Children Of The Poor Clares (29 page)

In early 1976 we attempted to get access to the orphanage records. We called the convent in Cavan and were told that the house was in mourning for Sister Carmel who had just died. We must write to the Mother General, we were told, for permission. This we did, and some weeks later the Mother General telephoned in answer to our letter. She said she had heard about the book, and wanted to give us her support. The orphanage had been closed before she became Mother General; she disliked the system of institutional orphanages and would never have countenanced them. Although she was an American herself, she had met girls who had been brought up in Industrial Schools and knew how they damaged people. We must, she emphasised, understand that the nuns who ran them had not been trained in child care.

We pointed out that the Department of Education had a lot to answer for in their tardiness to implement reports, and that government funding had not been generous. ‘If the system was bad,’ she responded, ‘then this must mean the people who ran it were also at fault.’ Again we equivocated, saying that we appreciated that the nuns had been placed in an impossible situation and that they had probably not entered the Order to work with children. ‘But if you are going to indict the system,’ she insisted, ‘you must indict my nuns as well.’

She told us that nowadays the Order was unable to satisfy the demand for babies for adoption, and that ‘earlier we had to send them to the United States.’
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She explained that we could not have access to the orphanage records because of the question of confidentiality, but wished us success with our project and said it might be possible to meet with us later in the year after she had returned from visiting the Poor Clares’ Houses in California. ‘We must accept whatever you write with humility,’ she said, ‘and regard it as a burden which has been sent to try us.’

We wrote to her again asking if it would be possible to see the Rules and Regulations under which St. Joseph’s had been certificated, and a few examples of the orphanage accounts. She telephoned to say that it would not be possible to see the accounts because ‘they were not kept in those days.’ She again offered her support, and suggested that we meet Sisters Theresa, Cecilia and Anne, a parish priest and the Bishop in Cavan, and two older Sisters in the convent. ‘It is a pity that you could not meet Sister Carmel. She died a short time ago. She was such a cultured person, so interested in literature and drama. She’d tell you how marvellous our freedom is today—to go to the theatre and so on.’ We again expressed a hope that we could meet her. She hoped that this would be possible when she returned from a visit she had to make to the Houses in England.

Sister Carmel’s obituary appeared in the
Anglo-Celt
. It told of her being ‘very popular among her pupils’ and that many of them visited and corresponded with her long after they had left her classroom. She read widely, it said, and had a marvellous memory. ‘Her great sense of humour made her a most interesting conversationalist. Sister Mary Carmel had very high ideals about the religious life and for 44 years aimed at realising them.’

We attempted to do as the Mother General suggested. The Bishop of Kilmore, with cordiality, pointed out that the orphanage had closed some time before he attained his present position, and he knew nothing about it. We arranged to meet the priest in Dublin, but he cancelled our appointment and did not make another. We wrote to the Sisters, received polite letters in reply but were asked first to contact the Mother General.

This time she telephoned in a quite different tone. ‘I don’t think I can permit you to talk to my Sisters now. I had not earlier seen your letter to the newspapers and it is clear from it that you are prejudiced against the Order and that nothing constructive could come from any meetings. You do not have an open mind on the subject.’ The Order, she said, had cared for many of the girls without payment, and she accused us of having tape-recorded ex-pupils we had spoken to without their permission
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—she knew that two of the girls who had spoken to us had had to have psychiatric treatment since. ‘Your motives are cash and sensationalism!’

Our letter in the newspapers had been straight-forward: we wanted to meet people who had been at St. Joseph’s to learn about their experiences. In fact one of the responses to it had been from Sister Constance, quoted earlier. Thus, apart from our meeting with Sisters Benedict and Dymphna, the telephone conversations with the Mother General and with the insights gained from Sister Anne’s frank comments, we were unable to give the Sisters who had looked after the children in Cavan any further opportunity to state their point of view.

Many of the nuns in our story were, even by the criteria of those days, sadistically cruel to the children in their care. One can only speculate why this was. Their motives for entering convent life may have been rendered these women least suitable for the care of children. They may have been under social, financial or parental pressure—there was great cachet in Ireland in having a daughter a ‘bride of Christ’; perhaps they may not have wanted to have children, particularly at a time when large families were the rule in Ireland. They may also have had an idealised view of a nun’s existence in an enclosed Order: quiet contemplation, intense spirituality, denial of their sexuality. If they then found that they lacked a true vocation, it needed immense courage to face, as a ‘spoiled’ nun, the disapproval of family and society. As they passed into maturity and middle age, their days spent in the repetitive, rigorous discipline of their religious duties, and enduring the petty jealousies and irritations than can exist in an enclosed community, their accumulated frustration and hidden resentment could, only too easily, be vented on the children in their power. Within the Orders, supervising children in an Industrial School was not a favoured position: the decision was made for them by their superiors, to whom they were tied by the most important vow, that of obedience.

The Poor Clare Sisters in St. Joseph’s were faced with the formidable task of taking responsibility for up to eighty children, in great emotional distress and need. As Tina put it, they had to take ‘what the world threw in at them.’ Add to this a general acceptance then in Ireland of the use of violence in controlling children, and a situation could exist where their consciences may not have been troubled by their actions—at least, not until they had left the School. That was Ann-Marie’s insight when she said ‘I think that when they went back to the ordinary life of a nun, they must have started to think about the things they had done.’ And it was also borne out by Sister Anne’s unguarded comment: ‘Things went on there which should not have happened’.

As for Sister Dymphna and the other kind nuns, or those who just stood by, turning their eyes from what they saw happening, what could they do? They were all caught up within the web of the system, bound by the vows of unquestioning obedience, and the power of their own Superiors within each Order.

There was silence too, from the general public. Yet so many thousands of children passed through the Industrial School system and out into the small, tightly-knit Irish community, that many people must have been aware of the children’s treatment and its consequences. Perhaps they were not silent in the privacy of their homes, or even in public when visibly confronted with a ghastly tragedy like the fire in 1943, but, in general, the public felt the children should be grateful for the care they were receiving—and most were unaware their taxes were subsidising the system. If the Church approved of what was going on behind those high walls, then all must be well. As we were to be told by the nun supervisor at a Magdalen-type laundry: ‘The type of care you get in any society reflects the society in which you live.’

Where the power of Church and State were inter-twined, as in the case of the Industrial Schools, the combination seems to have been too overwhelming for any effective interference. No government minister, no departmental administrator or inspector, whatever their misgivings or knowledge of the facts, ever publicly exposed or condemned the system. Not even when thirty-five children burned to death.
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Part of the reason for this was that Ireland’s Catholic population had a unique relationship with the Church, seldom wishing or daring to challenge its authority. During our researches—essentially up to 1978—we were unable to find any reservations publicly expressed by members of Government about the Industrial School system, and only on rare occasions by members of the Dail about specific incidents which had come into public view.
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We could find no criticisms of it by the press. No-one from the judiciary who publicly objected to this parallel and largely secret penal system dealing with children. Nor did they publicly object to the illegal detention of adult women in the laundry reformatories and Magdalen Homes. These were cruel and shameful infringements of legal and human rights in a constitutional democracy. They made a mockery of the civil system for care and protection of children promised specifically in the 1916 Proclamation and in the Declaration of the Provisional Dail in 1919, and then betrayed. So much for Ireland’s long fight for freedom from oppression!

Because proper records were not kept by the custodial Orders, no one will ever know how many girls from Industrial Schools were sent to these laundry-reformatories, and possibly confined there for a lifetime. Where the Church had total control, as in the case of ‘voluntary’ laundry-reformatories and Magdalen Homes with their ‘morally delinquent’ inmates, few people had the self-confidence, social status and determination to act like the Dublin doctor—the man who, in the 1950s went to the Magdalen Home in Galway when he heard about ‘poor Katy O’Toole’ being confined there for twenty-one years—and simply took her out.

The threat of the laundry-reformatory in Gloucester Street, Dublin, run by the sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge was a constant theme in the girls’ stories. It was, in fact, a Magdalen Home, though we had never heard it referred to as such. We had never been able to contact anyone who had been sent there from Cavan. All we knew of it were Ann-Marie’s still horrified memories of what she had seen as a twelve-year old in 1960 when Sister Anne took her there on a visit: the crop-haired women, wearing sacking, sweating in the steam. She and others also told us that girls who had been sent there during the mid-60s had described it as being horrible: their experiences had a devastating effect on them.

At that time the institution was uncertified, and we had never been able to discover under what section of the 1908 Act girls were transferred to ‘Gloucester Street’—as it was known, or if they had gone under some kind of license. In July 1975, we telephoned the convent, explained that we were researching the Industrial School system, with a focus on St. Joseph’s in Cavan. We were given an appointment to see Sister Angela
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, who was a supervisor. The convent, in a Dublin inner-city area, was built in Victorian institutional style, with high walls and a heavy door. Sister Angela, a qualified social worker, was a woman of strong character, straightforward, emanating competence. We quote extensively from her interview.

‘This type of institution was set up during the last century in response to inadequacies in the social services to provide a type of custodial care for delinquent women and girls. They were also run by the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity and the Good Shepherds. There were people who needed protection. People who—as they used to say moralistically—”fell from the paths of righteous virtue”. They were not suitable for mental hospitals or county homes. An unmarried mother, particularly in the Irish countryside, was a pariah. She couldn’t stay indefinitely in a Mother and Baby Home, and she couldn’t return to her family. She would either become an unmarried mother again and again, or would literally die in the streets because she had no one to take care of her.

‘Some of them came from very good families. There are women in this House who were from a better social class than I was. Some of them went with a man just once and became pregnant. You cannot be too hard on the families; you have to think of the social climate of the time. But they are not all unmarried mothers. There is still a need for a refuge and some of the backlog is still here.’

‘Did they come voluntarily or were they sent?’

‘Well, that’s debatable. What is voluntary and what is being sent? There was no legal provision by which they were sent and there was no legal provision by which they stayed.’

‘It was never custodial?’

‘No, completely voluntary in the sense that they did not have to come or have to remain… Earlier, the criteria for the treatment of girls was preservative and protecting, preventing them from becoming delinquent. It was never punitive, though in those times there may have been punitive aspects.

‘We began to separate them into groups in 1964. We always did have young girls but they lived in the ordinary institution with the others until it became inappropriate. We usually have a section with the old-age pensioners—ex-alcoholics, street walkers, and some who were unable to cope. Then we have a group with those who were mentally retarded unmarried mothers, and another group with those who are middle-aged and who were delinquents, women with problems. We also have the women from Industrial Schools who were inadequate. The schools knew they weren’t going to be able to cope and that, unless they were looked after, they would become delinquents and alcoholics. This was where the preventative aspect came in.’

They now had a training centre for ten girls, said Sister Angela. Five of them were usually on remand from the courts and some of the others came from what were still the Industrial Schools. ‘Usually they are sent here because they are very difficult; they are acting out and may be bullies. They settle down better among their own age group. We have never taken anyone under thirteen—earlier it used to be the late teens and twenties. Recently it is down to thirteen and fourteen. The programme now for the younger girls is half-training, half-education. Education is in the morning now. It used to be at night. They do a couple of hours in the laundry three afternoons a week. When the girls leave they often go through a wild stage but will come back at a later date—we often have to keep them till they are twenty-two or twenty-three. You don’t like to be over-protective, but you can’t throw them out into the world until they can cope.’ The Order, she said, now had a small half-way hostel where the girls could stay when starting to work outside. Government was giving them money for the younger girls, ‘but the laundry covers the cost of the rest—we only get the princely sum of £2 a week for sixty-seven of the others assessed as unemployable.’