- Volume 1
- Volume 2
-
Volume 3
- Introduction
- Methodology
- Social and demographic profile of witnesses
- Circumstances of admission
- Family contact
- Everyday life experiences (male witnesses)
- Record of abuse (male witnesses)
- Everyday life experiences (female witnesses)
- Record of abuse (female witnesses)
- Positive memories and experiences
- Current circumstances
- Introduction to Part 2
- Special needs schools and residential services
- Children’s Homes
- Foster care
- Hospitals
- Primary and second-level schools
- Residential Laundries, Novitiates, Hostels and other settings
- Concluding comments
- Volume 4
Chapter 1 — Department of Education
BackConcluding comment
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.