The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, will give evidence next month before the investigation committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse concerning his May 1999 apology to people who were in residential institutions as children.
The Minister for Health and Children, Mr Martin, is due to give evidence to the committee tomorrow, when it will deal with his role in preparing legislation setting up the commission and other matters following the Taoiseach's apology. Mr Martin was minister for education and science at the time.
His successor in that office, Dr Michael Woods, will be before the committee on Thursday, as will senior officials from that Department, including Mr John Dennehy, its secretary general, and Mr Tom Boland, now chief executive officer of the Higher Education Authority. It is likely also that the current Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, will be called before the Committee.
Yesterday's hearing dealt with the historical background to residential institutions in Ireland, with Dr Eoin O'Sullivan of the Social Studies Department at Trinity College Dublin tracing their evolution from 1750. These were regulated under the Reformatories Act of 1858 and the Industrial Schools Act of 1868. Under the former, 10 such schools for young offenders were set up in Ireland, five for Catholics and five for Protestants.
By the foundation of the State in 1922 there were just three reformatories in the Free State area, all for Catholics - two for boys (at Daingean and Glencree, both run by the Oblate congregation) and one school for girls deemed to have "immoral knowledge", run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Limerick.
By 1885 there were 51 industrial schools in Ireland. The great majority were run by religious congregations, of which 30 were run by the Sisters of Mercy. By the end of the 19th century there were 70 such schools in Ireland, involving 9,000 children, the majority girls. The last industrial school for Protestant children, at Merrion in Dublin, closed in 1917.
Detailed reports on the schools were conducted prior to independence, after which such reports/and commentary were scant up to the 1960s, Dr O'Sullivan said. Between 1911 and 1960, 43,500 children had been in such institutions in Ireland (26-county area). Reflecting on the comparatively high number of Irish people institutionalised since Independence, he quoted from the 1956 census for the Republic.
It showed that while there were 574 in prison, there were 5,385 children in industrial schools, 103 unmarried mothers institutionalised for having a first baby, as "first offenders", and a further 517 "repeat offender" unmarried mothers in other institutions. In both latter cases the women served two years "penance"- the practice but not the law - before release, Dr O'Sullivan said. There were also 950 women in Magdalen homes.
Meanwhile 19,000 people were "involuntarily detained" in psychiatric hospitals, with a further 2,025 detained as "mental defectives". He said 30,000 people in the State were institutionalised in 1956, or more than one person in every 100 of the population at the time (2.88 million). That year also a further 41,000 emigrated.
Dr O'Sullivan recalled the visit to Ireland of Father Flanagan, of Boystown, Nebraska, in 1946 and his description of the residential institutions for children as "Ireland's concentration camps".
He spoke of the work of Frank Duff of the Legion of Mary in setting up alternative homes for women and of a request by religious congregations in the 1960s that judges use the Probation Act less frequently as it meant fewer children were being sent to the institutions. It was refused.
He detailed the growing dissatisfaction with the institutions through to the Kennedy report of 1970 which recommended immediate closure for some and a shift to foster care for children. He said no records of the Kennedy committee's work were available now.