4,228 entries for Finance

The background of broken homes from which many of the residents came is captured by the Tuairim Report, 29: Some of the children in these schools will have no parents, or a parent with whom they have no contact, others may have both parents living but temporarily or permanently unable to provide for them. The committal of the children of one family to different schools, particularly if one parent is dead, often means the complete disintegration of the family as a unit. The surviving parent may marry again, set up a new home with the new spouse, and, when more children are born, abandon completely those of the first marriage who are, in any case, scattered in schools in different parts of the country. 3) Orphans

There was a high number of orphans in Industrial Schools. The Kennedy Committee survey found that the Schools knew that both of a child’s parents were dead in 1½ percent of cases and did not know whether they were both alive in a further 10 percent. Another survey – Lunney’s survey of the Sisters of Mercy Schools – which checked the various school admission registers from the establishment of each School up to 1950 – elicited an average figure of 11.2 percent.24 As a comparison, during the same period, the numbers of orphans was about 0.25 percent of the general population.

The full significance of these striking findings, here and under category 2, is brought out by Dr McQuaid: Not to know whether one or other or both of the parents were alive or dead... represents a remarkable level of basic ignorance of the facts about the children, in dealing with whom this information is most fundamental. For the responsible authorities (one does not necessarily mean the schools) not to be aware of these details is one of the most shattering indictments of the ‘system’. For the children themselves, these facts are also vital. When one considers that in all of us the prime requirement for effective functioning is a secure and unshakable sense of identity, it must be plain to everyone that for a child not to know who his parents were, nor where they are, nor how he can get in touch with them and maintain contact, must seriously invalidate whatever else may be done to help and rehabilitate him. 4) Physical or mental illness

O’Cinneide and Maguire observe: The Boards of Health and Public Assistance received many requests, from parents and guardians, resident managers of Industrial Schools, and other concerned individuals to have children with physical or mental handicaps admitted to the various institutions that catered for people with disabilities. The various local authorities seem not to have operated according to a standardised set of criteria, and many cases of obvious merit were turned down because parents could not contribute to their children’s upkeep in institutions. For the most part, the Boards were extremely tight-fisted when it came to maintaining children in special institutions, and one can only imagine how many disabled children languished at home, with parents who could not cope or provide them with even a rudimentary education, because of the Board’s strident policies in this area. ...Cases that were clearly worthy, given the circumstances of the parents, were rejected on the grounds that the parents were not eligible for public assistance and thus the Board could not accept responsibility to maintain their children.

The Kennedy Report, Appendix F, reported on a survey across different age groups and genders testing for intelligence, perceptual ability and verbal reasoning etc. Each category revealed broadly the same picture. The results of intelligence testing, in essence, were that (at p 113): 11.9 per cent of children in Industrial Schools are mentally handicapped compared with approximately 2.5 per cent in the population, and that 36.6 per cent are borderline mentally handicapped compared with approx 12.5 per cent in the population in general. This leaves 51.5 per cent who are of average or above average intelligence compared with about 85.0 per cent in the population at large.

A child might live in a School and, at a different period, in one of the alternative residential institutions. An example of such transfers is given by Professor Dermot Keogh, in a report he prepared for The Presentation Brothers relating to St Joseph’s Industrial School Greenmount and submitted to CICA, at 108: According to Fr James Good, who was appointed chaplain in Greenmount Industrial School in mid-1955, the following arrangements were in place in the Cork area for the receipt of children. Babies born in the home for unmarried mothers at the Sacred Heart Convent, Bessboro, normally stayed there for two and a half years with their mothers. Between the age of two and a half and ten they lived in a junior Industrial School, generally Passage for boys and Rushbrooke for girls. On their tenth birthday, the boys were usually transferred to Greenmount or Upton. At age fourteen, they were ‘out of books’ and usually worked in the bakery or at shoe repairs. At sixteen, they were released to farmers, for whom they worked as labourers or to take up employment in the army, industry, domestic service or the trades.

Two comprehensive tables25 show the various facilities available for children in care and also the scale on which they had to be utilised.

Table 5 Number of children regulated by census year
	1861	1871	1881	1891	1901	1911	1926	1936	1946	1951	1961	1966	1971
Children in workhouses/county homes	12,307	12,089	11,618	6,618	5,527	5,213	1,900	1,291	800	400	100	53	40
Children in mother and baby homes	-	-	-	-	-	-	607	887	869	817	-	-	-
Children in Industrial Schools under detention	-	2,482	6,279	8,547	8,254	8,382	5,927	6,039	6,510	5,844	3,686	2,456	1,072
Children in Industrial Schools voluntarily	-	200	434	376	298	427	350	250	150	89	99	123	70
Children in Industrial Schools by health authorities	-	-	-	-	-	49	-	-	-	339	388	433	511
Total number in Industrial Schools		2,682	6,713	8,923	8,552	8,858	6,277	6,289	6,660	6,272	4,173	3,012	1,653
Children in Reformatory Schools	539	970	1,151	786	596	652	115	109	237	214	205	145	42
Children in approved institutions	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	245	425	532	788
Children in orphanages	5,000	5,000	3,000	3,000	3,000	3,000	2,500	2,500	2,000	1,000	1,000	1,000	750
Children in prisons (under 16)	1,345	912	912	574	200	5	4	2	2	1	9	2	61
Children boarded out	-	1,476	2,250	2,540	2,370	2,623	1,906	2,304	2,419	2,283	1,692	1,162	914
Children hired out	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	89	131	170	145	184	100
Children nursed out (infant life protection)	-	-	-	-	-	411	803	2,800	2,493	1,500	505	382	365
Total	19,191	23,553	25,644	22,724	20,245	20,762	14,112	16,271	15,631	12,902	8,254	6,472	4,713
Population under 14 (,000)	1903	1914	1614	1529	1353	1301	873	820	823	856	877	901	931
Number of children per 1,000 population	10.1	12.3	14.1	14.9	15.0	16.0	16.2	19.8	19.0	15.1	9.4	7.2	5.1
Ratio of children in institutional care to non-institutional care		14.7	10.4	7.8	7.5	5.8	4.2	2.1	2.1	2.3	2.5	2.7	2.4

Dr O’Sullivan comments:

Table 5.5a Number of children regulated by census year (%)
	1861	1871	1881	1891	1901	1911	1926	1936	1946	1951	1961	1966	1971
Children in workhouses/county homes	64.1	52.3	45.3	29.5	27.3	25.1	13.5	7.9	5.1	3.1	1.2	0.8	0.8
Children in mother and baby Homes	-						4.3	5.5	5.7	6.3	-
Children in Industrial Schools under detention	-	10.7	24.5	38.1	40.8	40.4	42.0	37.1	41.6	45.3	44.7	37.9	22.7
Children in Industrial Schools voluntarily	-	0.9	1.7	1.7	1.5	2.1	2.5	1.5	1.0	0.7	1.2	1.9	1.5
Children in Industrial Schools by health authorities	-					0.2	0.0	0.0	0.0	2.6	4.7	6.7	10.8
Children in Reformatory Schools	2.8	4.2	4.5	3.5	2.9	3.1	0.8	0.7	1.5	1.7	2.5	2.2	0.9
Children in approved institutions	-									1.9	5.1	8.2	16.7
Children in orphanages	26.1	21.6	11.7	13.4	14.8	14.4	17.7	15.4	12.8	7.8	12.1	15.5	15.9
Children in prisons (under 16)	7.0	3.9	3.6	2.6	1.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.1	0.0	1.3
Children boarded out	-	6.4	8.8	11.3	11.7	12.6	13.5	14.2	15.5	17.7	20.5	18.0	19.4
Children hired out	-							0.5	0.8	1.3	1.8	2.8	2.1
Children nursed out (infant life protection)	-					2.0	5.7	17.2	15.9	11.6	6.1	5.9	7.7
Total	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0

Besides the Industrial Schools there were alternative residential institutions in which a child in the care of the might be placed.

The Local Government (Temporary Provisions) Act 1923 brought the administration of the public assistance services formally into the Irish Free State. It provided that in each county one workhouse building should be retained as a ‘county home’ in which all the non-medical inmates in the county were lodged. In the clinical language of a 1920s Report on the County Homes, there were approximately: 11,000 itinerant beggars who moved from workhouse to workhouse; a delinquent element, including prostitutes and young criminals, often the product of an earlier workhouse upbringing; a large group of infirm old people no longer able to care for themselves; so-called idiots and imbeciles, mentally handicapped people for whom there was as yet no special public provision; lunatics unable to secure admission to the overcrowded district lunatic asylums; unmarried mothers and their so called illegitimate children; rejects of a disapproving society; and orphaned and abandoned children.26

At independence, the only places that would receive unmarried mothers were the workhouses/county homes. In 1926, there were over a thousand unmarried mothers with their babies in county homes; by 1950, there were still over 800 children in county homes, but by 1966 only 53. The children remained for one or two years.

The undesirability of having mothers and their infants in the county homes was recognised and in the 1920s and 30s the policy was implemented of providing ‘mother and baby’ homes for unmarried women who were having children for the first time. These were reserved for young mothers who had ‘fallen’ once only and thus were likely to be ‘influenced towards a useful and respectable life’27 (leaving those unmarried mothers pregnant for the second or later time to the county homes). As can be seen from Table 5.5, from the 1930s to the 1950s, there were more than 800 children in mother and baby homes, but none by 1960.

The usual practice in a county home or mother and baby home was for the mother and her child to remain for one or two years, while the mother carried out domestic labour working to pay off their keep and (possibly) to make another lapse unlikely. After that period the child was boarded out28; or adopted (informally or when the Adoption Act 1952 came into force, legally) or sent to a junior Industrial School. By the 1960s, it was also becoming more common for children to be taken by their parents.

According to a Health Circular of 1954, there were 43 Schools and institutions approved by the Minister for Health. One was also a Reformatory (St Anne’s, Kilmacud) and 30 were also Industrial Schools, leaving 12 that were neither Industrial Schools nor Reformatories and thus not available for committals through the courts.

By 196929 there were 18 institutions approved by the Minister for Health which were not also certified schools. These institutions accommodated (in the 16 homes that responded to the Kennedy questionnaire) just over 700 residents (aged 0-2 years: 278; 2-14: 328; 14-18:73).