Most of the Irish children, who were consigned to Ireland's Industrial Schools' System, on leaving found sanctuary in the UK - not just the children of those Irish 'deserters' who found themselves incarcerated in those abusive places. It should be noted that in the 1930s in Ireland there were more children in the Industrial Schools than were in care in the whole of the UK. These were the places, along with the Magdalen Asylums, that the Irish State used for those who it deemed were the outcasts of society; the people who didn't conform to the Roman Catholic ideology of those times.
The book
Spitting on a Soldier's Grave is a very important book in every regard.