Children Of The Poor Clares (26 page)

The Commission made the fundamental point that the
per
capita
funding system meant it was in the interests of the managers to keep up the numbers of children in their Schools. This was because capital and running expenses did not diminish in direct proportion to the numbers of children in the institutions. Local authorities, they noted, often failed to make their proper contributions to the funding, or were tardy in doing so. Managers had been complaining that this resulted in the Schools running up bank overdrafts on which they had to pay interest. The 5 shillings
per
capita
grant from the state was still the same basic rate—although an additional 2s. 6d. cost-of-living increase had been given since 1919, and in addition local authorities were contributing an average of 4s.19d. per child.
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They did not recommend an increase in the basic rate, most costs having dropped during the 1930s’ Depression, but urged that salaries of qualified teachers be paid for directly by the state, and that there should be periodic increases to meet rises in the cost of living (both these recommendations were eventually implemented, but over a decade later, but with no perceptible advantage to the children).

We know that the Commission did receive some sort of information about how the grants were spent because they commented on the variations in the amounts paid by each school (these were not identified) on medical care, clothing and food. The report said that ‘disparities could be put down to lack of uniformity in cost accounting’ and to the fact that some of the institutions were more self-supporting for food and clothes than others. They did not speculate how it could be that annual medical expenses varied from an average of 3s.11d. per head in some of the Schools to £7 in others. The report made no comment about the absence of actual accounts books from the institutions that would have shown how the public monies they received were being spent. Records of expenditures ought properly to have been available for audit to the government through the Department of Education. In fact none of the Orders running Industrial Schools had their accounts audited either then or later, and, it has since been revealed, obstructed every effort to get access to them by the Department of Finance.

The report made no comment on the separation of siblings, and it made no reference to the application of the rule by which children could be sent from Industrial to Reformatory Schools, or about the ‘punishments’ received by the children, although, being covered by the regulations, these would have been within their field of reference. The Commission did not wish to alter the
status
quo
: ‘Subject to various changes, the present system affords the most suitable method of dealing with these children… We specially recommend that the management of schools by Religious Orders who have undertaken that work should continue’.

The only one of their recommendations known to have been implemented in the 1930s was the appointment, in 1939, of a medical inspector, Dr. Anna McCabe.

In 1966, thirty years on from the Cussen Report and a year before the last girls left St. Joseph’s, a pamphlet was published by members of the London branch of Tuairim, an independent association which, during the 1960s, produced a series of authoritative and influential studies on Irish affairs with the stated object of informing public opinion. The pamphlet was called
Some
of
Our
Children,
A
Report
on
the
Residential
Care
of
the
Deprived
Child
in
Ireland.
Its declared intention was to pressure for reform.

The nine members of the group were all lay people. One of them was Peter Tyrrell, described as ‘ex-pupil industrial school’, and of whom we wrote briefly in the last chapter. He was not, it must be emphasised, one of the three compilers of the final report.

One important change which had taken place by then was that the number of children being committed to Industrial Schools had fallen. Because the courts had become less willing to take this course, a greater proportion of children were now being admitted to care through the more flexible Department of Health Acts. This meant they could be sent to voluntary homes as well as to Industrial Schools, and were more easily fostered out. Moreover, with increasing prosperity, there had been a major drop in the numbers of children being taken into care. Nevertheless, by 1965 there were still 3,419 children in Industrial Schools. Tuarim noted that despite new adoption laws being passed in 1952, many children were still being left in institutional care from babyhood, a situation which, it said would be unacceptable in the United Kingdom. The association commented on the fact that in England and Wales a higher percentage of children in care were boarded out and observed that child care services in Ireland were ‘noticeable by their absence’.

The Tuairim group visited nine Industrial Schools and two Reformatory Schools. They also met ex-Industrial School pupils and the representatives of the responsible authorities. Their report made the important observation that the committal of the children from the same family to different schools, particularly if one parent was dead, ‘often means the virtual disintegration of the family as a unit’. The group expressed concern about the lack of interest by the staff at some of the schools in maintaining children’s links, ‘which can be gradually weakened and break’, with whatever relatives they had in the outside world. The attitude they found was: ‘The child is well looked after here. What does he want to worry about his parents for?’

They observed a profusion of toys for small children in the schools, although only one had any sign of books. They noted approvingly that ‘All the convent schools we visited were meticulously clean and tidy’—though they did not enquire who it was that was keeping them in that condition. They were impressed with the physical appearance of the girls, but made the point that just because they seemed ‘docile and manageable, this was not necessarily good for them… provided the children are physically healthy, well-clothed, obedient and can speak Irish, officialdom is satisfied’.

Their report described the difficulties experienced by boys and girls when they left the schools and the lack of after-care. They said that an absence of sex education resulted in the children being in a state of ignorance; they had little knowledge of ordinary family life and social behaviour, and had no one to turn to for advice. Girls, they felt, were especially vulnerable: ‘community life, however pleasant, well-ordered and easy’, would not be replicated in ‘a similarly protective atmosphere when they leave’. Brief case histories were given of two girls, both of whom had illegitimate babies. One of the girls had been claimed without difficulty by her mother when she was fourteen, taken to England and then abandoned.
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Some of their comments were oddly at variance with what we had learned from the girls in Cavan and elsewhere: ‘Many of the girls go on to secondary or vocational schools, take their intermediate and leaving certificates or attend secretarial courses. If they have ability, they seem to have a reasonable choice of career open to them: nursing, secretarial work, civil service, air hostess.’ Then the report continued: ‘Because of their early environment and heredity, not all the girls are capable of benefiting from these opportunities. Some will be mentally backward or educationally retarded. Residential domestic work is the only employment in Ireland for such girls’. Yet despite the obvious intelligence of many of the young women we met, we heard nothing about these opportunities. With scarcely an exception, they were all destined for domestic work.

The Tuairim report expressed confidence in the managers of the schools: ‘In the circumstances, financial and physical, the managers perform a task which no one else would contemplate. They do all and more than can be reasonably expected with too little help or support.
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When a child leaves an Industrial School to take up employment, he is equipped with a suitcase and at least two complete sets of clothes as well as toilet requisites… everything is supplied by the school at its expense.’

We thought of the humiliation of girls like Frances who, when she left St. Joseph’s a year after the publication of the report, was not wearing a bra, had no coat, and carried her few bits of clothing in a paper bag.

The Tuairim report included a paragraph about St. Joseph’s, Limerick, run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. This was where Bridget, Mrs. Hillery’s protégée was to be illegally detained in 1968. ‘This school was not visited by members of the group but we have heard excellent reports of it… The girls receive education and training which enable them to take up responsible positions, notably in nursing and commerce, when they leave.’ This range of career prospects was not even born out by official figures from the Department of Education. In the period 1959-69, all girls discharged from reformatories went, with one exception, into domestic employment; and it was certainly a different vocational training from that envisaged for Bridget, whose intended destination was the Magdalen laundry in Galway.

The report continued: ‘The mentally retarded and socially maladjusted who will be unable to organise their lives without the support of an institution or a protective family… are found unskilled work in the institutions run by the same religious order… some of them work in laundries run by the convent.’ Presumably the report is referring to the laundry-reformatories and to Magdalen Homes. What was meant by ‘socially maladjusted’ was unclear, and the report made no comment on possible causes for such maladjustment. Most importantly, it accepted a state of affairs in which girls could be deprived of liberty for years or possibly for a lifetime, for the crime of giving birth to a baby out of wedlock, of having been found ‘unmanageable’ by the Sisters in an Industrial School of being perceived as being inherently mentally backward or of what was perceived as socially unacceptable behaviour.

Commenting on punishment, they found that, as far as girls were concerned, ‘experienced female staff have little difficulty coping with young girls without resorting to punitive measures at all.’ On the boys’ institutions:
‘We have received accounts from a number of former pupils alleging excessive corporal punishment in the past… We have also heard stories of recent punishments which we consider to be either unsuitable or excessive
.
In
the
absence
of
any
verification
that
the
alleged
punishments
took
place
in
the
form
described,
they
must
be
treated
as
hypothetical
.’ (Our italics.)

Nevertheless, the recommendations in the Tuairim reports represented progressive thinking on child care. Tuairim wanted the 1908 Act replaced; the Department of Health to take over, from the Departments of Education and Justice, responsibility for all children in care; it wanted institutional care to be abolished and replaced with children’s homes, in keeping with contemporary ideas of small, mixed-sex units, and for a proper aftercare service to be set up.

But it had all come too late for Peter Tyrrell, and too much of the cruel reality had been ignored, denigrated and denied. Perhaps his involvement in the Tuairim study was his final hope, the channel through which his protest at the horror of his childhood and that of other children would at last be heard. We were told that he would not believe the other members of the Tuairim group when they assured him that things were better now. He could not believe that the truth had been told, the record put straight, and justice done. Two years after the publication of the pamphlet, London police were finally able to establish the identity of a man who a year earlier had committed suicide on Hampstead Heath by setting himself alight. They had traced the remnants of a name and address on the unburned corner of a postcard in his pocket to Professor Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, one of Ireland’s few socialist intellectuals, and a friend of the dead man, Peter Tyrrell.

*       *       *

The Tuarim report did help to spur the government into action. But there was a more important factor. In 1962 the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) had been asked by the Irish government to carry out an overall audit of its education policy. Its purpose was to help Ireland prepare for entry into the European Economic Community and thus into economic prosperity.

The OECD team appointed was an eminent one including a former Belgian Minister for Education, a Canadian minister from the province of Quebec, and an educationalist from Denmark. Part of the process included ‘confrontation meetings’, held following the completion of the report. These were at a high level and essentially investigative of the Irish situation. Among those interviewed was the Head of the Industrial School section in the Department of Education. He told the OECD committee that all children so ‘interned’ in Industrial Schools were there ‘at the request of their parents’ and that ‘the parents could have their children out at any time, irrespective of the home conditions’. These statements were both untrue and contrary to the regulations.

A fundamental question was raised in the team’s report: Why are 3,240 children in State detention?

The OECD’s report was published in 1965 and debated in the Dail. One of its most notable and immediate effects was that it provided and gave strength to the growing pressure to modernise the religion—and Irish language-oriented education system which had held back the bulk of Ireland’s population for generations, creating a flow of emigrant unskilled labourers. Donough O’Malley, the able and energetic politician who became Minister of Education in 1966, rapidly focused this momentum for change into the creation of free and extended secondary education. The references in the report to the Industrial Schools were critical but were limited to the education issue. They referred to the low level of employment attained by ex-pupils, and made the shocking finding that 58% of the boys in the Schools were educationally ‘delayed’, compared to 8% of boys nationally. The final ‘confrontation meeting’ was held in November 1966. A year later O’Malley established what became known as the Kennedy Committee to carry out a survey of Reformatory and Industrial Schools. It would seem that there was a hidden agenda to get rid of the Industrial School system since it was contrary to the education policies in the European Economic Community. If Ireland wanted membership, it would have to conform.