10,992 entries for Inspections - State

The daily adjournment debate (a maximum of 30 minutes in all, consisting of a speech from the member who initiated the debate, followed by a reply from the responsible Minister) enables a member to agitate some matter in a fairly narrow, often local, field. This might have seemed to be just the procedural vehicle for some allegations of individual injustice in a School to be ventilated. In fact it was seldom so used. One exceptional case in which it was invoked arose out of an incident in which a 14-year-old boy had his arm broken by a Brother at Artane using a sweeping brush when he refused to submit to additional beating. Both the Minister (Sean Moylan) and the Deputy, Captain Cowan, who raised the matter were concerned to emphasise that this was an ‘isolated incident’. In response to the debate, the Minister remarked rather broadly, that ‘this is an isolated incident...[and] any guarantee I give parents of full protection of their children is no licence to any of the children to do what they like’. He stated that he had visited practically all the schools and, rather unexpectedly, that ‘they are deficient in many things [and] in future a wider provision for expenditure must be made if these schools are to serve the purpose they ought to serve in the nation’. In one other rare adjournment debate, Deputy James Dillon set out the increasing figures for the committals by the Dublin Children’s Court and asked unavailingly that the Minister should review each individual committal.46

Although Dáil questions were occasionally the source of some exact information not available otherwise, they are of their nature episodic with their content depending on Deputies’ interests. They concerned such issues as: funding of children’s travel home for holidays; the failure on the part of the schools (or Department) to inform or warn parents when their children were transferred; and the suggested replacement of a police car as the vehicle for conveying children from the Dublin Children’s Court to the Industrial School because of the embarrassment it caused.47 Many of the questions asked simply for the numbers of committals on the various legislative grounds, in the previous year, figures that were published anyway in the departmental annual reports. Others urged medium-level changes of policy, for instance, repeatedly in the late 1930s, the adoption of the Cussen Committee recommendation that the salaries of literary teachers should be paid by the Department. The Deputy who asked the initial question seldom put a supplementary in response to the Minister’s reply.

In short, despite the panoply of weapons available to members, the ‘big issues’ in regard to the Schools were raised only seldom and then usually without preparation, passion or persistence. For instance: ‘It costs about 15 shillings per week to keep [a child at Industrial School]. It has often been said to me that if some of that money were used to help the parents, there would be a very big change in their conduct.’48 (There was no reply to this from the Minister, perhaps because he concentrated on another query advanced in the same interjection.) Another comment was: Six months would be quite sufficient [for a child committed under the School Attendance Act]. There is a great inclination, when children are sent to Industrial Schools, to send them there for long periods. To which the Minister replied: Absence from school leading to committal would never be of such a character that six months would be sufficient ...This proposal would mean setting up a new institution. Resident Managers would not accept a child for a short period. 49 Next, as regards early discharge, Minister O’Deirg stated: If responsible people– the local clergy or prominent Deputies who show that they realise both sides of the case could testify to [the Minister] ... an application for early release will be considered.50 A request for the setting up of a system for hearing individual complaints against the Schools received surprisingly little discussion with the Minister for Education emphasising the inherent difficulty confronting anyone evaluating a complaint from a child or parent: You have the situation that the child probably had been proved before a police court to be a notorious liar... Nevertheless some great abuse may have crept in and you are in this dilemma, that it is impossible to satisfy your mind that the allegations made by the children have absolutely no foundation. Improved after care was suggested, including compiling figures on those former school children who were subsequently in trouble with the law.51 And it was put to the Minister, with no thorough examination of the difficulties and possible solutions: if he will get his colleagues [in Finance and Local Government] to provide for suitable foster parents remuneration on the same scale as the state is paying to industrial school... half the number of children in Industrial Schools... will go into decent families.52 The following exchange was over in an instant: Mrs O’Carroll asked the Minister whether he is aware that the whole system of detention of boys and of Industrial Schools is out of date and needs to be reviewed and overhauled General Mulcahy: I am not so aware. 53

There was an air of Ministerial detachment in the Dáil exchanges arising out of the closure, in 1959, of Greenmount School. Deputy Stephen Barrett asked the Minister for Education, Jack Lynch, if he was aware that the Greenmount children had been ‘dispersed without any prior discussion with their parents and that, in fact, the parents were not aware that the children had been removed from the Industrial School to other Industrial Schools until after the dispersal had taken place?’ The Minister replied: The conductors of the school did so for what they considered good and sufficient reason and there was no intention whatever to ignore parental rights. They did so in the best interest of the management and conduct of the school. Deputy Barrett pressed the point by stressing that the interests of the parents had been ignored and that the promoters of the Industrial School knew that they were ignoring the rights of the parents. Minister Lynch’s answer was: I think it ought to be made clear that they acted strictly within their rights and within the terms of the Children Act, 1908, which governs the conduct of Industrial Schools.54

The tone of the debate was invariably respectful and grateful to the authorities who ran the Schools55, though sometimes there was an air of ‘formal pleading’ about this. There was surprisingly little reference to what was happening in Northern Ireland or other jurisdictions.56Down the decades, the same few members took part in debates, on the subject.

When, as they did only spasmodically, the Schools were referred to in the newspapers, it was mainly in three contexts. First were court reports of committal proceedings. Dr Maguire57 states: Regional newspapers and several of the Dublin evening papers published extensive accounts of committal hearings in Children’s Courts in Dublin and around the country, although it must be said that this coverage was varied and inconsistent: such reports were regular weekly or monthly features in some newspapers, while others reported on court proceedings not at all, or only in extraordinary cases. Both the (Dublin) Evening Herald and the (Dublin) Evening Mail (and later the Evening Press, which began publication in 1954), usually reported on the same cases each week, and these published accounts were remarkably similar. It could be that a single correspondent provided coverage for all three papers, although it is impossible to know this for certain as the stories did not carry by-lines. Coverage of committal cases in the Dublin evening papers began to fall off in the early 1960s, and this trend could be due to a variety of factors; the folding of the Evening Mail in mid-1962; a decline in court committals, and/or a growing trend towards an overhaul of the industrial school system coupled with a growing awareness of the need for privacy and discretion in cases involving children.

Secondly, there were accounts, generally in local papers, of the very occasional discussion of the Schools at a local authority meeting. For there seems to have been, if only spasmodically, livelier debate on the general topics of the School system at local authority meetings, sometimes inspired by resentment at the financial burden imposed by local residents in the Schools.

On this O’Cinneide and Maguire state58 The attitude of local authorities toward their responsibility for maintaining children in industrial schools, and general attitudes toward the efficacy of an institutional method of dealing with poor and neglected children, are themes that run throughout press coverage of local authority meetings and the often extensive coverage of children’s court proceedings. In an interesting and insightful discussion at the monthly meeting to the Galway Board of Health, one committee officer expressed a concern that the local ISPCC inspector, Mary Monnelly, was having children committed to institutions without the proper authority, and without consulting the appropriate local authorities. The Commissioner of the Board of Health instructed the superintendent home assistance officer to inform Monnelly that she was to consult with the local authorities before seeking the committal of children to industrial schools. In 1938 the Galway County Homes and Home Assistance Committee had a discussion, that was reported in the press, about the merits of boarding-out children rather than committing them to industrial schools. The committee was considering a proposal to discontinue boarding children out n favour of maintaining all local authority children in industrial schools. Alice Lister, the Department of Health inspector of boarded-out children, argued that children could never receive the same kind of care and attention in an institutional setting that they could in a good foster home... Other members of the committee countered these claims by pointing out that industrial school children received training in a skill or trade that would help them to support themselves upon release, while children boarded out, particularly with poorer families, were not guaranteed such an education or training... After much debate the proposal to discontinue the boarding-out system was defeated. The following week the local newspaper, the Connacht Tribune, published an editorial that attempted to provide both sides of the story but came down squarely in favour of industrial schools.

The third type of material about the Schools that occasionally appeared was human interest stories. For instance, an account of the visit of a dignitary (as when, in 1935, Eamon de Valera visited Artane and spent two hours in the School ‘and was treated to a performance by the famous Artane Boys Band’). Another similar report described a fund-raising carnival held at the Lenaboy Industrial School in Galway city.

The result was that, up to the time of the Kennedy Report, as Dr Keating writes59: [Apart from Michael Viney’s articles of 1966] the rest of the sparse coverage of the Schools was treated either with the nostalgic gloss of Patrick J McNulty’s article of 20-21 June, 1969 entitled Memories of Artane or as simple reportage devoid of analysis, despite opportunity for greater analysis as a result of conferences on the inadequacies and dangers of the system.

Serious cases of sexual or physical abuse were not reported, even if they came to light by way of a court case. Thus, for instance, a letter to The Irish Times on 11th May 1999, from a former reporter (and subsequently editor) of the Evening Herald, Brian Quinn, stated that in the 1950s the writer had:60 witnessed one of the worst of the Christian Brothers break into the office of the manager and demand that a court case that mentioned Artane should not be used in the Evening Herald. Before the manager could lift a phone, the Manager would push open the editorial door to tell us the manager had instructed that the case be dumped.... Those requests should have alerted journalists to start inquiries into what was happening in Artane. That we did not is a heavy burden.

Significantly, the case referred to in this letter seems to have gone unreported also by the other newspapers. Likewise, when in January 1951, an attendant employed at Marlborough House (not an Industrial School, but a place of detention, run by the Department of Education) was convicted of sexually abusing two boys detained in the institution, there were no newspaper reports.

A Departmental report by Dr McCabe of 8th January, 1948 recorded that following the death of a child in Rathdrum, owing to careless supervision, Dr McCabe visited the school and sought to get a ‘callous’ resident manager to appreciate the gravity of what had occurred: I drew her attention to the bad impression that would be likely to be created regarding the conduct of affairs in her school on anybody who would read the inquest proceedings in the newspapers. She told me that the matter had been taken care of in Carysfort and that there would be no report in the press.

Even if a skeleton made its way out of its cupboard, the newspapers could be persuaded to turn their back. An example from as late as 1964 was a story about head-shaving in the Connacht Tribune, which was picked up by the British Sunday paper, The People; but no Irish national paper reported the story.

The second omission was even more serious. With very few exceptions, there was no comprehensive survey of the School system and no accounts of the every-day experiences of the residents in the Schools. Specifically, so far as any serious discussion of the School system goes, in the 1940s and 1950s, only two contributions in daily papers have been found. Each was a multi-part feature in The Irish Times (referred to below).