Chapter 1 — Department of Education

Part 5 The inspection system

The widespread underfeeding of children was of particular concern to Dr McCabe, who disagreed with the Cussen Report’s findings of 1936 that had described the diet of these children as ‘on the whole adequate.’ Dr McCabe instituted a system of revised diet scales, nutritional education and comprehensive medical charts recording the weight and height of each child, which she used as evidence of underfeeding in the schools. In a letter sent from the Department of Education to the Department of Finance, recognition is given to the value of correct medical records and stated that these charts ‘brought about a marked improvement’.

The Department did try to address the near-starvation level of diet during World War II. An attempt at serious thinking is shown in a letter of 13th January 1945 from the Assistant Secretary in the Department to the Minister for Finance. The Medical Inspector has stated time and again that the general standard of nutrition is too low. This grave state of affairs is due, to a degree, which varies depending on the individual School, to: 1.Inability to provide adequate quantities of food owing to the rise in prices; 2.Failure to do so owing to parsimony; and 3.Failure to provide a properly balanced diet (even when the quantity is adequate) owing to lack of training in the management if institutions for children and ignorance of fundamental deictic principles. As to (1), the payment of the State capitation grant on all committed children and the increase from 5s to 7s per week of the State and local authority grants for children under 6, (both changes took effect as from the1st of July last), have done something to ease the schools’ financial position. When pressed to improve diet, however, managers complain continually that they cannot afford to do so, or that they can do so only by economising elsewhere e.g. in clothing. The Association of Managers has applied for an emergency bonus of 5s per week per child. There is no doubt that the schools, particularly the smaller ones and those that have no farms or very small ones have a case for an emergency increase in their income if they are to be compelled to maintain, and in many cases, to improve upon, their pre-war standards of food and clothing. As to (2), the strongest possible action has been taken in all cases where the Department was satisfied that parsimony was the predominant cause of gross malnutrition. Two resident managers have been removed from office at the request of the Minister for Education. Others have been solemnly warned and will be removed in due course if there is no adequate improvement. (in one such case in Co. Cork the warning was given personally by the Secretary of the Department accompanied by the Inspector of Reformatory and industrial Schools.) As to (3), this is a contributory cause of malnutrition in all schools, particularly those conducted by nuns, and an effort to eradicate it is an essential part of the general attack on malnutrition. It is proposed to have a course in institutional management next summer and to invite the Sister or Sisters in charge of the catering in each of the 43 schools conducted by nuns to attend. The City of Dublin Vocational Committee will be asked to conduct the course in Coláiste Muire la Tigheas, Cathal Brugha Street, and to make available the services of professors on their staff who are highly skilled in those subjects. From preliminary discussions between officers of the Committee and the Department it has been ascertained that the course could be specially designed to suit the actual conditions existing in the schools. It would deal with fundamentals of institutional cookery as applied to industrial schools needs, on costing, storage, and preparation of foodstuff. In addition, the Department’s Medical Inspector would avail of the opportunity to give some lecture on balance in diet, hygiene, etc. The course should last for four weeks. Having regard to the background out of which this proposal emerges persistent pressure by the Department on the schools to spend more money on food and constant complaints from the schools that they cannot afford to do so it will be clear that the course must not involve the schools in any expense if there is to be a reasonable prospect of securing their cooperation. It is proposed to make a grant of £9 towards the expense of each nuns travelling expenses, £6 for four weeks hostel expenses in Dublin, and £1 for materials and part maintenance (they will eat the meals they prepare). Nuns from Dublin City schools would receive the grant of £1 only.

In a long memo of 25th November 1944 written by Dr McCabe to a senior colleague she enclosed height and weight charts as a background to her scientific account of her attempts to get the schools to feed the children appropriate and nourishing food. The following quotation gives the flavour: For a considerable time past I have been carrying on a campaign for an improvement in the diet scales in the industrial and Reformatory Schools. Shortly after my appointment in 1939 I revised all the diet scales and advised individual schools as to deficiencies in the diet scale. On the whole I secured a measure of cooperation. I introduced many items of food to the school diet which were not then in use because they were unknown to the school managers. For a time all went well but that was in the halcyon days when food was plentiful and fairly cheap. The position on this regard cannot now be regarded as satisfactory.

In the early part of her career Dr McCabe was vociferous in her demands for improvements in diet and conditions in the schools and was quick to inform the Managers of her dissatisfaction. In a memo sent by Dr McCabe to the Department on 25th November 1944, it is clear that her reforms were often met with resistance from the schools and only instituted when Departmental pressure was applied: In the great majority of schools the children get a bare subsistence diet and nothing more. I have had abundant and convincing proof of this and have effected an improvement in conditions in some of the schools only after the strongest measures were used, e.g., Lenaboy and Passage West.

The Resident Managers often ascribed failings on their part with regard to the shelter and diet of the children to the inadequate funding received from the Department. The unavailability of funds was proffered as an excuse by both the Department of Education and the Resident Managers, in response to many of the weaknesses cited in the inspection reports. Consequently, Dr McCabe’s work was hampered by the ongoing capitation negotiations between the Congregations and the Departments of Education and Finance. At the end of her period in office in 1964, she wrote: I am constantly pressing for further improvements but I am met with the same query from all concerned ‘Where is the money to come from’... This state of affairs puts me in a very invidious position as I am unable to have the further improvements envisaged by me implemented.

Following an inspection of Letterfrack in 1957, Dr McCabe described the difficulty she faced in attempting to improve conditions in the schools: I would really like to see a number of improvements here- clothing, living conditions and cooking arrangements. I have often made suggestions but each time I feel up against a stone wall as always I am told increase the grant – give more money and of course I realize their difficulties – but all the same I will have to insist on better conditions for the boys. Br. Murphy the Resident Manager is very argumentative and difficult to persuade.

Dr McCabe advocated a strong response to Resident Managers who refused to implement recommendations: in striking contrast to the usual emollient words used by the Department, her correspondence with certain Resident Managers was often peppered with strong language and demands for improvements. One such letter to the reverend mother of Newtownforbes in 1940, in relation to unsanitary conditions and neglect of sick children, states: ‘I cannot find any excuse which would exonerate you and your staff.’ The inspector felt the best course of action was to hit the schools in their purses and threatened to reduce or remove state funding or certification if the Resident Managers did not comply Nevertheless, the Department considered it ‘impolitic’ to withdraw the certificates of suitability. However, Dr McCabe did succeed in having two Resident Managers removed from their positions as a direct result of her inspection reports.

Ensuring that the children received adequate food appears to have been Dr McCabe’s primary focus; the common use of excessive corporal punishment does not figure as prominently in her work. In her general report of 1964 she states: Corporal punishment was very prevalent when I first visited the schools, beating of children being quite commonplace; in addition there was a form of sadism deplored by me the cutting of girls hair and the shaving of boys heads. All this has been virtually eliminated except for the unfortunate example of the nuns in Bundoran.

Yet, so far as one can make deductions from a negative, there exists little to suggest that Dr McCabe actively attempted to prevent the excessive physical punishment of boys. Where criticism did exist it was levelled mostly against the girls schools. In 1940, upon finding girls in the infirmary in Newtownforbes showing signs of physical abuse, Dr McCabe wrote a scathing letter to the Resident Manager, in which she wrote; I was not satisfied in finding so many of the girls in the infirmary suffering from bruises on their bodies. Under no circumstances can the Department tolerate treatment of this nature and you being responsible for the care of these children will have some difficulty in avoiding censure.

Conversely in a boys’ reformatory the punishment received by a number of the children appeared to contravene Department regulations, Dr McCabe is not recorded as having challenged the Resident Manager. In a report to the Department on the basis of a complaint from the father of a resident of Daingean concerning excessive corporal punishment, Dr McCabe wrote: ‘I failed to discover any marks on any boy including ...’. She also made disparaging remarks about the boys in general, referring to them as ‘terrorists’ and stating that the boy whose father complained ‘is an unpleasant type of boy’.

Despite the 1946 circular stating that principals could draw on the advice of the Department’s Medical Inspector ’regarding any children who are specially troublesome of difficult to control’, there is no evidence that Dr McCabe offered advice on how the troublesome boys could have been treated differently. The standard forms completed by Dr McCabe and the other inspectors did not contain references to issues of discipline or punishment until Mr Granville, Child Care Advisor to the Department, noted that corporal punishment was still in use in the schools.

The requirement to keep punishment books is provided for in Rule 12 of the Department’s Rules and Regulations which states: The Manager or his Deputy shall be authorised to punish the Children detained in the school in case of misconduct. All serious misconduct, and the Punishments inflicted for it, shall be entered in a book to be kept for that purpose, which shall be laid before the Inspector when he visits. The Manager must, however, remember that the more closely the school is modelled on a principle of judicious family government the more salutary will be its discipline, and the fewer occasions will arise for resort to punishment.

Department files do not provide examples of these punishment books being kept by schools or ‘laid before the Inspector’. The inspector did not refer to the checking of punishment books in her/his inspection report but would at times record that ‘Records were well kept’. It is possible that schools kept these journals for a time and subsequently disposed of them when they were no longer needed. On 16th December 1970, the Minister for Education informed the Dáil that: ‘No industrial school now keeps a punishment book’.

In the early part of her career, Dr McCabe was heavily critical of the schools, reporting findings very different from the relatively favourable conclusions in the Cussen Report just a few years earlier. She stated that she was ‘simply horrified at the conditions existing in the majority of the Schools’. However, her reports from the 1950s show a marked decline in detail with little of the critical commentary that had characterised the reports of the 1940s. While it is possible that improvements were made during her tenure, and that the schools were better resourced, it is also necessary to take into consideration the fact that from the late 1940s Dr McCabe was suffering from recurrent illness.

Although there is no definitive diagnosis of Dr McCabe’s condition, it is evident from medical reports in her Departmental personnel file that she suffered from severe depression for much of the period during which she held the position of Medical Inspector with the Department. This illness seems to have commenced in the late 1940s, with a severe episode in 1951 requiring hospital therapy. Unfortunately, over the following number of years Dr McCabe’s health did not improve and began to deteriorate seriously in the mid-1960s. Dr McCabe resigned in 1965.