Chapter 1 — Department of Education

Part 8 The Department’s handling of complaints

The chapters in Volumes I and II on the schools recount many instances of complaints that came to the notice of the Department and the manner in which they were handled. Those cases are not repeated here and the following remarks are confined to general issues.

The Department of Education wrote to the Kennedy Committee to explain its procedures for dealing with complaints from the public: Upon receipt of a complaint from a parent or guardian about the treatment of a child in an industrial school, the Manager is furnished with a copy of the complaint and his observations are requested. Depending on the seriousness of the complaint the Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial schools will also interview the child and the school authorities and take appropriate action where necessary.

The Department also told the Committee it had ‘no complete record of all complaints received’ as many were of a ‘trivial nature’. It provided the Committee with nine examples of complaints received in the previous five years, all but two of which were deemed to be baseless. Mr Mac Uaid, an executive officer in the Department, wrote on another occasion: ‘Complaints about the treatment of children in industrial schools are not infrequent but from experience I would say that the majority are exaggerated and some even untrue.’

The Department’s submission to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse summarised the situation: The procedure for dealing with parent’s complaints was to refer them to the Manager of the school for consideration and depending on the response of the Manager and the seriousness of the complaint to determine whether the matter should be pursued with the school management. There does not appear to have been a defined system of assessing the seriousness of a parental complaint and generally the Department did not interview the parent or child concerned... There is no indication that complaints supported by public representatives were taken more seriously than others.

It added: There is also evidence to suggest that in many cases the Department accepted the explanations given by the Resident Manager when complaints were brought to his/her attention and that the Department may have viewed some complaints with a degree of scepticism.

The Department’s submission also stated: Where complaints were aired in the public media, the Department appears to have been concerned to protect the reputation of the school while privately addressing concerns with the religious order.

At the conclusion of the Department’s investigation of a complaint or episode, some kind of judgement had to be reached. The Department generally gave the benefit of the doubt to the school. Where an adverse conclusion was reached, the question of sanction, if any, depended on the nature of the complaint. One possibility where a member of staff was personally culpable was the removal of the staff member, which did happen but only on a very few occasions. As each side knew, there was also the ultimate sanction of derecognition, but, as each side also knew, this was the nuclear option, to which there were big disadvantages from the Department’s point of view.

• The Department did not have a system for examining and investigating complaints. It had a system that managed complaints in a way that minimised adverse publicity and scandal. Its trust in the religious Congregations led to a sceptical approach that rejected complaints in the majority of cases. The Department relied on the Resident Managers to respond to complaints and tackle the issues raised. This approach was a serious failure of the Department’s supervisory role.

Part 9 Missing files

The principal sources of documentary evidence in relation to Industrial and Reformatory Schools are: the Department of Education and Science; other Departments of State including the Department of Health and Children and the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform; the archives of the Congregations that managed the schools and reformatories.

Records on Industrial Schools comprise a wide range of internal Departmental files, covering areas such as: certification, general inspection and medical inspection. Registers on all children who were admitted to the schools through the courts also exist and in some of these cases there are files with varying degrees of detail on individual children. The completion of a comprehensive archivist exercise on these records by the Department has resulted in the creation of a database of approximately 36,000 entries.

In 1996 the archives of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools were catalogued by an archives and records management company, at the behest of the Department of Education and the National Archives. The records relating to the schools were mostly kept in the basement of Talbot House, a building on the grounds of the Department of Education headquarters, Marlborough Street, Dublin. In April 1998 the company submitted its final report to the Department. It noted the poor storage conditions in which these sensitive documents were kept, so much so that documents had to be cleaned before cataloguing could begin. Its findings were: (1)Case files and registers: a total of 41,714 entries made in registers and case files there were no registers or case files for three schools. (2)Certification files: 72 entries in the certification files. (3)Administrative files: 792 entries in the administration files. (4) Miscellaneous registers 31 entries in the miscellaneous registers.

In 1999 Dr Gerard Cronin undertook to complete a report on the Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ Archives in Athlone. In his ‘Initial Report on the Reformatory & Industrial Schools’ Archives Athlone’ Dr Cronin stated: ...every so often I have come across items (sometimes misfiled) which directly or indirectly throw unfavourable or critical light on the conditions which the young offenders had to endure at the Daingean School.

In 2004 Mr Noel Dempsey TD, the Minister for Education and Science, appointed Mr Matthias Kelly QC to conduct an independent review and report on the provision of discovery by the Department of Education and Science to the Commission. There was a particular background to this decision, which is explained at para 6 of Mr Kelly’s report: There has been criticism of the way in which the Department of Education and Science has handled the process of discovery of documents to the Commission. In the Third Interim Report, Ms Justice Laffoy recorded that the Commission were not satisfied that the department had complied fully with an order for discovery. There were concerns that the process of discovery was experiencing problems. It was against this background that I was asked to undertake this review.

His main objectives were: (1)to review the processes and procedures operated by the Department of Education and Science in main discovery to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse; and (2)to make such recommendations as are appropriate in relation to discovery by the Department of Education and Science.

Although the Department had disclosed its historic archive to the Commission voluntarily, this archive did not contain the total number of files relevant to the work of the Commission. Files not included and identified by Mr Kelly QC were: 27,000 pupil files; incomplete and early discharge papers; the working papers of the Kennedy working party; material separately held in safe storage within the Department; incident books; precedent books; miscellaneous files one would expect to find. (1) 27,000 missing pupil files