He walked into our bar last week, out of the blue, and I knew him straight away.
He's in his mid-60s now but the kind, soft spoken voice is the same.
The lovely smile and the good manners are the same.
The neatness of him is the same and the lively eyes are the same.
He cried when he met my mother. "I thought I'd never see you again," she said.
My mother and he began to talk as if they had never been apart.
He told of how he signed a confidentiality clause when they gave him his few pounds.
My friend -- we'll call him Tom because we can't say his name -- was given money in lieu of a childhood.
How can you put a price on childhood, I hear you ask? It costs 60 grand, that's how much.
For that was the money they gave Tom.
The Catholic Church, that is, and they gagged him just as many more small boys were gagged by unholy men in the hell- hole institution he was brought up in.
Tom wasn't sexually abused but he saw it happening. 'They pulled down the little lad's pyjamas' . . . and then he stopped unable to say any more. Tom was beaten and tortured both physically and mentally almost every day.
Tom's six brothers and sisters were also placed in care. All over Ireland.
I usually turn the page when it comes to this stuff and read the paper back to front but I promise you this piece will, eventually, have a happy ending.
It was back in the early 1960s and my family were part of a Vincent de Paul programme to take kids out of the Irish concentration camps for the summer.
My family took him in. They had a little boy of their own. I saw Tom as a big brother. Tom was my hero.
Tom loved the freedom. He played football with the local club and he made many friends.
In time my mother and father grew to love young Tom. Our family offered him a home until he finished secondary school. That was before free education and my father and mother had just about enough to pay for the teenager.
Tom refused. He wanted to go back to the Institution, he said.
We were desperately disappointed. My father, who died a decade ago, told the boy money meant nothing to him. "Education is freedom," he said.
Tom was clever. Some day he might even get to college and my father said he'd back him there too.
"Why didn't you stay?" asked my mother.
"I was afraid," he said, "of what they would do to me when I went back to the home . . . if I told them I was leaving. They could have beaten me to death."
My mother is in her 80s and his words broke her heart.
"We should have made you stay," she said.
"It wasn't your fault," he said and it wasn't.
We all know now State and church had conspired in an unholy alliance to keep the abuse a secret. My family would never have let him back had they known.
But back went young Tom and as the serpents slithered from the shadows he dreamt of next summer in Listowel.
My mother asked him why he hadn't told them of the savagery.
"I was afraid ye might think I wasn't telling the truth."
She never expected that answer.
The sad thing is we would have believed him.
Tom was an honest boy. My father, though not a wealthy man, was a brave one and he would have taken them all on. Church and State.
But young Tom had the confidence beaten out of him.
Tom came to visit again on Sunday last. He brought a fresh wreath for my father's grave and a lovely bunch of flowers for her.
Tom was with his friends. They are from a nearby village and he can stay in their home whenever he likes. The friends are mad about the gentle man who survived our holocaust.
Tom visited my father's plot and he felt fulfilled and happy. There was a graveside communion between them.
"I sent a card every Christmas," he said.
"And I sent one to you too," she said.
"But I didn't get them," he said.
There was a mix-up .
Wrong addresses.
They take tea and talk of happy times. Tom was never a man to stay sad for too long.
The family grew to four and Tom came on holidays well into his 30s. My family tell of the day a bull charged at one of the kids.
Tom stood his ground and threw the small child over a gate. He barely escaped himself but he saved my brother John's neck.
My mother speaks of the finest of priests and nuns who would do anything in their power to help out.
She tells him the bad ones are nearly all gone and his suffering was not in vain.
My mother says she will pray for him as she has done for 50 years.
"I'm not sure how long more I'll be in this world," said my mother as they said their goodbyes, "but there's always a mother here for you."
Tom has his own place now.
He bought a mobile home in a seaside town in England with some of the compensation.
His sister and her daughter live nearby. He loves his birth family. And they love him.
"It's very comfy," he says, "and it's insulated."
Yes, Tom won in the end. He beat the bullies by being still here and winning his case but he still can't speak of what happened to him in whispers, even in a private house.
I tell Tom they wouldn't dare to come after him.
It would be a public relations disaster for the careerist churchmen who continue to place the protection of the brand above the good name of Jesus Christ.
He's scared though and the legal advice I have is that technically he can be hunted down for the return of the money.
They do that to you in those homes. Leave you always in fear of the step on the stair and the knock on the door.
Tom and all the Toms must be allowed to speak out, as of right and without fear of reprisal.
The church should immediately, publicly and legally release all the victims from the gagging clauses.
Until then I can't say his name.