A FORMER patient at Lissue Children's Hospital, who was just two years old when he claims he was beaten with a metal spoon and left to stand in his own urine, said he is seeking "closure" from the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) inquiry.
The man suffered a catalogue of illnesses, including tuberculosis, as a child which ultimately led to him being sent to the notorious Co Antrim institution.
He is the first witness to give evidence about the Lisburn hospital.
The abuse at Lissue was first revealed in an Irish News article which published details of a official 2009 report documenting its harsh regime between 1979 until 1995.
However, Tuesday's evidence from the first witness suggests children were subjected to punishing treatment up to two decades earlier.
The man who became a patient in August 1951, aged just 23 months, spent 10 months in the Lisburn facility where he "remember always feeling cold and afraid".
The inquiry was shown photographs of him as a child, including one with relatives and staff in front of a cake with two candles marking his second birthday.
However, more than 60 years later, he told the inquiry: "I never recall being happy in Lissue, even when my mother came to visit me there."
He told the panel that he still suffers from a serious eating disorder which he traces back to his time there.
The man said he was in a cot in a "cell" like room where he was left on his own for long periods of time, naked and with just a red, rubber mattress and no bedsheets.
The man told of a clear memory when he was standing "holding onto the bars of the cot when a nurse came in and beat me".
"She shook me very hard, she threw me down on the mattress. I was so scared I wet myself. I had no nappy on and remember standing in a pile of urine," he said.
He recalled a male nurse "exposing himself", although he said he was not physically sexually assaulted during his time there.
Another clear memory he shared with the inquiry was of "being hit on the forehead with a spoon" and on the chin, which he believes was an attempt to get him to eat.
"I have not eaten properly in my life," he said.
"I couldn't eat in public... Even my own family haven't seen me eat."
He recalled a nurse who he said was particularly cruel to him, and said it had mostly been the "young" nurses who abused him.
The witness said his mother, who was herself abused as a child in Nazereth House in Belfast, had always "believed I received the best treatment" at the hospital.
He did not tell her until 2005, two years before she died, what had happened.
"I came to the inquiry to get some sort of closure," he said.
A woman, who along with her older brother spent four weeks in Lissue in the 1970s, told of being physically restrained by "two or three" nursing staff who pinned her down, with one person on top of her and others holding her arms and legs, until she was physically sick.
She also claims that her brother was put in a "mummy" jacket, which she now recognises as a straitjacket - a form of restraint which the hospital denies using on children in its care.
