Chapter 3 — Society and the schools

Part 4 Independent monitoring

The tone of the debate was invariably respectful and grateful to the authorities who ran the Schools55, though sometimes there was an air of ‘formal pleading’ about this. There was surprisingly little reference to what was happening in Northern Ireland or other jurisdictions.56Down the decades, the same few members took part in debates, on the subject.

When, as they did only spasmodically, the Schools were referred to in the newspapers, it was mainly in three contexts. First were court reports of committal proceedings. Dr Maguire57 states: Regional newspapers and several of the Dublin evening papers published extensive accounts of committal hearings in Children’s Courts in Dublin and around the country, although it must be said that this coverage was varied and inconsistent: such reports were regular weekly or monthly features in some newspapers, while others reported on court proceedings not at all, or only in extraordinary cases. Both the (Dublin) Evening Herald and the (Dublin) Evening Mail (and later the Evening Press, which began publication in 1954), usually reported on the same cases each week, and these published accounts were remarkably similar. It could be that a single correspondent provided coverage for all three papers, although it is impossible to know this for certain as the stories did not carry by-lines. Coverage of committal cases in the Dublin evening papers began to fall off in the early 1960s, and this trend could be due to a variety of factors; the folding of the Evening Mail in mid-1962; a decline in court committals, and/or a growing trend towards an overhaul of the industrial school system coupled with a growing awareness of the need for privacy and discretion in cases involving children.

Secondly, there were accounts, generally in local papers, of the very occasional discussion of the Schools at a local authority meeting. For there seems to have been, if only spasmodically, livelier debate on the general topics of the School system at local authority meetings, sometimes inspired by resentment at the financial burden imposed by local residents in the Schools.

On this O’Cinneide and Maguire state58 The attitude of local authorities toward their responsibility for maintaining children in industrial schools, and general attitudes toward the efficacy of an institutional method of dealing with poor and neglected children, are themes that run throughout press coverage of local authority meetings and the often extensive coverage of children’s court proceedings. In an interesting and insightful discussion at the monthly meeting to the Galway Board of Health, one committee officer expressed a concern that the local ISPCC inspector, Mary Monnelly, was having children committed to institutions without the proper authority, and without consulting the appropriate local authorities. The Commissioner of the Board of Health instructed the superintendent home assistance officer to inform Monnelly that she was to consult with the local authorities before seeking the committal of children to industrial schools. In 1938 the Galway County Homes and Home Assistance Committee had a discussion, that was reported in the press, about the merits of boarding-out children rather than committing them to industrial schools. The committee was considering a proposal to discontinue boarding children out n favour of maintaining all local authority children in industrial schools. Alice Lister, the Department of Health inspector of boarded-out children, argued that children could never receive the same kind of care and attention in an institutional setting that they could in a good foster home... Other members of the committee countered these claims by pointing out that industrial school children received training in a skill or trade that would help them to support themselves upon release, while children boarded out, particularly with poorer families, were not guaranteed such an education or training... After much debate the proposal to discontinue the boarding-out system was defeated. The following week the local newspaper, the Connacht Tribune, published an editorial that attempted to provide both sides of the story but came down squarely in favour of industrial schools.

The third type of material about the Schools that occasionally appeared was human interest stories. For instance, an account of the visit of a dignitary (as when, in 1935, Eamon de Valera visited Artane and spent two hours in the School ‘and was treated to a performance by the famous Artane Boys Band’). Another similar report described a fund-raising carnival held at the Lenaboy Industrial School in Galway city.

The result was that, up to the time of the Kennedy Report, as Dr Keating writes59: [Apart from Michael Viney’s articles of 1966] the rest of the sparse coverage of the Schools was treated either with the nostalgic gloss of Patrick J McNulty’s article of 20-21 June, 1969 entitled Memories of Artane or as simple reportage devoid of analysis, despite opportunity for greater analysis as a result of conferences on the inadequacies and dangers of the system.

Serious cases of sexual or physical abuse were not reported, even if they came to light by way of a court case. Thus, for instance, a letter to The Irish Times on 11th May 1999, from a former reporter (and subsequently editor) of the Evening Herald, Brian Quinn, stated that in the 1950s the writer had:60 witnessed one of the worst of the Christian Brothers break into the office of the manager and demand that a court case that mentioned Artane should not be used in the Evening Herald. Before the manager could lift a phone, the Manager would push open the editorial door to tell us the manager had instructed that the case be dumped.... Those requests should have alerted journalists to start inquiries into what was happening in Artane. That we did not is a heavy burden.

Significantly, the case referred to in this letter seems to have gone unreported also by the other newspapers. Likewise, when in January 1951, an attendant employed at Marlborough House (not an Industrial School, but a place of detention, run by the Department of Education) was convicted of sexually abusing two boys detained in the institution, there were no newspaper reports.

A Departmental report by Dr McCabe of 8th January, 1948 recorded that following the death of a child in Rathdrum, owing to careless supervision, Dr McCabe visited the school and sought to get a ‘callous’ resident manager to appreciate the gravity of what had occurred: I drew her attention to the bad impression that would be likely to be created regarding the conduct of affairs in her school on anybody who would read the inquest proceedings in the newspapers. She told me that the matter had been taken care of in Carysfort and that there would be no report in the press.

Even if a skeleton made its way out of its cupboard, the newspapers could be persuaded to turn their back. An example from as late as 1964 was a story about head-shaving in the Connacht Tribune, which was picked up by the British Sunday paper, The People; but no Irish national paper reported the story.

The second omission was even more serious. With very few exceptions, there was no comprehensive survey of the School system and no accounts of the every-day experiences of the residents in the Schools. Specifically, so far as any serious discussion of the School system goes, in the 1940s and 1950s, only two contributions in daily papers have been found. Each was a multi-part feature in The Irish Times (referred to below).

The Kennedy Committee Report, while it attracted more attention than any other single episode, was not front page news. Even the significant Doyle Supreme Court constitutional case61 received little coverage outside the The Irish Times of 13th October 1956.

A series of four articles appeared anonymously (‘By a Special Correspondent’) in The Irish Times in February, 1950. The author appeared to have been well-informed about the system and aware of the history of the institutions and of developments in the State and elsewhere. The series was very critical of the system and proposed radical changes to do away with institutions. The writer expressed limited approval of the Cussen Commission, which did valuable work but failed ‘to see that something more revolutionary than improvements in the existing structure was necessary’. There was little reaction to the articles, which seem to have gone largely unnoticed in official and political circles as well as among the general public.

The lack of interest generally is evident in a response by the Department of Education to a question from the Commission stating that it had found no records referring to The Irish Times articles on child delinquency in 1950. This is consistent with an expectation that there would be no interest in the matter among the electorate or public representatives. Otherwise, it would have been expected that cuttings would be kept and a defence dossier compiled.

Another breach in the iron curtain was the work of Michael Viney. He wrote a series of articles62 in The Irish Times, based on six weeks’ research. Significantly, even this major series attracted only one (published) letter to the editor,63 and it seems likely that given the expenditure of resources, the paper would have published any reasonable letters received. Likewise, the series was met by an eerie silence from other Irish newspapers, which declined the opportunity to mine the rich lode, which, it might seem, had been opened up by Mr Viney.