Children Of The Poor Clares (24 page)

But at least she and her friends had some contact with the outside world. They went out to church and for walks (and were laughed at), and she wrote that she received a good education until she was sixteen. But the cruelty was the same. ‘It was a terrible life. The nuns were hard, wicked, unkind. I often wondered were they really God’s creatures. I used to pray that my children would not have to suffer like I did and thank God He spared me to them.’ She had the equivalent both of a Mother Carmel—‘Mother Gertrude was in charge of us, she was a monster, we were all afraid of her’—and of a Mother Dymphna: ‘I always remember Mother Therese. She was nice. She was the exception. The only one. I used just to think of God and of how I would be sixteen one day and then I could get out.’ Like so many of those from Cavan, she expressed a Christian charity towards her tormentors: ‘I often wonder how they met their God, but I hope he forgave them, as I do.’

During our researches many people would point out to us that, during the period, brutality by Ireland’s schoolteachers had been part of an accepted level of violence against children. And it wasn’t only the image of the crucifix swinging with the cane. In the 1960s there was a campaign against excessive punishment in national schools, with one woman, the late Mrs. Constance O’Connell, as its driving force. She showed us boxes of newspaper cuttings about cases so extreme that even Ireland’s usually passive parents had taken action. There was a court case in Bandon, County Cork in which parents were being charged for failing to send their children to school: it emerged that a son had been beaten on the stump of a recently amputated finger. In 1961 there was the case of the Hurley family where the teacher at Raharoon School had terrorised the children and knocked their epileptic son unconscious. The family emigrated with their ten children to England—where the story received newspaper coverage—to evade a consequent court order to return their children to the school.

In 1963, £97 compensation was awarded against Michael Lynch, a teacher in Cork who had severed part of an eight year old boy’s ear from his scalp: the medical evidence said that after the ear had been re-attached, the child, who had now developed a stammer, had to be kept in hospital for a fortnight. This case was unusual because usually it was the parents who were up in court. More typical was the father fined ten shillings for hitting a teacher who had beaten his eight year old daughter so badly that she came home crying and shaking. We could, however, find no reports in the newspapers involving nuns, nor the Christian Brothers who dominated secondary education for boys until it became free, although their harshness was legendary.

Corporal punishment was banned in Ireland in 1982. However, the Provincial of the Rosminian Institute of Charity, which ran a number of Industrial Schools, and also a school for the visually impaired, sought advice on this matter and was advised by the Attorney General that the ban did not extend to Industrial Schools.

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It was the belief of many of the ex-pupils of St Joseph’s that, after their time, things got better. Hannah Hughes, who was there in the 1920s and ‘30s had met an old woman who had been a pupil in a much earlier era, and who told her that it had been even worse then. Those, like Sally Johnson, who returned after a few years and were impressed by the physical improvements, invariably presumed that this was reflected in the children’s treatment. Accounts we heard of other institutions during the 1960s and early 1970s, were not reassuring. During the period of our research, we met a woman who had been a godparent to children in an Industrial School in Dublin only a few years before. At first, she had doubted their stories. But when she realised they were consistent, and could not see how a child could invent them, she had to believe what she was hearing. One child told of being forced to eat his vomit, and of having his soiled, wet sheets put over his head. Another woman who had worked as a cook in a convent attached to an Industrial School—where she remarked on the richness and variety of the food on the nuns’ table—told of seeing a child, denied a drink of water, taking it from the toilet bowl.

Hearing these stories confirmed our belief that outsiders’ knowledge about what went on in these institutions was not uncommon in Ireland. The situation was most definitely of concern to the Joint Women’s Societies who pressured the government to improve conditions in them and to promote fostering as an alternative for children in need of State care.

A friend of ours, Dr Mary Henry
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employed a girl as a mother’s help. Patricia had been brought up in St Vincent’s Industrial School in County Limerick. At the age of fourteen she was sent to work on a farm where four other girls from the school had been previously, each one then running away for unexplained reasons. Shortly after Patricia arrived there, the farmer made sexual advances to her in the kitchen. She didn’t understand what was going on and ‘there was this white stuff all over the place’ which he told her to clear up. He raped her several times during the following weeks and finally she, too, ran back to the convent. ‘But why, asked our friend ‘didn’t you tell the nuns?’ ‘Ma’am, you couldn’t tell them that kind of thing. They wouldn’t understand.’

For her disobedience in failing to stay at the farm, Patricia was sent to the laundry-reformatory run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Limerick. When she left the reformatory she got a job as a domestic but was fired without notice for arguing with the nanny. After sleeping in an old car for a couple of nights she was picked up by a Canadian who took her to a hotel and she later became pregnant. The baby was adopted. She stayed a year with Dr. Henry before drifting off to London. She has not been heard of since.

It was impossible even to make an estimate of how many women brought up in Industrial Schools bore babies out of wedlock, or outside a common law relationship. Most of the girls from St. Joseph’s who became pregnant went to St. Patrick’s Home in Dublin for the last months, staying until their babies were adopted. They told us they were treated kindly there. We were contacted by a woman who wanted our help—which we were unable to give—in finding her child. Brought up in ‘an orphanage’, she became pregnant at seventeen and went to St. Patrick’s. Not long after the baby was born, she became hysterical and, turning on a nun who upset her, yanked off her veil. For this she was sent to the then uncertified laundry-reformatory at High Park, Dublin. Why, we asked, had she let herself be taken there? ‘Well they just told me I had to go there, and I was very young and used to doing what I was told by nuns.’ They promised her that she would be allowed to visit her little girl, but the promise was not kept. She said that the nuns at the ‘reformatory’ were not kind, that it was terrible there, her hair was chopped off, and the other women ill-treated her. Finally, after a fellow-inmate had beaten her up severely, nearly throttling her, she was released—she understood that it was to avoid a repetition of the incident. She went straight back to St. Patrick’s, but her baby was gone. Although, as she said insistently, she had never signed any adoption papers, the nuns told her it had been adopted. She had never ceased searching for her child.

Why the other women were in the ‘reformatory’, or on whose authority they were in custody, she did not know. She thought that they may have been prostitutes. This sad story illustrates several points: that a citizen, with rights guaranteed by a democratic constitution and free judiciary, could have her liberty casually removed without recourse to the courts; and that this was done by the Church, operating, in effect, its own penal system within the state
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.

We heard Bridget’s story from Mrs. Hillery
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who had acted as her godmother during the 1960s when Bridget was in the Industrial School in Drumcondra, Dublin, run by the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Refuge. This was the same order that ran the then uncertified laundry-reformatory in Gloucester Street, Dublin, to which Cavan girls had been sent. Mrs Hillery had been a member of the Joint Women’s Societies, and had also had previously been godmother to a boy from Artane Industrial School. Thus she was not particularly surprised by the stories of harsh treatment, grossly inadequate food, and lack of education that she heard from Bridget and the friends who sometimes came with her, stories which mirrored those we heard about Cavan. The only difference was that in Cavan, the children played outside near the nuns’ kitchen, and were used to the tantalising cooking smells of food which they would not be eating. At Drumcondra, the nuns’ kitchen was in a separate part of the premises, and it was not until one summer when the children were taken to Greystones for a holiday by the sea, staying in a large house, that they experienced the tantalising anguish of being exposed to the aromas of roasting meat and frying bacon which was not for them but only for the nuns.

When Bridget left the Industrial School she was sent to work as a domestic with a family who did not pay her. Mrs Hillery sent them a bill on Bridget’s behalf, and the family sent her back to the convent. Bridget was then found a job in the home of an Irish senator. During the summer he rented his house, together with Bridget’s services, to a German family. The wife lost a brooch, claimed that Bridget had stolen it and called the police. They took Bridget, then aged seventeen, back to the convent, and from there, she was sent at once to Limerick, where she was met at the train station by a police car and taken to the certified reformatory run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Before being taken away, she managed to contact Mrs Hillery. She was very distressed and was adamant that she had not stolen the brooch. Mrs Hillery eventually got an admission from the police that Bridget had not stolen it, and that the German woman had decided she had lost it because it had a weak clasp. No charges were laid by the police, but the Mother Superior informed Mrs Hillery that Bridget being sent to the reformatory had nothing to do with the brooch—it was because she was ‘man-mad’.

Over the next eighteen months, Mrs Hillery did everything she could think of to get Bridget released, but all to no avail. Meanwhile she was receiving letters from her which became increasingly disoriented and incoherent, pleading for help. Mrs Hillery wrote to Brian Lenihan, then Minister of Education with responsibility for Industrial Schools. He replied, in a letter of which we have a copy, that he had had the case fully investigated and was satisfied that the Reverend Mother had acted in the ‘best interests of Bridget’s future welfare’.

Finally, Mrs Hillery went to Cearbhall O Dalaigh, then an eminent jurist
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, for assistance. He studied the relevant legislation and then advised on a simple course of action. She was to write to the Mother Superior at Limerick informing her that she was coming to remove Bridget from the institution. When Mrs. Hillery arrived, Bridget was handed over to her by a nun who said it was a pity she was going because they intended to make her a ‘Child of Mary’ and to send her to Galway—to the Magdalen Home for ‘fallen women’—a laundry operated by the Sisters of Mercy, one of the many extra-legal
de
facto
prisons that infested the Irish state.

Mrs Hillery was deeply shocked by Bridget’s manner and appearance. She was pale, thin and listless, dressed in ragged, old-fashioned clothes, and she seemed to have deteriorated mentally. Bridget told her that she had worked in the laundry until 7 p.m. Monday to Friday, and on Saturday mornings, and was paid 25 shillings a week (but no insurance stamps), and the only meat they were given was chicken giblets. Some of the women had been there for years, and many had been prostitutes. Once a week, said Bridget, they were all taken, under escort, into the town, wearing their strange clothes and walking in crocodile. This was in 1969.

What makes Bridget’s case remarkable is not that a young girl was imprisoned without any legal process and with the direct collusion of a government Minister, but that she had someone in the outside world who had the determination and the contacts to be able to rescue her.

The story appears to have had a happy ending. After recuperating from her ordeal, Bridget went to England where she took a job as a mother’s help with a family who became very fond of her. Although she was semi-literate, they helped her to get training in hotel management. She then married, had a family and, according to Mrs Hillery, was content.

St Brendan’s is the largest psychiatric hospital in Dublin. We asked several physicians who worked there about their experiences with patients who had been in Industrial Schools. They said, in effect, that the moment they discovered a patient had spent his or her childhood in one of these institutions, they knew there was virtually nothing they could do to help, because normal emotional development had never taken place. One doctor told us of a patient who had been in Artane, and who had been in and out of the hospital for years. ‘He told me he and another boy were once beaten in the washroom for two hours to get a confession of homosexuality out of them, following some completely innocuous incident. I remember when I was younger seeing these little boys from the Industrial School at Cappoquin out walking in line. They didn’t behave like kids; they shuffled along, there was no life in them, no bounce, their heads hung down. I knew it wasn’t right, but you didn’t think about it much at the time because you knew the church was in charge. But I couldn’t forget the sight of them.’
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There were those who survived the system: women like Joan Thomas, Sally Johnson, Martha Prendergast and Bridget—through some quirk of circumstance or quality of their personalities. But there were so many who did not. Workers at the Simon Community in Dublin told us that at least half of the homeless men who came through their doors had spent their childhood in Industrial Schools.