Chapter 3 — Society and the schools

Part 4 Independent monitoring

Again, in 1963, a solicitor, who was representing two boys in Galway District Court, urged the court not to send his clients to Letterfrack. He said that every murderer in the country had served time there and that he would prefer that his clients were sentenced to six months in prison than two years in Letterfrack. The district justice’s response was to the effect that ‘there may be a great deal in what you say but I cannot do anything about it’. Exceptionally this exchange was covered in The Evening Press, The Connaught Tribune, The Connaught Sentinel and The Tuam Star. The manager of the school wrote to the Minister demanding to know what he proposed to do about these ‘very scurrilous and false allegations’ and adding ‘I also wish to draw your attention to the fact that too many TD’s are applying to Minister for Education to have certain boys discharged from here.’65

It might have been expected that, in the same way as prisons and (in recent times) national or secondary schools66, each Reformatory or Industrial School would have had its own ‘Board of Visitors’, namely, a group of respected local citizens who would make regular visits to a school, be aware of what was going on there, encourage improvements and inquire into any complaints.

A broader question is why, until the 1970s, even in the wider educational field, there were no local boards overseeing primary and secondary schools. The answer was regarded as self-evident, namely that the religious were giving their entire lives, usually working long hours, for scant financial reward, to serve the community in buildings that they had also provided. In an unsuspicious and deferential age, it would have seemed perverse to require that there be accountability to a board of lay outsiders. As against this, it might be thought that a special case should be made in regard to Industrial and Reformatory Schools because they were closed worlds with vulnerable inmates.

In fact, relatively late – in 1962 – the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders did recommend the establishment of visiting committees for certified schools. Mr Haughey, Minister for Justice, wrote to Dr Patrick Hillery, Minister for Education, commending this proposal and received the following lukewarm and third-person response: In view, of the rejection by the school managers some years ago of this Departments proposal that they be visited by an ad hoc committee of representatives of the Departments of Finance, Social Welfare and Education in connection with the managers appeal, at the time, for improved grants, the Minister is not over-sanguine as to the managers’ attitude to the idea of Visiting Committees. Neither is he clear as to how best such committees, if agreed to, should be brought into existence. He proposes, nevertheless, once more to approach the Managers’ association with the present suggestions.67

Starting mainly in the 1950s, Godparents’ Associations grew up for some Industrial Schools but they had no formal status, their central purpose being to provide as many of the children as possible with a person or family who would take a personal interest in them and bring them into their homes at some weekends or holidays. There was no connection between individual associations. The judgments they expressed on the Industrial Schools they knew were usually unfavourable and their presence was at best tolerated by Managers and at worst regarded as meddling. The Catholic Godparents Guild68 hosted children from several Schools throughout the State. The other associations each focussed on a single school, for instance Artane or Upton – or, at most, two Schools in the case of the Galway Godparents Association, which was concerned with the children in St Anne’s Lenaboy and St Joseph’s Salthill. This association found the Managers of each school uncooperative in the efforts it made to bring greater interest into the lives of the children.

A pressure group that took an interest in the Schools from the 1940s-70s was the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers. 69 Their submissions to the Minister were striking for raising not individual complaints but rather suggestions for the sort of innovation that ought to have been debated more frequently within the Department and the Schools themselves. For instance a letter of 2nd February 1966 to the Minister contains a constructive suggestion:70 In the matter of further education, that is, in preparation for a career, we would advocate the authentic training of the Vocational School, which, again, could serve as an interim introduction to the normal community into which the boys must, in two years time, become suddenly integrated. This would of course necessitate their sharing the benefits accorded to other boys, but surely they have as great a claim. Towards this end we would suggest that a proportionate number of places be reserved at each Vocational School. We have been particularly interested in the methods used by Br Stephen Kelly at St Patrick’s in Belfast. He employs a Social Worker, a layman, who meets each boy and follows his progress through the school, paying attention to his aptitudes. It is interesting to note that boys without homes are not automatically boys for farming.’

Between 1970-74, the Minister for Justice was Des O’Malley (as it happens Donagh O’Malley’s nephew and the inheritor of his Dail seat). In an interview in 2002, Mr O’Malley told Dr Keating that he was concerned about the Industrial and Reformatory Schools sector, in part because of the general public erroneous belief that it was the responsibility of the Department of Justice. A few months after taking office as Minister for Justice, Mr O’Malley happened to take a family holiday in North Connemara near Letterfrack and heard and observed personally a certain amount about that institution. On his return to Dublin, he made some inquiries and was told by the Secretary of the Department to ‘leave it to Education’. 71

In contrast, according to the memoirs of Padraig Faulkner, Minister for Education 1969-73: It was to be quite some time after I left the Department of Education that I first heard the word ‘paedophile’. During my time as Minister I hadn’t an inkling that child sex abuse existed. When I published the Kennedy Report in 1970 Dail questions on a variety of aspects of it came thick and fast. Some deputies praised the diligence and selflessness of the religious orders in caring for Children in care. Nobody raised the question of abuse. Dr Noel Browne and Dr John O’Connell were among my most persistent questioners and nobody doubts that if these deputies had heard so much as a whisper about abuse, they would immediately have raised the matter in the Dáil.

Even among external observers who scrutinised the schools, there seems to have been little or no contemporary knowledge of sexual abuse. Mr Michael Viney, for instance, who visited several schools, over a six-week period, in 1966 researching his 15,000-word series in The Irish Times in 1966, did not discover any evidence of sexual abuse (though, in those more innocent days, he was not looking for any). In the Tuairim Report of 1966,72 nothing is said in about sexual abuse because, according to one member, they could not believe what they were being told.

A district court clerk who served in the 1960s remarked: We knew about the sexual abuse in the Schools because one of the Gardai who drove the children from the Court to the Schools told us about it. In today’s climate I’d have protested to the Department of Justice. But in those times, at best my protest would have been ignored, at worst I’d have been disciplined.

It seems that the general public living in the locality of a School had some broad idea of the conditions. It was not uncommon for parents to threaten children who were misbehaving with some such formula as: ‘Stop it or you’ll be sent to Artane / Upton / Letterfrack...’ Both sides knew what was meant. When John B Keane wrote in 1967 about farmers exploiting cheap labour of youths from an Industrial School, it seems likely that he expected his readers to know what he was writing about.Letters of a Successful TD 73 contains the following passage: We will never again see a worker like Topper. I will never forget him a long as I live. You probably don’t remember Jeremy Tlopper. He died of TB when you were about three or four. It still plays on my conscience that I might have driven him too hard. In those days we used to get youngsters out of Kilnavarna Industrial School to work as farm labourers. They were usually aged about fifteen or sixteen. You didn’t have to pay them much and I know for a fact that most people paid them nothing. I had several lads but they were better for eating than they were for working. It was a mistake, too, to get fellows who hadn’t made their Confirmation because you would have to leave them off every day for catechism. Jeremy Topper was different. He had made his Confirmation. He was a great worker and a light feeder. He was as thin as a whippet but I never heard him complain and he worked out-of-doors, hail, rain, or shine. I often worry that I might have misused him, but no, that isn’t true, because he worshiped me as a son would. He had no father or mother but that was during the Economic War when nobody could afford a regular workman and dead calves were blocking the eyes of the bridges. The only labour we could afford were young lads or girls out of orphanages or Industrial Schools. Jeremy died when he was twenty but I think he killed himself. I never touched him, although I know of boys and girls who were whipped and punched like slaes and there were young girls who were badly abused by certain farmers who are pillars of the Church to-day. May God forgive them and the priests who knew what was going on. I put up headstone over Jeremy when he died. There was no cure for TB in those days. ...

In that year, 1988, there was a more sceptical reaction to Paddy Doyle’s story74 of, amongst other things, the violence of the nuns of St Michael’s Industrial School in Cappoquin. He recalled that: ‘I used to hear people refer to me as one of the children from the orphanage, which was the phrase locals used to soften the brutal reality of the Industrial School in their midst.’

The Task Force on Child Care Services 1980 refers to a most striking feature of the pre-Kennedy system of residential care as being ...‘...the alarming complacency and indifference of both the general public and the various government departments and statutory bodies responsible for the welfare of children’.

Until very late in the day, the contribution made by the Oireachtas or the news media towards supervision, or even education of the public, in regard to the Schools, appears to have been negligible. Pressure groups were rare and usually ineffective The general public was often uninformed and usually uninterested. All these pools of unknowing reinforced each other.

A trained social worker who practiced in the 1960s informed the Commission that: we knew that the Schools were ‘institutions’ with all that implied and were alert to try to avoid them or minimise a child’s stay there; but on the other hand we regarded them as safe places where the child would be if not positively cherished at least ‘protected from harm.