Culpability needed for ruined lives

Kathleen O'Malley was aged eight when she was sent to Mount Carmel orphanage in Westmeath in 1950. She was sent there with her two sisters.

Some of Kathleen's story is by now distressingly familiar. Regular beatings with a ruler or a long stick they knew as a pointer.

Beatings for the merest infractions, beatings for bed wetting. Beatings for letting hot pans fall; for talking during the hours of obligatory silence. Beatings for crying. Awful food.

Used as child slave labour. Laundry two days a week; too bad about school. Washing clothes and bed linen, including the nun's clothes and bed linen. Kathleen remembers having to wash the handkerchief of one of the nuns. The nun had a heavy nasal discharge and at times used to cough up phlegm into a handkerchief, which she would then hand to Kathleen, who would be required to wash it immediately.

They worked in the kitchen as well, and also knitted jumpers. Their own clothes were recycled endlessly. Shoes would be mended annually and if they broke during the year, there would be no repairs until the year's end.

Worst was the humiliation, which was even worse than the beatings. Being regularly characterised as the scum of the earth; being told they were useless, would come to no good, had no talent. But worse than that, for Kathleen and her sisters, was being told repeatedly their mother was a whore, a prostitute, a sinner, disreputable, degenerate. All untrue but the refrain was relentless.

Their mother, whom they loved dearly, was allowed to see them only once a year and initially the visits were searing for the mother and the children. The mother and the children cried throughout the visits. Then she would literally be torn away from them. When she made a scene once, she was told she would not be allowed see them again.

But in the case of Kathleen O'Malley and her sisters and brothers, there was an even darker dimension. Kathleen had been raped by a neighbour when she was barely eight years old. She knew something awful had happened and had failed to communicate to her mother what had occurred. But then her mother noticed Kathleen had a vaginal discharge and took her to St Stephen's Hospital, near the Bridge Street slums where the family lived. At St Stephen's they discovered Kathleen had gonorrhoea and the truth of the rape emerged.

The neighbour was charged with rape but pleaded not guilty. He would have been acquitted were it not for the gonorrhoea.

But before that case started, there was a dawn raid on the O'Malley tenement home, and Kathleen and her sisters were whipped away by social workers (or their then equivalent), brought before a court and, at the instigation of the National Society for the Protection of Children (NSPC), committed to the orphanage in Moate, to remain there until they were 16. There is no evidence of there having been a proper hearing of the committal case. No evidence that the mother was allowed present her opposition to the application for a committal order. No indication of any substantive evidence grounding the application.

The surviving documents suggest the mother was designated an "unfit" mother because of destitution. An additional factor, although not recorded, might well have been that the mother was not married. The oldest child was the product of a relationship the mother had in her early youth; the father of the other children was the mother's partner and later husband.

And another factor: a child's penalty for being raped by an adult was to be removed from its mother? The family was very poor but the mother being "unfit"? The evidence of solicitude on the mother's part in relation to Kathleen's infection certainly suggests otherwise. And Kathleen's memories are of her mother being loving, caring and supportive. She was very close to her mother and bereft when taken away from her.

And the injustice of breaking up a family such as that, without adequate inquiry and then sending the children to Mount Carmel? If the concept of "unfit" enters the fray here, how unfit were the nuns in Mount Carmel, people who had no training in childcare, many of whom (not all) were cruel, vindictive, disturbed.

A judge ordained that these children should be taken from their loving, caring mother and sent to an institution that was cruel, heartless and dysfunctional. Of course, the judge almost certainly did not know what the institution was like, but did he (you can be sure it was a he) care or bother to acquaint himself with conditions in such institutions?

We have focused a lot on the culpability of the religious orders who ran these awful places, and on the Department of Education, which neglected to ensure that the children were properly treated. But how about the judiciary? Perhaps what is most outrageous in the case of Kathleen O'Malley is that some self-important (you can be sure of that too) oaf (ditto) of a judge ruined the lives not just of the three girls but of their mother as well.

One consolation: the commission on child abuse has engaged David Gwynn Morgan of UCC to examine the culpability of the judiciary and the very questionable record of the NSPC in these matters.