Child slavery aided middle class

THE Ryan comission report on institutionalised child abuse makes very clear that the organisations in control of the remand schools, industrial schools and orphanages made a very substantial profit from their operation.

It is also clear from the figures provided that the vast bulk of the inmates of these houses of horror were working class children from inner city Dublin, from the other major cities, and the urban and rural poor outside these centres. The reverberations of that abuse live on for the victims and their families to this day.

Not only was the stipend from the state for care and education siphoned off but the children were put to work in all sorts of moneymaking rackets.

These ranged from farms, rosary bead assembly lines, laundries, etc. All of these were also very profitable and of course never subject to audit or tax.

The issue that arises therefore is what happened to all this money?

The report clearly states that some organisations, eg, the Christian Brothers in Artane, lived a very comfortable and cosseted lifestyle. However, there is no evidence of luxury lifestyles, of vast personal aggrandisement or of money going missing.

But there is evidence which points in a very different direction – a direction which is very painful for bourgeois Ireland.

It is very clearly documented that the Christian Brothers, and indeed practically every other religious order of nuns and priests mentioned in the Ryan report, operated a network of secondary schools throughout Ireland.

These schools catered mainly for the middle class and aspiring middle class. The fees charged, while prohibitive for most people at the time, were still below cost. How was this subsidy possible?

The mythology peddled, and indeed still regurgitated, by the church establishment and those who either defended the status quo or knowingly kept silent is that this education was possible only through the personal sacrifice of the priests, brothers and nuns involved.

The Ryan report makes amply clear that these people were much more interested in inflicting pain and sacrifice than enduring it.

Sadly, all the available evidence points to the fact that the subsidy for the education of the Catholic middle class came from the suffering, the starvation, the slavery of the thousands of incarcerated working class children behind the high walls and locked gates of Ireland’s secret children’s prisons.

Perhaps this is the real reason why nobody in authority shouted stop.

Padraig Mannion

Research Officer

The Workers Party

Mountjoy Square

Dublin 1