social services would have been encouraging children to live with their mother," he explains. He and his siblings were in and out of care when their mother was too ill to cope.
He was jealous, he says, of children who had a father around. "It was simple things, like if my watch broke, there was nobody to fix it. She couldn't fix it, so I would have to go across the road to get a neighbour to fix my watch. I found I was drawn to father figures; I would spend time watching a neighbour fixing his tiles just to see how he was doing it."
In 1981, when he was six, his father was granted custody of him and his siblings. An alcoholic, his father was then living in a sixth-floor flat in Ballymun with a new partner and two more children.
One night, just before Christmas in 1981, Dignam's father lost his temper with his youngest sister, Sandra, who was three at the time, and assaulted her. The next morning, he and his partner realised she was dead.
The couple left the body, along with the second-youngest child, an 11-month-old boy, in the flat and fled to England with the rest of the children. Dignam has no clear recollection of the time, although he does remember being in a hotel room, the police coming and then the journey back to Ireland.
His father and stepmother were both jailed the following year, after being charged with murder but convicted of manslaughter. The court heard that Sandra, who had 68-78 injuries on her body, had died of a severe beating.
It also emerged that the previous October, the couple had been convicted of abandonment after the five children were found alone in the flat.
"To this day I wonder could social services have done more to protect us. Sandra was taken out of a safe, short-term foster home to live with us in Ballymun where she died.
"Concerned neighbours also made several complaints to our social worker after seeing the condition Sandra was in," says Dignam. "I would hate to think that there are still children today being neglected and that social workers do not have the skills or resources to protect them."
He lost contact with his father for many years after that but they have since been reunited. He lives abroad and is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
"He told me what had happened. It was an important thing for me to listen and to forgive him. It was tough going but something I had to do for myself, hear his side of the story. I keep in contact by e-mail now," says Dignam.
For a while he and his surviving sister were back with their mother in Santry, but it was not long before they were taken into care again.
"We were in a very serious situation, where the health board had to take us out of the home," he says. "We were brought to a house in Bray where social workers were looking after us, like a little holiday. That would have been 1983. There, it was like a safe haven for us. My birth mother would come to visit us but she really couldn't look after us.
"It was very traumatic seeing her cry. But we were vulnerable, with men coming in and out of the house, and we had to be taken away."
Nobody explained anything but he says he knew in his heart the situation could not continue.
When they were out in Bray, a social worker asked a north Dublin family would they consider fostering eight-year-old Wayne. The couple, Joe and Betty Dignam, had six sons of their own aged from 11 upwards, and had already done short-term fostering.
"They would come out to Bray and we would walk along the promenade. They would talk to us, to get a feel for what we were like. So I remember vividly that time, going for a walk with this couple, feeling that I had to impress them. Then they would take us out to their home in Artane for a day and introduce us to the dog, and the older brothers, and they would say 'this is our spare bedroom' and I could feel the hints were coming that this could be your bedroom some day.
"So it was that kind of gentle introduction and it was really my first taste of somebody consciously making the decision that they wanted me to live with them. Beforehand, authorities were saying 'you can live here, you can live there'."
The Dignams provided the much-needed stability for Wayne. In later years, he took their surname by deed poll.
"At the time as a kid I was pretty messed up without realising it," he says. He was withdrawn, "trying to process what was going on and then trying to cope with the new situation.
"Luckily enough, I was very interested in learning, in studying and that was the start. My foster mother would make a point of going down to the school and explaining who I was. Very matter of fact, typical north Dublin - get on his uniform, get him in, he will be fine. Obviously they were keeping a close eye on me but that no-nonsense approach really helped me an awful lot."
He learned very quickly from them. "They were a family that came from the inner city, Ballybough, they grew up the hard way but they were good people. They worked hard, studied hard. They did dote on us, but they didn't spoil us and they didn't tip-toe around us."
At age 11 or 12 he found that his early experiences made it difficult for him to trust people and make friends. "I knew even at that age I needed to start talking about things."
He was brought to the childcare services in Park House on the North Circular Road for therapy sessions. When he saw photographs on the wall of other children looking for foster parents he became aware of how lucky he was.
"I thought that I had better sort myself out. I realised I needed help. I grew up very young because of what I had had to survive."
He went to St David's CBS in Artane where he excelled. "I was very studious at that stage, very competitive." He was determined to go to university.
For any child, the teenage years are about establishing an identity. Wayne was 16 when his birth mother casually mentioned that his grandmother in England had left him some silverware. It was his first inkling about her privileged background.
"My mother came from an aristocratic family in England," he explains.
"My great grand uncle was Viscount Rhondda who was the minister for food during the first World War and escaped from the Lusitania after it was bombed. My grandfather was a QC, and a Wing commander with the RAF in the second World War. So all should have been rosy for me."
Instead his mother, who had been to finishing school, rebelled and ran off to Ireland with his father, an Irish bus conductor she had met in London.
Dignam believes that if he had been brought up in London, he would probably be a solicitor or something similar. In his case, the much-debated question of nature versus nurture is far more than just academic interest. When he met relatives in England, "I found I just clicked right away. I thought, 'this is where I belong'."
The sense of growing apart from his foster family increased when he went to Trinity College, to study mechanical engineering.
"Subconsciously, I did separate myself and spend more time in college, which my mother found difficult. I was changing and developing but was happier with myself. I was not prepared to spend the weekends down in the pub drinking with the lads. That was not for me."
He sought role models for the life he aspired to, believing he could benefit from people with happy backgrounds.
"If I was in a lecture theatre and saw three fellas up the front who looked to be good guys, I would want to go down and sit beside them. I wanted to learn from them."
After graduating from Trinity, he went to Galway to study for an MA in industrial engineering. "I wanted to get out of the city for myself, to go off on my own which, I must say, I found very challenging."
His foster mother, to whom he owes so much, found it difficult to let him go. "I got the opportunity to thank her last year, before she died, for giving me the opportunity to grow up in a loving home and teaching me how to be a parent."
She taught him the principles of life, "how to be respectful of people, not to tell lies, simple things I had to learn; decent, honest-to-goodness living. I could have easily not been like that."
When he returned to Dublin after his MA to work as a business consultant, he met his wife, Michelle Burke, from Limerick, a paediatric nurse who was working in Temple Street hospital.
Before long, they were expecting their first child. Aged 25, he felt he needed to get his head straight for fatherhood and spent four or five months going to counselling sessions.
"It helped me cope with where I am now in my life. I do believe when you have had a childhood like this, you have to revisit it again sometimes. You feel something bottled up."
A committed Catholic, spirituality has always been important to him too.
Having been made redundant just before his first child was born, Dignam was a full-time father for a while at their apartment in Islandbridge.
"When I look back this was a blessing as I learned how to be a father. It was not something that came naturally to me but I took to it. That was my first grounding in being a parent; it was a great start."
Moving to Limerick five years ago was a big decision. "Michelle felt that if we were going to have a family, we needed to have support and that her family would be able to give her that support, which they do and they are brilliant."
Now a "bid consultant" with construction companies, he works from an office at home in Castletroy, while his wife does nursing through an agency so she can fit her hours around the family.
Describing himself as childish at heart, Dignam loves being with children. "I am the one out playing football with the kids, organising the football games. I even did pantomime in Limerick. I love acting. I think it's in my genes as well.
"I can relate to kids very easily. Maybe it's catching up, I don't know." He certainly feels he has achieved his main goal in life.
"Ambition for me is about who you are, the person you are, how happy you are, how grounded you are, how happy your family is, that's the most important thing for me. We are a typical middle-class family, but for me that is my success."
He believes he has overcome the disadvantage of his early years. Although "I get worked up about certain things, I think that is part of the anxiety that comes from the anxiety in childhood when I was in stressful situations".
He can also see a pattern of trying to please people and dislikes confrontation.
"I feel in my development there's a big hole . . . which I am trying to compensate for, which sometimes shows itself in different ways if I get nervous or become angry, if I am in a situation where I am not comfortable."
Apart from very close friends and family, few acquaintances over the years knew about his background.
“I wanted to be accepted for who I was. I have always been like that. But in the past couple of months I have started to feel I should start telling my story and not be afraid.”