Chapter 6 — Christian Brothers

Impact of religious life on institutional care

There were, however, doubts within the Congregation about the efficacy of the industrial school regime as the best way to prepare children to become upright and decent citizens in a Christian society. These reservations were sometimes expressed in Visitation Reports but were not acted upon by the authorities.

This concern, that the needs of the boys were not being met by the school, clashed with the philosophy of the Congregation and the way of life they advocated for themselves. The boys needed to be prepared for the day ‘when they pass through Artane gates into the wide world’, but the Brothers needed to keep their minds on the spiritual way of life and withdraw from that wide world.

The importance of all the vows taken by the Brothers was emphasised in a circular letter dated 3rd October 1958 from the Superior General to each Christian Brothers’ Community. The Superior General wrote: It is evident that in many of the houses of our Province the rule of silence is not being well observed. The observance of silence has always been regarded as essential to the Religious Life ... Silence is necessary for the practice of recollection without which there can be no spirit of prayer or true holiness of life... The cause of these defections [from the Brothers] is to be found in the loss of the religious spirit due to such secularizing influences as too great intercourse with externs, frequenting places of public resort and undue preoccupation with the news of the day. Our rule warns us against the danger to vocation of holding too great intercourse with externs. The sentiments and outlook of people who live in the world are, of necessity, very different from those of religious. A Brother who frequents the company of seculars either by visiting them in their homes or by holding long and unnecessary conversations with teachers, parents, or domestics will be in danger of imbibing the spirit of the world and losing his esteem for his vocation ... Too great preoccupation with the newspaper or with radio programmes can also be a cause of the loss of the religious spirit by diverting attention from the affairs of the soul and diminishing interest in the spiritual life.

These are values for a spiritual life of religious meditation, but they do not form a basis for training young boys to enter the outside world.

To counteract the attraction of the outside world the Brothers lived a life of religious and secular study. It was not surprising that they applied the same way of life to the boys in their care. Through moral teaching, religious observance and hard work in the school and in the workshops, they sought to change and reform the children. Young boys from poor families were confronted with this regime, and found it arduous. It not merely clashed with the culture from which they came, but it placed them in an all-male world that did not meet the emotional and developmental needs of children and adolescents.

The strict regime, the routine that took away all initiative and placed all its emphasis on following orders, led to the boys becoming institutionalised. Many left to join the army, or drifted into other institutionalised occupations, and far too many ended up in institutions like prisons or in psychiatric care.

A recurrent complaint made by Brothers in their evidence to the Committee and found in the documentation was the unequal division of work.

In his evidence at the public hearing into Letterfrack during Phase I, Br Gibson stated: You see the Brothers who were teaching in the school, who were mainly the young Brothers, they were with the boys almost 24 hours a day; in other words, from 6:00 to 10:00 at night. They would have had very little free time during that period. They slept then in small bedrooms at the end of one of the dormitories. Often those rooms were very simple. There wasn’t heating for a lot of the time. That was their place of living and then they went up to the house for a short period of recreation at night-time, but effectively speaking they were on the job seven days a week.

The vow of obedience made it difficult for these Brothers to voice their disquiet. Junior Brothers were in awe of their seniors in the Community. Each Community that operated an industrial school had senior Brothers who did not work in the school or act as carers but who nevertheless exercised authority and influence over those who fulfilled those arduous duties. Many Brothers spoke of how they resented this unequal burden of labour when they were juniors in the institutions, but felt they could not challenge the system by asking the senior Brothers to do more. Some junior Brothers felt that, because of their lack of seniority, there was no point making suggestions for reform.

Many of the Brothers who gave evidence complained about the difficulties they had in carrying out the onerous dual responsibilities of teaching and caring, which inevitably had an adverse effect on the children.

The failure to train Brothers in childcare

In their Opening Statement on Tralee, the Christian Brothers defined the purpose of industrial schools as being: To cater especially for neglected, orphaned and abandoned children, to safeguard them from developing criminal tendencies and to prepare them for industry.

To achieve this end, children were removed from the backgrounds of neglect and poverty, given a basic education and were taught a trade. In the process, it was believed that they were improved by hard work and religious observance. These objectives remained central to the Christian Brothers’ thinking, and became the basis of the training given to the new recruits. The teaching Brothers were trained as national school teachers, and received no special training in childcare. Many Brothers deplored this fact.

The Brothers explained that this failure to give specialist training was due to the fact that ‘there existed no special training system in Ireland for carers in Industrial Schools’ and that there was no awareness of the emotional needs of children. They had a ‘physical care philosophy’.

In fact, ideas on how to provide better care were being developed abroad. As early as 1943, Dr Anna McCabe, the Medical Inspector of Industrial Schools, attended a course in England and recommended the establishment of a child guidance clinic, but her advice was ignored. The Carysfort Conference of 1951 revealed that there was expertise in the State on care issues. Members of the Sisters of Charity went to England to do Home Office courses and returned with schemes to reorganise the system of care homes they provided.

No such training was undertaken by the Christian Brothers until, in the early 1970s, Br Burcet17, who had worked in senior positions in both Letterfrack and Artane, attended the course in the School of Education in Kilkenny in 1973, and implemented some of what he had learned in the last remaining industrial school operated by the Brothers, Salthill. He recalled his frustration in Artane in the mid-1960s when he was trying to change teaching methods and to introduce psychological expertise. He felt that he was engaged in an uphill struggle and that there was no understanding of the importance of this kind of approach among the Leadership of the Congregation.