State involvement in mistreatment of children exposed

Something profound happened this week with the screening of the RTE documentary States of Fear, about the abuse of children in industrial schools. For the first time, the fact that these things happened in institutions under the patronage of the State has been acknowledged, to the extent that the Government has promised a statement next week.

But what has still to be acknowledged is the sheer extent of the State's involvement. It is not enough to limit that acknowledgement to the State's failure to stop dysfunctional religious from mistreating children. Children were treated cruelly by the State, quite apart from anything that was done by Sisters of Mercy, Christian Brothers or other religious.

The State cut spending and nearly halved income tax in the first five years of its existence. That pleased the well-off, but it meant there was little left to spend on poor families and their children. When a father died the State gave his widow so little money to keep herself and her children that many women had to have their children committed to industrial schools.

But to make that happen, the women had to get friends or neighbours to make a complaint so as to have the children taken from them and sent off to one of these institutions. The cruelty of this most vicious necessity is beyond comprehension and was forced upon them. The Sisters of Mercy did not make that happen. The Christian Brothers did not make it happen.

The founding fathers (and in this instance I use the word with contempt) of this State made it happen.

The Christian Brothers pointed out this week that the State paid them £1.50 per boy per week in 1950, at a time when institutions in the North were getting £4 and those in Britain were getting £5.25. In other words, the State was unwilling to pay to feed and clothe the children thrown into institutions following its own refusal to help their families to keep them. And the State knew what it was doing. Official reports complained about the breaking up of families and the incarceration of children in institutions as early as the 1920s.

The State has other dirty secrets, too, many of them chronicled in The Politics of Irish Social Policy 1600-1990 by Frederick W. Powell. We have all heard of the Magdalen laundries in Dublin and elsewhere and of the virtual incarceration in them of unmarried mothers and other unfortunate women. In recent years it is the nuns who have taken the blame for the existence of these laundries.

But the incarceration of these women, especially of women who had more than one child outside marriage (some of them women who had been deserted and could not legally remarry), was proposed by the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor in 1927 and, writes Powell, "by 1932 an arrangement had been established between the local authorities and the sisters-in-charge of Magdalen asylums in Dublin and elsewhere for the containment of `this more intractable problem' ".

These nuns, in other words, were acting on the express wishes of the State, and the State, not the church, was the senior partner in what went on.

Worse, some women were detained in county homes without authority but by the expedient of refusing to allow them to keep their children with them if they left. Not only was this illegal - but it was known officially. In her annual report for 1931-32, the Inspector of Boarded-Out Children, Alice Lister wrote: "A grave wrong is done to their children by retaining them in the Co. Homes, but retention of the children is the only means of securing their mothers from the danger which freedom spells to them."

The foster care system also involved cruelty to children, as acknowledged by another inspector, Aneenee Fitzgerald-Kenney, in her report for 1931-32, where she spoke of "the utter helplessness of the little ones, passed sometimes from one foster mother to another; the appalling disclosures made at inquests of their sufferings and neglect certainly demand something more than sympathy from the public."

And she complained that the 1908 Children Act was not being rigorously enforced.

Following the closure of the big institutions in the late 1960s under pressure from reformers, media and, indeed, some religious, it looked as though the sufferings of the children would retreat safely into the past. Then the children came and told their stories, and it looked as though the willing partners, the religious, would bear the brunt of public revulsion.

But now, thanks to States of Fear, like an old concentration camp commandant dragged from safe obscurity to face his crimes, the senior partner in the mistreatment and abuse of children in industrial schools - the State - is called to account for its actions.