4,228 entries for Finance

A few years later, in 1945, the cost of living had increased and another study of family income told the same sad story. This study of 10,500 families drawn at random from the Corporation’s information on families in Dublin, found that 55 percent of them had an income that was below £2.10 s 0d. The significance of the figure of £2.10 s is as follows. The unemployment assurance was relatively high but only lasted for a few months. Where a man was unemployed beyond this period, he and his family would go on to either home assistance or unemployment assistance. In 1945, in the case of Dublin residents, this was 30 shillings per week. In addition, children’s allowances would bring in another 7s 6d, food and (in winter) fuel vouchers would bring in another 6 shillings, and there might also be a grant from St Vincent de Paul or another charity. Yet experts at the time stated that the weekly minimum cost for a healthy standard of living ranged from £3.5s 0d. to £4.18 s 0d for a family with five children between the ages of five and 15 (taking the lowest figure for rent and for nutrition which will create healthy growth and resistance to the social disease of tuberculosis and rheumatism). Extrapolating from these figures, one can deduce that throughout the country, there was likely to have been at least 60,000 children who, because of either their parents’ chronic unemployment or inadequate wages, were living at such levels of destitution as to make them eligible for Industrial Schools.5

A 1948 survey contrasted two types of meals, the ‘bread and spread’ and the cooked meal. The ‘bread and spread’ consisted of a tea or milk drink, bread and a butter or jam spread. The cooked meal consisted of fish, meat, or eggs and may also have included potatoes and vegetables or a pudding. For children under 14 years of age in slum families, 44 percent of all the meals they ate were of the ‘bread and spread’ type, while these figures declined to 36 percent of children in artisan families, and 18 percent in middle class families. The survey found that intakes of milk and cheese were insufficient in all income groups, although the deficiencies were most marked in slum families.

As to housing for the poor, there was even at the higher level a shortage of adequate accommodation at affordable rents and, at the lowest level, an absence of any accommodation that was not overcrowded, unheated or often rat-infested.6 The conditions were ‘often quite unsuitable for cattle’.7 Writing about housing conditions especially in urban areas in the 1930s O’Cinneide and Maguire state:8 Studies ... especially in urban areas in the 1930s suggest that housing conditions improved little from the beginning of the Irish Free State. In fact, one report noted that the number of urban families living in unsuitable or hazardous conditions in the intervening years rose from 25,820, in 1913 to 28,200 in 1938, in spite of slum clearance efforts in the intervening years.

As late as 1950, there were 6,300 tenements housing 112,000 people or nearly one-third of Dublin Corporation population.9

	1926	1936	1946	1961
	No of households/ persons	No of households/ persons	No of households/ persons	No of households/ persons
All areas
Private households in 1 room	47,000 140,000	43,000 125,000	34,000 89,000	15,000 27,000
- with 1 or 2 persons	24,000 35,000	23,000 33,000	20,000 28,000	12,000 15,000
- with 3–5 persons	17,000 85,000	15,000 56,000	11,000 43,000	3,000 10,000
- with 6+ persons	6,000 41,000	5,000 36,000	3,000 18,000	321 2,000
Dublin City and County
Private households in 1 room	27,000 89,000	27,000 92,000	22,000 66,000	11,000 21,000
- with 1 or 2 persons	12,000 18,000	16,000 22,000	14,000 19,000	9,000 12,000
- with 3–5 persons	11,000 42,000	11,000 42,000	9,000 33,000	2,000 8,000
- with 6+ persons	4,000 28,000	4,000 28,000	2,000 14,000	258 2,000

The Table shows that, for instance, in 1946, there were 3,000 households comprising six or more people living in one-room accommodation. Two-thirds of these one-room accommodation units were in Dublin City and County. These figures were worse in 1936 and worse again in 1926. By 1961, however, there had been significant improvement on the 1946 figures. Small wonder that the numbers of Dublin children committed for reasons of poverty were disproportionately high.

As the country became less poor through the late 1950s and 1960s conditions improved. In 1936, in Dublin inner city, a family would have to consist of nine or more persons in one room to merit Corporation housing. Even then, many families living 12 in one room had to refuse the offer of a corporation house because they could not afford the rent. With the advent in 1950 of the differential rents system for corporation houses, this difficulty fell away and, by 1961, while conditions were still not good, a family of three or four had a reasonable chance of rehousing.

Although conditions were worst in Dublin, they were also bad in the provinces. The following descriptions of family circumstances were collected by O’Cinneide and Maguire from ISPCC files:10 One-roomed house, mud-walled cabin, overcrowded and condemned by CMO. One bed for entire family (family of five, 1938, Arklow) Two-roomed house mud walls and thatched in very bad state of repair; no rent paid. Home congested and damp, unfit for human habitation (family of four, 1943, Wexford) Living in with the paternal grandfather in one room. Very little furniture. One double bed, poorly covered. One pram. Room clean and tidy. Family are overcrowded (family of six, 1954, Wicklow).

Income shortage was often compounded by bad management and debt was a major problem. Credit unions did not start until the late 1960s. Moneylenders charged up to 100 percent interest and took children’s allowance books as security. One poor mother described her whirligig of debt – to the landlord, ESB, shop on the corner, moneylenders – as being ‘as if my head and my feet are in a halter’.11 Alcoholism or gambling were other thorns. Parents were occasionally in such severe straits that they refused to take their child home from maternity hospital. Dr Dillon wrote in 1945:12 The Poor cannot keep clean, because they are unable to buy soap or fuel to heat water. With every month at unemployment their position becomes more desperate, more hopeless, until they finally join the ranks of the unemployable. The mother starves herself to feed her children and, in a very high percentage of cases, is found on examination to be suffering from nutritional anaemia. The children fall behind in school and gradually slip down to a social status even lower than their parents. They are in the majority of cases all but useless to the modern employer. At the age of 18 they are replaced by some other unfortunate and join the ranks of the unemployable proletariat. There are families in Dublin in which the second generation is now well advanced on that dreary road.

Family-planning facilities were virtually non-existent and many marriages floundered owing to these extreme family stresses. For instance: 13 A typical example of the emigration pattern of the 1940s and 1950s was an expectant mother with five children alive out of eight pregnancies, who usually became pregnant during her husband’s infrequent visits home. She lived in two rooms at the top of a city tenement, and was known to the almoner from 1939 to 1957. She was distraught because she suspected that her husband, who was living in ‘digs’ in England, was having an affair with his landlady – ‘he never wires but send money regularly’. She described him as ‘indifferent’, having no affection for his children.

As well as poverty, many related evils flourished in these extreme and unnatural conditions. In the years leading up to independence, Crown books (court records) show that prosecutions for sexual crime involving children – indecent exposure, gross indecency, indecent assault, buggery and unlawful carnal knowledge – arising out of acts occurring in the Dublin tenements, were commonplace and prostitution was regarded as a common problem in Dublin. Of the 1,984 deaths from venereal disease recorded in Ireland between 1899 and 1916, 69 percent of the victims were children under five years of age.14 However, according to a report ‘contrary to the currently accepted opinion, VD was widespread throughout the country and it was disseminated by a class of girl who could not be regarded as a prostitute’.15

The illegitimacy rate was high (eg 295 per 1,000 births in 1929-30) and according . to one historical survey: ‘To judge from the pages of the Cork Examiner, (from 1925-6) infanticide was a weekly, if not a daily reality in Ireland.’ The reports were brief, factual and non-judgemental. The most usual outcome was a guilty verdict ‘with a strong recommendation to mercy’, partly due to the stigma already attached to the perpetrator and their family.16

Against this background of extreme poverty, some saw the Schools as no worse than anything else and as offering children at least adequate food and housing. The type of situation which might easily lead on to entry to an Industrial School is described in the Rotunda Hospital Annual Report for 1955: Mrs X was delivered of her fifth child in November, 1954. She was under the care of the Hospital for her four previous confinements in 1946, 1947 1952 and 1953. She is of low intelligence and has served several sentences in prison always on charges of stealing. Her husband is frequently unemployed. The family is almost constantly in debt. When a social science student visited the home, both gas and electricity had been cut off due to non-payment of accounts and arrears of rent amounted to £3. In early February, 1955 the new baby was brought to the Paediatric Unit and found to have gained no weight since birth and was in poor condition due to neglect. The child had to be admitted to Hospital forthwith.17

A newspaper report (source not given, in Lunney, at 93-9418) gives a graphic description of conditions in some Dublin homes under the heading of ‘Shocking Case of Neglect’, during the Second World War years. Miss Hannah Clarke, Inspector of the NSPCC gave evidence in court, stating that when she visited the one roomed home of this particular family in Dublin, she found three very neglected children in the room. The eldest girl was six years of age. They were alone. According to Miss Clarke: ‘Mary was dirty, her hair verminous and her clothes dirty and verminous. She was wearing old slippers. Margaret was in the same condition. Carmel was lying on a filthy bed. Her head was a moving mass of vermin. There was no food in the room and witness went to a shop and purchased bread, butter and milk for the children’s tea. The father stated that it was not his duty to clean the children while the mother admitted negligence but pleaded ill health. Both parents were sentenced to imprisonment. The report went on to state that in the opinion of the presiding justice, Mr Little, ‘the children should be sent to one of those admirable institutions, miscalled industrial schools, which were really boarding schools for the poor.

In the Rotunda Report for 1945-46 in the section on social services by the almoner, Miss Murphy, another case was summarised as follows: Mrs N developed phlebitis following her discharge from the wards on her seventh confinement and she was advised to rest in bed at home. We were asked to arrange for a district nurse to dress her leg. Her home consisted of one small attic room. There were holes in the floor, the walls were wet and plaster was falling off them. All water had to be carried up from the ground floor. Mrs N was in bed. The head of the bed was against the damp wall and beside an open window. As a result, the baby had developed a cold. Mrs N and her husband and five children – the eldest aged 6 & 12; years lived in this room and slept together on the only bed. In spite of the difficulties, the home was reasonably clean. Mr N, an unemployed cattle drover, was dependent on 18/4 unemployment assistance, 12/6 food vouchers and 5/- children’s allowance pr weekend and his rent was 10/-. Occasionally he obtained a day’s work and earned about £1. In addition the Society of St Vincent de Paul was giving him a food voucher value 4/- per week and the Catholic Social Service Food Centre was giving Mrs N dinner and milk every day. We applied at once to the Corporation Housing Department for accommodation for this family and seven months later they moved into a four-roomed corporation house.

In 1948, the maximum rate of unemployment assistance was 38 shillings per week. So, for a family with five children, the total income including children’s allowances would have been 45s 6d. The NSPCC Annual Report of the Dublin Branch 1947-48 stated: Allowing for a moderate rent of, say, 5 shillings per week, the amount available per head, viz, 5/9½ is well below the minimum necessary to provide food alone. ...It is true that in the worst cases the home assistance authorities sometimes intervene with an allowance for rent; but the total is still insufficient to provide proper nourishment for the children, to say nothing of clothing or bedding, much less for any less necessary amenities. It is a small wonder that some parents give up the unequal contest and apply for the committal of their children to industrial schools on the grounds of inability to support them, when, as we have so often pointed out, they cost the public funds 15/-a head.