I don’t think I’ve seen that before
Baltimore Industrial School left its mark on John Griffin – so deep that it stays with him even in the grave. The ‘sea of barbarism’ was how John Griffin described the institution. The Irish Times quotes him in response to the Laffoy Commission report, "It's now there on the record for generations to take heed and realise what happened to us." The engraving on the headstone is a prompt towards that record.
The Southern Star article after his dead has the headline ‘Storyteller John could put a smile on anyone's face’ – on a cold November afternoon at St Patrick’s Cemetery in Skibbereen, he did to me.