A low-profile support group helps rebuild the shattered lives of torture victims, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
IT COULD be the faintest sound - a stuttering exhaust or a falling pen - that would unsettle him in those early days. In the very first session, he sat rigidly in the small prefab office in the back yard of Spirasi House, all but silent and constantly on edge.
There were physical symptoms, too - a missing toe, severe scarring on his back and shoulders and damage to nerve endings where the electrodes had been used. He asked straight out: was there hope for him?
"His big thing was safety," recalls Margaret O'Reilly Carroll, the psychotherapist who sat across from the refugee that day more than two years ago.
"That blind would have to be down, because he couldn't be in an enclosed space. It was so extreme, this man's panic, that when the pears would fall from the tree outside and hit the roof, he would go into complete and utter panic. He would sit frozen - immediately his memories would go back."
As the months passed and the pair built a rapport, the man told O'Reilly Carroll that he had been taken from his home, blindfolded and tortured along with a number of other men for just over two months. Each night they would sleep alongside one another in their handcuffs, he said, occasionally hearing digging outside and wondering each time if it was their grave that was being dug. Silence could oppress like thunderous noise. "There might be a gunshot but you didn't know if somebody was killed or wasn't. So night-time became a time of terror. Then there was the physical torture, which was sometimes extreme."
To listen to O'Reilly Carroll describe the man who visits her these days is to hear of a man transformed. He has obsessive compulsive disorder - he checks and re-checks the windows of his flat each night, then rises at the slightest sound and checks them once more - and prefers to sleep in the morning than at night. But his situation is improving by the week. "He can smile now. He can come into the building without feeling terrified. He interacts, he chats to people. He's stable emotionally - he can go to the supermarket, and that's a big thing," she says.
In its 10 years in operation, Spirasi has provided services to more than 20,000 people in its rambling Georgian building on Dublin's North Circular Road. Some have availed of English language and computer courses; others have come for health information sessions or orientation programmes. The ethos is scrupulously multidisciplinary, but the primary focus has been the Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture, which was established in 2001 and remains the only specialist centre of its kind in the Republic.
Spirasi is one of the biggest immigrant support groups in the State, but most of its work is done quietly, without press releases or much public recognition. To protect its clients' privacy and to avoid distressing them further, it declines media requests for interviews with survivors - despite a pressing need to find new donors.
The corridors of the centre are lined with artwork contributed by former clients, each one telling another of the thousands of personal stories that staff can relate.
"Can you imagine the hours of work that went into that," Fr Begley asks admiringly, pointing to a striking painting donated by a Georgian man. "He learned his English with us." There's another by Femi, a Nigerian who first came to Spirasi as a 17-year-old. "He did his Leaving Cert eventually and now has got a degree in IT. Delightful fella. These are imprints of integration."
Between 10 and 35 per cent of all refugees settled in Europe, it is estimated, have experienced torture or other forms of serious violence in their country of origin. But according to Spirasi's strategy and development manager, Greg Straton, there is little public awareness of the problems faced by torture victims living here.
Spirasi says international evidence suggests the consequences of a failure to invest in torture care will be keenly felt in years to come. "The situation for survivors of torture currently in Ireland is almost like a Pandora's box," Straton says. "The country now has the opportunity to invest in preventing the transfer of the trauma from the torture survivors to the next generation."