Chapter 2 — Finance

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate response

In relation to the ‘benchmarks’ used, they reiterated the point made by the other three submissions that Comparisons with the value of average family incomes, welfare benefits paid to families or family spending are unlikely to give a useful measure of the cost to the Oblates of running a residential institution.

Whilst this is true to a certain extent, the comparators used by Mazars are valid in assessing whether funding was adequate to provide basic physical care such as food, clothing and accommodation.

Conclusion

The Mazars report raises doubts about the generally accepted proposition that funding for the residential schools was so inadequate that children suffered neglect and deprivation.

There were variables that had a considerable effect on the ability of schools to provide an adequate standard of care. These include: The size of the school. Mazars calculated a break-even number in respect of the four schools. This would indicate that where numbers fell below a critical figure, which varied as between the schools, a school would have been under financial pressure. Economies of scale were a significant factor in large schools. The ‘one size fits all’ approach by the Resident Managers failed to address the genuine needs of some of the smaller institutions. The existence of a farm that could provide food and fuel to the institution. Schools with an internal national school received a national school grant in addition to the capitation grant. This grant was also based on capitation and was therefore more valuable to larger schools. Many schools used industrial training as a means of generating income and for providing the needs of the institution.

Value of work done by the Order

The purpose of the residential school system was that the State and religious Orders would act in partnership in providing care to poor and destitute children. The Religious would raise donations for the establishment and upkeep of the schools and the State would pay to maintain the children. By the time the Department of Education took over the running of these schools and by the start of the period examined by the Investigation Committee, this dual role had become blurred for a number of Congregations. Most religious Orders did not seek public subscription for the premises used as residential homes and used the capitation grant to enhance and improve them. It is difficult to establish what effect, if any, this had on the funds available for the children and it varied from school to school.

In assessing the adequacy of the capitation grant, some Congregations have taken into account the monetary value of the work done by the religious staff over the years. On a simple accounting basis such an approach may be justified, but in determining whether the institutions had enough money to provide the basic needs of the children, an analysis of what was, at the time, understood to be the charitable nature of this work is important.

The Christian Brothers were particularly defensive of the remuneration paid to the Brothers. Their response submission criticised the suggested assumption by Mazars that everything earned by the Christian Brothers in the community irrespective of source should have been available to the school ‘to fund its losses’. It argued that this was tantamount to suggesting that anybody who worked in state institutions should hand back any money left over at the end of the year. The argument proceeded to criticise this approach as ignoring ‘obvious and unarguable facts.’ One of these facts was that each and every Brother who provided his services to the industrial school was entitled to remuneration and that such remuneration paid by way of stipend ‘was unarguably the property of the community. If the State was running the institution itself it would have paid each and every person employed there a salary which would have been the legal property of that person.’

In putting forward their analysis of the value of the Brothers’ work to the institution, the Christian Brothers stated in their opening statement to the Artane module: the Brothers working in Artane were not paid a salary; instead a stipend for each Brother working in the schools or on the administrative staff was paid to the local Community. This was in keeping with other schools or institutions in the capitation system. The annual stipend in Artane ranged from £142 per Brother in the 1940s to £300 per Brother in the 1960s. Significantly the rate of stipend in Artane was lower than in other schools where the rate in the 1960s was £550. The fact that the Brothers were only paid a stipend represented a clear saving to the State....

The statement then set out the 25 Brothers working in Artane in the 1960s and, by reference to Northern Ireland salary scales, estimated what they would have been earning in salary. They concluded that had the State paid the Brothers’ salaries instead of stipends it would have cost the State £14,070 per year in the mid-1960s.The stipends came to a total of £7,500 thus representing a saving to the State of £6,570.

As in the case of assessing adequacy of income, the Northern Irish comparator is less helpful than an actual salary comparison in the Republic. According to the Christian Brothers’ Northern Ireland comparator, eight primary school teachers at £750 each at the lower end of the salary scale would have attracted a total of £5,800. In fact, in the State a primary school teacher at the lower end of the salary scale earned £450 in 1963, which increased to £605 in 1964. The correct figure for that one element of the Christian Brothers’ calculation is either £4,000 or £4,840. Similar adjustments to each category of Brother employed in Artane would quickly erode any ‘clear saving to the State’.

The following is a table of stipends paid to Brothers in Artane, against primary school salaries from 1944 to 1968:18

Year	Trained single teacher – lowest point on salary scale	Artane stipend per Brother
1944	€187	€152
1945	€187	€152
1946	€187	€152
1947	€279	€241
1948	€279	€241
1949	€279	€241
1950	€317	€241
1951	€317	€241
1952	€362	€241
1953	€396	€241
1954	€396	€317
1955	€396	€317
1956	€432	€317
1957	€432	€317
1958	€432	€508
1959	€458	€381
1960	€476	€381
1961	€476	€381
1962	€546	€381
1963	€571	€381
1964	€768	€381
1965	€787	€381
1966	€837	€381
1967	€837	€381
1968	€837	€381

Two important factors arise: All of the Brothers’ ordinary living expenses were paid by the school including food, accommodation and general maintenance of the monastery. The stipend, which was paid directly to the monastery, covered expenses such as clothing, holidays, travel and medical care. All Brothers received this stipend, even those in more menial positions in the school and those with no involvement in the care of the boys. If £300 represented a fair remuneration for a Brother who was a teacher in the school, it was arguably an overpayment for Brothers who worked in the kitchens or the farm. It was certainly an overpayment for those Brothers who were retired and elderly and who were not directly involved in the running of the school.

Although the value of the stipend fell in the latter half of the 1960s, it was a generous payment in the 1940s and 1950s and early 1960s. It allowed Artane and other schools to make significant contributions to the building fund, which facilitated the development of Christian Brothers’ schools outside of the Industrial School system.

It is not correct to assert that the payment of stipends represented a significant saving to the State on salaries that would otherwise have to be paid. The cost to the State of running institutions like Artane was considerable.

It is not clear that the cost to the State of paying all the Brothers in the institution a stipend was fully understood by the Department of Education or the Department of Finance at the time. As was shown in the historical section of this chapter, no proper breakdown of this figure was submitted to the Department in the 1940s or 1950s and no reference appears to have been made to it by the Department in its communications with the Resident Managers’ Association when discussing increases in grants.