Children Of The Poor Clares (27 page)

Pressure had been increasing from many other quarters to do something about Ireland’s anachronistic system, and the Minister was well aware of the growing public unease. 1967, the year in which the Committee was set up, was a year after the publication of the Tuairim report, and the same year that St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan was closed. The chairman was District Justice Eileen Kennedy, from whom it took its name, and there were eleven other members: the Christian Brother manager of Artane School, a psychiatrist, a nun with qualifications in social science, four representatives of departments of state, and four laypersons. As in the case of the Cussen committee, no evidence was heard from pupils, present or past.

The committee covered an enormous amount of ground, meeting formally on sixty-nine occasions. It commissioned surveys and visited all the schools at least once, as well as local authority children’s homes and foster homes. The result was a comprehensive report, embodying modern attitudes towards the overall needs of children, both emotional and physical, and with recommendations which repeated and extended those of the Tuairim report. It laid stress on the importance for children in residential care to be provided with educational facilities superior to those obtaining generally, and stressed the necessity for after-care facilities. ‘Heretofore, much of the emphasis has been on the provision of creature comforts and accommodation for children, and on safeguarding them from moral and physical dangers. Too little emphasis has been placed on the child’s needs to enable him to develop into maturity and to adjust himself satisfactorily to the society in which he lives.’

The committee found an ‘institutional approach to the care of the children’ and, using almost the same words as the Cussen Report, thirty-four years earlier, said that this produced a lack of ‘initiative and adaptability’. Of family-unit homes in England that the committee visited, they remarked on how much happier and how ‘normal’ in their behaviour these children were.

One of the committee’s recommendations was for an end to the capitation grant in favour of a block grant. The former arrangement, they said, resulted in schools being unwilling to permit children to leave or be transferred—a problem also identified in the Cussen Report. One manager actually told the committee that he could not for that reason ‘afford to release children’. They remarked on the children’s lack of contact with the outside world: ‘We met children who did not know that food had to be paid for or that letters had to be stamped.’

At the time of their report, 2,247 children, aged from under a year up to sixteen, were still being detained in Industrial Schools. They were being looked after by a mere 41 full-time staff. Of these, 21 were religious and 20 lay, and only four of them were described as having taken childcare courses run by the British Home Office. The institutions did have additional staff, a manager, teachers, and domestics. However, ‘in almost every case the same staff members are required to perform the duties of teaching, supervision and residential care which means that they are on duty, to all intents and purposes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.’ And the committee noted that ‘there appears to be a tendency to staff the schools, in part at least, with those who are no longer required in other work.’ To mirror ordinary society, the committee suggested that ‘The ideal situation would be that the housemother should look after the running of the unit and the housefather should go out to work in the usual way.’

The committee had attempted to contact all known voluntary residential homes outside the state system (such as the Poor Clares’ baby home at Stamullen), but did not receive replies from all of them. Thus, they said they were unable to supply accurate figures and other information about them. They recommended inspection of these places and said that without this, ‘such a home could stagnate’, adding ‘we are not suggesting that many of these homes are not well run.’

The committee was strongly critical of the inspection of Industrial Schools: it was ‘so far as we can judge, totally ineffective… We are satisfied that the State obligation to inspect these schools at least once a year has not always been fulfilled.’

The report also exposed the long-hidden scandal of illegal detention in the laundry-reformatories, certified and otherwise, and of Magdalen Homes. The committee found an average of twenty-six girls being held in the two certified reformatories, one of which was St. Joseph’s, Limerick, during the period 1964-69. They said that about 15 per cent of those ‘detained’ were ‘voluntary’ cases who had been admitted at the request of relatives, clergy or Health Authorities. Certain types of ‘offenders’ (girls known to have been prostitutes, or who on conviction were found to be pregnant) were not, they said, accepted by these institutions. Of the non-certified institutions, they said ‘a number of girls considered by parents, relatives, social workers, welfare officers, clergy or gardaí to be in moral danger or uncontrollable are also accepted in these convents for a period on a voluntary basis… This method of voluntary arrangement… can be criticised on a number of grounds. It is a haphazard system, its legal validity is doubtful, and the girls admitted in this irregular way, and not being aware of their rights, may remain for long periods and become, in the process, unfit for re-emergence into society. In the past, many girls have been taken into these convents and confined there all their lives… No State grants are payable for the maintenance of those in voluntary Magdalen institutions. There is consequently no State control or right of inspection of these institutions.’

Thus, if further evidence were required, one need not doubt the truth of everything we heard about ‘poor Katy O’Toole’, sent from St. Joseph’s to the Magdalen Homes in Galway and kept there for a quarter of a century; nor about Bridget, detained in the certified reformatory in Limerick, and about the many Poor Clares girls sent to the Gloucester Street ‘reformatory’ which was, in effect, an extra-legal prison.
59

The committee commissioned a survey from Rev. Father O’Doherty, Professor of Logic and Psychology at University College, Dublin. Using standard tests for the measurement of intelligence, perceptual ability, verbal reasoning, literature and numeracy, his department found far higher levels of mental handicap, educational retardation and backwardness among Industrial School children than among the Irish population at large. The department also found that, whereas a high incidence of mental handicap was not marked among younger girls, by the time they had reached the age of fifteen, it was 38.8% higher! ‘It is difficult’, the writers of the survey comment ‘to say why this should be so.’ This level of naiveté was remarkable in a reputable university’s department of logic and psychology. The effects upon children’s mental development of sustained emotional deprivation had been widely known since the late 1940s through the work of Dr. John Bowlby, the renowned British developmental psychologist.
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The report showed that the committee was determined that fundamental change take place, and it did in fact signal the end of the Industrial School system. However, the report was never submitted to the Dail for debate, and was only finally brought before the Seanad through the efforts of Mary Robinson, later to become the President of the Republic of Ireland, and Timothy West, two of the Dublin University senators
61
. In many regards—such as the lack of equivocation over illegal detention in laundry-reformatories—it was refreshingly honest. Yet, like previous reports, it too said nothing of the repulsive brutality experienced by children, it raised no questions about the absence of financial accountability, and, anxiously refusing to apportion any blame, it repeated the necessary mantras: “In listing the limitations of the present child care system insofar as it concerns Reformatory and Industrial Schools, it may seem that we are criticising those responsible for the schools. This is not the intention of the committee: indeed we are very much aware that if it were not for the dedicated work of many of our religious bodies, the position would be a great deal worse than it is now.’
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Should one believe that they knew nothing about the savage level of violence inflicted on the children? When Tim Dalton, the secretary-general of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform was giving evidence on July 1
st
2004 to the investigation committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, he said that when he and Dick Crowe (a principal officer in the Department) worked with the Kennedy Committee, they came across institutions where children were being punished, not at the time of a misdemeanour, but were later gathered on a stairway, made to strip off and were then beaten.

As for the issue of sexual abuse inflicted on boys, not surprisingly there is not a word.

Discussing the terms of reference for the survey by UCD’s Department of Psychology and Logic, the committee stated: ‘Research on the topic shows that the most important factor in childhood and later development is the quality and quantity of personal relationships available to the child… If it is seen from a study of our institutions of care that our children have not a competence in these areas of development which is up to the standard attained by the majority of the population, then we can speak of cultural deprivation in such institutions as a fact…
Such
a
statement
would
have
no
implications
as
to
the
conditions
which
obtain
within
our
institutions
(our italics).’

The Kennedy Report made recommendations intended to bring the residential care of children in Ireland into line with modern practice and did result in extensive change. All the bodies—Cussen, Tuairim, OECD—with their recommendations, represented an attempt to improve the system which was responsible for the care of thousands of Irish children. The first, the Cussen Committee, came at a time of conservative reaction when the radical change that was undoubtedly needed was inimical to the social and moral climate. A quite different situation prevailed with the OECD. Ireland’s future access to the European Economic Community depended on the state of services, including education. The investigation by the OECD found the Industrial Schools and Reformatories unsuitable in the level of education they were offering. Because the international body carried great weight, its findings were responsible for Donagh O’Malley’s rapid response. It was as a consequence of this that the Kennedy Committee came into being, and was then faced with urgent and radical action to avoid prejudicing Ireland’s entry into the EEC. Obviously the committee acted appropriately, but it was forced into this position: it should not be seen as the radical far-sighted body which has been claimed by posterity.

All these commissions avoided overt criticism of those responsible for the children, and the compilers of the Cussen, Tuairim and Kennedy reports went out of their way to emphasise that the Church was undertaking an onerous task with very little reward. Given the strength of the evidence in front of their eyes, and however good their intentions, they failed to acknowledge the devastating reality of the children’s lives. It must have been obvious to these presumably well-intentioned men and women that the children were suffering severe restrictions in their mental, emotional and physical development that would exact a terrible toll in their adult lives
.
Yet they relied upon and accepted much of their information from authority figures who were often active participants in the Industrial School system, and, in the case of Tuairim, they openly stated their suspicion of first-hand accounts from those who had been children in these institutions.

Who can be surprised if Peter Tyrrell despaired?

CHAPTER NINE
 

Betrayal of Responsibility

‘If
any
person
who
has
the
custody,
charge,
or
care,
of
a
child
or
young
person,
wilfully
assaults,
ill-treats,
neglects,
abandons
or
exposes
such
child
or
young
person
in
a
manner
to
cause
such
child
or
young
person
unnecessary
suffering
or
injury
to
his
health,
that
person
shall
be
guilty
of
a
misdemeanour,
and
shall
be
liable,
on
conviction,
to
a
fine
not
exceeding
one
hundred
pounds,
or
alternatively
in
default
of
payment
of
such
fine,
or
in
addition
thereto,
to
imprisonment
with
or
without
hard
labour.’