4,228 entries for Historical Context

The initial proposed membership of the committee were: Chairman, Mr. John Hurley, Cinema manager – has wide social interests Mr Declan Lennon and Miss Margaret McGivern – members of the Dublin Junior Chamber of Commerce which has interested itself in seeking improvements in the facilities and amenities provided in Artane Industrial School. The Rev. Kenneth McCabe, S.J. Middlesex, England. He has done a great deal of work in the field of juvenile delinquency and neglected children. Specially recommended by Mr. Declan Costello, T.D., who for many years has interested himself in the problems of children suffering from physical or mental handicap. An tSuir Caoimhin O’Caoimh – Little Sisters of the Assumption, Corbally, Limerick. Prominent social worker attached to Limerick Social Service Centre. Br. Francis O’Reilly, Resident Manager Artane. Sec. Association of Resident Managers of Reformatory and Industrial Schools. Dr. John Ryan, Medical Director, St. John of God’s Services for the Mentally Handicapped.’164

This proposal was submitted to Cabinet and was approved on 5th October 1967 subject to a number of changes on the proposed membership of the committee. These changes were: (1)The deletion of Rev K. McCabe; (2)John Hurley to be an ordinary member – not chairman; (3)DJ Miss Eileen Kennedy165 to be chairman; and (4)the addition to the membership of the committee of a nominee each from the Ministers for Education, Justice and Health.166

On 12th September 1967, Mr Barry Early,167 a member of Dublin City Council, was also appointed to the Committee and two days later, on 14th September 1967, the Department of Justice wrote to the Department of Education informing them that ‘the Minister’s nominee for membership of the committee is Mr Risteard Mac Conchradha, a higher executive officer, of the prisons division in this Department’. The other Departmental nominees were Dr JG O’Hagan, Senior Medical officer, Department of Health and Mr Antoin Ó Gormain, Psychologist, Department of Education. At the inaugural meeting of the Committee on 20th October 1967, O’Malley stated that his reason for establishing the Committee was that ‘various individuals and groups interested in sociological activities, had from time to time represented that the provision being made in our reformatory and industrial schools is in urgent need of improvement’. He further stated that the Committee ‘should not feel that limits are being placed on their investigations’.168

The publication of the of the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ Systems on 12th November 1970 is generally viewed as a pivotal moment in the history of residential childcare in Ireland. The Report recommended, inter alia, that the childcare system should be geared to the prevention of family breakdown and residential care should be considered only when there are no satisfactory alternatives; that the system of institutional care should be replaced by small group homes; the Reformatory at Daingean be replaced by a modern Special School; Marlborough House be closed; childcare staff should be fully trained; children in residential care should be educated to the ultimate of their capacities; after-care should form an integral part of the child-care system; administrative responsibility for childcare should be transferred to the Department of Health, with responsibility for the educational element retained by the Department of Education; there should be a new updated Children’s Act; the age of criminal responsibility should be raised to 12 years; both Reformatory and Industrial Schools should be paid on a budget system rather than the existing capitation system; an independent advisory body with statutory powers should be established and there should be continuous research into childcare.

In addition to these broad recommendations, the Committee made a number of recommendations specific to residential care. These included: When children have to be placed in residential care, those from one family should, where at all possible, be kept together. In order to create a home atmosphere the children should be reared in self-contained units in groups of not more than 7-9 children. In well populated areas these units could be purchased or rented houses in different housing areas. The term ‘Industrial School’ should be replaced by the term ‘Residential Home’. Each home should have house parents who would be responsible for the day-to-day running of the unit as a home. Where this is not feasible every home should have a house mother; continuity of staff in these units is fundamental. There should be no suggestion of a dormitory system in units. Children should sleep in bedrooms with not more than three and, in some cases, only one in a bedroom. Units should house both sexes as in a normal home and children should be of different age groups. All homes catering for children in care should be subject to regular inspection. The approach to deprived children in residential care should be one of over-compensation. The children should enjoy the right to, and be encouraged to have, personal property. This means that they should be given pocket money, and should have some say in the choice of their clothes. Children should be encouraged to join in as many outside recreational activities as possible and to use local facilities such as swimming pools, tennis courts, and playing fields. They should be encouraged to mix with friends from outside and allowed to bring them to their homes as well as to accept invitations to visit their friends. Every effort should be made to foster the individuality of the children by allowing them to encounter and cope with circumstances existing outside the home as much as possible. When new buildings are being planned, units should be separate from one another. Where old buildings have to be adapted this adaptation should take the form of modern self-contained units with their own bedrooms, bathroom, lavatories, kitchen, living room, dining-room and entrances. Where it is necessary to alter existing buildings not more than 3-4 units should be in the one building. Grants should be made available for building purposes as in the case of schools and hospitals. Before a child is admitted to residential care he should be assessed to ascertain where he can be suitably placed with most benefit to himself. For this purpose every region should have one centre designated as a reception and assessment centre. This centre should also be a Residential Home. This reception and assessment centre would receive all new cases and be responsible for collecting the background information required for the assessment of the child and his subsequent placement. Before a child is placed into residential care from a reception and assessment centre certain records concerning him should be obtained. These should include birth, baptismal and confirmation certificates, a social background report, a schools report, other personal records. These reports should accompany the child when placed. • A comprehensive record should be kept of every child in residential care including medical case history, school progress reports, psychological tests and any other relevant reports.’169

The apparent significance of the Report can be gauged by the observations of one commentator with a long involvement in the provision of residential care, who argued: the impetus for change and improvement came with the Kennedy Report of 1970. A number of the larger, single sex, isolated institutions were closed down altogether. All the others began to develop small units within their buildings and/or group homes in the community. Alongside with this, training at a basic qualifying level was initiated, starting in 1971 with one training centre, eventually rising to six separate centres...170

More generally, he argued that the report: brought about a remarkable shift in emphasis – from reformatory/punitive to caring; from large institution to small familial group homes; from controlling/corrective to understanding/caring; from custodial to educative; from basic vocational training to all-round education; from untrained, with no opportunity for training, to professionally trained and recognised care workers. It also pointed out that the deprived child needed an investment over and above that required for a child safely and securely growing up in its own family. It also set in train the up-dating of all laws relating to children and child care... 171

Denis O’Sullivan argues that it was only from the late 1960s, that a ‘social risk’ model of childcare, which had influenced policy for the previous hundred years, became displaced by a more developmental model of childcare. This was brought about by the discovery of the ‘deprived child’ in Ireland. Prior to this period childcare intervention was viewed as ‘a means of social control rather than of individual fulfilment’.172 The primary facets of the emerging developmental model were disenchantment with institutionalisation and the need to move beyond a narrow interpretation of childcare. Rather than focusing, almost exclusively, on the physical needs of the child, the need to incorporate emotional and psychological dimensions in promoting the welfare of children gained acceptance. The Reformatory and Industrial Schools Systems Report (the Kennedy Report), prefaced with the statement that ‘All children need love, care and security if they are to develop into full and mature adults’173 most clearly articulated this shift. O’Sullivan has argued that ‘[the] application of changing interpretations of equality to the life circumstances of children who came into care, mediated to the public through conferences, publications and considerable media coverage, was to be one of the major sources of the “discovery” of the deprived child in Ireland’.174 However, while the Report was symbolically an important stage in the evolution of child welfare and, in particular, residential childcare services, it is perhaps better understood as the distillation of an understanding of the role, function and dysfunctions of residential care that had emerged most articulately since the mid-1960s. The key recommendations of the report, from the need for new legislation and the need to provide a coherent administrative structure were recognised and broadly accepted before the report was commissioned.

Mr Padraig Faulkner, the Minister for Education who received the report of the Commission, in his memoirs recalled that: It was an excellent report, highlighting as it did the serious deficiencies in the service, which I accepted. It gave my Department a base on which to build for the future....I remember being pleased that in reference to religious institutions the committee stated: ‘We are very much aware that if were not for the dedicated work of many religious bodies the position would be a great deal worse.175

He further stated that: 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 Dáil 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 two deputies had heard so much as a whisper about abuse they would immediately have raised the matter in the Dáil. I suppose in a way, like most people, I was living in an age of innocence when nobody believed that people in authority, be they religious or lay, could commit such heinous crimes.176

It was only with the construction of health boards in 1970, as a result of the Health Act 1970, that the State began to take a more active role in the provision of childcare services.177 The Act established eight regional health boards and within each health board a number of community care areas. Previous to this Act, services were delivered by local authorities, for whom services for children formed only a very minor proportion of their multitude of tasks.178 Health boards had responsibility for what were termed three ‘programmes’: (1) community care services; (2) general hospital services; and (3) special hospital services. Community care services are further sub-divided into three sub-programmes (i) community protection sub-programme; (ii) Community health services sub-programme; and (iii) community welfare sub-programme. Services for children were provided through the community welfare sub-programme of community care services.179 Gilligan has argued that as health boards began to establish their own social work services, social workers employed by the boards identified childcare as a priority and quickly subsumed the Irish Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children180 as the key agents responsible for placing children in care.181 This was facilitated by utilising the ‘fit person’ order182 under the Children Act 1908,183 a section long forgotten, but initiated by Eastern Health Board social workers and adopted by the other boards.184

The Department of Education were also reorganising their services at this time and on 16th July 1971, it was announced that ‘the industrial and reformatory schools branch will not henceforth exist as a separate branch but will be joined to the Special Schools Sub-Section of the Primary Administration branch under the Principal Officer L Lane and the Assistant Principal officer T Ó Gilín. L Ó Criodhain is appointed as an Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools in the grade of HEO’. Mr Ó Maitiú later commented that the work of this subsection was ‘innovatory and in some ways experimental. It calls for staff of a high quality’ Despite this re-organisation, by November 1973, Mr Ó Maitiú stated that ‘While significant headway has been made in bringing about the reform of the old discredited system, progress in some aspects has not been as satisfactory as it could have been, mainly because of staffing problems.’ As a consequence, he reported that ‘resort has been made to keep the work of the section above the water line’. These included: (i) Formal inspections by HEO of residential homes and special schools suspended since June 1973, apart from a few urgent journeys. As the HEO is bound by law to inspect each school at least once a year, this is a matter of the gravest importance. (ii) Parental Monies (a) Visits by E.O. to homes of parents have practically ceased. (b) arrears in payments of parental monies not being fully investigated. As a result the weekly amounts collected have fallen: immediate action is necessary if the continuing loss in revenue to the State is to be countered. (iii) Other duties: Certain of the minor duties of the clerical assistants have been curtailed or eliminated.

After the publication of the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ Systems, the Department of Education invited observations on the recommendations contained in the report from various interested parties.185 Before examining these responses, it is worth examining the initial response from the Department of Health. In a memo dated November to from PW to Mr O’Sullivan, it outlined that: The main recommendation from the point of view of this Department would appear to be that the Commission recommends the taking over by this Department of the administration of the various Acts dealing with Child Care and the setting up within the Department of a Child Care Division which would deal with all aspects of child care.

The consequences for the Department of Health was that: Apart from finance which would mean transfer not only from the Vote of Education to the Vote for Health, but also from local authorities to health boards of the cost of maintenance of committed children, there would be an increase in the routine work in child care. This work is at present dealt with as part of the work of this section, which also deals with Public Health Nursing Services, and the Maternity and Infant Care Scheme, and by two posts of Inspectors of Boarded Out Children. At present, one of these posts is vacant. The Department of Education Reformatory and Industrial School Branch is staffed by one A.P.O. who also acts as Inspector of the Schools, one HEO, one E.O., one C.O. and 4 clerk typists. Individual returns are received from each school by the Department half yearly.

The memo concluded While the taking over the care of children committed through the Courts for indictable offences would be new to this Department, there is duplication between the work of this Department and the Department of Education where the taking of children into care for social reasons is concerned. I feel that this Department should take over administrative responsibility for the residential care of all children as recommended by the Committee, and that co-operation between the Department and the voluntary organisations running the schools might result in the closing of some of them and the adaptation of others to the requirements set by the Committee at the most economic price possible while meeting the high standards advocated.