The Free State’s Forgotten Children
by Jamie Canavan
Jamie Canavan is a middle school English Language Arts teacher in the US and is in the final stages of her PhD in History at University of Galway. Her PhD examines the history of foster care in 20th century Ireland and is funded by the Irish Research Council.
“The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens…cherishing all of the children of the nation equally,” rang the words of the 1916 Proclamation. We are currently within what has been termed the “decade of centenaries,” with politicians, historians, and artists marking the one hundred year anniversary of Ireland’s Revolutionary Period. Over the course of these events, several academics have spoken about the different roles that women played in the Republican efforts in the fight toward independence. They highlighted the respect that the male revolutionary leaders had for their female compatriots and the revolutionary and radical ideals that were fostered and developed between Republican men and women. During this time of remembrance, discussion is now shifting toward what happened as Ireland moved toward its 1937 Constitution, which enshrined the Irish woman’s place to the home and to the family and left the women of Cumann na mBan in the margins. One hundred years after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission finalised its report and presented its redress scheme for victims of the Irish mother and baby homes system. This report was published twelve years after the Ryan Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which similarly delved into the Irish industrial school and reformatory system. How did a newly independent state let down its women and children to such an extent that its government is repeatedly apologising to its citizens for relatively recent events?
Independence is the opportunity for a blank slate, to dismantle the existing structures and build anew. The Treaty and the partition of the six northern counties were the initial actions that undermined Republican efforts and the ideals expressed in the 1916 Proclamation. However, what has not been given as much focus by historians of this time period is just how much Ireland’s first Dáil Éireann kept things the same as they were under British rule. So much of what happened to Irish child and maternal welfare was because of the lack of radical change to local government structures post-independence. There was an opportunity to knock over the Poor Law system that Britain left behind but the Irish state kept it almost entirely intact on a practical level. An innate distrust of impoverished people remained and grew, deeply affecting parental rights and the treatment of children. Women and children, especially those experiencing extreme poverty, were at best neglected and at worst abused by the new Irish state and this is especially evident when examining the history of Irish foster care.
““what has not been given as much focus by historians of this time period is just how much Ireland’s first Dáil Éireann kept things the same as they were under British rule.””
The concept of foster care within Ireland’s written history can be traced as far back as 650 AD, when the children of wealthier families would be fostered out into the households of other families who were also wealthy, but typically of a slightly lesser rank. This practice was utilised in order for children to learn trades and also to maintain peaceful relations between the different families in power.[1] Over one thousand years later, the concept of taking in the children of a neighbour or family member out of need or for financial gain persisted in Irish culture. However, the structural basis for what became modern Irish foster care can be directly traced back to the Irish Poor Law under British rule.
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1862 formally granted the Boards of Guardians the right to place children up to age five (or eight for health reasons), who were resident in the workhouses, with households in the community. This amendment was added after feeling pressure from charitable campaigners, who advocated for the removal of children from the workhouses, as well as in response to overcrowding issues. The wealthier members of Irish society and those with positions of power considered poverty and its ramifications to have been contagious, especially to children. By 1903, speakers at a workhouse reform conference were referring to the “vicious inclinations” and “generations of illegitimates” that stemmed from the “morally debilitating structures,” the lack of “industrious and useful” people that came from a childhood in the workhouse, and the negative “Union brand” that children left the workhouse carrying into adulthood.[2] The charitable campaigners who advocated for boarding out often expressed concern surrounding the bleak workhouse conditions that the children faced along with a concern about the children’s future prospects as “industrious” adults. Sociologist Harry Hendrick coined the term “‘dual-perception theory’ in his studies of child welfare history.[3] Hendrick argued that especially at the turn of the twentieth century, policy makers in Britain started to view children as both vulnerable innocents who needed protection and potential threats to societal order. In regard to children under the Irish Poor Law, campaigners wanted to ‘save’ them from the bleak workhouse existence but not necessarily pull them up into a higher social strata.
The Poor Law authorities did not have clear and full rights to board out children who they deemed ‘orphaned’ or ‘deserted’ until 1898, when the different unions started to embrace and utilise the boarding out system at an increasingly regular rate. The Pauper Children (Ireland) Act of 1898 gave the Board of Guardians the power to assume control of orphaned or deserted children without the requirement of sanction from the local government board, the power to send children to nearby schools outside of the workhouse, and restricted hiring out to children over the age of twelve. In 1902, the Act was amended to specify the meanings of the terms ‘orphaned’ and ‘deserted’: orphaned children were to be considered those legitimate children with both parents dead, incarcerated, or mentally or physically disabled, and illegitimate children whose mother was dead, incarcerated, or mentally or physically disabled; deserted was to include those legitimate children deserted by both parents and illegitimate children deserted by his or her mother.[4]
Plainly, how the boarding out system under the Poor Law worked was as follows: advertisements for households to take in children were put into the community through newspapers and notices; families applied to the Board of Guardians to be foster parents; the Board of Guardians placed workhouse children into the homes that were deemed fit; the foster parents were paid a monthly fee for housing the children. The hiring out system operated in the same manner except that the children were over twelve and they were placed with a person or family who hired them to perform a job and in turn paid a fee to the union for the child’s services. The ‘visiting committee’ of the Board of Guardians conducted inspections of the households where boarded and hired-out young people resided as part of their wider role inspecting all aid recipients in their assigned districts. These officers provided monthly reports on children in their districts. The boarding out system that was founded in 1862 had experienced no change sixty years later by 1922.
Prior to independence, as historian Martin Maguire detailed in his 2008 monograph, civil service workers already viewed Dublin Castle as corrupt and nepotistic. The First Dáil put forth proposals to avoid ‘cronyism’ and corruption but these did not see any strong follow-through. A “‘clean-break’ decree was promulgated in September 1920, ordering all local authorities to cease contact with the British and to accept the authority of the Dáil Éireann department.” However, Maguire quoted Kevin O’Higgins, a Minister in the Provisional Government, as having stated, “The passing of the State services into the control of a native Government, however revolutionary it may have been as a step in the political development of the nation, entailed, broadly speaking, no immediate disturbance of any fundamental kind in the daily work of the average Civil Servant.”[5]
In regard to boarding out: the workhouse became the County Home in title; the Local Government Board remained the overseer of all of the different Boards of Health; and the Boards of Health took over the role of the Boards of Guardians. The ‘visiting committees’ were replaced with Home Assistance Officers, many of whom were the same people who kept the same jobs. Potential foster parents sent applications to their county’s Board of Health. Their particular Board of Health approved or disapproved of the applicant and then sent the approved applications on for sanctioning from the Minister for Local Government, of the Local Government Board. Within each Board of Health, there was a Superintendent Home Assistance Officer who oversaw all Home Assistance Officers, who were in turn hired to monitor those receiving home allowances and boarded-out children in their designated region of the county.
The Local Government Board also had inspectors and auditors to regulate and oversee home assistance and boarding out; in 1920 there were forty-one Local Government Board Inspectors, sixteen of whom were women. Ann Fitzgerald-Kenney oversaw the arrangements for boarded-out children from at least 1907 until approximately the late 1930s. In 1923, the Local Government (Temporary Provisions) Act was passed and Alice Litster was appointed as the temporary inspector of boarded-out children, made permanent in 1932. Fitzgerald-Kenney continued her work as well during Litster’s post, covering more of the West of Ireland while Litster covered the East and South (this was not an absolute division as both also corresponded concerning children in different regions).[6] Inspectors Litster and Fitzgerald-Kenney have been heralded in the media lately for their repeated advocacy for women and children under the welfare system.[7]
In practice, the boarding out system remained untouched and institutionalisation in the industrial schools continued to be utilised more commonly than fostering. The new State had the opportunity to solve problems that were inherent in the system from the beginning. Before independence, the boarding out system dealt with irregularity of visits from members of the various visiting committees across Ireland, which opened the opportunity for maltreatment, neglect, and other forms of abuse to take place. These visits were sporadic and largely surface level instead of thorough inspections. For example, in September 1904, a man who hired out a Galway workhouse boy moved to Athlone, taking the boy with him. The inspectors stated that they no longer felt their inspections to be necessary as they believed that the man would “continue to treat the boy kindly.” Also in 1904, a boy returned to the Galway workhouse with the explanation that he had been "treated badly.” After the Poor Law Commissioners demanded the Board follow up on the case, it was stated that the boy had complained in August of that year that he experienced “illtreatment" but did not make a formal complaint.[8]
In August of 1920, the Ministry of Dáil Éireann appointed the Commission of Enquiry into Local Government to investigate proposed changes to be made to the existing local government structures, which were originally formed under British rule. One of the recommendations made in the report was from Teachta Dála, Dr. Richard Francis Hayes, which stated in regard to the workhouse, “all children to be boarded out” into the community, with no children remaining in the institutions.[9] This did not happen and many remained in the County Homes.
Within the handover of positions, children in Irish state care slipped through the cracks. In November 1923, a man wrote to the Kerry Board of Health stating that he had been caring for two children since the closing of the Dingle Workhouse. In the following January, the Minister for Local Government wrote to the Kerry Board of Health about a different group of children placed in Castlegregory and the Board replied that “it would appear that the Guardians of the Dingle Union asked [foster parent] to care for the children on the breakup of the unions…there was no contract entered into.” Months later in July, a solicitor wrote to the Kerry Board on behalf of a foster parent who had not received payment for a boarded-out child since January 1919, five years prior.[10] These children fell out of state supervision.
The welfare sphere remained largely the same as it was before Irish independence. The Clare Board of Health opened a County Nursery in Kilrush. This nursery was an auxiliary institution in conjunction with the Clare County Home. It operated with the same moralistic and punitive ethos as other religious-run mother and baby homes across the country. This home was heavily utilised in 1924. The matron, along with the home’s doctor, complained to the Clare Board that “there are 164 inmates at present in the institution, every habitable corner of which is occupied. Children sleeping two in a bed and admissions almost every day and very few discharges.” The desperation of the women who entered into the institution is evidenced by the details given by the matron about putrid odours, “almost primitive” sanitary arrangements, lack of ventilation, leaking roofs, and working conditions for the women inmates which included standing in a pool of water that gathered on the floor in the laundry.[11] It was desperation or coercion that caused unmarried pregnant women or mothers to enter the County Nursery in Kilrush but upon entering, they then lost the ability to leave the institution for “a period of two years from the date of their admission." The two-year time limit was enforced to deter, shame, and frighten the population. However, these punitive and moralistic codes and rules often clashed with the Boards’ desires to be economically pragmatic.
Inspector Fitzgerald-Kenney tried to regulate the boarding out system across each county to streamline record-keeping and efficiency. In 1935, she drafted uniform forms for foster parents with the goal of having these printed and distributing them to each Board of Health. She was met with resistance from certain Boards who pushed against this regulation effort, complaining that the Children’s Act did not state that a register is necessary and that it is up to each local authority to “preserve those particulars in such a manner as they see fit.” Fitzgerald-Kenney expressed frustration with disorder and the Acts themselves: “You understand I have never been able to work in disorder. I need some means of grouping these children. I never wanted to take the working of the horrible Acts at all, but it was shoved on to me.”[12] This frustrated retort was a snippet of the main cracks that existed within the child welfare system at this time: inspectors with a wide-reaching and heavy workload, unaccounted for and unregulated children’s data and well-being, and power clashes between the different authorities involved.
““Maintaining the power structure of the coloniser lessens the power of a Revolution and leaves people in the margins to continue to feel the ramifications.””
Child welfare was not a priority for the First Dáil or the following. In 1938, Martin Finnerty of the Galway Board of Health stated that “sympathy with the poor man’s child is popular nowadays.” Finnerty was debating against Inspector Lister in favour of the industrial school system over boarding out.[13] The ‘poor man’s child’ may have become a popular topic of discussion for politicians by 1938 but this was not a reflection of state actions. Child welfare was not a priority from day one for the new Irish state. It continued to be disregarded. The Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland continued to let church authorities and the charitable sector manage children in care which prevented the social work field from developing and progressing. The social work system today is still feeling the effects of this stagnation and neglect.
What can be learned from this is that when a state has an opportunity to start fresh, keeping the most vulnerable members of society at the forefront of policy-making should be priority one. When we have an opportunity to build anew - such as legislatively after the 2015 and 2018 referendums, if we lose sight of our initial goals and the initial values behind the cause, stagnation and complacency will take over. Maintaining the power structure of the coloniser lessens the power of a Revolution and leaves people in the margins to continue to feel the ramifications.
Article originally published in Issue 9 of Rupture Magazine. Subscribe or purchase previous issues here.
Notes
Bronagh Ní Chonaill, “Fosterage child-rearing in medieval Ireland,” History Ireland, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 28-31; Peter Parkes, ‘Celtic Fosterage: Adoptive Kinship and Clientage in Northwest Europe,’ Society for Comparative Study of Society and History (2006), pp. 359-395. Thomas C. O’Donnell, Fosterage in Medieval Ireland: An Emotional History, Amsterdam (2020).
‘Workhouse Reform,’ Tuam Herald, 12 September 1903.
Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debates (Bristol, 2003).
Great Britain. Pauper Children (Ireland) Relief Bill 1898. 1898, III.653; Great Britain. Pauper Children (Ireland) Bill 1902: A bill intituled an act to amend the Pauper Children (Ireland) Act, 1898. 1902, VI.203. Great Britain. Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838. Reproduced in Irish Statute Book.
Martin Maguire. The Civil Service and the Revolution in Ireland 1912-1938 : 'Shaking the Blood-Stained Hand of Mr Collins’ (Manchester, 2008).
Information found in Board of Health and Public Assistance Minute Book Collections at: Clare County Archives, Cork City and County Archives, Galway County Council Archives Service, Kerry Local History & Archives Department, Wexford County Archives, Leitrim County Council Local Studies Department. All are available to consult via appointment, some are digitised to access online.
See: Maeve Sheehan, “New scholarship will honour mother and baby homes inspector Alice Litster who warned of death toll,” Irish Independent, 20 June 2021.
Galway Poor Law Union Minute Book July 1904-February 1905, Galway County Council Archives Service.
Bureau of Military History 1913-1921, Appendices A-F to W.S. 1413 statement by Tadgh Kennedy, Military Archives of the Department of Defence.
Kerry Board of Health and Public Assistance [heretofore KBOH] Meeting Minutes, 12 Nov. 1923, 30 Jan. 1924, 24 July 1924 (Kerry Local History and Archives Dept., Kerry Board of Health Minute Book Coll.).
Kerry Board of Health and Public Assistance Meeting Minutes, 12 Nov. 1923, 30 Jan. 1924, 24 July 1924 (Kerry Local History and Archives Dept.
McArdle to Ann Fitzgerald-Kenny, 28 October 1935. Ann Fitzgerald-Kenny to McArdle, 2 November 1935 (UG Special Coll., Ann Fitzgerald-Kenny Coll., correspondences).
‘Committee Refuses to Adopt New Method’ Tuam Herald, 22 January 1938