Children of the Poor Clares: The Collusion Between Church and State That Betrayed Thousands of Children in Ireland’S Industrial Schools

By Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey

The original 1985 edition of Children of the Poor Clares was the first book to expose the reality of the treatment of children placed in church care in Irelands post-independence horrendous industrial school system. Giving an intimate picture, covering over four decades, of life in one of these institutions, it documented the gross physical and emotional abuse, neglect, malnourishment, exploitation, lack of proper education, deprivation, and humiliation that scarred the children for life. It further identified the collusion of the state and its own lawbreaking that enabled the abuse in its vast apparatus of incarceration of impoverished children. This revised updated edition gives chilling details of revelations that have since become public and of the states ultimate responsibility for what took place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jan 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466909038

Mavis Arnold

The authors were both journalists in Ireland for many years. Mavis Arnold still lives in Ireland; Heather Laskey now lives in Canada, where she has been a magazine and newspaper writer and made documentaries for CBC radio. Her last book was the prize-winning Night Voices: Heard in the Shadow of Hitler and Stalin published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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© Copyright 2012 Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

The original edition of ‘Children of the Poor Clares: The Story of an Irish Orphanage’ from

which this present book has been extensively revised, extended and updated, was first published and printed by The Appletree Press Ltd., Belfast, N. Ireland, in 1985.

This book was created in the United States of America.

isbn: 978-1-4669-0903-8 (e)

Trafford rev. 01/18/2012

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Note

Foreword

Prologue

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

Part Two

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

Part Three

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the many people we interviewed, and without whom this book could not have been written. In particular we thank all the ex-pupils who told us their stories of their lives both inside these institutions and in the outside world.

Note

The names of all ex-pupils of Industrial Schools and inmates of other institutions that we interviewed or heard about have been changed to guard their privacy; also the names of other non-public figures either at their request or to maintain their privacy. This also applies to nuns, unless we knew they were dead or where they made public statements. Exceptions are also made to this rule of privacy in the case of ex-pupils where they made public statements or have written books, or were publicly identified—as in the case of the orphanage fire and Inquiry.

For Anne and all the others

It shall be the First Duty of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children.

Declaration of the Provisional Dail of 1919.

Foreword

Bruce Arnold

I was an onlooker to the events that gave birth to this book. I knew the authors when we were all students and married one of them. Our children grew up knowing one of the principal characters; we know much of her life story, and that of her children and grandchildren. All of them have been marked by the dire ineptitude of the supposed care and charity bestowed on her by the Order of the Poor Clares.

When the events covered in the early chapters of this book were revealed to us, bit by bit, their chilling message was deeply impregnated with a sense of isolation and secrecy. We knew what had happened to her and to other members of her family, and we knew the story of others whose childhood life she had shared. What we did not know was the extent to which the experiences of the young girls in St Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan town represented a tiny part of a system that was spread throughout the length and breadth of the country. Thousands of children were incarcerated over many decades. They were given what were in effect long prison sentences by the courts under legislation that was severely interpreted and even more severely backed up by the Church, the social workers who were supposedly caring for young deprived and disadvantaged children. Those committed to the industrial school and orphanage system had one thing in common: the period of their confinement ended, usually, at age sixteen. Some had been in institutional care since they were infants.

This book researched into other aspects that also had a common character of a very unhappy and, from the State’s point of view, shameful background. Almost universally throughout the industrial school system—which, at its most extensive, had several thousand boys and girls in what would now be called care—the administration of the children’s needs was seriously defective. They were always hungry, malnourished, and in some cases they literally starved. It has been said by the religious orders which managed these places that times were hard. This was emphasised in the context of times being hard generally in the country, through poverty, from the 1930s to the 1960s. It was not so. The State’s subvention, on a per capita basis, was adequate to feed, clothe, house, heat and give health care to the inmates. It also provided sufficient for educational and craft skills to be taught.

It was rarely done. There were exceptions, but they prove the rule that in reality the money disappeared. Startling tales are told by men and women who went through the system of the loaded tables of the religious, the disposal of waste to pig farms, while the children remained hungry. One of the worst examples has been published. This was the Baltimore School in Cork. It came directly under the Bishop of Ross, now dead, and it was examined in horrifying detail by Judge Mary Laffoy, head of the Commission to Investigate Child Abuse. Children who had serious eye defects so that they could not follow the limited teaching they got but never saw an optician. They did not possess toothbrushes. They were never seen by a dentist. They slept on foul bedding and contracted diseases from vermin. Their education, seriously inadequate, equipped them only for the most menial of jobs. And there is evidence that this led to further abuse and also to exploitation of a brutal and horrifying kind.

St Joseph’s was not the worst, not even among the worst. Yet the collected testimony indicates a regime that was profoundly ignorant of the needs of the girls, cruel towards them to the point of sadism, and dishonest in the presentation of their plight to the outside world.

People now say that everyone knew about it. Yet at the time no one spoke out. The iron hand of the Church kept the voices of witnesses silent. This was even so when St Joseph’s was plunged into the limelight by the tragic fire which is part of this book’s story. In it many girls died, clearly unnecessarily. The State and the administration of St Joseph’s, with the Church conniving, covered up the nature of the institution and the degree of ignorance and lack of intelligent action that led to the deaths. The Report was a whitewash.

It took the indirect intervention of a European organisation, the O.E.C.D. (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) investigating Irish education with a view to assessing Ireland’s credentials for entry into the European Union, to wake the country up to what was going on. That organisation, spotting the anomaly in education levels in the industrial schools, blew a whistle to which the then Minister of Education, Donagh O’Malley, responded. As a result, through the Kennedy Committee which he set up, the dismantling of the whole system was mercifully started.

It took six years before the original 1985 edition of this book could find a publisher. In the following years, a changed climate of outspokenness in the country as a whole led to further revelations and to television documentaries that exercised a powerful impact on the public and on the politicians. It achieved far less with the Church.

Nevertheless, with his apology in 1999, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, changed the tempo and direction of blame and anguish. He acknowledged a collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue. He made what he called a sincere and long overdue apology, and he set in motion legislative remedies.

I have never been happy with the apology and what followed. On investigation I was able to reveal, in a number of newspaper articles, what I call, rather guardedly, a hidden agenda. There was clear evidence of collaboration between Church and State. Collectively, the State, through the Department of Education, and C.O.R.I.—Conference of Religious of Ireland—acting on behalf of the orders, sought to create a self-protective structure. It included the agreement. The Government backed this with laws, procedures and investigations. The order was protected in exchange for their acceptance of the other processes which appeared to fulfil the terms of the apology by the Taoiseach.

The system of Redress was unfair and, again, secretive. Men and women seeking recompense were under legal restraint not to divulge the amounts given to them. There were heavy penalties for breaching these conditions. The alternative route to compensation—through the courts—was made peculiarly difficult. The terms under which the religious communities were persuaded to come forward protected them, in law, from criminal prosecution. This was an unusual exclusion in Irish tribunal law.

From the outset, the set of proposals that were offered—in that suspect phrase—to bring closure—have instead brought suspicion, distrust, dismay and disappointment to the victims. They still feel on the outside. They still feel that their circumstances—as diminished, marginal, second class people in Irish society—remain unchanged.

This applies to the girls of St Joseph’s as much as to the rest of them. And it is wrong.

When Children of the Poor Clares first appeared I was immensely proud of what my wife and our friend, Heather Laskey, had achieved. It had the simple appeal of what I saw as careful, objective truth. It was and is a poignant picture of a dark set of experiences that paint a terrible picture of a hidden Ireland, brutal, cruel and covert. This much-revised, updated and extended version enriches the story and adds greatly to our knowledge of what has happened since in an ongoing saga. But it still leaves the story unfinished. It will never be finished. The pain and damage to these men and women, many of whom have long since passed on, many of whom are still wrestling with the memories and the nightmares, are a shameful extract from living history. The State still has not dealt with them fairly. It has not drawn them in nor healed their suffering. And anyone who thinks otherwise has only to take up this book and read the truth.

Bruce Arnold, a political journalist with the ‘Irish Independent’’ is the author of 21 books including political biographies and novels. His book The Irish Gulag: How the State Betrayed its Innocent Children was published by Gill & Macmillan in 2009.

Prologue

One day in 1972, in a Dublin psychiatric hospital, a young woman recovering from a suicide attempt was suddenly overcome by hysterical panic. Its cause was found to be the entry into her ward of a nun. During the weeks that followed, the young woman, whom we call Mary, would talk compulsively and consistently to her doctor about an event which had taken place when she was six or seven years old. It had happened in what she referred to as the ‘orphanage’ in Cavan, run by the Poor Clare Sisters, where she had spent her childhood. Mary said that she and two other little girls had been given sixpence by a woman attending morning Mass at the chapel inside the convent walls. Delighted at their good fortune, Mary and the two other children ran out of the courtyard door and across the street to a shop to buy sweets. On their return they were confronted by a nun. She picked up a piece of wood which had a nail in it, and struck out at them, hitting one of the other little girls on the side of her neck. The child fell down, ‘pumping blood’.

Mary never saw this child again. She remembered that not long after, she was called into a room where there were people she had never seen before, sitting round a table. They questioned her about the event. The nun, who had struck the child, and whose name Mary could not remember, went away at about the same time. This was all she could recall of the incident, but she spoke of many other things which had happened inside the walls of this institution which—though known as an orphanage—was, in fact, St. Joseph’s Industrial School run by the Poor Clare Sisters.

Mary’s psychiatrist was Jim O’Brien. He had already come across other patients who had spent their childhood in these institutions and had been appalled by what he heard of their experiences. He urged his wife, Heather Laskey, a freelance journalist, to research and write about St. Joseph’s. Shortly after this, Heather had a chance meeting with Mavis Arnold. They had been acquainted as students but had not met since 1960. For reasons she could never subsequently explain, she said to Mavis: ‘I need your help. I want to write a book about an orphanage in Cavan.’ Mavis replied: ‘So do I’.

At about the same time that Jim O’Brien met Mary, Mavis Arnold had been asked to take into her home the young woman we call Clare and who had also been sent as a child to St. Joseph’s. Clare was twenty-three years old, pregnant and unmarried. She had no job, no money and nowhere to live. She had been sent by a voluntary agency which had offered to find her a family with whom she could stay until her baby was born. Tense, pale and unsmiling, she had arrived carrying a battered brown suitcase containing all her possessions.

During the months that followed, her story emerged. She was one of a family of ten children. In 1952, when the youngest child was two, her mother disappeared and the children were put into Industrial Schools. Clare was four years old then, and she and her three older sisters were sent to St Joseph’s in Cavan. She remained there for twelve years and, after she left, was able to keep in touch only with one brother, who had been in Artane Industrial School, and one sister. She did not know what had happened to the others. Her mother, she thought, was still alive, though she had never heard from her.

Living with the Arnolds was Clare’s first experience of family life and it was hard for her to get used to it. Mealtimes were the most difficult because she could not eat the food, saying it was too rich—though for fear of giving offence she would sometimes eat it anyway and then go and be sick. At other times she would sit quietly, her shoulders hunched, rocking. She grew fond of the children, as they did of her, although she thought they needed much more discipline. She would look expectantly at their parents when she heard the children being rude, waiting for them to be beaten and surprised when they were not. She mistook the noisy games, the rivalry, the laughter, and the tears for bad behaviour, unable to understand that it was the normal pattern of family life. Her own concept of discipline was always based on physical punishment.

Obviously intelligent, she liked to help the children with their homework and was shocked at how little Irish they knew. She was paid a small amount of money in return for help in the house and she saved it carefully. She was clean, tidy and reliable. She loved praise, although she found it hard to believe she deserved it. If anyone was cross with her she would burst into tears and bite her nails furiously.

As the months passed she felt more at ease. Her suspicions and anxiety seemed to fade and to be replaced by trust. This, in due course, led to a confession a few weeks before her baby was due. Crying bitterly, she said this baby would not be her first. She had already had one other which had been adopted.

After this disclosure, Clare talked more freely. She described her life in the ‘orphanage’ and was both pleased and surprised by the often horrified reaction to the stories of her childhood: the fear, the loneliness, the poor diet and the endless beatings. She talked constantly about the other girls, some of whom she still saw, and to whom her loyalty was intense. Many of them, like her, had moved from one domestic job to another, friendless and lonely, and regarded as easy prey for any man who came along. These encounters often resulted in pregnancy. There were two choices available to these young women when the children were born: to give them up for adoption or to keep them—a choice which, all too often, resulted in a pitiful struggle to survive. Some of the girls married men who beat them, drank too much or deserted them. A few, very few, had husbands who were ‘good’ to them. ‘You feel ashamed to have been in an orphanage,’ Clare would often say. ‘You feel as if you belong nowhere. As if you’re not good enough to be with ordinary people.’

Clare’s daughter was born in the autumn. She had been persuaded by an older woman who took an interest in her, to keep the baby, and had agreed, although she was apprehensive about how she would manage. When Clare and her baby left hospital, they were welcomed back into the family of which she had become inextricably a part. She had no difficulty in looking after the baby’s physical needs: that came to her easily enough as she had looked after plenty of babies in the orphanage. But she had to be taught to show her affection: to hold the baby closely and to kiss and cuddle her. When the child was six months old, Clare made the sudden decision to leave the family. She was determined to be independent and so she found a job and put the baby into a day nursery. The next few years were very difficult for her. Accommodation was expensive and she could get only low-paid, part-time work. The child was often sick and Clare spent many lonely days and nights looking after her. Her friends were other girls from St. Joseph’s, in similar circumstances; virtually penniless, and alone.

We eventually met Mary, whose story is told here later.¹ She could not remember the name of the little girl who had been struck, and we were unable to find any record in the Cavan town registry of the death of a child from St. Joseph’s during the period in question. If she did die, this may have happened in a hospital elsewhere. However, because we were unable to locate any documentary evidence, and although everything about the incident was 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.

*       *       *

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 28th, 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 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, 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