Children Of The Poor Clares (30 page)

We asked her about several of the Cavan girls sent there in the late 50s and early 60s. This, she said, would have been before her time, but she did remember one—Therese Dwyer.
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‘She tried to burn down the place. She was very disturbed. We used to get a lot of girls from Industrial Schools, but this has changed. A lot of the Homes are looking after their past pupils better; they have better chances of education and are not just thrown into the world at sixteen.’

She thought the turning point for children in care had been the publication of the Kennedy Report: ‘Though to be quite honest I think it was obsolete before it was published. It came at a time when there was an upsurge into child care anyway. It slated some of the Industrial Schools wholesale, but the changes were already taking place. We all know there were terrible things, but it annoys me slightly when society gets up on its high horse and says “Oh, the way the nuns were looking after the girls!” But they didn’t want us to look after them in any other way. The type of care you get in any society reflects the society in which you live.’

We asked her under what section of the Act Industrial School girls would have been sent to the institution prior to its present official certification by the Department of Education. Sister Angela could not remember exactly what section, but that it was a clause that permitted children to be sent away for special courses and special education. We asked how this was financed. Their grants, she replied, were transferred by the schools.
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Although a 1957 amendment to the 1908 Act does state that during a period of detention, an Industrial School manager may grant a leave of absence to attend a course of instruction at another school either as a boarder or a day pupil, it is difficult to see how these requirements were fulfilled at Gloucester Street or similar institutions. The ‘course of training’ could hardly have applied to the laundry since the girls were already trained in the laundry at Cavan. Furthermore, their committal orders expired at the age of sixteen, with a period of vague and unfunded ‘supervision’ until eighteen.

As for those other women, who had been sent there for ‘preventative and preservative’ reasons, the authors could find no legal process by which they were put into this ‘custodial-type’ care. In effect, this and similar uncertified institutions had operated as unregulated private prisons in an extra-legal penal system. The State, however, had not protested this situation, but had colluded in it. The most shockingly blatant documentary evidence of Church-State collusion in illegality we encountered was the letter to Mrs. Hillery from Brian Lenihan, as Minister of Education, concurring with Bridget’s
de
facto
imprisonment in the Limerick laundry-reformatory when she was 17 years old. This, he wrote, was at the behest of the Mother Superior of the Industrial School run by the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Refuge in High Park, Dublin—where Bridget had spent her childhood.
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We caught a glimpse of the ‘backlog’ and the ‘inadequate’ ex-Industrial School pupils, referred to by Sister Angela, when she gave us a brief tour of the laundry before we left. One sensed that whether the doors to the outside world were now locked or unlocked, the women we saw working there would be unable to leave.

Some time later we were to meet a woman who had worked for the County Cavan Health Authority during the early 1960s, administering the 1953 Health Act.
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She told us that only under rare circumstances and for short-term stays were ‘Health Act’ children put into St. Joseph’s. It was, she said, considered a ‘last resort.’ Her visits to the Industrial School were mostly on the few occasions that children had been admitted there by her department. She had, however, gone to complain several times when her office had not been notified that girls had left. Even though most of the children there were committed through the Department of Education, the after-care of all of them was the responsibility of her department. On one occasion when she went to protest, she recalled a Mother Abbess sweeping out of the room saying ‘Just you try prosecuting me!’ This Mother Abbess, she said, would not let her go straight into the orphanage. ‘She didn’t like it. They’d give you tea in the parlour all right, but they didn’t want you to go any further. You have to remember that the Church was a law unto itself.’

We told this woman that according to information we had received from the girls, some of them had been sent away to work before their committal periods were up. She was astonished to hear this. She said that the grants for all the girls, whether under the Departments of Health or Education, passed through the local office where she had worked. She was absolutely sure that, according to the returns, none of them had officially left St. Joseph’s before the age of release at sixteen.

There were several implications from this information. The Order, as we have already established, had flouted Industrial School regulations, and had also broken the laws of the land. Now, there was the additional question about the misuse of state funds if the Order was receiving money for children who were no longer in residence.

Our first contact with the Department of Education, Special Schools Section, took place in 1975. We were given much assistance finding the documentation we were seeking—though we were not allowed any access to the department’s records about St. Joseph’s, or any of the records about other Industrial Schools which we were told were confidential.
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We were helped to photocopy the 1908 Children’s Act, the amending Acts, and the report of the inquiry into the Cavan fire, all of which we had been unable to obtain elsewhere and without which our book would have lacked much of its strength.
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Thus, ironically, it was with the Department’s aid, that we obtained the information that would necessitate our eventual confrontation. Official reports and studies of the Industrial Schools system had always been written from an establishment position. Both of us, clearly middle-class, would have been expected to toe the usual line.

While the bureaucracy was not directly responsible for the devastating effect of the absence of love, kindness and warmth in the children’s lives, it was responsible for failing to ensure the implementation of those laws and regulations which would have prevented the worst excesses of the children’s treatment as well as providing them with their basic needs of food and clothing. Because we had no access to departmental records, we did not know that the Department had also persistently blocked efforts to reform the system. Nor did we know that the Department had backed up resistance and objections by Church authorities and the Schools’ Managers to suggestions that impoverished parents be given financial assistance to maintain their children.
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Thirty years later, a man who had been a pupil at Artane Industrial School was to tell an inquiry into the abuse in these schools that he and others who had been through the system wanted ‘the people who sat behind the desks at the Department of Education, who ran a system, who thought it was perfectly natural to come to work every day and to preside over a child imprisonment system, we want all of those exposed… These we call the desk criminals… ‘.

In April 1976 we had a meeting with Mr. Leo O Criodhain, the civil servant in charge of the Special Schools Section with responsibility for what had been Industrial Schools, but which since 1970 had been renamed ‘Residential Homes.’ We had written to three of these Homes asking whether we could visit them. The managers had referred our request to Mr. O Criodhain and he wrote to us, asking us to contact him. At first his main concern was to impress on us that the Homes were private.
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We pointed out that they were certificated and in receipt of public money. ‘We all try to do our best for the children,’ he responded, adding that he could see no point in writing about a fire that had taken place thirty years before. ‘Surely you should write about what would help the children now, and how can your book do that?’

By agreement we had delivered in advance a list of the questions we wanted to ask him. For example: ‘What steps were taken to ensure that the Dietary Scales were implemented if the accounts were not scrutinized? Could we see an example of the Cavan dietary? Could we see an example of a notification of punishment as required by the Act?’ Mr. O Criodhain seemed nervous and said that the answers were not available. We had asked about children being sent out to work from the age of ten, as late as the 1960s. He replied that it was not possible to see ‘individual confidential reports.’ We wanted to know why the accounts of the Industrial Schools were not audited annually. He replied that he ‘believed’ accounts were not audited. When we started to ask questions about the process by which girls had been sent to ‘Gloucester Street’, he said with increased agitation ‘I don’t think we’d better delve into that terrain’, and, as though excusing his department, added that it had not been certificated.

Mr. O Criodhain said that he and his colleagues were working ‘round the clock’ attempting to implement all the 1970 Kennedy Report recommendations. What about the recommendation that all children in care should be under the administration of the Department of Health, we asked. He did not think this was necessarily more efficient because ‘the people here know their job.’ Repeatedly he said that he had not been in charge during any of the period covered by our book. We asked who had been in charge then? None were around, he replied. One person was in England and others were dead.

This meeting with Mr. O Criodhain took place before our final conversation with the Mother General. It is possible that he or someone else may have contacted her to warn her about the direction of our research. If so, this may have been the explanation for her subsequent abrupt change of attitude

Some time later we had a discussion with an administrative officer in the department who had recently been given responsibility for Residential Homes. He told us that Mr. O Criodhain had now been transferred. ‘He was an Industrial Schools inspector for years, you know.’

What was potentially the most fundamentally damaging attack on the Department of Education’s failure to fulfil its statutory obligations towards children committed to the Schools was made in the Dail in December 1970 by Dr. Garrett FitzGerald, then a Fine Gael TD, a liberal Catholic intellectual, a lawyer, journalist, and academic economist. Obviously apprised of the requirements of the 1908 Children’s Act, and of what had been going on in the Schools, he requested that the dietary scale drawn up by the medical officers of the Schools be made available in the House library. The Minister’s Parliamentary Secretary, Mr. O’Kennedy, answered that there was no useful purpose in this, particularly since the scale had been improved following major grant increases the previous year. Dr. FitzGerald persisted and then—citing clauses of the Schools’ regulations—asked for details about the hours that the children were working, their education and training. Crucially, he also wanted to know whether the punishment books had been maintained, and if so, he wanted Members to be able to inspect the books. O’Kennedy dismissed the regulatory requirements as being irrelevant to the present day—the children now went to local schools and no Schools now kept a punishment book. Did this mean that the children were no longer being punished? asked Dr. FitzGerald. It did not mean that, said O’Kennedy, but couldn’t explain why the books weren’t kept. Wasn’t this a serious abuse when the regulations had been laid down to protect children? To this O’Kennedy responded that they related to ‘Dickensian times’ and that the Schools were ‘properly inspected.’ That was the end of the matter, and although Dr. FitzGerald was later to serve as Taoiseach, between 1981 and 1987, he did not revisit the issue in the Dail. Perhaps, like us, he had been assured that all was now well.

Over a period of some months we tried to contact Dr. Anna McCabe, the now retired Medical Inspector for Industrial Schools and Reformatories, but were always informed that she was away. We tried to meet the retired National Schools Inspector for the Cavan area. He refused to see us, saying that ‘the nuns did their best for the children.’ Formal interviews were requested with those men still alive who had exercised ultimate government control for Industrial Schools up until the closure of St. Joseph’s Cavan: the Ministers for Education. All refused.

At that time, Ministers since Independence had been: Michael Hayes (one term); Eoin McNeill (one term); J.M. O’Sullivan (four terms); Richard Mulcahy (two terms); Sean Moylan one term); Thomas Derrig (seven terms); Sean T. O’Ceallaigh (one term); Sean T. O’Ceallaigh (one term); Eamonn de Valera (one term); Jack Lynch one term); Patrick J. Hillery (two terms); George Colley (one term); Donough O’Malley (two terms); Brian Lenihan (one term). Four of them became Presidents of the Republic: Eamonn de Valera, Sean T. O’Ceallaigh, Patrick J. Hillery and Brian Lenihan. Jack Lynch served as Taoiseach from 1966-73 and 1977-9.

We were, however, granted an interview with Padraig Faulkner, who had been Minister for Education in the Fianna Fail government from 1969-73. This covered the period of the 1970 Kennedy Report—although it would not be for three years, and under another government, that the Report would be the subject of debate in either houses of Dail Eireann, and then it was in the Senate—a reflection of the urgency and importance accorded the issue under his watch. Nevertheless, it was during Mr. Faulkner’s period in office that the process of replacing Industrial Schools with group homes and Residential Homes was activated.
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Mr. Faulkner was known to be a kindly, unpretentious and decent man. He started by telling us that the first thing he had done as Minister was to visit a boys’ reformatory. ‘The staff was doing a good job in spite of the old buildings and bad facilities.’ He had ordered a new Special School—their new name—to be built to replace it. We reminded him that we had come to see him about Industrial Schools, not Reformatory Schools. ‘Same thing,’ he said. ‘I saw them all as deprived children.’ While this was true, we had to remind him that former pupils of Industrial Schools had always suffered from association in the public mind with those who had broken the law. Mr. Faulkner could not agree.