Children Of The Poor Clares (25 page)

In 1976 a priest, who ran a hostel in Dublin for boys from these schools compiled figures showing how 108 boys brought up in Artane Industrial School were coping with life. He categorised them in four groups in descending order of vulnerability: normal, borderline (in and out of jobs), social and vocational failures, mentally ill. He found that 22 boys belonged in the first category, 19 boys in the second, 60 in the third and 7 in the fourth.

When we wrote the first edition of this book, we had accounts of only two men who spent their childhood in institutions. We heard about Peter Tyrrell from several people. He had spent a number of years in the 1930s in the Industrial School run by the Christian brothers in Letterfrack, Co. Galway, and in the 1960s he had been involved with a group of people working on a report on Industrial Schools.
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He had tried to write a book about his childhood there, but, so we were told, was unable to express himself coherently.
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He claimed that the boys were sometimes stripped naked and beaten for long periods and that he was sodomised by one of the Brothers. When he told a priest about this in confession, the reply was: ‘How dare you speak so of the Brothers. If it wasn’t for them you wouldn’t have a roof over your head.’ Peter Tyrell volunteered for the war in 1939 and was taken prisoner—his Stalag, he wrote was ‘hard and unpleasant’ during the last months of the war, but it was ‘Heaven on earth’ in comparison to his childhood at Letterfrack. (In his book, he described his arrival there, aged six, ‘Most of the children are terribly pale, and their faces are drawn and haggard… The children of Letterfrack are like old men, most of their eyes are sunk in their heads and are red from crying. Their cheek-bones are sticking out… ‘) He told a woman we met that Letterfrack was ‘like Belsen’—the same profoundly shocking comment that had been made to us by Hannah about St Joseph’s in the 1930’s.
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One of the responses to our letter in the newspapers was from a man who was orphaned as a baby in 1938 and spent his first sixteen years in Nazareth Lodge, a vast, bleak building in Belfast, an institution that we understood depended entirely on charity for its maintenance.
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In Northern Ireland, the Roman Catholic authorities provided and administered their own hospitals, schools and orphanages independently of the state. Whatever the human consequences, the Church was determined to cocoon its people from regulation by a Protestant-dominated secular authority, and, in turn, the ruling Unionist governments, saving money, did not interfere with them.

We went to see Laurence Green in his home in a Catholic ghetto in west Belfast in May 1976. It was a bleak area where thickly-wired anti-bomb fencing surrounded an empty block of flats that had recently been occupied by British troops. Anti-British graffiti was crudely scrawled on a nearby wall and there was a general air of hopelessness and despair.

Laurence was a tense, strained man. His nerves had never been good, he said, and he’d had a nervous breakdown after his family were forcibly removed from their previous home at gunpoint by a Protestant terror gang. He was also frightened of IRA intimidation and worried that they might be able to identify him in this book. Like many other unskilled Belfast men, he had been out of work for years. His wife, a calm warm woman, sat with us, a baby contentedly in her arms, while he told us about the horrors of his childhood.

His earliest memory, he said, was when he was four years old. He had wet and messed himself in bed, and a lay worker shoved his faeces into his mouth and he kept vomiting it up. He was then put into an ice-cold bath, pushed under with a brush and had buckets of cold water poured over him when he struggled up for air. This was a usual punishment, he said, for that particular offence which happened often because the smaller children were terrified of getting out of bed in the great, dark dormitory. He remembers being ill quite often. At different times he had jaundice, pleurisy and pneumonia. ‘It was the strangest thing—when you were ill it was like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. You got quite different treatment. The nuns came up to see you every day and brought sweets.’

The orphanage was, he said, ‘a place of fear—a reign of terror’—terror inflicted by lay workers, nuns and older boys. He showed us a lump on his hand from being hit with a hurley stick for not getting his answers right in catechism. They were often beaten with these sticks, usually with pants down, even when they got older. ‘I’ve seen terrible things: boys with backsides beaten as purple as that sofa, a boy beaten until the dirt ran out of him.’ There was a nun that made us undress in front of her and then beat us. That place was so big that you could be screaming at one end and it couldn’t be heard at the other. There was one kind nun. She tried to comfort us when we were beaten, but she left when I was ten.’

The food, he told us, consisted of ‘drip-bread’ and cocoa twice a day, greasy soup with a bit of bad potato for lunch. They got an egg at Easter and a small piece of turkey at Christmas. The boys wore short-legged dungarees, a shirt and a waistcoat, and had no jumpers, even in winter. It was always very cold. ‘The place was fumigated with Jeyes fluid—I was beaten once for dropping a bottle of it. We were all very clean, though, baths twice a week.’ He said there were bars at the windows and no fire escapes: ‘I often thought since how dangerous it was. The place was five storeys high.’

Several times he made the comment that there was ‘a lot of homosexuality on the little boys’, and finally we asked if he had suffered from this. ‘Yes, I did. The first time when I was seven. A gang of older boys raped me. Several of the bigger boys would come on to you.’ (After he married, he had been unable to consummate his marriage for over a year.) There was very little supervision of a non-punitive nature. He once saw a boy being forced to slide down the banisters. He fell off and broke his back. Laurence admitted that he, too, had ‘clobbered’ younger boys when he got older.

He attended the school in the orphanage until he was eleven. ‘After that I scrubbed, cleaned and did darning and mending.’ Some boys were kept on to work on the farm that belonged to Nazareth Lodge, until they were twenty-one. ‘I’d write a book about the place myself’ he said, ‘but I haven’t the education.’ One should note that school attendance, at that time in the United Kingdom, was compulsory up to the age of sixteen.

During the long years he and his older brother were in the institution, none of their surviving grandparents, or any other relations, ever came to see them, or wrote to them. He had heard that his brother, who was no longer a Catholic, now belonged to a Protestant extremist organisation. He said he had once come across a man who had been brought up in the local Dr. Barnardo’s Home, and they had compared their experiences. ‘They had some homosexuality there, but nothing like at Nazareth, and it was quite different: they had good food and clothes and so on. They lacked for nothing because the Orange Lodges looked after them.’ Laurence reckoned that it was around 1952 that conditions improved a little—they even began to get sausages occasionally. ‘I think the government must have begun to interfere.’

Laurence Green walked back with us over the torn-up paving stones to the place where a bus route once passed, but where the only public transport was now provided by shabby group taxis coming in and out from the city centre. He pointed out the scars of the last ten years, and the wall with gaping holes gouged by the bullets which had torn the life out of a Provo some weeks before.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Nazareth isn’t like that anymore. You wouldn’t recognise it now inside, and the nuns are altogether different. They’ve set it up as a home for children whose families have suffered from the Troubles. It’s all different now, but what worries me is what would happen if Ireland was re-united. It would happen all over again and no-one would dare to interfere.’
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CHAPTER EIGHT
 

For Peter Tyrrell, ‘ex—pupil Industrial School’

‘All
children
need
love,
care
and
security
if
they
are
to
develop
into
full
and
mature
persons.’
Kennedy Report, 1970

During the years following Ireland’s independence in 1921, four reports were published on the subject of the country’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools: the Cussen Report in 1936, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Report in 1965, the Tuarim Report in 1966, and the Kennedy Report in 1970.

The reason given for setting up the first commission, whose report took the name of its chairman, Judge Geoffrey P. Cussen, was that ‘the Free State is behind most European countries in its arrangements for dealing with this important social question’. The Minister for Education wanted to look into the operation of the system ‘before introducing reforms’. Its brief included the care and education of the children, after-care and staffing. At that time there were fifty-two Industrial Schools in Ireland, certificated for the reception of 6,563 children, and that year, during a period of great economic hardship, they were nearly full to capacity. Since 1917, they had all been under Roman Catholic management. As in the case of all these inquiries, the Schools would have been given advance notice of the arrival of the commission.

The commission had nine members: Judge Cussen of the Dublin District Court; Mrs. Mary Hackett, who was later to serve on the Tribunal of Inquiry into the Cavan fire; Senator Mrs. Clarke, widow of the Rebellion leader executed in 1916; a parish priest and two civil servants (one of whom was the Deputy Chief Inspector of the Department of Education), a doctor and two laymen.

They heard evidence from invited representatives of the relevant departments of state—Education, Justice and Local Government, and from interested organisations, including the Catholic Rescue and Protection Society, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (which over the years initiated requests that children be committed to the schools), the Provincial of the Irish Christian Brothers, who ran most of the senior boys’ Industrial Schools, and representatives of the trade unions. Among those who gave submissions were Madame Maude Gonne McBride, the famous Anglo-Irish revolutionary, Miss Margaret McNeill, an Industrial School inspector (whose visits were recalled for us by women who had been at St. Joseph’s, Cavan at that time), and managers and teachers from seven Industrial Schools, nine of which the commission visited. If the submissions still exist, they have yet to become publicly available. No evidence was heard from pupils, present or past.

The Cussen report said that the Commission found the care of the children to be ‘generally good’, and that ‘on the whole’ they were ‘suitably housed, fed and clothed, and their treatment is in general kindly and humane.’ Their diet, was ‘on the whole adequate, but we consider more variety in the meals desirable’ and ‘Milk is not supplied to the extent necessary for growing children, and butter seldom.’ No reference was made to the anomaly between the average height and weight of the children in comparison to that of the norm in the country. They did, however, make detailed suggestions for improved medical care. Perhaps this concern reflected the rise in the Schools’ mortality rate. In 1929, the Department of Education itself in its annual report had noted that proportionately more children were dying in the Schools than in the general population. That year, of a total of 6,515 in the Schools, 17 died
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; in 1934, the year in which the Commission was sitting, 25 died out of 6,420—a proportional increase in the death rate. No reference was made to any of these figures.

The Commission wanted the children to receive ‘at least’ as good an education as children outside and they criticised the tendency to give formal instruction only in the evenings—implying that children were working all day. They emphasised the importance of making the Industrial Schools Irish-speaking—at that time sacrosanct to the educational and political establishment, and observed with satisfaction those of the Schools where this was the case. They also wished each manager to make every pupil feel that ‘he is his guardian and friend while maintaining an ever-vigilant but unobtrusive discipline’.

They showed a progressive outlook on several issues, defining the root causes for children being committed to both Industrial and Reformatory Schools as ‘poverty and neglect’ and not criminality. They wanted changes in terminology, children no longer to be ‘committed’ to the Schools, because of the overtones of criminal proceedings, but ‘admitted’, and they wanted them renamed National Boarding Schools. They also recommended that the massive Senior Boys Industrial School in Artane, be divided into separate schools with no more than 250 boys in each, in order to give each child ‘the impression that he is an individual in whose troubles, ambitions and welfare a lively interest is being taken’.

Noting ‘the lack of initiative and individuality that are characteristic of children reared in these institutions’, the Commission expressed its dislike of the practice in some schools of requiring silence at meals and in workrooms and deplored the lack of recreation facilities: ‘monotonous marching round a school yard takes the place of free play’. In contrast, one school was singled out for praise. ‘We have learned with pleasure that the Conductors of one Industrial School, Drogheda Junior Boys, in charge of the French Sisters of Charity, have provided a camp of wooden huts at Termonfeckin, to which they have taken all their charges for a month’s holiday at the seaside during each of the past two years. The Sisters expressed the opinion that the resulting benefits in the health and spirits of the children and the widening of their experience more than repaid the trouble and expense entailed’. The destiny of many of these little boys on reaching the age of ten would have been Artane.
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