Chapter 1 — Department of Education

Part 4 The Cussen Commission

The Cussen Commission considered the role to be one which required ‘qualifications and gifts that might not be considered indispensable in ordinary schools’. Consequently, the choice of person to fulfil this role was regarded as a most important decision and it was recommended that ultimate approval for this post should rest with the Minister for Education. The Report went further to state that the Minister for Education should also have the power to remove Resident Managers who were derelict in their duties. The report maintained ‘that it should be within the competence of the Minister to report to his or her Superior, with a view to replacement, a Manager who is found unsatisfactory’.

The response to this recommendation came in the form of section 5 of the 1941 Act, which gave the Minister the power, for the first time, to direct the removal of the Resident Manager. If the Minister is satisfied that the Resident Manager of a certified school has failed or neglected to discharge efficiently the duties of his position or that he is unsuitable or unfit to discharge those duties, the Minister may request the managers of the school to remove such Resident Manager from his position and the managers shall comply with such requests (unless withdrawn) within one month after receipt thereof.

Crucially, however, the Act did not allow the Minister for Education the power of veto over the selection of a Manager or approve appointees to the role as recommended by Cussen, though this had been part of the Bill as introduced in the Dáil. The Resident Managers’ Association was against this change and protested to the Department and also lobbied the Opposition party who supported their protests. The Government withdrew the provision at committee stage in the Dáil and substituted a new section 5, which gave the Minister no power at the appointment stage and merely provided that the Minister had to be notified of the appointment within 10 days of its occurring. Following the appointment of a Resident Manager a Departmental form known as ACA 1 was completed by the new Resident Manager and by the representative of the Managers of the school and returned to the Department in accordance with the legislation.

The Department of Education was reluctant to exercise its power of removal. There are only two known occasions where the Department invoked this power: the removal of the Resident Managers from Lenaboy, Industrial School, Galway and St Michael’s Cappoquin in Waterford.

In 1942 an internal Department of Education memo discussed the findings of Dr Anna McCabe’s inspection of Lenaboy Industrial School. The inspection report expressed grave unease at the actions of the Resident Manager. The produce of the garden was sold. The old sister in charge of the kitchen protested against the starvation of the children – she and another old sister were removed and replaced by two young novices who dare not challenge the Superior’s orders. It is rumoured that the tea ration is also sold. (It is certain that the children have not been getting it.) The suggestion made by Dr McCabe last year that skipping ropes and a net ball should be provided evoked the remark If she thinks I’m going to throw away my money on skipping ropes, she’s mad.

The memorandum reiterates Dr McCabe’s concerns The Resident Manager is a miserly, ruthless old woman of 70 years who has as her objective the reduction of the debt on the institution. She has been hardened by age and a lifetime spent in Magdalene Homes. She has no experience of children and has no sympathy with them. Her fortes are finance and farming. She set about obtaining her end with cold thoroughness.

An official at the Department of Education stated in a memo that Lenaboy represented a ’clear case for action under section 5(4) of the 1941 Act’. On 14th September 1943, the Department wrote to the Mother Superior stating that the Minister felt the Resident Manager of Lenaboy was unsuitable for the role and asked that she be removed from that position and a more suitable person be appointed in her place. Over one week later on 23rd September 1943 the Mother Superior of the Order replied to the Department to say that a new Resident Manager had been appointed.

As with Lenaboy, the removal of the Resident Manager was precipitated by an inspection by Dr Anna McCabe in 1943. Dr McCabe found the children to be undernourished, where 61 out of the 75 boys in the school were under the normal weight for their age-height groups. An internal Department of Education memorandum referred to St Michael’s as ‘another school run by the Sisters of Mercy’ with ‘a long record of semi-starvation’. After much bitter correspondence the Department was forced to issue a statutory request for the removal of the Resident Manager whom Dr McCabe described as a ‘ruthless domineering person who resents any criticism and challenges advice’. After much wrangling, a new Resident Manager was eventually installed.

This incident is an excellent illustration of the relationship between the religious Orders and the State. The requests for the improvement in diet in the school had begun in December 1943 following an inspection report. The removal of the Resident Manger was requested under statute by the Minister in September 1944 but only came about in November 1944. The lack of urgency following a statutory request by the Minister of Education and the language used by the school in the correspondence with the Department is further evidence of the timidity of the Department in dealing with the school. For instance in response to the statutory request to remove the Resident Manager the reverend mother replied a week later ‘I am looking into the matter and will communicate with you later’.

On the other hand, these cases demonstrate that, when the Department was prepared to insist and to invoke the statutory power, the religious authorities responded.

The Cussen Report also recommended that schools should have no more than 250 children at one time which would permit the Manager ‘to make every pupil feel that the Manager is his guardian and friend’. With this in mind the Report advocated the division of Artane, which at that time was home to over 800 boys. The Report recommended that Artane be subdivided into four separate schools, each with its own Manager, segregating the children according to age and attainments. However the Christian Brothers argued against the division of Artane in their submission to the Cussen Committee; Again it is said: ‘Artane is too large’. We reply that nevertheless it has exceeded beyond all expectations. We would go further and say that in its largeness lies its chief merit and advantage; for it is size and its multiplicity of activities that afford exercise to those following the various trades, etc within its own precincts...We hold that its great educative value is due to its size, and accompanying circumstances; for if a boy has only moderate intelligence, it must develop owing to the thousand and one influences to which he is subject.

This recommendation of the Cussen Commission was never implemented by the Department of Education and, as preferred by the Christian Brothers, Artane remained as a single institution.

Until the changes brought about by the Kennedy Report in the 1970s, the staff of the schools seldom if ever had any education or training for their exacting role in childcare. The view seems to have been taken by the Department that the training and development of religious and lay staff in the institutions was largely a matter for the religious Orders.

This lack had been perceived by the Cussen Commission, which sent questionnaires to school Managers regarding the qualifications and numbers of teaching staff within their schools. The information received showed a large deficit in the numbers of qualified literary teachers. The schools which completed the questionnaire disclosed that in the girls schools there were 81 teachers of literary subjects of whom only six were trained; the equivalent for senior boys schools was 73 literary teachers of whom 38 were trained. Reformatory Schools’ educational standards were deemed to be of an even lower standard than Industrial Schools: Cussen commented that ‘the standard of teaching and qualifications of the teachers in Reformatories are not high’.

It was also the case that there was a lack of fully trained teachers because, commencing in 1932, on the basis of a request from the Christian Brothers, it became the policy of the Department of Education to allow Brothers to interrupt and defer completion of the required two-year teacher training after one year and to work in schools, with a view to completing their training within three years. In 1943 the Department agreed to extend this to a period of five years. Upon completion of their first year of teacher training the Brothers then became known as untrained assistants, who under the Rules and Regulations for National Schools, were allowed to teach in a temporary capacity for up to five years. This relaxation was extended to the other Orders in 1943 and came to an end only in 1962-63.