Peter Tyrrell

Peter Tyrrell (1916 – 26 April 1967) was an Irish author and activist against child abuse. When he was eight years old, the authorities sent him to St Joseph's Industrial School, Letterfrack, an institution run by the Christian Brothers. He was physically and sexually abused by the Christian Brothers until he was released from the school when he was sixteen.

He became a tailor by trade, emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1935 and in the same year enlisted in the British Army. For four months in 1944, he was held as a prisoner-of-war in the German camp Stalag XI-B. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, Tyrrell campaigned against corporal punishment and child abuse in industrial schools. In 1967, feeling that his efforts to enact change were unsuccessful, he burnt himself alive on Hampstead Heath in London. His remains went unidentified until 1968.

In 2006, his autobiography Founded on Fear, which he had written between 1958 and 1959, was published posthumously by the Irish Academic Press after historian Diarmuid Whelan discovered the manuscript in the papers of politician Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, with whom Tyrrell had conducted a correspondence lasting seven years.