Child Abuse
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For its first hundred years Daingean was an Army garrison and a prison. For the next hundred years it was a Reformatory for boys. The dates are almost exact. The garrison was established in 1776, the Reformatory in 1870 and the closure - recommended by the Kennedy Report of 1970 - took place in 1973. Since then Daingean has been largely forgotten. It is now a decayed place of sad and fearful memories for those who were inmates and of shameful ones for those responsible for its operation.
I first visited it in the company of two former inmates and wrote about the experience, trying to make sense of the complex feelings of my companions. They traced among the derelict buildings and the overgrown paths and yards their own youthful experiences which were far from happy. They recounted them, and I was shocked. At the same time I remember the matter of fact approach they both adopted. One of them was angry and became heated with his rage, the other resigned and philosophic about what he had endured.
They were both survivors. They would never come to terms with what they suffered, but they had both spread a lifetime between then and now and were living within the flawed comfort of what life had to offer. If there is guilt, shame, culpability for what they endured half as century ago, it rests on the shoulders of others. And whatever may be done about Daingean, that is an unchanging fact about the place.
It is only half the story, however. Daingean, when it was first built, was a British Army garrison, the main, two-storey building a plain but well-designed series of quite modest rooms surrounding the entrance courtyard on three sides. Unlike many garrison structures and military barracks elsewhere the scale and extent of the original complex, which stood within high walls which have since been extended outward, was pleasantly harmonious, in keeping with its time and its purpose. Of course it changed and developed. Additional buildings were constructed including a gaol. The high walls were extended. In the middle of the nineteenth century the gaol became a convict prison and was integrated into the barracks. When Daingean was taken over in 1870 a chapel and other reformatory buildings were added and this process of expansion within the 1870 site continued right up to closure in 1973.
The Military EraLike so much to do with the overt expression of British power, the military presence in Ireland has been demonized, with a supposed primary purpose of combating insurrection. In effect, Ireland was a significant contributor to Imperial defences during the eighteenth century with a disproportionately high share of the overall British Army strength and a willing participation in the real objectives of military garrisons wherever they were in the British Isles. This was to repel invasion, give aid to the civil powers and be in preparation, more or less at all times, for overseas postings.
The Irish peacetime British Army establishment fluctuated during the eighteenth century. At the beginning it was double the standing army in Britain. By mid-century it was about the same. The '1745' Scottish Rebellion led to an emphasis on Protestant recruits, but the recruiting of Roman Catholics was commonplace in Ireland by the time Daingean was founded. The Act of Union led to the amalgamation of all military personnel under central control. The widespread barrack system throughout these islands was an accepted part of life. Its existence is widely reflected in fiction. Officers feature in every one of Jane Austen novels, in the plays of Dion Bouccicault and other Irish dramatists of the nineteenth century and in the novels of Charles Lever.
In Ireland the establishment of Army institutions, including Daingean, became moreformalized during the eighteenth century. Because of cheap and available land, this led to a steady rise in the numbers of soldiers of Irish birth serving abroad and in barracks in their own country. The figure rose to around 26,000 or 14 per cent of total imperial military strength during the eighteenth century. This rose substantially after the Napoleonic Wars in which something like 130,000 Irish soldiers fought. Given the comparative numbers between these wars and the First World War - when 260,000 men fought - the Irish contribution was massive. And it grew still further. By 1830 40 per cent of the British Army was Irish. When one considers the scale of the British Empire at its peak, in the mid-nineteenth century, this represents a huge Irish commitment to Imperial defences. Duties for Irish soldiers also included ordnance survey work and relief of famine. The economic and social impact of this standing army was huge.
The Grand Canal, which was built in 1797, passed beside Daingean and provided ready access for canal trade, a significant and cheap means of shipping provisions, horses, weaponry and building materials. As already indicated, a gaol was constructed beside the barracks and this became a convict prison in mid-century where prisoners, sentenced to deportation, were held before shipment, mainly to Australia.
From the point of view of Daingean, once on the fringe of the Pale, the period during which the barracks grew and came to dominate the town was an era of prosperity derived from the military presence quite at odds with the poverty in other parts of Ireland.
Of course it was not all peace and harmony. Some of the difficulties arose from Catholics and Protestants serving together, some from illegal organisations fomenting disaffection within the ranks. But for the hundred year period from Daingean's foundation until it was passed to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the history was an unexceptional one of service to the British Army in all of its many and diverse roles.
Daingean as a ReformatoryThe Oblates of Mary Immaculate was a French order founded in 1816. It ran two reformatories in Ireland, both of them famous. St Kevin's in Glencree was visited by John M Synge who had a cottage nearby and wrote amusingly of one particular and rather daring inmate who escaped and masqueraded successfully as a woman collecting for charity. The Order operated in Daingean from 1870, in St Kevin's from an earlier date. In both institutions the Order was subject to the British legal system which included regular supervisory inspections. Some of the sentences passed on boys prior to independence were very harsh; five years for stealing two suits of clothes, almost as long for stealing apples and p[ears. The reformist principles followed were religious and moral, and aimed at creating in the boys a normal outlook. There had been a long process of bringing under political control the many charitable establishments dealing with destitution and minor criminal behaviour throughout the British Isles, and Ireland operated under this system until independence.
There is now little argument that fairly fundamental changes took place after 1922 and included an alliance between the revolutionary politicians who had brought the State into being and the Roman Catholic Church. Inevitably there were power struggles, but these were won convincingly by the Church. Undoubtedly this had a retrograde effect.
A small insight has been provided for me. In 1924 Liam O Daimhain, a local politician, asked a question in the Dail of the Minister for Local Government whose name was Burke. He was asked if he would state the number of children at present detained at Daingean (Phillipstown) Reformatory School. He was asked also to give the cost on State funds. The deputy pointed out that several business firms are anxious to secure the premises for starting industries. This, he said, would give much-needed employment in the district.
The deputy thought the transfer of those detained at present in Daingean might be moved to another reformatory. Then the business firm might move in and secure the premises for the trade.
This proposal was rejected by the Minister. He said that there were 34 boys at present in the school. The cost of their maintenance ordinarily was £706 yearly, but a special grant of £800 was made the year before (1923) to meet portion of a deficit which had arisen from a fall in the admissions owing to the abnormal conditions.
As to the idea of business stepping in, the Minister said: "I am not prepared to take the steps suggested in the question. The premises are the property of the religious community which conducts the reformatory."
So the cruel life at Daingean went on.
The legal safety mechanisms designed to protect institutionalized children were surrendered in those baleful years. The Reformatory Schools, which were for children convicted of criminal offences, were different from the much larger number of Industrial Schools. The offences were often very minor but the punitive regimes were notorious and the sentences imposed by the courts were quite out of proportion to the crimes with which the children were charged.
In 1940 St Kevin's Reformatory in Glencree was closed and the boys transferred to Daingean. This was then the only reformatory for boys in the State. It lasted for just over 100 years. Latterly it became infamous and was singled out for immediate closure by the Kennedy Report of 1970, but it should be made clear that the context for this was not so much the regime within the institution as it was deep dissatisfaction with the Reformatory System. Inmates of Letterfrack, for example, who had also been in Daingean, said it was far worse in the Connemara industrial school. Nevertheless, Daingean was rightly feared as an institution and its shadow falls over many lives.
I visited it in the company of two former inmates. One's arrival there is deceptive. Between the entrance gate and the first building, the original barracks, there is a garden. Two huge copper beech trees stand on a mown lawn, and between them is the figure of St Conleth. The atmosphere is benign, almost inviting. The priests and brothers of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate had their rooms in the barrack buildings, which also housed the kitchen and refectory. On arrival one passes through an entrance and then two doors into a long, dark corridor stretching to left and right.
Whatever an inmate's sentence, during its term he never again saw that garden or the outside world beyond it. The walls, twenty feet high, in places several feet thick, run round this world of punishment. They close it in completely. The laundry, the prison yard, the chapel, the bakery, the huge dormitories, various workshops, all of them scenes of oppression, created a world of fear with nowhere to go. Daingean stands today, a bleak reminder of those times.
One of those with me had corresponded as a result of an earlier meeting, writing to tell me how the climate had changed since his time there, for two years, in the early 1940s. He described the physical punishment which was always carried out by the same Brother. Punishment took place in the same room, near the toilets and on the same floor as the dormitory. It had a cold tiled floor and young offenders were taken there from the dormitory at night, or brought from the Prison Yard during the daytime.
"The Brother then told you to take off your trousers and also your shirt if it had a long tail. You were then naked. You were not supplied with underwear. You were then made to kneel down and forward onto your hands so that your buttocks and sometimes your back could be flogged with a leather that was made in the shoe repair shop." This particular leather strap he remembered as much larger than the ones carried by the brothers to punish inmates on the hands. "It was about four feet six inches long, one and a half inches wide, and about 3/8 of an inch thick. It left black and blue raised marks on your buttocks for weeks and sometimes they would bleed."
In the 1940s the boys were compliant and did what they were told, including submitting themselves to what were excessive punishments. In later years things were different. According to much other testimony, all of it now widely known, the Brother giving the punishment in the 1960s needed help from other brothers to hold the victim down for flogging. The punishment was carried out at night in the main stairwell leading up to the dormitories so that the cries of pain were heard by everyone.
My correspondent, who visited Daingean with me, was flogged four times during his two years there. We spent a long time together in the different gloomy and derelict parts of the former institution. It is now used to store artefacts from the National Museum. Even the carts and carriages, the plaster casts and pieces of furniture, make it more homely than it was. He brooded to himself about his time there and confessed afterwards that he had been overwhelmed.
When he was at Daingean there were as many as 200 boys detained. The ratio of staff to inmates was roughly 1 to 12 and the boys were aged from 12 to eighteen.
It has been admitted, on behalf of the Order, that reliance on physical punishment was heavy. There was a climate of fear; members of the Order imposed it, but they also felt it in respect of the older boys, many of whom had reached the age of manhood. The punitive regime is confirmed; one inmate reckons there were around two severe floggings a week. It may have been more. Some of the victims thought there was a sexual aspect to the punishment, always carried out by the same 'Prefect' of the Order, always in degrading circumstances and always excessively harsh.
There were other beatings on the hands and arms. Sean Burke who sprang George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966, and was himself a inmate of Daingean, gives a frightening description of a boy being beaten in this way. The assault left him with swollen and bleeding hands the fingers of which he was unable to use.
Nothing of this cruelty, excessive brutality or possible sexual sadism has come out in the testimony presented to the Commission on Child Abuse during the months of June and July. Neither the Department of Education nor of Health have added to our knowledge of this. Quite the reverse is the case. Departmental knowledge, as expressed by the Secretary General, John Dennehy, was seriously limited. And when a spokesman for the Oblates of Mary Immaculate gave testimony it represented so different a report on the punishment at Daingean as to represent a quite different, imagined institution.
Father Tom Murphy, who represented the Order before the Commission inquiry on July 23, 2005, claimed that there were only six instances of complaint about excessive physical punishment from 1963 until Daingean closed ten years later. He also said that earlier records were either not available or had been lost, and that no records were ever taken of the interviews that followed such complaints. How he knew this, since the records were not made available of the earlier period, is a puzzle.
Father Murphy made the point that before the Taoiseach's apology the complaints were very few in number, a total of six, but then escalated rapidly afterwards, rising to 322 by 2002. "There was," he said, "deep shock, deep disbelief" at the idea that there was ever any excessive physical or sexual abuse. The former staff were shocked at the growing numbers coming forward of claimants claiming sexual or physical abuse. All former surviving staff members would insist, Father Murphy said "that they had no knowledge of abuse on that scale at all, at all, or on any scale actually." The implication, not expressed, would seem to be that the complaints were a product of the political acknowledgement of a need for the State to apologize.
Again, contrary to first hand information, Father Murphy claimed that the "punishment on the buttocks" was reserved to the prefect. The one surviving member of staff who was appointed to that position had claimed that the beatings were always delivered "in his office" and during the day.
Punishment of the kind described to me by inmates went unrecorded. Members of the Order do not remember. Those who were there deny knowledge. When all else fails, the possibility of abusive cruelty is mitigated by reference to "the times" in which it all happened.
The record of the Order over the years has not been impressive.
Though incidents where the State intervened in the running of reformatories or industrial schools are rare, the Oblates at Daingean came in for criticism from the Secretary of the Department of Education following a visit he made in 1955. He found that the cattle on the well-run and profitable reformatory farm were better fed and better cared for than the boys. For many years previously there had been pressure on the Order to improve, both in material terms and over their education. The Department of Education inspector had repeatedly been told that there were inadequate funds.Daingean was a special case, being the only reformatory in its last years, and deserved the opprobrium heaped on it. Inmates during the later years refer to the climate of fear with special regard to the fact that the upper age of the boys was eighteen, whereas the inmates of industrial schools left when they reached their sixteenth birthday. This meant that the Oblates at Daingean were dealing, in many cases, with starved, angry, hostile young men.
A Future for DaingeanDaingean's past is a sorry tale of systems that were hopelessly ill-considered and unsuitable. The State's control was inadequate. The introduction of modern practices in the care for young offenders and their rehabilitation had hardly progressed at all in thirty years or more. The looming opportunity for Ireland, of EEC membership, led to revised thinking about the whole sorry structure of detention centres for the young. This examination was given reinforced urgency by an O.E.C.D. report in 1965. The report included embarrassing observations about Ireland neglect of this section of its young population.
With the closure of Daingean the whole complex became a 'Lost Domain'. It was deserted and closed up, its rooms filled with museum artefacts that were being stored there. The courtyards and pathways became overgrown with weeds. Many of the buildings, of poor quality in some cases, fell into disuse and decay. They have been cleaned up and tidied up for today.
The purpose of the Open Day, organised by the Minister Tom Parlon, is to show what Daingean is at present and to inspire thoughts as to what it might become.
Among former inmates there is a strong desire that neither the place nor what happened in it should be allowed to vanish. This has happened with other institutions.
Daingean, in their view, should be a memorial to the inmates of all the industrial schools, other reformatories and to the many people who went through them. It should be national and it should focus on children.
It should serve the local community as well. Sporting facilities, also aimed at the young, would be entirely consistent with a memorial project. Any such project should depend on the positive record that has come out of the past abuses.
They are many survivors and they are a credit to the recovery powers of the human spirit under adversities that were often not of their making. They should not be forgotten or overlooked.
Written by Bruce Arnold in April 2006 for Tom Parlon, Minister of State at the Department of Finance, responsible for the Office of Public Works which is in charge of Daingean.