Madam, – Archbishop Diarmuid Martin made generous personal reference to me in The Irish Times (Opinion, May 25th), arising from my 1966 series of articles, “The Young Offenders”, which dealt in passing with the industrial school system and conditions in its bleakest institutions. The Ryan report also found the series helpful and significant – not least for having prompted so little public comment at the time. Key excerpts from it were published from The Irish Times archive in Weekend Review of June 6th.
Some context for the series may be useful.
As an immigrant journalist from England, with a special interest in social affairs, I had joined The Irish Times in 1962. I found an Ireland virtually innocent of social inquiry or investigative journalism. Douglas Gageby, then the new editor of The Irish Times, was prepared to trust in my initiatives and to allow them generous research time and column space. He was leading the paper into the mainstream of national affairs, but its circulation was still under 35,000.
The “Young Offenders” series, focused primarily on juvenile delinquency, was one of several similar social inquiries I produced in the 1960s (the treatment of single mothers, the elderly and the mentally ill, the alcoholic, were subjects of others). Details of the research are now blurred by time, but as a non-Irish, non-Catholic journalist, asking an outsider’s questions in religious-run organisations, I recall that I was generally received with courtesy and seeming openness.
At the industrial schools, I was aware of treading on strange cultural and historical ground, and of the absence of professional secular expertise and self-scrutiny familiar from Britain. I do recall, in a meeting with executive nuns, talking of John Bowlby’s book, Child Care and the Growth of Love, and finding them unaware such appraisals existed.
The Ryan report has referred to the “innocence” of the times.
Paedophilia was then, indeed, a term little known outside of medical journals. Inevitably, I reproach myself for not digging deeper, and for remaining too content with describing systems rather than seeking out their victims. – Yours, etc,