Chapter 1 — Department of Education

Concluding comment

The Department was, firstly, lacking in detailed information. The inspections were too few and too limited in scope. The failure to insist on an external review on at least two occasions during the period between Cussen and Kennedy was supine. The need for some kind of external informed supervision of the certified schools is self-evident. If the Department had been in possession of better information about the schools, it would have been in a stronger position to exercise control. In addition, greater openness would probably have reduced the level of abuse: sunshine is the best disinfectant. It is plain too from the chapters on individual schools that officials did know of many of the abuses that were going on in the schools.

The Department of Education should have exercised more of its ample legal powers over the schools in the interests of the children. The power to remove a Manager given to the Department in 1941 should have been exercised or even threatened on more than the handful of occasions when it was invoked. This would have emphasised the State’s right to intervene on behalf of a vulnerable group.

The Department was woefully lacking in ideas about policy and made no attempt to impose changes that would have improved the lot of the detained children.

Finally, evidence of the failures by the Department that are catalogued in the chapters on the schools can also be seen as tacit acknowledgment by the State of the ascendancy of the Congregations and their ownership of the system. The Department’s Secretary General, at a public hearing, told the Investigation Committee that the Department had shown a ‘very significant deference’ towards the religious Congregations. This deference impeded change, and it took the Kennedy Report in 1971 to begin the process of dismantling the Industrial and Reformatory School system.