Parental cruelty, neglect is `ignored in book about industrial schools'

A UCC sociologist, Dr Harry Ferguson, has warned against "the apparent intolerance of alternative viewpoints and closure of debate", following the publication of Suffer the Little Children.

Writing in the current edition of Doctrine & Life magazine, he said the links between the industrial schools and child protection were being ignored. Cruelty and neglect were not even being mentioned, he said, and noted that the admission to the schools of "at least 80 per cent of children" was due to "lack of proper guardianship".

He rejected claims that the industrial schools amounted to a criminalisation of poverty. Between 1889 and 1955 the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children dealt with 478,865 Irish children. Only 2 per cent of those were taken from their parents, he said. But it was "indisputable that the State was guilty of criminal negligence in allowing the children of the poor to starve in inhuman living conditions and then punishing them and their parents by removing some of them from parental custody".

It was "crucial" to understand, however, that children were also taken into care because of child cruelty, he said. So it was "highly contradictory" that Suffer the Little Children "should neglect the historical reality of child abuse outside the industrial schools as a factor" in children being admitted.

There was a need for "a more historically and sociologically grounded analysis of child abuse as a social problem than Suffer the Little Children offers", he believed.

Meanwhile, the religious orders had barely begun to answer questions raised by the scandal, "preferring to take a defensive legalistic stance rather than one based on restorative justice, reconciliation and healing", he said.

Suffer the Little Children, by Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan, is based on research by the authors which also contributed to last year's States of Fear series broadcast by RTE. That series shocked the public with its accounts of the abuse of children in industrial schools, hospitals and other institutions and led to the setting up of the Commission on Child Abuse.

The book contains much additional information and analyses the role of the religious orders and of the State in the abuse of children.