884 entries for Government Department

The majority of hearings were held in the Commission offices in Dublin. One hundred and sixty six (166) of the 1,090 hearings were held in other locations in Ireland and in locations overseas. Witnesses who were house-bound through illness or disability who wished to be heard in their home or place of residence were facilitated. A number of hearings were conducted in hotels in provincial centres to facilitate witnesses who had particular difficulty travelling to Dublin, and the evidence of three witnesses was heard in Irish prisons. Witnesses who lived overseas and wished to give their evidence in Ireland were facilitated by assistance with travel and accommodation arrangements within guidelines established by the Department of Education and Science. A number of witnesses had not been back to Ireland for a substantial length of time. Some had never returned since their departure as young people and the Committee hearing was the occasion of their first return visit. See Table 1 for details of hearing locations:

Location of hearing	Males	Females	Total witnesses
CICA offices	501	423	924
USA	2	0	2
Ireland	57	30	87
UK	31	44	75
Mainland Europe	1	1	2
Total	592	498	1090

In addition to reports of parental payment for foster care and other placements, the Committee heard evidence from many witnesses of the requirement for parents to contribute financially towards their children’s maintenance in Industrial Schools. Copies of correspondence, shown to the Committee by witnesses, between their parents and Department of Education officials, Gardaí and Resident Managers indicated that such payments were assiduously pursued by their officials. I was illegitimate ... I went into the orphanage ...(Industrial School).... My mother was unmarried, her mother had died in childbirth. My grandfather never saw me, my father didn’t want to know.... She was wandering the streets and there was this man a Mr ...X... he was sort of in charge, an overseer, of unmarried mothers, to keep an eye on them for the Government. He got her into the workhouse ... run by nuns and she worked scrubbing and cleaning ... the nuns told her she had to be punished for committing a mortal sin, they were the words from my mother to me. She was there from when she was 7 months pregnant until I was born.... She was kept in the workhouse, for 2 or 3 months. Then her sister went up one Sunday to see her, and took me and her out. She then went to work ... it was then I was left with ...(foster mother).... I was minded by ...(foster mother)... for the first 2 years ... and my mother paid that woman to mind me. It ...(the cost)... became too much for her I suppose and I went to ...named School... through the Courts. It was through Mr ...X ... I went into the orphanage ...(Industrial School).... I did not know I had gone through the Courts until I got the records, it said my mother was incapable of minding me and so I went into the orphanage.

Ninety seven (97) witnesses reported that the general conditions for their care and welfare were temporarily improved for inspections, with extra food, toothbrushes, schoolbooks, better clothes and bedding reported as available for the duration of the inspector’s visits. Fifty four (54) witnesses reported that the Schools were thoroughly cleaned in preparation and 32 witnesses described being dressed in their ‘Sunday best’ or ‘going-out’ clothes when inspectors came. Twenty eight (28) witnesses reported that bedspreads were put on each bed prior to visits from a Department of Education or other inspector and were removed when the inspector left. Witnesses recalled that the leather straps were put away and residents were warned beforehand to be on their best behaviour and told that the inspector was ‘the teacher’s boss’. Forty one (41) witnesses stated that they were coached in advance about what they could and could not say when the inspectors came. Sixty four (64) witnesses stated that residents were not spoken to directly and that staff were always present. I have no memory of anything really being inspected, we were never spoken to, we wore our Sunday clothes and had extra food. We saw them at a distance, you would see them for a moment standing and looking, they were always accompanied, you would be asked to recite a poem for them in class. • We always knew when inspectors were coming as white quilts and pillows were put on the beds. The inspectors walked around with the Brothers, they didn’t speak to the boys. • The food was always very good with chops or other recognisable meat, vegetable and dessert for the inspection. Boys were coached by Br ...X (Resident Manager)... to say it was like this all the time, the inspector spoke to boys, who followed the instruction with Br ...X... present and did not complain.

A number of witnesses presented the Committee with copies of correspondence between their parents, Resident Managers, gardaí and Department of Education officials relating to their early release. Eight (8) witnesses reported being granted early release to their parents following such parental intervention.

The Department of Education had overall responsibility for the Reformatory and Industrial School System and for Marlborough House detention centre. The Department provided finance to the schools and oversaw their operation, leaving day-to-day control to the Congregations and Orders that operated them. The Department had a duty to ensure that the rules and regulations were observed, that finances were correctly utilised and that reasonable standards were maintained. The principal method of monitoring the schools was the inspection system, which was carried out by members of the Department’s Reformatory and Industrial Schools Branch.

The timeframe of this investigation falls between the publication of the Cussen Commission’s Report into Reformatories and Industrial Schools in 1936 and the Kennedy Report on the Schools in 1970. The Cussen Report endorsed the system contingent upon the implementation of its 51 principal conclusions and recommendations, but the implementation of these recommendations by the Department of Education was inconsistent and intermittent. Consequently, the system continued largely unchanged until the late 1960s. By the time the Kennedy Report was published in 1970, the system had greatly declined and the report itself was more of an obituary than a death sentence. The events that led to the ending of the system had little to do with policy decisions by the Department of Education, and that also is part of the story. Consideration of the Department’s role is thus largely confined to the 34 years between these two reports.

The Secretary of the Department of Education in evidence to the Investigation Committee in June 2006 admitted that there had been ‘significant failings’ by the Department: As Secretary General of the Department of Education and Science I wish to state publicly here today that there were significant failings in relation to the Department’s responsibility to the children in care in these institutions and that the Department deeply regrets this. Children were sent to industrial and reformatory schools by the State acting through the courts. While the institutions to whose care they were committed were privately owned and operated the State had a clear responsibility to ensure that the care they received was appropriate to their needs. Responsibility for ensuring this lay with the Department of Education, whose role it was to approve, regulate, inspect and fund these institutions. It was clear that the Department was not effective in ensuring a satisfactory level of care. Indeed, the very need to establish a Commission of Inquiry testifies this.

Mr R MacConchradha, a Higher Executive Officer in prisons administration but formerly in the Department of Education, wrote on 20th April 1968 to Mr McCarthy, his superior in the Department for Justice. Mr MacConchradha expresses his views frankly: Even at the risk of breaking confidence, may I say that the Industrial School system has been centrally administrated in a very plodding way, with little sympathetic involvement or thought for the children. Finances have been ungenerous for years and what forward thinking there was, came from individuals in the conducting communities. The lot of the children, especially the boys, is very sad and there is an unbelievably entrenched ‘status quo’ to be overcome, not least in the Department of Education, if there is to be any change for the better.

In general, the Department of Education was regarded as a conservative Department producing little by way of policy. Even on the wider fronts of primary and secondary education, its main concern lay with curricular content rather than wider social justice issues, such as what today would be called access to education. Further, the Department ‘enjoyed a reputation for secrecy’ and this secrecy would have had the effect of rendering it difficult for any countervailing pressure to that of the Church, even had there been any, to assert itself.

The Department had the power of fixing the capitation fee and in theory this power gave it considerable control over the institutions However, the Department did not use such increases as an opportunity to impose changes of policy on the schools. When the Department succeeded in providing increased funding for the schools, it communicated in non-specific terms its wish to see improvements made in the standard of care provided to the children in the schools. For instance the Departmental circulars to Resident Managers announcing the increases in 1947, 1951, 1952 and 1958 stated the Minister’s expectation that, with the improved financial position, schools would effect, without delay, substantial improvements in the standard of diet, clothing and maintenance of the children. There is no evidence to show that these broad admonitions were followed up by attempts to verify that these substantial improvements had actually materialised. Few circulars were as specific as the following (Circular 1/1952 (10th March 1952)): The Minister trusts that consequent on the improvements in the financial position of the schools as a result of the increase of 5/- weekly in 1951 and of this increase of 6/- weekly in the amount of the Capitation Grants that the Managers of the Schools will be in a position to effect substantial all round improvements where necessary. Each child should get as a minimum one pint of milk daily, the full ration of butter and sugar, and 4 to 6 ozs of meat at each meal at which meat is served. It is desirable, that the children’s breakfast should include an egg, sausage, rasher, tomato or other suitable relish and that the dinner should be a substantial meal consisting of soup (where practicable), meat, vegetables (including potatoes) to be followed by a dessert such as pudding, jelly stewed or raw fruit, cereal.

The circular met a polite but prompt rebuff in the form of a message from a meeting of the Managers’ Association (letter from Chairman to Department, 31st March 1952), which said that, given the prices, this ‘recommendation’ was not ‘practical’. Indeed as the Department of Education submitted; Evidence provided to the Commission by Mr Granville also underlines the dominant role that school authorities continued to play [into the 1980s] in the operation of residential homes and special schools post-Kennedy. The religious orders, it is clear, remained the ultimate decision-makers.

The schools’ control over the Department can be seen in the way decisions were made in the early 1950s about mixing offenders and non-offenders in Industrial Schools. The question whether children who had been convicted of offending seriously or repeatedly should live in the same school as those in need of care should have been a key policy issue for the Department of Education.

When addressing this question, before CICA, the Department of Education simply stated: The policy regarding the category of child admitted to and detained within a particular school was a matter for the Religious Order concerned and the Department had no role in the committal process. While the courts ordered the detention of a child, the Resident Manager of a School could exercise his/her power to refuse to accept this child into the school. Similarly the Religious Order could decide to change the category of child being admitted to a school. The essential question, however, is broader than the legalities involved. For the schools to work properly the system needed an authoritative overseer. If the Department declined to play such a role then there was no one to do so.

They had divergent attitudes to boarding out as an alternative to the schools for dealing with needy children. The Department of Health’s general policy, repeatedly stated, was that maintaining children in their families of origin should be encouraged and, if this was not possible, foster care rather than institutional care should be provided. In sharp contrast, the Department of Education believed firmly that institutional care offered many benefits and in March 1946 went so far as expressly to prohibit the boarding out of children from Industrial Schools.

Reflecting on this divergence, a Department of Education memo, written in 1964, stated. It seems strange that two Government Departments should be at variance on such a fundamental issue. I spoke to an official of the Department of Health and apparently that Department considers that a home, even a disrupted home, is preferable to an institution however good...Industrial school managers are not in the most favourable position for supervising the treatment of boarded out children and this Department has no officers for that kind of work. On the other hand the Department of Health has its own Inspectors for inspecting foster homes etc... If the practice of boarding out children becomes widespread the industrial schools could very well become uneconomic but it is submitted that to keep children in institutions for the sake of the institutions would be inverted thinking. Modern thinking as practised by Department of Health and abroad, regards institutionalism as a dehumanising factor and instead favours a home environment as a proper place for a child to develop its personality. Moreover the decision of this Department to prohibit boarding out from industrial schools was taken at a time when economic conditions were very bad (immediately post-war) and was based on fear of an inquiry rather than on what was best for a child.