Chapter 1 — Department of Education

Concluding comment

The Department of Education bore responsibility for the children placed by the State in its care. There was no other body to watch over the interests of one of the most vulnerable groups in the community.

The Department retained the Industrial and Reformatory School system inherited in 1922, making only a few minor changes when circumstances demanded them. The Department continued to see itself, as Richard Mulcahy, the Minister for Education, put it, as ‘the man with the oil-can’ who goes around attending to squeaks but makes no fundamental change to the machinery.

The unit dealing with the schools was at a very low level in the hierarchy of the Department. It had considerable powers, but it lacked the initiative and authority to do anything more than maintain the status quo, and keep the costs down. When alternative strategies for helping children in care emerged, such as boarding out, they were ignored. The Department of Education’s submission to the Commission stated: We do not have any records to suggest that this was actively considered by the Department. The Department did not see itself as having an active policy or operational role in the committal of children to institutions and it seems likely that it would have taken the view that the question of boarding out was a matter for the Department of Health. Could the government have done more to make the schools better run?

Assuming that the Industrial Schools or something like them would have had to exist for some children, much could have been done by the Department of Education to improve their operation.

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.