One of the most disturbing child neglect cases in 20th century Ireland was the Henhouse Boy. In September 1956, a chance discovery near Crossgar in County Down, exposed the heartbreaking story of Kevin Halfpenny. The little six years old lad had spent his entire life locked in a henhouse.
His mother, Margaret Halfpenny, kept him confined among the chicken from birth, like a farm animal. Kevin never learned to speak. He clucked and pecked at food thrown to him. He moved the way the birds around him moved, because they were the only company he had ever known. I'm actually tearing up here writing this, but the story needs retelling.
When Kevin was finally found, doctors catalogued the damage. Rickets had bowed his legs and hollowed his shin bones. His joints were swollen and he could barely hold himself upright for more than a few seconds without help.
The horrific case went to court. Margaret Halfpenny pleaded guilty to neglect. The unbelievable sentence handed down was nine months! The judge, weighing the horror of what he'd heard against the leniency he was about to grant, admitted he wasn't sure she deserved any mercy at all, yet gave her loads anyway.
As for poor Kevin, he was placed into institutional care at Nazareth Lodge in Belfast, where he received extensive medical treatment and surgical intervention for severe rickets and physical neglect. Though he spent his youth in a special school in Newry and remained largely non-verbal, he adapted to care, developed a love for music, and lived out much of his adult life in a care home in Warrenpoint, where he was remembered by locals as a gentle, well-liked member of the community until his death.
Crossgar seemingly moved on, but the story didn't stay buried in a Down parish. It travelled, quietly, into literature in the form of one of Seamus Heaneys most quietly devastating poems. Heaney grew up not far away, and he turned the horror into "Bye-Child," a poem in his 1972 collection Wintering Out, opening with a newspaper clipping, documentary note about a child found in a henhouse, unable to speak.
Three decades later, Bernard MacLaverty adapted it into a short film of the same name, with Susan Lynch playing the "mother", if you could call her that. MacLaverty moved the setting to the early 1970s and invented a backstory involving the woman's own father, rather than reporting it straight. The film picked up a BAFTA nomination and won MacLaverty a Best First-Time Director award in Scotland.