Chapter 1 — Department of Education

Sex abuse files

In total there were three separate allegations made to the Department.

The Commission learned about the existence of these allegations following the receipt of a statement from a former Manager of St Joseph’s Special School. The Department had been made aware of allegations of abuse as early as 1979. The Investigation Committee conducted a through search of the documents given to them by the Department, but no file relating to these reports of sexual abuse were discovered.

Following correspondence with the Chief State Solicitors office, the file relating to these matters was located and furnished to the Commissions. The full account of the cases appears in the chapter on Ferryhouse Industrial School (Volume II Chapter 3).

In 1969, during a routine inspection of Renmore, a Department of Education inspector was approached by a 15-year-old boy who claimed to have been sexually abused by a senior member of the staff of the school. Following questioning of the boy the inspector became satisfied that he was telling the truth and informed his superior in the Department of Education, the Provincial of the Brothers of Charity and the school Manager.

The Manager told the inspector that he would investigate the complaint and within a matter of days informed him that the Brother had admitted to the sexual abuse of the boy and had been transferred to a psychiatric hospital.

The inspector’s superior in the Department of Education requested a written report on the matter. The Department of Education were unable to produce this report and consider it missing. The report was last seen in the Department in 1989 by an inspector. The Department believe it is impossible to say how or when the report went missing.

A teacher in St Joseph’s Cabra was the cause of numerous complaints between 1980 and 1985. The matter was being investigated by the Department of Education, which had withheld his teaching diploma pending investigation of the complaints.

Fifty nine St Joseph’s teacher files were furnished to the Commission by the Department of Education, but this teacher’s file was not among them. A letter dated 10th October 2007 from the Chief State Solicitor’s office confirmed that the Department’s file register had a record of the file. The letter also stated that the file could not be located and that the Department had no record of any complaints in respect of this teacher prior to 1985.

Several files relating to Lota were also missing. The files, which should have been given to the Commission but which had not been located, were listed by the Department. These files are described as having gone missing since 2001 when they were catalogued. The Department gave no explanation as to why these files have gone missing.

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.