A second man has come forward to link a former senior Department of Education official with child abuse allegations.
Mr Kevin O'Connell (33) was fostered by the official for four years. He has claimed that during that time he was physically abused, locked in his bedroom for days and endured "a living hell" while being kept by the man, who was identified in the last Dáil by o Fine Gael TD Mr Phil Hogan.
Mr O'Connell has already made a statement through his solicitor, Mr Eugene Murphy, of Murphy English Solicitors, Cork, to the Laffoy Commission .
And bizarrely, there is no record of Mr O'Connell being fostered by the official, according to lawyers acting on behalf of the man, who has spoken out for the first time.
The Southern Health Board and the Department of Education have no knowledge of Mr O'Connell ever being in this man's care and they have refused to release the files on Mr O'Connell to his solicitor.
In the Dáil, Mr Hogan said the same official was "named in a statement by an abuse victim who claims he had sex with the man when he was a 17-year-old male prostitute in Dublin.
"This man is the link to investigations into sexual abuse at residential centres in Kilkenny city, Cappoquin, Co Waterford and Clonmel.
"The man, it has been claimed, was with convicted murderer Malcolm McArthur when the two picked up the rent boy on the quays in Dublin. The youngster recognised the Department official.
"He had met him while he was a resident of St Joseph's Industrial School, Ferryhouse, Clonmel. The man was the Department inspector who visited the centre," Mr Hogan told the Dáil four weeks ago. The second man has come forward after being made aware of the allegations made.
Mr O'Connell, a coloured Irish man, feels aggrieved at the way the system has treated him. He said he "was abused by the same official who was named by the first victim in his statement to the Laffoy Commission".
Mr O'Connell, who is now destitute and living in a cardboard box in the centre of London, said he was locked in his bedroom for days at a time by the official who is now at the centre of a Garda investigation initiated by the Department.
He has told the Laffoy Commission that the official collected him from the Nazareth Home in Tralee when he was seven and brought him to his home in Co Dublin.
He said that over the next four years he was beaten almost daily by the Department official, who had no children of his own.
"I think that he had a fetish for young coloured boys because he had another black boy in the house before me," Mr O'Connell said.
"I was never sexually abused by the official but I did become concerned that when I got older, at around 11 years, he used to watch me bathe and liked to dry me afterwards. I felt I was being prepared for something but I wouldn't let him break me," Mr O'Connell said.