Children Of The Poor Clares Read Free Page A

caring for destitute children. For this work they were given dispensation by the bishop of their diocese, their superior within the Church hierarchy. 3 They also became known for the lace-work and embroidered linen produced for sale in their convents—examples of which are in Ireland’s National Museum. In 1869, St. Joseph’s, Cavan was certified as an Industrial School for female children.
     
    The Poor Clares were the only closed order to be given the care of children committed to Ireland’s Industrial Schools, and it was symbolic of the Church’s control over such institutions, and of its power, that a contemplative order of nuns, their lives shut off from the world, their concepts of love focused on Christ and Our Lady, should have been allowed by the state to have absolute charge of children deprived of normal family life.
     
    Industrial Schools first came to Ireland in 1868, eleven years after Westminster legislated them into being for England and Wales. The legislation followed hard on the heels of the Reformatory Schools legislation introduced to deal with young offenders. The stated purpose of Industrial Schools was to shelter, clothe, feed and morally instruct the inmates. The institutions were designed to give gainful occupation to destitute, orphaned and abandoned children who were committed through the courts.
    The system that was put in place was based on per capita payments by the State; at the outset it was set at five shillings per week. The immediate effect of this in Ireland was dramatic. In 1869 there were 183 children committed to the new Industrial Schools; five years later the number had jumped to 3,000. By the time the system was dismantled a century later, 105,000 Irish children would have passed through these schools. The inevitable result of paying for each child, rather than for the funding of each institution, was that it encouraged the school administrators to have as many children as possible committed to their care.
     
    In Ireland there was a reluctance to use the term ‘Industrial School’. Throughout the history of St Joseph’s, from its establishment in 1861 by the three nuns, until it closed in 1967, it was always referred to, and formally described as, St Joseph’s Orphanage. Although the death of one or both parents was not always the cause of a child being committed to one of these institutions, the charitable appeal of an ‘orphanage’ rather than a state-funded institution was considerable. Furthermore, in the public mind Reformatory and Industrial Schools were associated with criminal activity. Therefore, the description of the children as ‘orphans’ was far more likely to elicit sympathy for both them and the religious in whose charge they were placed. This in turn helped to conceal the fact that the schools were both state-funded and governed by regulations intended to ensure the proper care, treatment and education of the young inmates.
     
    The per capita system of funding made sense in the Irish context: it was designed to prevent charges of sectarianism. Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches were running institutions for the young and the giving of money by the State needed to be seen as impartial. Another reason was also the general reluctance of the local authorities in Ireland to contribute to the cost.
     
    There was a higher percentage of destitute children in Ireland than in England and Wales during the nineteenth century. This was usually attributed to the long-term effects of the great famine, a situation reflected in the proportionally greater numbers of children in Industrial Schools. By 1898, there were seventy-one of these schools in Ireland, caring for approximately 8,000 children. Five were for Protestant children and fifty-six for Roman Catholics. The largest anywhere in the British Isles was the school at Artane, near Dublin, which could hold up to 800 boys.
    In 1908, Britain’s reforming Liberal government brought in the Children’s Act,