Children Of The Poor Clares Read Free Page B

which improved and extended previous legislation for child welfare and compulsory school attendance. It was this Act, known popularly as the ‘Children’s Charter’, which formally abolished the death penalty for children, while retaining birching and hard labour as punishment in reformatories, and criminalised cruelty to and the sexual use of children. It also systematised and regulated the Industrial and Reformatory Schools, requiring each school to have a Manager and to be subject to annual government inspection. In Britain, after World War I, the growing public distaste at the idea of placing children in massive prison-like institutions, led to a rapid decline in numbers being committed to Industrial Schools, and in 1933 they were abolished. This, however, did not happen in newly independent Ireland where these institutions were to remain on the statute book until 1992.
     
    By the time of Independence, all these schools in Ireland were for the reception of Roman Catholic children (Protestant children needing residential care were by then being sent to private orphanages). In 1921 the Department of Education took over the administration of Industrial Schools and the system was to remain entrenched and intensified under Tomas Derrig, Minister for seven terms in Eamon de Valera’s governments. Mr. Derrig brought in amending legislation in 1933 that while purporting to improve the children’s educational and dietary standards, also spelt out a wide range of punishments that could be inflicted on the children. Under Mr. Derrig, Irish policy deliberately went in the opposite direction to the reforms being introduced in Britain.
     
    Although Westminster had abolished per capita funding in 1919, replacing it by block grants, in Ireland the Department of Education and the Religious Orders managing the schools persisted in fiercely and adamantly promoting its continuation. The Orders required and demanded a constant inflow of children to keep up their total income. They claimed that the moral training given the children under their care would be superior to that offered to them in the outside world. Backed by the Department of Education, the Orders also combated suggestions that it would be better for impoverished families to be given financial assistance rather than be broken up. In fact, it was poverty, in many guises and for many reasons, which was the fundamental and primary cause for the detention of children in Ireland’s Industrial Schools.
    Under the Act, children could be committed from the age of six to sixteen, and ex-pupils could remain under the Manager’s supervision until the age of eighteen. From the late 1930s, the schools also received younger children, whose maintenance was paid by local authorities. Once a child was committed to the schools, only the Minister of Education was empowered to order her or his release. The terms of the Act made it clear that the children were in detention; escape was an indictable offence for which their period of detention could be extended, and for which, if they were over twelve years old, they could be sent to a certified Reformatory School. They were de jure and de facto prisoners. This situation was to have a bearing on the terrible event which took place in St. Joseph’s, the Industrial School in Cavan in 1943.
     
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    February 1943. Ireland was a carefully neutral country on the edge of a continent engulfed in World War II. Socially and economically it had made little progress since the State came into being, and would change little until the late 1950s. Wealth, privilege and power, though now often wearing different coats, remained in the hands of the few. The subservience of its rural poor, the product of their long oppression and restrictive, minimal education, had yet to be overcome. Chronic unemployment weighed down its urban working class. For a century, the only escape had been emigration. Confined that year in its Industrial Schools,