A District Court judge brought the issue of abuse to the stage, writes CAROL COULTER, Legal Affairs Editor
IN VOLUME 4 of the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which describes the political, social and economic context of the industrial school system, there is a short sub-chapter titled A Play at the Abbey Theatre.
This describes how, in January 1961, a play called The Evidence I Shall Givewas premiered at the Abbey, running initially for 42 performances, followed by four other runs and totalling 87 performances over the year, which, Mr Justice Ryan comments, was "most unusual".
The play was written by Richard Johnson, a judge of the District Court in Co Kerry, and was a court-room drama depicting a day in the life of a District Court judge.
The main case concerned a 13-year-old girl, the subject of an application to transfer her from an orphanage to an industrial school because of her alleged indiscipline.
The main protagonists were a humane solicitor who argued that young children needed “kissing and caressing” and a mother superior who argued that they needed harsh discipline in order to learn “humility”.
The six children of the family had ended up in two orphanages following the death of their mother because their father could not afford to hire a woman to look after them.
The solicitor calculated that with the capitation fee of £2.10s per week, the institutions involved were getting a total of £760 a year.
“Would you not agree,” he asked the mother superior, “that for £150 a year he would have got someone to look after all six?”
The play ended with the girl taking off her scarf to show her shaved head, a punishment for absconding.
According to the Ryan report, the play was well received and enjoyed an unusually long run for the Abbey at that time.
Judge Johnson’s son, also called Richard and now president of the High Court, remembers his father’s preoccupation with this issue at the time.
He was in Dublin, having just been called to the Bar, and his father had spoken to him about it.
"He felt there were things going on he was not happy with," Mr Justice Johnson told The Irish Times.
He said the incident at the centre of the play was a true one, where a girl who ended up appearing before his father was sent to school with one shoe and her head half-shaved.
“Children were coming into court every day. The ‘cruelty man’ was bringing them in. There was no representation for them. That was the way it was, everyone thought it was a good thing that the children went to the nuns or brothers. There was nowhere else to put them.
“If the evidence came in that they had to go into care and there was no other evidence to counter it, the judge had to accept it. There was money going to these people, and if the money went to the parents, they could have maintained the home.
“This was a very important thing to him, and he felt it had to be exposed. It was gestating for a number of years, and he had a lot of difficulty getting it on in the Abbey, it took a good 2½ or three years,” Mr Justice Johnson explained.
“There was a lot of criticism of my father at the time,” he said. Asked if he had experienced the proverbial “belt of the crozier”, he replied that he had not.
“He was there too long.”
This was the only play Judge Johnson ever wrote, though he also did some writing in Irish, according to his son.