Children Of The Poor Clares (3 page)

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 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.

*       *       *

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, were almost 7,000 children, under the care of religious orders.

The Roman Catholic Church, given a ‘special position’ in Eamon de Valera’s new constitution of 1937, had taken on a clearly defined character: narrow, censorious, repressively intrusive, and obsessed by sex. Under its influence, laws had been passed since the foundation of the State, banning divorce and contraception; a heavy censorship was imposed on films and all printed matter with any sexual content. The Church was anti-socialist, opposed to state assistance to the poor, and accommodating towards the Fascist regimes of Spain and Portugal. The number of priests had doubled, and despite the Church’s ambivalent loyalty during the birth of the new state, it had become a formidable and all-pervading independent power that few dare defy. It owned and operated schools, hospitals, institutions for the old, the infirm, the mentally ill, and for so-called ‘fallen women’—known as Magdalen Homes, as well as Industrial and Reformatory Schools. It had become the single wealthiest organisation in the State, paying neither taxes nor rates, and was, in effect, a state within a state.

The war was being felt: an Emergency had been declared; farmers were making good money exporting produce to Britain; imported goods, tea, tobacco and clothing, were rationed; there was a shortage of manufactured goods and limits on the use of electricity. Fuel oil was allotted only for essential services: public transport, tractors, doctors’ cars, fire engines, a few taxis. Coal was virtually unobtainable and the only readily available fuel was peat-turf: a situation which would contribute to the tragedy about to unfold in Cavan town.

County Cavan, an area of rocky hills, bogland and lakes, was one of the poorer parts of Ireland. Its county town, of the same name, had a population of 3,400. There were old stone houses built along the side of a stream, and rows of small brick terraced houses farther up the hill. It had a typical wide eighteenth-century street, with a courthouse and handsome Georgian houses owned by the professional and well-to-do merchant classes. There was a slum, known as the Half Acre, where the poorest of the town lived, the old Market Yard, the Town Hall, and a street along which were located most of the shops and stores. This had recently been officially renamed Pearse Street in memory of the rebel poet and educational reformer executed in the 1916 Uprising, but it was always referred to, even in official documents, as Main Street. The town was dominated by the domed cathedral of the diocese of Kilmore, then nearing completion.

One of the buildings on this street was Sullivans, a large general store of a kind to be found in those days in every country town in Ireland, selling everything from building supplies to bread, and with its own stables, workshops and vegetable garden. As was the custom, most of the unmarried staff lived in. It was a pleasant place to work; the atmosphere was easy-going and the food was good. Next to Sullivans stretched the extensive premises of the Poor Clare Sisters. Behind the main buildings, the Poor Clares’ farm with a steward’s house and farm buildings, an orchard and well-tended vegetable garden, reached up the hillside. Below lay the convent, a national school and the Industrial School, or, as it was always known, St. Joseph’s Orphanage, in whose walls, facing onto the street, were barred opaque windows. The occupants of the convent were never seen outside; the orphanage children rarely. Perhaps an older girl might be sent out on an errand to Sullivans, or old Maggie Smith would walk slowly through the town. She had been in the orphanage in its first years in the 1870s, and had returned because, as she told the nuns who took her back in again, it was where she wanted to die.

The isolation of this small community behind its high walls in the centre of Cavan town was to have ghastly consequences. On the night of 23 February 1943 a fire took hold in the building in which the children were asleep. The outside world burst open the doors of the convent; breaking locks and forcing doors, men intruded into the silent orderly life of the nuns. Within forty minutes the fire had taken the lives of thirty-five girls and old Maggie Smith, and, for a few weeks, would bring St. Joseph’s and the town of Cavan into the public eye.

Part One
 

CHAPTER ONE
 

The Sacrifice

The
ground
floor
of
the
Orphanage,
built
over
a
basement,
consisted
of
a
laundry,
fuel
store,
refectory,
kitchen,
and
a
corridor
with
a
wooden
staircase.
This
led
to
the
first
floor
where,
over
the
laundry,
there
was
a
classroom.
Over
the
refectory
and
kitchen
was
Our
Lady’s
dormitory.
Twenty-one
girls
aged
from
nine
to
nineteen
slept
in
this
dormitory,
under
the
supervision
of
a
lay
teacher,
Miss
Harrington,
who
slept
in
a
cubicle.
The
wooden
staircase
continued
up
to
the
second
floor
landing.
Off
this
landing
were
three
doors:
one
led
to
the
Sacred
Heart
dormitory
in
which
slept
nineteen
girls
from
the
age
of
fourteen
to
eighteen.
They
were
under
the
supervision
of
a
middle-aged
lay
teacher,
Miss
Bridget
O’Reilly,
who
slept
in
a
cubicle
in
the
room.
A
second
door
led
to
St.
Clare’s
dormitory.
In
it
slept
thirty
girls
aged
from
five
to
seventeen,
also
under
the
supervision
of
Miss
O’Reilly.
The
third,
a
double
fire
escape
door,
led
over
an
exterior
metal
landing
to
a
door
into
a
classroom.
An
adjacent
door
in
the
classroom
led
onto
an
exterior
metal
staircase
down
to
a
yard.