LETTERFRACK, Ireland - Outside this tiny village in Ireland's rugged west, a gravel footpath takes visitors through a grove of gnarled trees to a small, secluded graveyard - and a window on one of the darkest chapters in modern Irish history.

The cemetery belongs to Letterfrack's industrial school, where thousands of boys were institutionalized during the 19th and 20th centuries, before it finally closed in 1974. Between 1891 and 1956, 99 boys - ages 4 to 16 - died at the Catholic Church-run school.

In recent years, the now-defunct industrial schools system - 52 combination orphanages-workhouses - have been at the center of the sex-abuse scandal rocking Ireland's Catholic Church.

In 1999, RTE, the state television network, aired a documentary series called "States of Fear," featuring grueling testimony from former industrial-school inmates about the physical, psychological and sexual abuse routinely meted out by priests and nuns.

The schools had their origin in Catholic orphanages established in the 19th century. After 26 of the island's 32 counties won freedom from Britain in 1922, the Irish government began bankrolling them. As anger swept the country in the wake of "States of Fear," Prime Minister Bertie Ahern was forced to apologize for the failure by previous governments to ensure the safety of its wards.

Last January, the Catholic Church agreed to contribute $110 million in compensation to industrial-school abuse victims. The government gave an additional $290 million.

But industrial-school abuse is only one facet of the wider church sex scandals.

In 1992, one bishop was found to have used church funds to raise his illegitimate son in America. In 1994, an Irish government was toppled over allegations that it blocked the extradition to Northern Ireland of a priest who had sexually abused children for decades at a Belfast Catholic school. The priest was later convicted on dozens of abuse charges in both parts of Ireland.

Last April, Wexford Bishop Brendan Comiskey resigned over his mishandling of serial pedophile priest Sean Fortune. And, citing the precedent of the resignation of Boston's Bernard Cardinal Law, many victims now want Dublin's Desmond Cardinal Connell to step down because of his alleged mismanagement of clerical sex-abuse cases. His archdiocese is facing 450 legal actions.

In November, a group dedicated to erecting individual headstones to all children who died in industrial schools placed new heart- shaped markers on the graves of 77 of the 99 boys who died at Letterfrack, in county Galway. They also left a teddy bear on the grave of the youngest boy, Bernard Kerrigan, who died in August 1935 at 4 years of age.

Linda O'Malley, 31, of Connemara community radio, said the new grave markers "will be very important for a lot of people."

Her station is on the grounds of the old industrial school, which is now a vocational training center. In recent years, she's seen many former inmates return to the site for the first time.

"And it took a huge amount of courage to come," she said. "A lot of them were extremely upset, just about being in Letterfrack, and seeing the building. Because a lot of them had very bad experiences."

These "bad experiences" motivated Dubliner John Kelly to help form Survivors of Child Abuse, or SOCA, in 1999. At 12, he began serving two years in county Offaly industrial school, where he said he was regularly beaten and abused, before escaping and fleeing to England.

Kelly, now 51, feels the group that placed the grave markers at Letterfrack is misguided.

"I'm not interested in putting teddy bears on children's graves," he said. "I'm more concerned with how the children died. We want these graves to be exhumed to see what happened - and then have proper Christian burials."

Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell will soon announce what type of official government inquiry will be carried out. Kelly is optimistic the inquiry will be "given teeth," but he said his own bottom line is that the highest Church officials must face prosecution for their actions.

"Because they allowed people to carry on in ministries where serious allegations went, they should face serious inquiry and police investigations," he said. "Cardinal Connell should be removed and face the same due process as the rest of us."

DUBLIN, Ireland - As Ireland begins the third millennium fondly hoping that a lasting peace will embrace this troubled nation at last, the second millennium dawned with the savage specter of war blackening its landscape to the far horizons.

A thousand years ago this month, legendary Irish king Brian Boruma - known more commonly as Brian Boru - swept aside Viking defenses and sacked Dubhlinn (Dublin) on the banks of the River Liffey.

Dubhlinn was established in the year 841 by Viking chieftain Olaf the White as a Norse pirating base for raiding other parts of Ireland, which Vikings had been plundering since 795.

It had been the site of an Irish monastic settlement, which had been noted as early 140 AD by the Greek-Egyptian geographer Ptolemy, who called it "Eblana."

Under the Vikings, Dubhlinn, which the Irish had called Ath Claith ("the ford of the hurdles") quickly grew into Ireland's most prosperous town, and one western Europe's wealthiest ports.

In January, 1000, Brian Boru ("Brian of the Tributes") and his army launched a horrific attack on Dubhlinn to make the Viking invaders bow to his authority and to establish himself as the most powerful ruler the island had ever known. He succeeded.

Boru's rise to power began more than 20 years earlier, in a 10th century Ireland politically divided into six main kingdoms.

In the south and west there were Munster, Leinster, and Connacht, three of modern Ireland's four provinces (the last being Ulster).

The North was more fragmented. Near Derry there was Ialeach, the land of the Ui Neill clan, which had dominated the area for 500 years. On Ulster's southern border, the Airgailla ruled. The modern counties of Antrim and Down were run by the Ulaidh.

In addition, some 200 minor chieftains held sway over smaller areas.

Brian Boru became king of Dal Cais, County Clare, on the all- important lower Shannon River basin, upon the death of his brother Mathgamain in 976.

Within a few years, Boru began expanding his rule by first conquering the nearby Viking outpost of Limerick, founded in 922, and then all of Munster.

By 997, he was deemed king of the southern half of Ireland, known as Leth Moga. But the Vikings of Dubhlinn and the Ui Neills, who reigned over Ireland's North - known as Leth Cuinn - remained free from his rule.

But at the end of 999, Boru's forces defeated a combined army of Dubhlinn Vikings and lesser Leinster Irish chieftains at the decisive Battle of Glen Mama, west of Dublin.

Then, in January, 1000 - the dawn of the new millennium - Boru sacked Dubhlinn, establishing himself as an island power never before seen.

But his conquering days were far from over. From his rock fortress of Cashel, he plotted further campaigns. Within two years, he forced King Malachy, who occupied Tara, the symbolic site of Ireland's "Ard Ri" (high king), to yield the title to him without a fight.

Next, he led his now massive armies into the North, forcing the submission of Ulster's chieftains by 1005, when a scribe in Armagh recorded that "Brian, Emperor of the Irish" had visited the city.

But he would still have to deal with years of resistance. In 1014, Viking contingents from as far away as Normandy and Iceland joined their Dubhlinn counterparts in a final showdown with the mighty Boru.

At Clontarf, north of Dublin, on Good Friday, 1014, his forces crushed the Vikings in a day-long battle, breaking forever the Viking grip on Ireland.

But at battle's end, Boru, then in his 70s, was slain in his tent by a lone fleeing Viking. His hold over Ireland died with him. By the time the first Anglo- Norman invaders arrived in 1170, Irish chieftains were again disunited, making Ireland ripe for the picking.

During the eight centuries of often brutal English rule which followed, Brian Boru remained etched in Irish folk memory, an icon from a time when the Irish were masters of their own destiny and drove foreign oppressors from their shores.

CAMLOUGH, Northern Ireland - In January she'll have watched the world turn during three centuries - and two millennia. But 100-year-old Mary Anne McCreesh from South Armagh takes it all in stride.

"I don't think about it at all," she said with a smile, adding, when asked if she would stay up to ring in 2000, "If I'm as well as I am now, I surely will."

Born Mary Anne Muckian July 12, 1899, she spent most of her life in Mullaghbawn, a tiny hillside hamlet perched across a lush valley from Slieve Gullion, South Armagh's highest mountain.

She has watched the winds of change sculpt Ireland from an agrarian society to a modern state with a vibrant high-tech economy, from a British-ruled island to a divided land struggling to heal past wounds and forge a lasting peace.

She has seen landlords treat poor tenant farmers "like cattle. They wouldn't give them anything, and if they could take anything off them, they'd do it. People had to put up with a lot - and say nothing."

When she was 16, she recalled, a friend returning from nearby Dundalk brought news of the Easter Rebellion of 1916.

"She started telling me about this thing happening in Dublin, that they were marching and were as far as Drogheda. And that they were going to come down to us, as far as here," she said.

When the IRA began the War of Independence (1919-21), she heard the hushed whispers of rebel friends and relations.

"In the beginning we didn't know what they were talking about. But when we found out . . . we were all behind them," she said with a laugh.

Widowed 50 years, she lives with daughter Aideen, one of her five children, in Camlough, birthplace of IRA legend Frank Aiken.

He commanded the IRA's 4th Northern Division in the War of Independence and plotted ambushes, derailments of British Army trains and sieges of police barracks with textbook precision.

His guerrilla prowess made him one of Ireland's most wanted men. He and his comrades often hid out at her family's farm.

"I had a cousin . . . in (the IRA). That's why Frank Aiken came to our house. He was a nice person. They stayed . . . for a long time," she said. "They'd stay in the room the whole day. They were afraid on their lives of being seen."

Aiken opposed Michael Collins in the Irish Civil War (1922-1923), and, as IRA chief of staff, later halted its campaign against the newly formed Irish Free State.

He helped found Fianna Fail, the South's dominant party, and was deputy prime minister from 1959-69.

Mary Anne visited him during that time, "and I had me dinner with him - in Leinster House," Ireland's parliament.

Did he recall the old days? "He did indeed," she said with a smile.

Mary Anne, while up on the news, offers few comments on current events, but reminders of "The Troubles" are ever-present.

Spoiling the breathtaking panorama of hill-ringed Camlough Lake outside her side window are two heavily fortified British Army mountaintop bases, bristling with surveillance equipment.

As she spoke to the Sunday Herald, Army helicopters buzzed to and from the bases.

But Mary Anne was unfazed.

She brushed it off with a twinkle in her eye and the wry smile of one who has seen Britain vacate most of Ireland: "Sure, you wouldn't be bothering your head about these things."

Book Disputes Cromwell's Atrocities
by Jim Dee
Boston Sunday Herald, August 22, 1999

DROGHEDA, Ireland - Want to get yourself noticed in Ireland? Try telling people the island's most notorious mass murderer was an "honorable" fellow.

"Cromwell conjures up images of evil. And that shouldn't be the case," insists Drogheda's Tom Reilly, 39, author of the recently released: "Cromwell - An Honorable Enemy."

In Britain, Oliver Cromwell is revered as a champion of democracy who led the armies of parliament to victory over King Charles I in the English Civil Wars (1642-49).

But Ireland remembers Cromwell as a genocidal butcher who slaughtered towns wholesale and banished Catholics from fertile farmland in the east to perish amidst the rocky desolation of Connacht in the west.

"He had a ruthless streak," says Reilly, an amateur historian. "But he didn't commit war crimes. He was perfectly within his rights, of 17th century warfare and politics, to do what he did here."

Last March marked the 400th anniversary of Cromwell's birth. On Sept. 11, Reilly's hometown of Drogheda will remember the 350th anniversary of his butchering of the towns' inhabitants.

Drogheda was the first town Cromwell took after his August 1649 arrival in Ireland, when he defeated the Royalists - Anglo-Irish backers of King Charles.

Upon hearing wildly exaggerated reports of the number of Protestants killed in the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Puritan Cromwell vowed "to break the ... lawless rebels" he termed "enemies to human society."

"Blood and ruin shall befall them, and I shall rejoice to exercise the utmost severity against them," he intoned.

Most histories say Cromwell's "utmost severity" meant death for thousands of Drogheda men, women, and children. One modern Irish school text says, "Not a dozen escaped out of Drogheda, townspeople or soldiers."

Cromwell visited similar carnage on Wexford, leaving thousands more dead. When he left Ireland in May 1650 his name was forever burned into Irish folklore.

Reared in Drogheda, Tom Reilly learned the prevailing Irish view of Cromwell. But in the early '90s he found town meeting records, from both before and after the massacre, listing the same people in attendance.

This couldn't have happened, he argues, if most had been killed. Reilly says thousands of unarmed people were slain - but they were defeated soldiers, not civilians.

"I can't condone what Cromwell did," Reilly says. "Unarmed defenders were killed, and they shouldn't have been." But at the time, he said, "The strong prevailed over the weak, and the morality . . . was just deemed irrelevant."

Aware he's earned the ire of some by defending a man many consider indefensible Reilly says "I'm actually very proud that I have cleared his name."

Reviews of Reilly's book have been mixed - some lauding his exhaustive research, others calling it unconvincing.

Sean Collins, 40, chairman of the Old Drogheda Society of history buffs says that, while town records cast doubt on the massive slaughter theory, Cromwell remains "a bloodthirsty fiend in my book."

Reilly notes how Cromwell references are everywhere in his life. He lives on Scarlet Lane, so named because it ran red with the blood of Drogheda's vanquished.

Last year, his wife broke her toe after a 30-pound Cromwellian iron cannonball rolled off a coffee table onto her foot.

Three weeks ago, leaving the Drogheda Heritage Center he's building near where Cromwell breached the town's walls - and in which the "revised" Cromwell will be featured - a 400-pound iron gate fell off its hinges, crushing one of Tom's toes.

Perhaps the wrath of Cromwell's victims? Tom laughs, adding that some probably think him "the reincarnation of Cromwell."

With the 1660 restoration of Britain's monarchy two years after Cromwell's death at age 59, his body was exhumed. His head was chopped off and impaled a pike in London. For three centuries it then made the rounds, once on display in a circus, before being buried in Cambridge in 1960.

"Do you know when his head was buried?" Reilly smiles. "The month I was born."