Children Of The Poor Clares (17 page)

But authority would always report that all was well.

Department
of
Education
Report
1962:
‘Great
credit
is
due
to
managers
of
the
schools,
particularly
the
girls’
schools,
for
the
manner
in
which
they
strive
to
make
the
lives
of
the
children
as
happy
as
possible
during
their
enforced
absences
from
home.’

CHAPTER FIVE
 

‘The Soil Of The World’

Annual
Report
of
the
Department
of
Education,
1959:
‘After-care
of
Industrial
School
children
is
exercised
in
many
ways,
particularly
by
finding
suitable
employment
for
them,
personal
visits
to
them,
correspondence
with
and
reports
on
them
by
social
workers.’

A reporter with Cavan’s Anglo-Celt told us ‘Once they came out, all they could do was go away. You know what it’s like coming from an orphanage—they’d no manners or education. And of course they had religion dinned into them but it didn’t seem to do them much good. They were very bad-mannered somehow. I’ve met them sometimes in the Presbytery and that, and they were very unobliging and bad-tempered. I’m surprised any of them would talk to you about it—it was a disgrace to be there. It’s thought of as something shameful to have come from those places.’

‘When the girls got out’, said a Cavan bar-owner, ‘they were wild, like animals. A fellow could do what he liked with them.’

*       *       *

When the last generation of Cavan girls emerged from behind the walls of St. Joseph’s in the 1960s, it was into a country which itself was coming out from decades of isolation from the main currents of the modern world.
There is a popular view of the decade as enlightened, and for Ireland this period is usually represented as an outstanding period of social and economic progress, of optimism and development. Cities and towns began to expand; horizons of knowledge and awareness widened under the influence of television and travel, along with a rapid growth of cultural activity, a steady expansion of trade, and an increasingly successful tourism industry—all this reflected in an increase in income.

In reality, however, economic and social progress was quite modest. Membership of the European Economic Community lay in the future, and emigration still leached away Ireland’s young men and women. A crude censorship of the sexual content of books and films remained in place, restricting intellectual freedom.
Contraception was illegal, and women who had babies out of wedlock, whatever the circumstances of their pregnancy, were condemned by their neighbours and often rejected by their families.

For the affluent, new standards, even in moral and religious terms, were more easily acquired but were cautiously adopted. The poor, however, remained submissive to the all-powerful Church. For them, its dominance remained comprehensive and authoritarian.
When Dr. John Charles McQuaid, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, returned from Pope John’s XXIII’s reforming Vatican Council in 1963, he made a public statement assuring the faithful that they had nothing to fear: in Ireland, he said, ‘nothing will change.’

To a large extent, Dr. McQuaid was correct: much less changed than was imagined, p
articularly for the 2,000 children still in Ireland’s Industrial Schools or for those like the emotionally damaged, uneducated and unprepared girls of St. Joseph’s, who would soon be coming out into a world of whose ways they knew nothing. Their experiences were little different from those detained in the School a quarter of a century before.

Before Elizabeth Bright went to her first job as a domestic at the age of sixteen in 1966, Mother Catherine handed her a book on sex education and later asked her if she had understood it. ‘I replied truthfully that I hadn’t understood a word.’ Nothing further was said to her about such matters before she left. ‘One evening I went out with a young fellow. His two friends came too. The fellow I was with said to me; “Would you like a baby?” and then he did it. It was right up against a wall, perhaps that’s why I didn’t get pregnant, but I’ve always been lucky. Then I saw that the two other fellows were standing there in the shadows looking on. When I got back to the house I was bleeding and frightened. I thought I was dying and told the other girl from the convent who was working with me. She said, “God, you’re pregnant!” and she told someone who told the nuns, and I was taken up to a doctor in Dublin. But I was bleeding again by then so they knew I was just menstruating. After that I knew what it was all about and told fellows I wouldn’t. ‘

When Elizabeth got married, the family she had been working with (where there were ten children) ‘gave me my wedding breakfast and sent me a pram and a cot. I had the advantage that I always worked with nice people. But if they had been nice from pity, I would have gone. Just gone.’ Of her first year of marriage, she said cheerfully ‘Talk about battered wives! And I had no money at all. I lived on potatoes when I was pregnant. But everything’s great now.’

She had always wanted to find her mother, and after years of searching she was put in touch with an official in the Department of Education who had helped many other girls in similar situations. He traced her mother and, because she refused to disclose her address, he acted as intermediary when letters passed between mother and daughter. ‘When I got the first letter I couldn’t read it. You can see it’s the first one because it’s covered with blotches from where I cried all over it. I was delighted and disappointed at the same time. Delighted because I was the only one, but disappointed because I had no brothers or sisters. My mother said she had got married when she was forty-six but she’d had a hard life up till then. She and her husband owned a little petrol station in the country and she was terrified that her husband would find out about me.’ The mother was so frightened that eventually the correspondence ceased. ‘I would love to see her, just once, and I’d never even let on who I was.’

She showed the package of her mother’s letters, tied with a ribbon, carefully wrapped, and kept with her marriage certificate, locks of her two babies’ hair, and her book with the other girls’ addresses.

Connie Fitzpatrick was Mother Anne’s favourite; she told us that she had loved the orphanage. She left at the age of eighteen in 1965 and went into domestic service. ‘I missed the girls and I used to cry a lot and be frightened of people. I knew nothing about men. We learnt everything too late. We just went out that courtyard door into the world.’ She left her first job because her employer made advances to her. After that, said Connie, she had slept with many men and been lucky to avoid pregnancy. ‘I have no will power where sex is concerned. I used to get kind of depressed and drink a lot but I’ve stopped that now.’ When we met she had been in the same job as a live-in help for three years—’I love the children and I love a family atmosphere. I bake for the children and look after them.’ Some months later we learned that she was in a hospital suffering from depression and anorexia nervosa. Although they begged her to return she was refusing to return to the family. The last we heard of her she was still under medication and had gone to stay at the same Poor Clares convent as Sister Anne. Then she disappeared from contact.

Rosemary Tracey, who was put into St. Joseph’s shortly before the fire when her mother’s death left her in a deep depression, was sent to work as a domestic in another convent. After a year she decided, on the advice of the nuns there, to enter their order, also enclosed. She left after five years before taking her final vows ‘I thought it was right to leave though it was regarded as being a shameful thing to do.’ When we met, she was widowed, childless and living alone in a clean, bleak, isolated cottage, with not an ornament to be seen, only a picture of the Crucifixion.

Bridget Rooney was twelve when she and her two sisters were put into St. Joseph’s in 1953. She avoided being sent out to work as a domestic when it was time to leave: ‘I said I wanted to be a nurse. The nuns refused at first but I had my way in the end and I was sent off to train as a children’s nurse in their baby home in Stamullen.’ When we met, she was living in England, married with children, and was working as a hotel waitress. She was proud of what she had achieved materially, never told people about her background, and was very concerned to appear ‘respectable’.

We received a letter from one of the ex-pupils who was living in Australia. Patricia wrote that when she left the school in 1964 aged sixteen, she was sent to work as a domestic outside Cavan for a family with four children. Her hours were from 6 a.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. with two hours off on Sunday afternoons, and she was desperately lonely. When Patricia told her employer that she wanted to look for another job, the woman took her back to the convent. ‘She told the Reverend Mother that I wanted to leave but that she needed me badly. “She’s a very good worker” she said. I was a slave there! The Reverend Mother said to me “You go back to your job or else we’ll send you to an institution in Dublin for girls!”. I didn’t want to go there so I went back to the job. What else could I do? I was so lonely. Well, really to shock her, I ended up a couple of months later pregnant from the brother of a girl I’d got friendly with.’ Patricia was sent to a convent in Dublin and gave birth to a baby which was adopted. After that she did domestic work in hospitals in Dublin and then England before meeting her husband and emigrating. She sounded content with her present life.

When we interviewed Maureen Harty, her memories of St. Joseph’s were dominated by constant beatings and persecution by Mother Catherine. The other girls had admired Maureen because she was so pretty. She told us that she had been sent out to work in 1964, at the age of fourteen.
31
Her second employer was extremely kind to her, she said, and tried to explain to her about sex and how to behave with men. ‘But I took no notice at all. It didn’t sink in because I was man-mad.’ We were told by several of the girls that Maureen had a terrible time, and that she’d had two babies which were given up for adoption. Since then, however, she had married; her husband, who knew about the babies, was said to be ‘good to her.’

Margaret and Deirdre Ryan left St. Joseph’s in 1966, shortly before it closed. They were thirteen and twelve at the time. Margaret told us that they were asked if she would like to go and live with a Mrs. Crowley, the woman with whom they had stayed during school holidays. ‘But I didn’t know if it was for a month or a year. Nothing was explained to me. I said I would go. Deirdre said she wouldn’t. I was very lonely and cried a lot because I missed the girls, but Mrs. Crowley was very good to me. I couldn’t say a word against her. She even bought me a record-player. I went to secondary school while I was with her. I left there after three years—I can’t explain it but I didn’t want to stay any longer—and I went to Booterstown
32
where Deirdre was, but I used to go back and visit Mrs. Crowley. Booterstown wasn’t clean the way our orphanage had been but the nuns didn’t hit the girls. I did my Intermediate Certificate and passed.

‘I went to a live-in job working in a shop with Deirdre and then didn’t she get pregnant. I was mad with her for marrying him because I knew he was no good. I had lots of jobs after that, nearly always in shops or in hotels for the summer. I’d never been told the facts of life, so I never knew what to let a man do. The other girls used to sleep around and go with married men but I never could abide that. I got pregnant before I married Joe. Then he went off to England but he sent me £10 every week, and when he came back we got married. I like it here in the country although I was lonely at first and wanted to run away. But it’s healthy for little Tom and I like gardening—I’ve planted onions and parsley and potatoes. I used to wonder how I’d manage when I got married, but I wash the clothes and look after the child and I always have a dinner on the table ready for when Joe comes in. I never hit Tom though I’d slap him the odd time. I never tell anyone where I’m from. I tell the neighbours different things to keep them quiet. I talk to Joe sometimes about Cavan and the things that happened. I don’t go to Mass but sometimes in the afternoons when I take Tom for a walk we go into the church and I say a prayer.’

She worries constantly about Deirdre who has not been so lucky. ‘I’m different from Deirdre, aren’t I? I wish she wouldn’t go back to that fellow but I think she likes being abused. She likes to get sympathy. I used to lie awake at night crying about her.’

Deirdre was quiet and withdrawn when we met her. She was very thin and pale, as was her four-year-old child. She spoke very little. The child was utterly silent. When Deirdre was sent to the Industrial School at Booterstown, she said some effort was made to teach her to read. This failed. Then she’d had a succession of jobs. ‘The nuns in Booterstown went on trying to help me. They gave me food and money but after a while I stopped going to see them.’ Then she became pregnant. ‘I only married him to give the child a name.’ She told us that her husband often gave her no money at all, and frequently beat her up. ‘Once I needed five stitches in my head. I was terrified of him. We had no light or gas for six months while the baby was in hospital.’ The little girl had been admitted to hospital for massive shots of calcium; her baby diet had been tea and bread. A year after we met, her husband had been forced to leave the flat and the marriage was annulled. Many people tried to help her: social workers, her sister Margaret, Nora O’Hanlon, the nuns. We heard later that she had gone back to her husband and was pregnant again.