“I was a convicted criminal at the age of two.” Michael Kennedy, a costumier by trade, has a story to tell.

“I was found wandering in Killenaule, Tipperary.”

Soft-spoken and gentle mannered, Kennedy spent his working life backstage at the best theatres and opera houses. But that’s not the story.

“My mother had died, and my father went to England. I know nothing of that.”

Kennedy has costumed stars from Jose Carreras to Leonardo DiCaprio. Peter O’Toole was a good friend. But despite a career in the theatre, he never wrote. Now, with that career behind him, he has returned to the story of his childhood, and sought to put it front of stage.

Aged two, and apparently destitute, he appeared in the district court, and was sent to Cappoquin orphanage. At eight, he was sent to Ferryhouse, an industrial school run by the Rosminian order, in Clonmel.

“I was walloped. As a young child, aged nine and ten, I was stripped and slashed across the arse. You learn fear – the dreaded fear.”

He was tough, though. “I was beaten every day. I took the beatings. I was a bit of a rebel. They couldn’t tame me.”

They put him to work in the school’s leather workshop. He learned to make shoes.

“I even made the implement that they used to beat us. It was two pieces of leather sewn together with pennies in the middle. We called it the Apostle, because they gave us 12 lashes with it.”

Ferryhouse was one of the institutions examined by the Ryan Commission. Judge Ryan’s report included testimony from his schoolmates. Not all were as tough.

“I cried most days in that school,” said one. “I was so scared when the next beating was going to come, whether it would be me. I mean, I cried for my friends, my friends cried for me.

“I’ve walked landings with hard men in the Joy. I was never afraid. I would stand eye to eye with people that killed people. I wasn’t afraid. But I was afraid when I was in that school, every day of my fecking life.”

Kennedy, too, carried that fear with him. “If I hear somebody pull a chair in a restaurant, still, I look up, I get a flashback.”

When he first left, as a teenager, in the mid 1950s, he tried to tell people about it. Nobody believed him, or cared. “I stopped telling stories because people laughed at me.”

Kennedy got on with his life, and made a success of it. But he carried those stories with him. In 2002, the government set up the Redress Board to compensate former residents of the industrial schools, and Kennedy got a chance to tell his story.

But it wasn’t that simple. What he said was challenged; he found the attitude of those who dealt with him aloof and unsympathetic.

“I’m deaf in my left ear from a beating – they said it wasn’t admissible because I didn’t have a medical certificate.”

Friends of his found the experience of appearing before the board adversarial and traumatic. But because of a gagging order placed on applicants for redress (designed to protect the anonymity of those accused of abuse, who had not been found guilty by a court), there has been little examination of the Redress Board in the media.

So Michael Kennedy was left with a story that still felt untold, and a further story about his attempt to tell it. And then he thought of a way to tell the story of the Redress Board without violating the gagging order: he wrote a play.

Skinners, running till next Saturday at the intimate theatre at the Teachers’ Club on Parnell Square, Dublin (tel 086 844 8468 for bookings), is Kennedy’s fictionalised account of appearing before the Redress Board, based on both his experience and those of his friends. In it, a former resident appears before the board, and in giving his testimony, begins to relive his experiences at the school.

The play takes its title from the boys’ nickname for their daily supper: “two slices of thinned bread, dipped in diluted jam,” as he recalls.

Kennedy is scathing of the official response to abuse. The Ryan Report was “a bit of a sop”, he thinks, not tough enough on the State, in particular.

Like many others, he still feels the stigma of having been institutionalised by the court. “If they gave you a piece of paper to say you were a criminal, they should give you a piece of paper to exonerate you, and I don’t have that.”

And he is dismissive of the religious orders’ offers to contribute more money to various funds. The former residents “don’t want all these funds,” he says. “They want hard cash so they can enjoy it the rest of their life and spend it the way they want.”

He wasn’t happy with his own award from the Redress Board; but when he saw his son’s reaction, he decided to move on, and accepted it.

“My son broke down in front of me. He said, ‘I didn’t believe you before, Dad. Now I do.’”

That may be the most important legacy of the recent inquiries and reports, for many: to have told their stories, and been believed.

Fifty years ago, Michael Kennedy failed to get people to suspend their disbelief at his stories of abuse. Finally, with his debut as a playwright, the time for belief has come.