Children Of The Poor Clares (31 page)

‘I started with the premise that the child was not bad. I set up Residential Homes instead of orphanages, and brought in the idea of having men as well as women in charge. I cannot take the credit for what I did, and I cannot answer for what my predecessors did or said, but, on the other hand, I support them. Times change, the electorate and attitudes of society alter. What was possible by the time I was in power would not have been possible before. I probably would not have tried to make the changes that I did had I been in office at an earlier time.’

We referred to laws and regulations having been broken. ‘You’ve got to remember that attitudes have changed,’ he replied. ‘Before Vatican II it was a matter of the individual and his faith. Now we have learned to be more concerned with the total community; with all human beings.’ He enlarged on the subject of changes in the spiritual life. ‘Some things were taboo then which are acceptable now… My predecessor brought in free secondary education in 1967—you have to bear that in mind when you talk about these children not getting a good education.’

We mentioned the lack of nourishing food—the girls having only one egg a year, even in the prosperous 1960s. ‘If you remember, teenagers are always hungry,’ he replied. ‘I was brought up on a farm and things were not easy for anyone. People forget this, and you can’t judge yesterday by today’s physical standards.’ We pointed out that our ‘yesterday’ had only ended in 1967 in Cavan. ‘You must,’ he politely admonished us, ‘be objective.’

He denied any knowledge of girls being sent to non-certificated reformatories. On being told that they had often been sent away to work from an early age, he said ‘I’m not accepting that happened. I could not believe that.’ He wondered if we had ever talked to anyone who had something good to say about Industrial Schools. We said we had not.
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‘I only got one complaint about a Residential Home,’ he said. ‘I investigated it at once in person. I asked around and it was completely without foundation.’ What was the nature of the complaint? ‘It was’ replied Mr. Faulkner, ‘about cleanliness.’

CHAPTER TEN
 

Aftermath: An Accounting

‘A
light
has
been
shone
into
the
dark
corners
of
both
our
past
and
present,
and
these
victims
have
performed
an
immense
service
in
challenging
our
collective
complacency.
They
have
shown
us
that
we
cannot
put
the
past
behind
us
by
ignoring
it.
We
must
confront
it
and
learn
its
lessons.
That
is
the
least
we
can
do
to
address
the
injustices
of
the
past
and
the
dangers
of
the
present.’

An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, 11 May 1999

‘
 . . .
the
apology
given
by
Bertie
Ahern
was
not
something
he
gave
willingly.
It
was
brought
about
by
the
revulsion
of
people
who
watched
the
States
of
Fear
programmes
on
RTE
 . . .
As
Taoiseach,
Mr.
Ahern
and
various
members
of
his
Government
were
aware
before
the
screening
 . . .
that
institutional
abuse
of
children
in
the
care
of
the
State
was
widespread
 . . .
Mr.
Ahern’s
apology
didn’t
touch
my
heart.’

Ex-Industrial school pupil, Paddy Doyle, April 2008.

‘Bertie
Ahern
had
completely
side-stepped
the
main
issue:
that
the
State
had
run
a
Gulag
of
prisons
for
children,
 . . . ‘Bruce Arnold
:
‘The
Irish
Gulag:
How
the
State
Betrayed
its
Innocent
Children.’

Nearly forty years have passed since the authors first made the decision to tell this story. For a long time we were unable to find a publisher willing to accept our manuscript. Several in the Republic read it, expressed interest in the subject, but told us that it would be too controversial for them to handle. A number of major publishers in England considered it, but each time withdrew, indicating that they felt it inadvisable to tackle such a delicate subject for fear of antagonizing their neighbour across the Irish Sea. After several years, when we had almost given up, a small independent publisher in Belfast agreed to take it on, and brought out the book in 1985. Public response was muted, disbelieving, and mostly censorious. The disapproval was not of those who had abused the children or failed in their duty to protect them: it was of the authors—and of the ex-pupils who were reprimanded for their ingratitude towards the Sisters and Brothers. The culpability of the State was ignored.

The publication of
The
Children
of
the
Poor
Clares
nevertheless had breached the wall of silence that surrounded the cruel reality of Ireland’s Industrial School system, documenting for the first time the disastrous effect upon the children of the symbiotic relationship between Church and State. By creating a layered and human picture of one School, we were able to show the irreparable damage inflicted upon young lives by the very people into whose care they had been entrusted. We had also exposed the timid acquiescence in this situation by governments, politicians and civil servants who had thus failed to carry out the fundamental duty of the State to protect its most helpless citizens, the thousands of Irish children who, in the words of the Bishop of Kilmore in his funeral oration after the fire in 1943, ‘had not the care of their parents’.

By 1985, the vast network of institutions spread around the country to warehouse thousands of imprisoned children was disappearing. But the gradual closing of the Industrial Schools and Reformatories had done nothing to offer any solution or recompense for the broken and damaged lives of so many of the men and women who had been through the old system—the number of those still alive was estimated in 1999 to be anything from 20,000 to 30,000. And, paradoxically, the system’s slow dismantling and apparent disappearance had the effect of leaving them even more isolated and unacknowledged.

When we were doing the research for the book in the mid-1970s, many people tried to dissuade us from pursuing the project with the assurance that whatever we had heard about the past, times and conditions had changed for the better. We thought that possibly this might be true because formal recognition was at last being given to the needs of children. From the beginning of the 1960s, the number of children being committed to Industrial Schools had declined sharply. There were several reasons for this: increased prosperity, a fall in the birth-rate, and the expansion of social services meant there were fewer destitute children in need of care. It was also becoming more widely understood even in Ireland that incarcerating children in large institutions was detrimental to their emotional health and well-being. St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan was one of seventeen Industrial Schools which had already closed during the 1960s before the publication of the Kennedy Report in 1970. The Report, together with the findings of the O.E.C.D.,
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had accelerated the process; residential child care became focused on the development of smaller units, and in 1984 the responsibility for children in care was finally transferred from the Department of Education to the Department of Health which placed more emphasis on the use of foster homes.

When we were given permission to visit the Residential Home for Junior Boys (as they were known by then) in Passage West, we had been heartened and impressed by the openness, warmth and good sense of the Sister in charge, and by the relaxed relationship between the staff and the children. But we had heard enough to suspect that not all the Homes were like that, and we knew that some of the worst offenders in the system were still in charge of children. Furthermore, the legislation remained unchanged and proportionately far more children were still in institutional care in Ireland than in North America or Great Britain. Also, much of the old system remained in place, and nothing had been done to implement the Kennedy Report’s crucial recommendation that an independent advisory body with statutory powers be established ‘to ensure that the highest standards of Child Care are attained and maintained.’ Combined with the endemic absence of openness on the part of the administration, and an almost willful naïveté, the failure to implement this recommendation was probably a contributory factor in the notorious incidents of child abuse in residential homes by both lay and religious staff that are now known to have taken place in the decades since 1970.

Although the public may not have wanted to know about the Schools, the story would not go away. It had only entered a new phase. Much of what we ourselves wanted to believe had been relegated to history was in fact the present.

*       *       *

In 1971, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy of the Irish Sisters of Charity, a leading figure in child care, established the first professional training course for child-care, in Kilkenny. In 1997, one of its graduates, a lay child-care worker, David Murray, was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for gross sexual abuse during the 1970s of several young boys in St. Joseph’s Industrial School, Kilkenny, run by the same Order. Two of his male colleagues were also later charged. There was no inquiry into how this could have happened. Similar charges were laid against child-care workers and employees at a number of the residential child-care facilities which were superseding the Industrial Schools. Most of them were lay workers, but not all.

In 1979, a Brother was expelled from St. Joseph’s Industrial School in Clonmel, run by the Rosminian Order, after allegations of sexual abuse were made against him by three boys. Though the authorities were notified, no charges were brought by the gardai. Allegations of sexual abuse during the late 1980s were made against two de la Salle Brothers at St. Lawrence’s Residential School, Finglas. An internal Departmental investigation determined that no further action was need. In 1989 gardai began investigations into gross sexual abuse of children at a small residential home run by Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge in Cualan, Co. Dublin. The man alleged to have assaulted the children had disappeared. No inquiry followed.

In 1993, Frank Griffiths, a maintenance worker at Madonna House, run by the Sisters of Charity, was convicted of the sexual assault of several children in residence there during the 1980s and into the 1990s, and was sentenced to four years imprisonment. There was an inquiry, held jointly by the Sisters and by the State, but its report was heavily censored by the Government before it was released, making it impossible for lessons to be learned from what had happened. It is, however, known than those expurgated sections described a harsh and punitive old-style regime, and also contained allegations that a trainee priest had sexually assaulted two boys in the Home in 1980. The Sisters of Charity offered a public apology. Expressing their deep regret, they also added that it was important ‘not to lose sight of the many hundreds of children in our care, who experienced only love, care and safety from very committed staff.’

Although Madonna House was closed in 1995, there had been no admission of responsibility in their apology, nor in the 1998 statement these Sisters made regretting what had happened at St. Joseph’s, Kilkenny. This too was issued in response to public disgust, after the criminal courts had exposed the depravity inflicted on young boys in this institution. In 1998 after several Christian Brothers had been arrested and were awaiting trial on sexual assault charges relating to boys in their Industrial Schools, members of the Order issued a statement expressing deep regret to anyone who suffered ill-treatment while in their care. Again, there was no mention of responsibility for what had taken place.