Oisín King: 'I was a terrified, lost and really sad little boy'

Two years ago, and just before the country went into lockdown, teenager Oisín King delivered the most powerful of testimonies to MSPs about the harm done by separating brothers and sisters from each other when they are taken into care.

It was his words that helped change the law.

Watching the then 15-year-old address the justice committee in the Scottish Parliament with such clarity as he told them very directly that his name was pronounced Osh-een, it was hard to reconcile the confident, besuited, teenager that stood before them, with the horror story that came out of his mouth. But you knew then that his was not a name to forget.

And yet what Oisín gave the MSPs was just a censored potted history of his short, troubled life and if you’re familiar with the novel Shuggie Bain then you will be marginally anaesthetised to the pain that follows.

His is an inevitably complex family tree. He is one of five siblings, possibly more, he doesn’t really know, half brothers and sisters, most of whom grew up in institutional care settings of one kind or another. Oisín’s mother had been in care.

His Irish-born father was adopted after his mother placed all her children into care. His maternal grandfather grew up in a children’s home. There’s a pattern here and it is to that cycle of care to which he constantly returns as he talks about the pressures put on him to break it.

“I am sitting here at 17 talking to you about my life and one of my biggest worries and fears about having children, if I ever do, is that when I look at my whole family, which is big, every single one of my siblings has been in some sort of care.

“Both my biological parents were in care. My mother’s father was in care. I’ve not looked back any further because I’m scared to. If I look back and it just keeps going with the same pattern, then my anxiety only increases about what the future holds for me and for my kids. And then everyone says, ‘Oh, you’ll break the cycle, you’ll break the cycle’, it’s like, you can tell me to believe something but until I see it, I won’t believe it. With my family history, why would I?

“Knowing what breaks the cycle is like finding the golden ticket of all answers and I don’t know if I’m there yet in my life to see the answer because, I mean, I’m learning so much as I’m getting older and I’m getting different perspectives, but I just don’t know, at this point in my life, if I can get that answer for myself more than anyone else can.

“I mean, my oldest brother, he’s just had a baby recently, she’s just the most perfect little thing, my niece, and I absolutely adore her to bits and I have no anxieties about how things will turn out for her but then looking at his upbringing, compared to mine, of him being adopted, of having a very good upbringing with his adoptive parents, which again is very different from mine, is that the answer that makes the difference, is that the thing that breaks the cycle? I don’t know but I definitely live with a fear that it just doesn’t break.”

I would describe me then as a terrified, lost and sad, really, really sad, little boy. I would want to say that I was also very clever because I had learned to look after myself and my baby sister but then looking back, I was only seven, I was seven, and of course I didn’t know what I was doing.

So, to Oisín’s childhood. His father, who he describes as “complicated” and affected by The Troubles growing up in Ireland, was largely absent from his life but on one of his infrequent visits, he implied to his young son that two older half-brothers, whom Oisín had never met, had been killed in a car accident. That wasn’t true. They had actually both been taken into care and later adopted. And having only recently been connected with his older brothers, Oisín has no real desire to have any further contact with his biological father.  

His mother, who had problems with drug and alcohol use, would disappear for days on end to feed her addictions, leaving her young son in their Govanhill flat to fend for himself. 

He describes an almost unimaginable existence – too young to know how to put the heating on or even to turn lights on and off – it was a childhood spent in a twilight world absent of any real adult supervision and raising so many questions about school, neighbours or any other support services.

When he was about six or seven – his memories of dates are often blurred – his mother, who he always refers to by her first name, dumped him with her mother. And in turn, his granny put him into the care of the social work department, saying that it would help bring his mother to her senses. It didn’t. Instead, Oisín was moved around several foster homes before his mother eventually returned home, pregnant, and he was sent back by social workers to live with her.

You can’t help but be struck by how conflicted Oisín is by how he feels about his mother. He constantly questions how she might feel about how he describes his childhood. Tries to put himself in her adult shoes in trying to understand why she was the way she was with him. And for all her faults, he describes her as funny, very bright and loving – but only when sober or not under the influence of drugs. Those moments were rare.

“When she was drinking, I was just getting battered black and blue and kicked up and down Glasgow on a daily basis. I thought that was the norm. I actually preferred it when she was taking drugs because although there were always lots of other people in the flat, at least things were calm. I still can’t get my head around how alcohol can make someone so evil that they would abuse their own kid the way she did me, physically and emotionally. It’s just beyond me.” 

At seven or eight, Oisín took over what he describes as “being a parent” for his new baby sister when his mother left their flat and didn’t come back for weeks. His sister was six months old. 
Oisín struggles to recall any real detail of how he cared for his baby sister or even how the time passed but remembers feeding her cheesy pasta from a red box, reusing nappies, and building a “sort of castle” from chairs and a table so he could just sit and watch out the tenement flat window waiting for his mum to return. She didn’t.

One day, and he can’t remember the catalyst, although he says he was feeling really angry and exhausted, he hadn’t really slept fearing that either he would miss his mother’s return or that the police would come knocking, he left the flat and ran out onto the street where he sat down on the pavement and sobbed.

He was picked up by a lady who took him into the local Spar supermarket where she fed him chocolate while they waited for the police to arrive. He was then placed with his first set of foster parents. And so began Oisín’s care journey. 

“I would describe me then as a terrified, lost and sad, really, really sad, little boy. I would want to say that I was also very clever because I had learned to look after myself and my baby sister but then looking back, I was only seven, I was seven, and of course I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Over the course of the next six months, Oisín was placed with two different sets of foster parents before returning home to his mother. His memory is sketchy, and he suspects he has blanked lots of things out but five years later, following long periods where he was his sister’s sole carer, he was taken into residential care. He didn’t see his sister again for 18 months while bureaucracy and ‘the system’ conspired to frustrate attempts at contact.

He described the separation as a loss, “a death”, which left him feeling bereaved, to blame and not good enough to care.

When it came, ‘contact’ was now an official label and with it came the restrictions of time, of location and of professional supervision.

‘Contact’ was inconsistent. It depended on an available driver to take him from his residential home to an anonymous building where space had been cleared for them to meet and to play. It relied on the timing being convenient for his sister’s guardian. It needed there to be a social work professional free and able to be present who would sit throughout the visit taking notes. It needed to stick to an agreed agenda.

And afterwards, Oisín would be picked up and even reprimanded about things he had asked his little sister. Casual, normal questions, about how she was and where she was living, if she was happy, and who she saw. Everyday chit-chat between loving brothers and sisters became points of conflict about whether he was trying to find out too much. About his own sister.

“Both my biological parents were in care. My mother’s father was in care. I’ve not looked back any further because I’m scared to.

To be clear, Oisín wasn’t the problem. He hadn’t ever been the problem. He had only ever tried to be a big brother. But ‘the system’ perceived him as a risk to be assessed. And that was hard.
At the time that Oisín told his story to MSPs in 2020, he hadn’t seen his sister for over a year and a half. He just knew she was getting on with a life without him. They now have no contact and, heartbreakingly, he says that it is “probably best for her not to see him, less disruptive to her life.”

On such a fundamental issue as the consequences of ripping siblings apart, it seems unbelievably shocking that in a parliament established five years before he was born, and with the common cause of finding Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, that it took this young man having to describe the ache of being separated from his own sister, in a bid to support legislative change that would presume this not to be the case, for the children of the future.

Oisín told MSPs that his experience was no different to that of many other children taken into care – that 70 per cent of siblings find themselves separated when taken into care – and that he wanted politicians to understand that they’re just children who love their brothers and their sisters.

You don’t need to go through the exercise of rehearsing the obscene outcomes for care-experienced people to understand the devastating impact of losing contact with your own flesh and blood, at a time when you have already been taken from the family home.

But listening to Oisín, you could feel it.

Two weeks after Oisín appeared before the committee, the much-heralded Independent Care Review published its findings of an inquiry that had taken three years, thousands and thousands of pounds, and the huge personal investment of the hopes and dreams of the many care-experienced young people who had been employed by the review to find answers to the scandalous outcomes of their own lives.

We didn’t really need another report that spelt out the mistakes or detailed the appalling outcomes for care-experienced young people. The suicides, the drug addiction, the homelessness, the prison sentences, the underachievement, the failure to thrive. The clear consequences of separating siblings. We knew them. We’ve known them for years.

And Oisín just confirmed them.

Oisín couldn’t officially speak to me back then because even though he had pretty well cared for himself from the age of six or seven and that his mother was largely absent from his life, he was still officially a minor in voluntary care and had to get her permission to speak about his life.

Now nearly 18 and at college in Edinburgh studying politics, and largely independent of ‘care’, he says he now feels the most secure he ever has, can really start living and find out who he really is. He is a disarming mix. So articulate, seemingly self-assured, always immaculate, which is a carefully constructed façade, but oh, you can’t help but feel, he’s also so fragile.

He knows himself that he has built his own protective shields, he finds it hard to forge relationships, can blunt his emotions, talk about himself in the third person and that despite having an old head on young shoulders, out of sheer necessity to survive, still has a lot of growing up to catch up on. 

Two years on from speaking in the Scottish Parliament to MSPs, Oisín has been sworn in as a member of the Scottish Youth Parliament as a representative of the care-experienced community. And Oisín King is a name that he won’t let anyone forget.

“I want to use my story to help create the change for future generations of care-experienced young people…and yes, to break the cycle.”