29

Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (1999)

In May 1999 RTE Television broadcast a three-part documentary series States of Fear directed by Mary Raftery. These programmes, together with Suffer the Little Children, the tie-in book published later that year, revealed extensive physical and sexual abuse of children in state-funded but clerically-run reformatory and industrial schools. There had been a steady drip feed of criticism in various official reports since the 1960s but damning evidence had been supressed and reports had been sanitised even as the industrial school system was being reformed out of existence. Powerful accounts by victims had emerged in novels such as Nothing to Say (1983) by Mannix Flynn and in memoirs such as The God Squad by Paddy Doyle (1988).1 Suffer the Little Children was not the first book-length exposé of physical and sexual abuse of children in industrial schools, but it was the first systematic analysis.

In 1999 Eoin O’Sullivan, a social policy academic, gained access to Department of Education files with the support of the then Minister of Education Micheál Martin. When it became clear that civil servants were removing portions of files before allowing him to read them, he again sought the intervention of Martin and secured full access to those not exempt from being made public under the thirty-year rule that generally applied. On 11 May 1999, following the airing of States of Fear, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern issued a statement of apology on behalf of the State and all citizens of the State for a collective failure to intervene on behalf of victims of ‘childhood abuse’. This apology fell far short of acknowledging the dynamic revealed in Suffer the Little Children of decades of complicity by the Irish State in supressing evidence of the physical and sexual abuse of children. This was taking place in Church-run institutions into which children had been placed, a process which was financed and in theory regulated by the State.

Raftery and O’Sullivan describe a 1968 visit by the then Minister of Education Brian Lenihan to Artane Industrial School. When he was leaving a fifteen-year-old boy approached him and begged him to stop the Brothers beating the boys. Lenihan, according to this former inmate, turned to his driver and said, ‘Get me out of this fucking place.’ This became a catchphrase amongst the boys. A year later, the industrial school at Artane was closed down.2 Artane featured prominently in subsequent inquiries into institutional sexual abuse. The key questions for these were: who knew what and who failed to act on what they knew? Lenihan certainly knew enough to have written in 1966 to his predecessor Donogh O’Malley, complaining that Department of Education officials were unwilling to establish visiting committees for industrial schools. O’Malley’s response was to establish an inquiry chaired by Justice Eileen Kennedy to examine the entire industrial school system. Suffer the Little Children closed with a discussion of the Kennedy Report (published in 1970) which was as up-to-date as the book could have been given the thirty-year rule governing the release of state documents. The Kennedy Report severely criticised the industrial school system and its woefully inadequate regulation by the Department of Education and ‘sounded the death knell’ of a model of institutional child care that had lasted a century.

The industrial school system was introduced to Ireland in 1868. More than 105,000 children were committed to such schools by the courts between 1868 and 1969. 40,000 of these were held in institutions run by the Sisters of Mercy who also ran the Magdalen Laundries in adjoining premises as part of what Raftery and O’Sullivan describe as a massive interlocking system:

All these institutions were linked together in two key ways. Firstly many of the religious congregations who managed the reformatory and industrial schools also operated Magdalen laundries. Several orders of nuns had constructed large complexes, containing an industrial school, a reformatory and a Magdalen laundry all together on the same site. Secondly, these institutions helped sustain each other – girls from the reformatory and industrial schools often ended up working their entire lives in the Magdalen laundries. Many of the children of unmarried mothers, born in the county homes and Mother and Baby homes, were placed in industrial schools. In some cases the mothers themselves ended up in the Magdalen laundries.3

Under the 1908 Children’s Act, children could be committed who were found begging, found to be without proper guardianship or visible means of subsistence or due to non-attendance at school or for having committed indictable offences. Most girls – over ninety per cent – were sent to industrial schools under the catch-all category of lack of proper guardianship. This covered children of unmarried mothers not eligible for adoption, children whose parents were incapacitated through illness, those of families unable to take care of them due to poverty and the children of families that had been broken up because of the desertion, imprisonment or death of one parent. About ten per cent were committed for non-attendance at school. The numbers committed for criminal offences were small; eleven per cent of boys and less than one per cent of girls.4 The use of religious orders to process such children into adulthood was the cheapest option available to the Irish State:

From the State’s perspective, any of the more enlightened approaches that they were aware of would not only have cost more, but would also have been strenuously resisted by the Catholic Church as an erosion of its power.5

In 1924 there were more children in Irish industrial schools than in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. Various reforms in Britain were bringing down the numbers of children committed to these, most notably the removal after 1919 of per capita state funding. The more children Irish industrial schools took in the more funding they received. Religious orders which turned a profit from children they kept or benefited from their labour were often unwilling to release them even when improvements in the circumstances of their families made this feasible. But a 1945 Department of Education memorandum noted that it would be cheaper to support at least one-third of the then-industrial school population by giving some financial support to the families of these children. Government officials believed that much of the funding that was allocated to support the care of such children was not being spent for this purpose by the religious orders. A 1945 memorandum from the Secretary of the Department of Education to the Department of Finance described this as a ‘grave situation’: children in several industrial schools were severely malnourished.6

During the mid-1940s Fr Edward Flanagan, the priest who founded Boys Town in the United States, published several articles in Irish newspapers condemning the use of violence against children in Irish industrial schools and described these as a disgrace to the nation. Spencer Tracy won an Oscar for his portrayal of Flanagan in the 1938 film Boys Town. Flanagan’s criticism was dismissed by Irish politicians as exaggerated and as a slur on Ireland’s reputation. In private correspondence quoted by Raftery and O’Sullivan, Flanagan wrote that he had removed the Christian Brothers from Boys Town (‘they left after they found out that they could not punish the children and kick them around’). The Irish, he added, sent missionaries into foreign lands but needed to look at how they had turned their unwanted, unloved, untrained and unfed children at home into slaves. There would be, he believed, a day of reckoning for the Church in Ireland and for others who presided over the mistreatment of children:

What you need over there is to have someone shake you loose from your smugness and satisfaction and set an example by punishing those who are guilty of cruelty, ignorance and neglect of their duties in high places. We have punished the Nazis for their sins against society. We have punished Fascists for the same reasons… I wonder what God’s judgement will be with reference to those who hold the deposit of faith and who fail in their God-given stewardship of little children?7

In 1948 Flanagan, who was by then an advisor to President Truman on child welfare, wrote to the Irish government requesting permission to visit a number of penal institutions for adults and children. He died of a heart attack a month before the visit was scheduled to take place. Flanagan’s allusions to Nazis and Fascists were not unreasonable. John, who was an inmate of St Joseph’s Industrial School in Glin from 1945 to 1952, recalled the following punishment of some boys who had been caught trying to run away:

I remember they made these fellows stand in the yard in the rain for hours. No one was allowed to talk to them. It was a bit like a concentration camp – the boys, with their heads totally shaved, falling on the ground unconscious, passed out from exhaustion. They were just left lying where they fell.8

One escapee from Glin had come to the attention of Fr Flanagan. Notes in Fr Flanagan’s archive described how fourteen-year-old Gerald Fogarty had been severely flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails. He then ran away to his mother’s house in Limerick, 34 miles away. A crowd consisting of the Fogarty family and their neighbours – almost 100 people – marched to the offices of Martin McGuire, a well-known Limerick businessman. McGuire was their local councillor and was no less outraged. He wrote to the Minister of Education asking if such punishment was legal. The doctor that examined Gerald Fogarty sent in a medical report on his injuries to the Department of Education. A reply letter on behalf of the Minister to McGuire stated that appropriate action had been taken but gave no details. What appropriate action, asked McGuire in a follow-up letter. The reply stated that the Minister did not feel called upon to give details or that McGuire had any right to such information. On October 1945 Gerald Fogarty’s mother received a letter from the Head Brother at Glin stating that the Minister of Education had granted a discharge to the boy.9 In 1946 the Department of Education had sent a circular to all industrial schools stating that corporal punishment should be administered only for grave transgressions and under no circumstances for mere failure at school lessons and that under such circumstances it should be limited to slaps on the open hand with a light cane or a strap. All other forms of punishment were prohibited but none of these prohibitions were enforced.10

In 1950, an employee of Glin wrote to the Minister of Education Richard Mulcahy and later to the Minister of Justice Sean MacEoin describing ‘awful conditions’ and harsh treatment of the boys, naming specific Brothers who frequently beat boys with leather straps. The whistle-blower suggested a surprise inspection of the industrial school. MacEoin wrote to the Department of Education demanding an investigation. But the complaint was dismissed and a hand-written annotation on the letter from MacEoin in the Department of Education file stated, ‘No action required.’11

In 1951 Mulcahy pushed for an inquiry into the running of industrial schools that was successfully resisted by the Association of Reformatory and Industrial School Managers, all of who were clerics. The focus of the proposed inquiry was to have been on how State money was spent, for example, the proportion spent on food for children. A caustic 1955 report by a Department of Education official on St Conleth’s Reformatory School in Daingean, Co Offaly, described the boys as less well cared for and worse fed than the farm animals kept by the school and expressed the opinion that very handsome profits were being made by the farm with no evidence of any of these being ploughed back for the benefit of the boys.12 But no follow-up action was taken by the Department and hundreds of boys suffered miserable conditions over the sixteen years that followed.

Many of the former inmates quoted in Suffer the Little Children described experiences of beatings and physical abuse. Terry, one of four siblings sent to an industrial school in 1952 after their mother died (his father, a farm labourer, kept custody of two other children) describes beatings administered daily to children who wet their beds, which many did because of the anxiety they experienced. Similar stories emerged from many other industrial schools. Tom, who entered the industrial school system in 1951 at eighteen months of age, recalled an incident that occurred at Artane where he lived from 1959 to 1965:

I was about twelve, and I’d grown out of my shoes. When I asked for a new pair the Brother wanted to know why. The old ones looked perfectly okay, he said. I told him they were too small, and he hit me with a belt across the face. Sent me flying. ‘Now tell me the truth’, he said. I told him again, ‘Because they’re too small for me.’ He hit me again, and asked me again, and this went on and on, and he kept hitting me. ‘You’re telling lies’, he said at last. ‘Your shoes are not too small, you’re too big for your shoes.’13

In 1962, with the approval of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, the chaplain at Artane wrote a report that documented extensive physical abuse of boys by Christian Brothers. Suffer the Little Children includes an account by ‘Barney’ who was incarcerated in Artane between 1949 and 1958 with his older brother. Their mother had died when he was seven years old. The boys were so hungry at times that they supplemented their diet with scraps meant for the furnace and food meant for animals kept on the farm. Barney described boys being so badly beaten that they used to suffer from ‘head staggers’ like punch-drunk boxers. He claimed that boys were chained to trees or had their heads shaved as punishment for misdemeanours. If one boy ran away all the others were punished by having their rations cut. He recalled incidences of suicide by boys who may have been amongst those buried in the unmarked graves found at Artane. Barney also described the sexual abuse of boys conducted in full view of the classroom by Brother Joseph O’Connor who was in charge of the Artane Boy’s Band that played in the interval at major GAA matches in Croke Park.

Fr Moore’s report was first made public by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin in August 2007, 45 years after it had been first received by Church and State. The supressed report described a culture of excessive physical punishment:

There seems to be no proportion between punishment and offence. In my presence a boy was so severely beaten on the face for an insignificant misdemeanour. Recently, a boy was punished so excessively and for so long a period that he broke away from the Brother and came to my house a mile away for assistance. The time was 10.45p.m., almost two hours after the boys retired to bed. For coming to me in those circumstances he was again punished with equal severity. Some time ago, a hurley stick was used to inflict punishment on one small boy. The offence was negligible.14

Fr Moore described the atmosphere at Artane as an ‘unnatural situation’ – 450 boys and a staff of 40 had no contact with members of the opposite sex – that ‘invariably leads to a degree of sexual maladjustment in the boys’. Whether Fr Moore was alluding to sexual abuse is unclear. In Artane, according to Raftery and O’Sullivan, the children referred to this as ‘badness’, in the absence of a specific vocabulary to describe what many experienced. A former Artane inmate described what happened when a group of boys of which he was one reported a Brother who used to try to sexually abuse them:

We were kind of afraid, in case the priest would go back and tell the Brother. We were really putting our lives on the line. I remember that when we told the priest, he didn’t seem very surprised. Then about a week later, that particular Brother was gone. No explanations – he just wasn’t around any more. And that was the last we heard of it.15

In 1966 Tuairim (in English, ‘Opinion’) published a pamphlet on the residential care of deprived children in Ireland.16 One of its authors, Peter Tyrrell, had been committed to Letterfrack in 1924 at the age of eight along with his two elder brothers. Tyrrell wrote a harrowing memoir that was eventually published in 2006 as Founded on Fear, thirty-nine years after he burned himself to death on Hampstead Heath, having never recovered from the psychological damage caused by the physical abuse he experienced as a child.17

Although the Tuairim report was critical of the industrial school system it did not include, to Tyrrell’s distress, any descriptions of the kinds of physical abuse he experienced in Letterfrack. In a 1958 letter to Tyrrell, Senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, in whose papers Tyrrell’s memoir was discovered, argued that vested interests would obstruct efforts to redress the abuse of children in Letterfrack and elsewhere:

Suppose I write to the Bishop of Galway? He is an arrogant and unscrupulous bully, whose only interest in the matter would be to warn any evil-doers, so that their tracks could be covered. Write to the Minister of Justice? I should be more hopeful there, though these political figures are a bit afraid of a row with anything that looks like a clerical collar. I know what he would tell me, that the matter was being looked in to, that it was all a long time ago, and that suitable action would be taken if required, but it was not the practice to divulge what action, if any, had been taken.18

Tyrrell in his memoir described the rations he received in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1945 as much better than those at Letterfrack. Life in the camp was ‘Heaven on earth’ compared to that in the industrial school ‘where children were brutally beaten and tortured’.19

The Kennedy Committee established by the Government in 1967 to examine the industrial and reformatory school system was, unsurprisingly, stonewalled by the Department of Education. In 1968 Justice Kennedy wrote to the Department seeking details of all complaints about such schools over the previous five years and details of how these complaints were dealt with. The Department’s response more than a year later referred to just five complaints all of which, it claimed, had no basis.20 Responses to questions put by doctors on the Kennedy Committee to Fr William McGonagle, then Chairman of the Association of Resident Managers of Industrial and Reformatory Schools, confirmed the frequent practice of getting boys to remove their nightshirts before punishment beatings at Daingean Reformatory School where McGonagle was in charge.21 But this was the sole instance the Kennedy Committee managed to document of the physical abuse of children in the industrial school system.

A 1991 Focus Ireland report on residential care for children and adolescents in Ireland exemplified the desire to move on without acknowledging the pre-1970 abuse by children in industrial schools. In a section on the history of residential care, it described the dominance of religious orders over the industrial school system as the result of the unwillingness of local authorities to provide financial assistance. Just one sentence referred to a number of reservations about the operation of industrial schools, ‘mainly concerning the nature of education and training obtained’. There was no mention of physical or sexual abuse. The report stated that criticisms of the system ‘primarily in the form of autobiographical or semi-journalistic accounts of the past, do not reflect the present situation’, the implication being that these could be discounted.22

Suffer the Little Children documented the failure of the State to protect children in its care even though much of the focus was on the culpability of religious orders that directly ran these institutions. Responses to revelations of such abuse cannot be completely disentangled from the anti-clericalism that accompanied secularisation. At the same time, as Nell McCafferty’s book on the Kerry babies argued, the moral policemen of Catholic conservatism were not always priests. Officialdom in its various forms was implicated in the suppression of sexuality, the stigmatisation of lone mothers and the secret removal of their ‘unwanted’ children from families and communities.

In their 2012 book Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents, Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell argue that the preservation of rural Irish society, as it had developed in the post-Famine era, required industrial schools for surplus children and mental hospitals for surplus adults just as much as it required emigration. After the Famine a stem-family system, where just one child would inherit the land and any others were expected to move away, predominated.23 Memoirs like Peter Tyrrell’s suggest that the wider community had a good idea how children were treated in industrial schools and such institutions were part of the local economy. Communal opposition, such as that which occurred with respect to Glin in 1945, was exceedingly rare. Catholic public morality took illegitimate children who threatened rights to property out of the equation. Industrial schools removed children who could not be cared for by their families from circulation. Emigration then removed many of these once they grew up. The State was unwilling or unable to develop the range of welfare services that could have provided alternative care for children wrenched away from their families. Nor did it introduce legislative reform until obliged to do so as a signatory of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).

Such institutional failures were by no means unique to the Republic of Ireland even if Catholic public morality shaped the Irish case. Revelations of the experiences of children in Irish institutions mirrored those from Newfoundland and Australia, where similar Catholic institutions had become established. Other countries also have their histories of coercive confinement and institutional neglect. François Truffaut’s 1959 film Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) depicted how a child became displaced from his family into institutional care in a similar way to some of the cases documented in Suffer the Little Children. In the two decades following the Childcare Act of 1991 there have been many further disclosures of on-going institutional failure. For example, the 2012 Report of the Independent Child Death Review Group identified 196 young people who died between 2000 and 2010 whilst in contact with social services. As scathingly put by Fintan O’Toole, the State put more time and effort into tracing farm animals than it did into tracing lost children.24

BF

Notes

1Mannix Flynn, Nothing to Say (Swords: Ward River Press, 1983) and Paddy Doyle, The God Squad (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1988).

2Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (Dublin: New Island, 1999), p.380.

3Ibid., p.18.

4Ibid., p.22.

5Ibid., p.15.

6Ibid., pp.95–109.

7Ibid., p.194.

8Ibid., p.201.

9Ibid., pp.212–15.

10Ibid., p.206.

11Ibid., p.222.

12Ibid., p.104.

13Ibid., p.114.

14Fr Henry Moore, Private Report on Artane Industrial School Commissioned by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland (1962) <http://www.paddydoyle.com/category/father-moore-private-report-on-artane-industrial-school/>

15Ibid., p.120.

16Tuairim, Some of our Children: A Report on the Residential Care of the Deprived Child in Ireland (Tuairim: London, 1966).

17Peter Tyrrell, Founded on Fear (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006).

18Letter cited in Tyrrell, Founded on Fear, p.173.

19See Tyrrell, p.157.

20See Raftery and O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children, p.229.

21Ibid., p.230.

22Focus Point, At What Cost: A Research Study on Residential Care for Children and Adolescents in Ireland (Dublin: Focus Point, 1991), p.45.

23Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell, Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p.275.

24Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times, 23 June 2012.