An orphan, Patrick Touher spent his early years in a foster family before being sent to Artane Industrial School in Dublin at the age of seven. Living there from 1950 to 1958, he was trained as a baker and went into this trade on leaving at sixteen. He spent the 1960s and 70s travelling, and in 1972 he married his late wife Pauline and they had three children together. In 2003, Patrick received a settlement from the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and he was finally able to put the past behind him.
Touher's story powerfully discloses the pain of being without secure moorings in life ... his account of the regime of the Irish Christian Brothers is an important one Irish Times It is a book of survival, of hardship, but also of friendships and solidarity despite the oppressive regime all the Artane Boys suffered in a society not willing or able to see its own faults Fingal Independent A story ... which must be neither hidden nor forgotten Leinster Leader Gripping in its honest and no-holds-barred account of one boy's sometimes tortuous trek through the grey underworld of Dublin's industrial school life during the 1950s Northside People