Children Of The Poor Clares (7 page)

During the debate on the motion a week later in the Seanad
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, the Sinn Féin Senator from Cavan, Patrick Baxter, was at pains to defend the town and to rebut press criticisms, especially those in the
Irish
Times
, of its fire-fighting facilities. He also said there had been ‘statements about the difficulty of gaining access to the building and about the difficulty of procuring keys. All these had been a misrepresentation of the facts.’ Mr MacEntee, a senior member of Eamon de Valera’s government, repeating a point he had made earlier in the Dail, replied that the purpose of the commission ‘was not so much to find scapegoats as to try and find what were the weaknesses which led to the loss of life and devising preventative measures… It might convey a wrong impression of my point of view if it were assumed that the commission would not have to fix responsibility.’

The members of the Tribunal of Inquiry were Mr Joseph McCarthy, Senior Counsel (Chairman), Major James Comerford, Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Fire Brigade and Mrs Mary Hackett, described in newspaper reports as being well-known in connection with social services in Dublin. The secretary of the tribunal was Brian O Nuallain, an official from Mr MacEntee’s department, a man with several aliases.

The tribunal began its sittings in the Cavan courthouse on April 7th. The hearings lasted for eleven days, with sixty-four witnesses giving evidence: thirteen girls from the orphanage, eleven nuns, two lay teachers, several of the people involved in the rescue attempts, local authority employees, experts in relevant fields and two Industrial School inspectors.

A tribunal of inquiry is not a court of law, and members of a tribunal are not judges. The role of counsel and solicitors is to represent groups or persons whose interests are threatened or who need to be protected.

The interests at stake represented at the Inquiry were the Cavan Urban District Council (UDC), which had responsibility for local fire-fighting; the Department of Education, which had statutory responsibility for the administration of Industrial Schools; the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), represented because it had been suggested that the fire was caused by an electrical fault; the Order of Poor Clares and their employees, and the girls from St Joseph’s Orphanage. Counsel were briefed to represent the UDC, the Department of Education (through the Attorney General, as the representative of the State), the ESB, the Poor Clares and their employees. The General Solicitor for the Wards of Court was represented by a solicitor, as were three next-of-kin. These were Mrs. Cassidy, whose dead daughters were Mary, aged 12 and Mona 11; Mr. M. Carroll who had lost Mary, 12 and Josephine 10, and Mr. Thomas Lynch, who had lost Mary 15 and Margaret 10.

The transcript of the proceedings shows that determining the truth did not become the main objective of the Inquiry, and that the aim of those who controlled it and directed its course of investigation was fundamentally one of protecting authority. It was authority in several guises, but in each case, the group concerned, the State, the Church and local government, were all to be exonerated from blame.

*       *       *

Responsibility for providing fire-fighting arrangements lay with the UDC, although at the time it was under no statutory obligation to do so. The thrust of the Council’s argument was that any shortcomings in its fire-fighting arrangements were not responsible for the loss of life. Their case was that there was no proper turn-out of the town fire brigade on the night of the disaster because the captain had not been called; they also submitted that the council’s equipment, a hose on a handcart, and two extending ladders were in good working order.

Mr P. Gaffney, the Town Surveyor, with responsibility for the Council’s fire-fighting arrangements, told the Inquiry that he inspected the brigade’s equipment at least once a week, and that it was ‘in perfect order’. He admitted, however, that the UDC ladders were not part of the equipment, and that the lack of arrangements for rescue work was ‘because no case requiring ladders had ever arisen’ and, anyway, that the ‘whereabouts of the ladders was generally known on the night of the fire’.

The failure of the council’s ladders had clearly been a contributing factor in the deaths of the children. It had taken a long time to locate the ladders and bring them to the fire. They did not extend properly or far enough, and they fell apart. The council employee responsible for their care and maintenance was Mr Thomas Smith, Weighmaster for the previous thirty years. He told the inquiry that he lived in the Market Yard building where ‘potatoes, oats, hay and such’ were kept. His job was to ‘weigh stuff’, keep the place clean, caretake and hire out the extending ladders. These, he insisted, were not for fire-fighting, though he claimed they were always returned to the market yard at night.

He said that to get the ladders at night it would be necessary to rouse him, or rather his wife. “I sleep in the back and the woman sleeps at the front’, a piece of information which, together with his habit of speaking through his moustaches, produced guffaws in court. To wake her it would be necessary to shout because there was no bell or knocker. To the chairman’s question, ‘Did you ever think that the ladders might be wanted for a fire?’ Smith replied, ‘Well, you cannot foretell.’ He insisted that the ladders were in perfect order before the fire.

(One of the men who had made rescue attempts told the authors that there was a carpenter still alive then in the town who had been paid to add four feet onto the ladders before they were inspected by a Dublin fire officer after the tragedy. We could not confirm this. However, at the Council meeting four days after the fire, great emphasis was placed on the fact that, upon the officer’s inspection, the ladders were found to be long enough to reach the dormitory windows, if properly extended. Moreover, Counsel for the UDC prompted the Weighmaster during his evidence to the Inquiry to say that the ladders were in the same condition at that moment as they were on the night of the fire.)

During the evidence of three men—Louis Blessing, John McNally and John Kennedy, who had played brave and active parts in the rescue attempt—the UDC counsel tried to prove that they did not know how to use the ladders and had extended them wrongly. Both McNally and Kennedy insisted that the ladders had been pulled correctly, that they were used to demonstrating them in the course of their work in hardware shops, and that the ropes were off their pulleys. The chairman was overheard saying to Counsel in respect of McNally, ‘You are wasting your time. That man seems to know what he is talking about.’

The town’s only official fire-fighting equipment was a hand-cart and some lengths of hose. When the hose was connected up to the street hydrant soon after 2.20 a.m. it was seen to be leaking in several places. The equipment was in the charge of Mr James Fitzpatrick, the town’s waterworks caretaker, and he was responsible for its maintenance. He told the tribunal that he had twenty-two years’ experience with fires and that the hoses were in ‘splendid condition’. ‘After a fire is over I take the hoses down and wash them and I test every length by itself and put it out to dry.’ Then he would leave it on the hand-cart.

Fitzpatrick said that after the taxi driver, James Meehan, brought him to the fire, he supervised the hose which, on the advice of the convent steward, he played into the refectory ‘to keep the fire from getting into the main building.’ During his evidence he used phrases like, ‘I went out to see what was proceeding there’ and ‘there was smoke and a nice blaze coming out.’ He agreed that there had been a lot of talk about the fire in the town but said he did not join in ‘I have enough to do to mind the water’ and added that because he, Fitzpatrick, had been called, Meehan could be thanked for the convent not burning.

The organisational history of the fire brigade itself was obscure. In 1940 Mr Gaffney was given responsibility for it, but the man who was in charge of the AFS told the tribunal that it was impossible to get crew because ‘the apathy was terrific and they kept falling away’. There was uncertainty about who constituted the brigade. Fitzpatrick, for example, maintained that, although he ‘turned out’ with the brigade he was not actually in it. When the chairman enquired whether or not he got anything extra for this, Fitzpatrick growled, ‘All I ever got for any fire work I did was plenty of abuse’, at which there was laughter in court.

Several members of the brigade described the call-out procedure. One man told the inquiry that he knew of no call-out instructions except that Fitzpatrick was to call him. Another said that their training was ‘all perfunctory’; they had no practice with a ladder, only with ‘putting water on’. Patrick Cullen, the captain of the brigade, said that he had been chosen because he lived at the Town Hall, and that was where the Brigade assembled. He was not ‘really’ but only ‘sort-of’ captain. At fire drill he never took charge or gave instruction. He described the call-out routine. He was to be called first, and then the rest were to be called in turn, each one bicycling off to get the next.

Major
Comerford
: ‘Was there any means of calling you at night?’

Cullen:
  ‘Not unless they kicked the door.’

Comerford:
  ‘No bell or knocker?’

Cullen:
  ‘No.’

Comerford:
  ‘How long would it take to assemble everyone at the town hall?’

Cullen
:   ‘Judging from previous occasions I would estimate about three-quarters of an hour.’

This was the same period of time as had elapsed between the smoke first being seen from Sullivan’s, and the final collapse of the dormitory floor.

Chairman:
 
‘Was this little fire drill you had just an afternoon’s amusement?’

Cullen:
  ‘No, it was in case of an emergency.’

At that time, Cavan’s fire-fighting facilities were probably no worse than many other small towns in the country. However, an editorial in
The
Anglo
Celt
on 27
th
February, when the anguish was still fresh, commented that ‘over half a century ago when the waterworks scheme was inaugurated, a volunteer fire brigade was called into being with full equipment, including ladders, to deal with any emergency and a weekly drill of the entire members at the highest buildings in the town.’ This referred to the period before independence from Britain.

*       *       *

Because St Joseph’s was a certified Industrial School, most of the children had been committed to it through the courts by the Department of Education. It was the duty of that department to ensure that the children were adequately protected by the relevant legislation and that the regulations were being implemented. Yet, in the statement with which he opened the Inquiry, Counsel for the Department, Mr McLoughlin, clearly defined his role as one of only ‘assisting’ the Inquiry, and, unlike the other Counsel, he was to make no final submission—presumably to emphasise the point that the Department had no case to answer.

‘The orphanage,’ he said in his opening statement, ‘being a certified school is subject to inspection by the Minister. This school has been regularly inspected and would appear to have carried out its duties to the children in all particulars. Following the receipt of circulars from the Department of Education about regular fire drill, the Department had been informed by the Manager in a letter that it had been put into effect.’

Fire drill was required by the regulations to take place once every three months, each alternate drill at night, and a record had to be kept in the school diary.

Mr McLoughlin called Dr Anna McCabe, Medical Inspector of Industrial and Reformatory Schools. She testified that, during her visits to the orphanage, she had been satisfied that all the regulations, including compulsory fire drill, were being carried out. Mr Roe, Counsel for the Order, then clarified the children’s legal status.

‘This is an Industrial School and the children have to be detained in it. They are not permitted to go out?’

Dr
McCabe:
  Yes, it was a very well managed school.’

Mr
Roe
:   ‘In a school of this kind where the children are in a sense prisoners, what are the relations between the children and the nuns?’

Dr
McCabe
:   ‘Excellent. In fact this is one of the good schools… although this is an enclosed order, they do not suffer any restraint. They were intelligent and active children. They were allowed out and about. They had every facility. They were all normal children.’

Although fire escapes were not compulsory in any State institution at that time, the Cavan orphanage did have one. During the fire, however, only two girls out of the eighty-two in the building actually escaped that way, despite the fact that the double fire escape door leading to it was only seven-and-a-half feet away from St Clare’s dormitory. Before going down the iron staircase, it was necessary to go along an exterior iron landing which led through a door into a classroom, then out another door from the classroom, which opened onto the staircase. Criticisms about its location had been made in the
Irish
Times,
and this may have been one of the reasons why Mr McLoughlin called the architect who had drawn up the plans for the fire escape to give evidence. When questioned, he admitted that the location of the fire escape would not have been up to standard regulations. ‘Being an Industrial School you don’t want to have a stairway where people would have access to it other than the people in the institution and you are not always free to put it where you like.’
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His statement, and its implications, was accepted without comment.