Children Of The Poor Clares (28 page)

Children
Act
1908

We based this book on the evidence of women who had spent their childhood in the Industrial School known as St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Cavan, during the years from the 1920s to 1967, a period of nearly half a century. From their first-hand testimony we know that both the Children’s Act and the Industrial School Regulations were broken, and that the system designed to give the children some protection consistently failed them. The Department of Education did not enforce its own regulations and some of their inspectors, who annually produced those complacent congratulatory reports, failed even to make the yearly visit required under the Act. Those who did announced their visits well in advance. It is easy to imagine the conducted tour of the clean, well-polished rooms and hallways, the dormitories with the counterpanes on the beds for their annual airing; the orderly rows of girls in their Sunday best, eating what they described as ‘the one good dinner we got apart from Christmas.’ If the inspectors knew—or suspected—that the reality was different, they were either unwilling or unable to exercise their regulatory authority to effect change.
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The Department of Education and its Ministers gave unwavering support to the system, and the Orders obstructed and resented any interference. Furthermore, it was generally accepted that nobody else would look after the children for what was deemed to be so little financial reward. If there were concerns that the government grants were not being spent directly on the children, nobody in the Department appeared to be troubled by the absence of audited books to account for the expenditure of public monies. Any demand for real change would have required a revolution in Ireland’s
status
quo
at its most fundamental level.

The rule-breaking covered every aspect of the mental and physical development of the children. They did not receive the nourishing food laid down for them in the dietary scale—their hunger was so acute that even in the relatively prosperous Ireland of the 1960s when the
per
capita
grants increased exponentially, the Cavan children were foraging in a hen-bucket for the leavings of the Sisters’ well-covered table. Punishment—or rather ‘discipline’, as the Act referred to it—far exceeded the rules, and was not reported to the authorities as specified. They were sent out to work when the Education Acts required that they should be at school. Some were sent to laundry-reformatories, including Magdalen Homes, where they were illegally imprisoned, to work as virtual slaves, for years, if not all their adult lives. And this was going on into the 1970s.

It is also true that the legislation in many instances actually permitted and endorsed a restrictive and punitive regime for the children. They were
de
jure
prisoners, as was made clear at the inquiry into the fire which took 35 children’s lives. And it was the law which, in the 1930s made it possible for Mary MacHenry who ‘liked to put a quiff into her hair’, and who pulled off a nun’s veil, to be sent as a punishment to the Reformatory School in Limerick. A similar fate befell Lal Smith in the l950s—the girl described as having ‘no harm in her’ and who ‘used to make the others laugh.’ If Martha Prendergast had run away when the farmer she had been sent to work for in 1960 made sexual advances to her, she could have been sent to a certified Reformatory School according to the provisions of a 1957 addition to the 1908 Act. We know this actually happened to a girl from another Industrial School under similar circumstances.
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When Martha was sent back to the convent she was beaten by the nuns. Details of this beating—and all the others—should, according to the regulations, have been put down in the School Journal, and notified to the Department. (Indeed the intense and health—damaging brutality of so many of these beatings was far beyond the level of violence permitted by the regulations: it would no exaggeration to describe some of them as the infliction of torture.) There is no evidence that this was done or that when Martha, Mary McNeill and Joan Thomas were sent out to work that it was done with the formalities required by the Act. The Act required that the Department of Education be informed in the event of a child being sent out ‘on license’ to live with ‘a trustworthy and respectable person’ or for ‘a course of training.’ In any event, as noted above, Ireland’s Education Acts, administered by the very department that supervised Industrial Schools, required that these children should still have been attending school. And truancy, of course, was a legal offence for which a child could be committed to one of these institutions.

What is clear is that the Acts and regulations which were there to benefit and protect the children were broken. Yet, when they were punitive and restrictive they were fully implemented. This situation existed for decades in a democracy with an independent judiciary and a professional, permanent civil service. The responsibility for these children lay with both Church and State. Both had betrayed that responsibility.

The relationship between Church and State during the post-Independence years was documented by the eminent Irish scholar, J.H. Whyte in his
‘Church
&
State
in
Modern
Ireland,
1923-1970’
. It details incidents demonstrating the all-pervading power and influence of the Church, and its interference with people’s lives and with the policies of the State—from agricultural education and the introduction of free library services, to attempts to legislate for free pre—and post-natal and obstetrical services
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. Commenting on a statement by Dr. Cornelius Lucey, the ultra-conservative Bishop of Cork in 1953, Whyte wrote ‘These are not the words of a private interest group making submissions to a government whose ultimate supremacy is recognised.’

From the beginning, we knew it was important that we attempt to get the ‘other side’ of the story—that we should also listen to the nuns, to representatives of the Department of Education and to government ministers. We wanted some kind of explanation for the law breaking, the cruelty, the broken crippled young lives. Who were the people who had been responsible for the children? What could they tell us?

The attitude of the Poor Clare nuns to our investigations was to become one of reluctance and evasion. But this was not the case initially.

We first went to Cavan in March 1975. We were still in the early stages of our research and although we had read the old newspaper reports of the fire, we were not yet familiar with the State context—the Industrial School legislation and regulations. But we wanted to see the town and the orphanage, and if possible meet some of the Sisters. We wrote to the convent, saying that we were doing research into the Industrial School system, and asked if we could visit. When we received no reply, we telephoned and were given permission to come. We were shown into the convent parlour where we were joined by two elderly nuns, Sister Dymphna—of whom we were to hear so much—and Sister Benedict.

It was Sister Benedict who did most of the talking. She began with the fire, clearly a focal point in their lives. One of the first things she told us was that ‘Louis Blessing had nothing to do with the rescue attempts’ and that the first concern of the Sullivans, the owners of the shop next door, had been to save their property.
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With a quick glance at Sister Dymphna, she said ‘We used to have fire drill regularly every month… The doors were not locked… the children didn’t notice the emergency exit… Miss O’ Reilly put the children in the dormitory then forgot about them. We all felt the controversy greatly about the locked doors.’ The fire, she said, had been ‘a blessing in disguise’ because many aspects of the Sisters and the children’s lives had improved afterwards.

Sister Dymphna remembered the woman who was on the Tribunal saying that ‘she never met such children; they never said one word about the nuns.’ Sister Benedict explained that like most of the Sisters, she was a qualified teacher, unlike the nuns who had looked after the orphanage children. ‘The Department used to send inspectors. They’d come without notice. Before the fire there was a Miss McNeill. In 1960 the Department sent out an instruction that orphanages were to be phased out, so fewer children were sent. Sister Dymphna gave them a great training in laundry, and they also got training in housework and needlework. A nun would do the cooking, helped by the older children. The orphans usually went out to domestic work and we placed them in jobs at sixteen. Fifteen or sixteen of them went to become nuns. Eight went to England to the Loretto Order—they were delighted with them but said they wouldn’t take any more. The girls were mostly illegitimate and they were the happiest little creatures you could wish to meet.

‘They were well mannered and well educated. I suppose we were like a strict boarding school. Sometimes they would try to run out. I never met the like of their loyalty to the nuns—they could not speak better of us behind our backs.’ We asked her why the children should not have spoken well of them. ‘Well, they could have told a thing or two about the strictness if they had wanted to’, she laughed. We asked, were the girls ever ‘chastised’? ‘Only by the principals,’ Sister Benedict replied. ‘There was a lovely family spirit, just lovely, although we did have to have the strictness. We spoke of them as “our children”. They were not simple, not one was mentally retarded. They come back to visit us with their little babies and seem very happily married.’

Sister Dymphna, who would figure in so many girls’ memories for her kindness, her distress when they were being beaten, and who gave Sally Johnson a mother’s love, had a wonderfully gentle expression. Of the fire she said ‘Because of where our cells were, we didn’t hear what was happening at first… I wished I was burned with them. I couldn’t sleep for months. A set of them worked with me in the laundry and I carried coal and broke sticks with them. They were great children. So gifted. I really loved them. Thank God I never lifted a hand to them.’ This good woman was innocently unaware of the implications of her words.

It was Sister Benedict, we learned later, who slapped Joan Thomas’ face after she’d put a wave in her hair, and who watched while Deirdre Ryan was beaten on her bed by Sisters Anne and Catherine.

One sunny spring afternoon a couple of months later we drove out to the Poor Clares’ babies’ home at Stamullen, not far from Dublin, where Sister Benedict had told us that Sister Catherine was now working. It was Sister Catherine, together with Sister Anne, who was in charge of the girls from the mid-50s to the mid 60s, the period about which we were receiving most of our information. The home was a solid Victorian country house set in large and immaculately kept grounds. A girl opened the locked door and went to get the Matron while we waited in the very clean and polished parlour. Not a sound could be heard.

The Matron, a brisk woman in her late thirties with keys on a chain round her waist, came in. We explained that we were writing a book about the Cavan orphanage and would like to meet Sister Catherine or Sister Anne. She told us that they were now in other Poor Clare convents. We asked her if she knew any of the girls who had been in Cavan, mentioning one whom we had heard was working in Stamullen. That girl had left, she replied, and it would be better not to disturb her because she did not like people to know where she came from—indeed, when a couple of other St. Joseph’s girls visited her, she had become ‘almost hysterical’ and said she wanted nothing more to do with the orphanage.

Our conversation with the Matron was brief. She told us that they kept children up to the age of two or three, before adoption. On our way out, and, at our request, she opened the door into a bright quiet room in which there were about twelve babies being tended by two girls. It was all very quiet, the babies placid and plump. There was neither sight nor sound of the toddlers inside the building or outside in the warm spring air.

Afterwards, two of the St. Joseph’s girls told us that the Matron was Sister Theresa, one of the last two nuns in charge of the children in Cavan.
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Some time later, we spoke to a member of the Task Force, a group set up by the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government to implement the Kennedy Report’s recommendations and to work on new legislation
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. He knew nothing of our particular interest in the Cavan orphanage. Going through a list of children’s homes, he pointed to one that he said they were not too happy about. It was the Poor Clare’s Home for Babies at Stamullen.

Not long after our visit, we went—without notice—to the convent in Gormanstown where the Matron had told us we would find Sister Anne. A slim, fine-featured woman in her forties, with an alert, observant expression, came into the room. Quietly she said that she would have to go and ask her Superior’s permission for the interview, but before leaving the room, she asked in a rush, whether we had chosen to write about Cavan because of the fire. ‘No,’ we replied, ‘not just because of the fire’. Hurriedly, she went on: ‘The Sisters were blamed you know, because none of them died, only the children. There was a lot of controversy about it. That place should never have been re-built. Things went on there that should not have happened, but things have changed now. I tried to make the place cosy. I was considered progressive at the time, I wanted to change things, but my ideas were not agreed with. There was a lot of opposition to what I tried to do.’

She left the room to speak to her Mother Superior. She might have stayed longer and said more had she not noticed that we were running a tape-recorder—for which we had not asked permission, the only time we did so. But despite this, she had still appeared to want to talk, almost to get something off her chest. It was quite a while before she returned, and then it was to tell us that she had been instructed that interviews were not permitted; any questions we had should be written down and sent to the Order’s Counsellor. So we prepared a list of basic questions about food, finances, and clothing, and sent it. Receiving no response, we then sent the list to Sister Anne and after some time she replied, apologising for the delay and explaining that she could not answer the questions fully because it was many years since she had been in Cavan.
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