Children Of The Poor Clares Read Free

consistent with what we later learned about this and other Industrial Schools, in the first edition of the book we decided not to refer to her insistent story. Further information which has emerged during the past years has revealed a number of incidents in Industrial Schools of unreported and unaccounted-for deaths. Some of these appear to have been the result of violence against the children and should therefore have been the subject of criminal investigation. We have no knowledge of any charge being recorded in respect of a death in any Industrial School in the State’s history. But Mary’s description of the unknown adults sitting around a table asking her questions would possibly conform to some kind of coroner’s inquest or to the inquiry formally required under the 1908 Act governing these schools, following a pupil’s death not due to natural causes. 2
     
    What we learned of the experiences of both Mary and Clare, and what we were later told by many other ex-pupils, stirred in us a sense of outrage, and persuaded us that the facts about this institution, which we were to find was, in most respects, essentially representative of a whole system, had to be made public. The only major way in which its story differed was in regard to an infamous mass tragedy which took place in 1943, and which we heard about only after we had begun our research.
     
    We were constantly assured by those in authority and others, particularly when they were attempting to dissuade us from writing this book—as many did—that everything was now different. We thought that possibly this was true. Times had changed, and, even in Ireland, by the 1970s it was possible to hope that there was more recognition of the needs of children. But we decided that the truth about the past had to be told. At that time, there was no independent record of the reality behind the external apparatus of twentieth-century Church ‘benevolence’ towards children in Ireland. Nor had anyone yet documented the failure of successive Irish governments to implement their own laws and ministerial regulations relating to its Industrial School, a system where the Church ignored and broke State laws and regulations with arrogant impunity. It was a subject that was spoken of only with lowered voices, behind closed doors.
     
    We went ahead with our research and then writing the book without a commitment from a publisher, also with constraints upon our time because we both had young children and other work as freelance journalists. Despite this, and despite our being able to gain access to only a minimal amount of government records, we were nevertheless the first to reveal the stark truth about the Industrial Schools, and to attempt to document the suffering endured by the tens of thousands of children who had been trapped in the vast network of what were in effect Ireland’s child prisons, and the shameful silence of those who knew or suspected what was going on, but who looked the other way and failed to carry out their statutory duty.
     
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    The earliest record we found of what was always known as St. Joseph’s Orphanage is in the Newry, Co. Armagh, Annals of the Poor Clares:
     
    May 28 th , 1861—Three Sisters left our dear convent to found another St. Clare’s in Cavan for the education and salvation of the Little Ones of Our Divine Lord.
     
    The Poor Clares, an order of nuns founded in the year 1212 by St. Clare in Assisi, Italy, at the suggestion of her mentor, St. Francis, was enclosed: they were not at liberty to leave the confines of the convent in which they had taken their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The Order came to Ireland in 1625, and, like others, gradually expanded during the following three centuries despite periods of intense persecution of the Catholic Church. By 1900 there were seven Poor Clare Houses in Ireland. They were a contemplative order, but some of their numbers were engaged in teaching and in