Children Of The Poor Clares (2 page)

Bruce Arnold, a political journalist with the ‘Irish Independent’’ is the author of 21 books including political biographies and novels. His book
The
Irish
Gulag:
How
the
State
Betrayed
its
Innocent
Children
was published by Gill & Macmillan in 2009.

Prologue
 

One day in 1972, in a Dublin psychiatric hospital, a young woman recovering from a suicide attempt was suddenly overcome by hysterical panic. Its cause was found to be the entry into her ward of a nun. During the weeks that followed, the young woman, whom we call Mary, would talk compulsively and consistently to her doctor about an event which had taken place when she was six or seven years old. It had happened in what she referred to as the ‘orphanage’ in Cavan, run by the Poor Clare Sisters, where she had spent her childhood. Mary said that she and two other little girls had been given sixpence by a woman attending morning Mass at the chapel inside the convent walls. Delighted at their good fortune, Mary and the two other children ran out of the courtyard door and across the street to a shop to buy sweets. On their return they were confronted by a nun. She picked up a piece of wood which had a nail in it, and struck out at them, hitting one of the other little girls on the side of her neck. The child fell down, ‘pumping blood’.

Mary never saw this child again. She remembered that not long after, she was called into a room where there were people she had never seen before, sitting round a table. They questioned her about the event. The nun, who had struck the child, and whose name Mary could not remember, went away at about the same time. This was all she could recall of the incident, but she spoke of many other things which had happened inside the walls of this institution which—though known as an orphanage—was, in fact, St. Joseph’s Industrial School run by the Poor Clare Sisters.

Mary’s psychiatrist was Jim O’Brien. He had already come across other patients who had spent their childhood in these institutions and had been appalled by what he heard of their experiences. He urged his wife, Heather Laskey, a freelance journalist, to research and write about St. Joseph’s. Shortly after this, Heather had a chance meeting with Mavis Arnold. They had been acquainted as students but had not met since 1960. For reasons she could never subsequently explain, she said to Mavis: ‘I need your help. I want to write a book about an orphanage in Cavan.’ Mavis replied: ‘So do I’.

At about the same time that Jim O’Brien met Mary, Mavis Arnold had been asked to take into her home the young woman we call Clare and who had also been sent as a child to St. Joseph’s. Clare was twenty-three years old, pregnant and unmarried. She had no job, no money and nowhere to live. She had been sent by a voluntary agency which had offered to find her a family with whom she could stay until her baby was born. Tense, pale and unsmiling, she had arrived carrying a battered brown suitcase containing all her possessions.

During the months that followed, her story emerged. She was one of a family of ten children. In 1952, when the youngest child was two, her mother disappeared and the children were put into Industrial Schools. Clare was four years old then, and she and her three older sisters were sent to St Joseph’s in Cavan. She remained there for twelve years and, after she left, was able to keep in touch only with one brother, who had been in Artane Industrial School, and one sister. She did not know what had happened to the others. Her mother, she thought, was still alive, though she had never heard from her.

Living with the Arnolds was Clare’s
first experience of family life and it was hard for her to get used to it. Mealtimes were the most difficult because she could not eat the food, saying it was too rich—though for fear of giving offence she would sometimes eat it anyway and then go and be sick. At other times she would sit quietly, her shoulders hunched, rocking. She grew fond of the children, as they did of her, although she thought they needed much more discipline. She would look expectantly at their parents when she heard the children being rude, waiting for them to be beaten and surprised when they were not. She mistook the noisy games, the rivalry, the laughter, and the tears for bad behaviour, unable to understand that it was the normal pattern of family life. Her own concept of discipline was always based on physical punishment.

Obviously intelligent, she liked to help the children with their homework and was shocked at how little Irish they knew. She was paid a small amount of money in return for help in the house and she saved it carefully. She was clean, tidy and reliable. She loved praise, although she found it hard to believe she deserved it. If anyone was cross with her she would burst into tears and bite her nails furiously.

As the months passed she felt more at ease. Her suspicions and anxiety seemed to fade and to be replaced by trust. This, in due course, led to a confession a few weeks before her baby was due. Crying bitterly, she said this baby would not be her first. She had already had one other which had been adopted.

After this disclosure, Clare talked more freely. She described her life in the ‘orphanage’ and was both pleased and surprised by the often horrified reaction to the stories of her childhood: the fear, the loneliness, the poor diet and the endless beatings. She talked constantly about the other girls, some of whom she still saw, and to whom her loyalty was intense. Many of them, like her, had moved from one domestic job to another, friendless and lonely, and regarded as easy prey for any man who came along. These encounters often resulted in pregnancy. There were two choices available to these young women when the children were born: to give them up for adoption or to keep them—a choice which, all too often, resulted in a pitiful struggle to survive. Some of the girls married men who beat them, drank too much or deserted them. A few, very few, had husbands who were ‘good’ to them. ‘You feel ashamed to have been in an orphanage,’ Clare would often say. ‘You feel as if you belong nowhere. As if you’re not good enough to be with ordinary people.’

Clare’s daughter was born in the autumn. She had been persuaded by an older woman who took an interest in her, to keep the baby, and had agreed, although she was apprehensive about how she would manage. When Clare and her baby left hospital, they were welcomed back into the family of which she had become inextricably a part. She had no difficulty in looking after the baby’s physical needs: that came to her easily enough as she had looked after plenty of babies in the orphanage. But she had to be taught to show her affection: to hold the baby closely and to kiss and cuddle her. When the child was six months old, Clare made the sudden decision to leave the family. She was determined to be independent and so she found a job and put the baby into a day nursery. The next few years were very difficult for her. Accommodation was expensive and she could get only low-paid, part-time work. The child was often sick and Clare spent many lonely days and nights looking after her. Her friends were other girls from St. Joseph’s, in similar circumstances; virtually penniless, and alone.

We eventually met Mary, whose story is told here later.
1
She could not remember the name of the little girl who had been struck, and we were unable to find any record in the Cavan town registry of the death of a child from St. Joseph’s during the period in question. If she did die, this may have happened in a hospital elsewhere. However, because we were unable to locate any documentary evidence, and although everything about the incident was consistent with what we later learned about this and other Industrial Schools, in the first edition of the book we decided not to refer to her insistent story. Further information which has emerged during the past years has revealed a number of incidents in Industrial Schools of unreported and unaccounted-for deaths. Some of these appear to have been the result of violence against the children and should therefore have been the subject of criminal investigation. We have no knowledge of any charge being recorded in respect of a death in any Industrial School in the State’s history. But Mary’s description of the unknown adults sitting around a table asking her questions would possibly conform to some kind of coroner’s inquest or to the inquiry formally required under the 1908 Act governing these schools, following a pupil’s death not due to natural causes.
2

What we learned of the experiences of both Mary and Clare, and what we were later told by many other ex-pupils, stirred in us a sense of outrage, and persuaded us that the facts about this institution, which we were to find was, in most respects, essentially representative of a whole system, had to be made public. The only major way in which its story differed was in regard to an infamous mass tragedy which took place in 1943, and which we heard about only after we had begun our research.

We were constantly assured by those in authority and others, particularly when they were attempting to dissuade us from writing this book—as many did—that everything was now different. We thought that possibly this was true. Times had changed, and, even in Ireland, by the 1970s it was possible to hope that there was more recognition of the needs of children. But we decided that the truth about the past had to be told. At that time, there was no independent record of the reality behind the external apparatus of twentieth-century Church ‘benevolence’ towards children in Ireland. Nor had anyone yet documented the failure of successive Irish governments to implement their own laws and ministerial regulations relating to its Industrial School, a system where the Church ignored and broke State laws and regulations with arrogant impunity. It was a subject that was spoken of only with lowered voices, behind closed doors.

We went ahead with our research and then writing the book without a commitment from a publisher, also with constraints upon our time because we both had young children and other work as freelance journalists. Despite this, and despite our being able to gain access to only a minimal amount of government records, we were nevertheless the first to reveal the stark truth about the Industrial Schools, and to attempt to document the suffering endured by the tens of thousands of children who had been trapped in the vast network of what were in effect Ireland’s child prisons, and the shameful silence of those who knew or suspected what was going on, but who looked the other way and failed to carry out their statutory duty.

*       *       *

The earliest record we found of what was always known as St. Joseph’s Orphanage is in the Newry, Co. Armagh, Annals of the Poor Clares:

May
28
th
,
1861—Three
Sisters
left
our
dear
convent
to
found
another St.
Clare’s
in
Cavan
for
the
education
and
salvation
of
the
Little
Ones
of
Our
Divine
Lord.

The Poor Clares, an order of nuns founded in the year 1212 by St. Clare in Assisi, Italy, at the suggestion of her mentor, St. Francis, was enclosed: they were not at liberty to leave the confines of the convent in which they had taken their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The Order came to Ireland in 1625, and, like others, gradually expanded during the following three centuries despite periods of intense persecution of the Catholic Church. By 1900 there were seven Poor Clare Houses in Ireland. They were a contemplative order, but some of their numbers were engaged in teaching and in caring for destitute children. For this work they were given dispensation by the bishop of their diocese, their superior within the Church hierarchy.
3
They also became known for the lace-work and embroidered linen produced for sale in their convents—examples of which are in Ireland’s National Museum. In 1869, St. Joseph’s, Cavan was certified as an Industrial School for female children.

The Poor Clares were the only closed order to be given the care of children committed to Ireland’s Industrial Schools, and it was symbolic of the Church’s control over such institutions, and of its power, that a contemplative order of nuns, their lives shut off from the world, their concepts of love focused on Christ and Our Lady, should have been allowed by the state to have absolute charge of children deprived of normal family life.

Industrial Schools first came to Ireland in 1868, eleven years after Westminster legislated them into being for England and Wales. The legislation followed hard on the heels of the Reformatory Schools legislation introduced to deal with young offenders. The stated purpose of Industrial Schools was to shelter, clothe, feed and morally instruct the inmates. The institutions were designed to give gainful occupation to destitute, orphaned and abandoned children who were committed through the courts.

The system that was put in place was based on
per
capita
payments by the State; at the outset it was set at five shillings per week. The immediate effect of this in Ireland was dramatic. In 1869 there were 183 children committed to the new Industrial Schools; five years later the number had jumped to 3,000. By the time the system was dismantled a century later, 105,000 Irish children would have passed through these schools. The inevitable result of paying for each child, rather than for the funding of each institution, was that it encouraged the school administrators to have as many children as possible committed to their care.