IN Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so poor for so long? , published in 2004, Tom Garvin refers to active canvassing by clerical administrators for "delinquent" children and those of "unsuitable" parents, in order to reap the benefits of the capitation system which financed the industrial schools they ran.These institutions lacked any mechanism by which they could be regulated.
Garvin says that, "Officials who tried to put such mechanisms in place seem to have been sidetracked by bureaucratic manoeuvrings."
A file just released from the Department of the Taoiseach under the 30-year rule, however, indicates the extent to which political leaders and civil servants sought to leave those who ran these schools to their own devices.
Salary scales In 1976, both the Association of Workers for Children in Care (AWCC), and the superiors of the religious orders, expressed their desire for the introduction of salary scales for childcare workers. These requests came in light of the recent opening of two state-funded units for young offenders in Lusk and Finglas.
The salary scales of the 'housemasters' were designed to relate to those of the teachers with whom they worked. These childcare workers were paid by the Department of Education.
The demand for salary scales reflected the recommendation of the Kennedy Report (1970), which was the product of a committee on reformatory and industrial schools, formed in 1967 and led by District Justice Eileen Kennedy.
The report proposed that a budget system be implemented for residential care units instead of the straight capitation system that existed. In 1976 these institutions received IR£18 per week for each child.
The report had also advised that one government department retain sole responsibility for these children and, with a view to this end, a Task Force on Child Care had been formed under the auspices of the Department of Health. The Department of Education, however, continued to have responsibility for the residential homes themselves and the children referred there through the courts.
The Department of Health was responsible for those referred by the various Health Boards. By the late 1970s, more and more cases were dealt with through the Health Boards, although approximately 50% of cases came through the courts.
Responsibility Writing to the Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave, Sister M Josephine, Superior General of the Sisters of Mercy, complained that "when one department is pressed for help, the responsibility is handed to the other department".
The Sisters of Mercy looked after three residential homes (St Vincent's, Goldenbridge, Inchicore; St Anne's, Booterstown and St Kyran's, Rathdrum). Sister M Josephine described how, apart from three resident managers who were all religious sisters, there were only 11 full-time and three part-time sisters to care for 205 children.
John Bruton was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education during the life of Cosgrave's 1973-77 Fine GaelLabour coalition government.
The newly released files contain correspondence between Bruton and Cosgrave. Bruton said that, by 1976, there were two new pressures on the homes that no provision had been made for.
These included the higher costs of the small group home system as compared with the "older large-institutional structure"; and the wages bill for the increasing proportion of lay staff "and indeed for the religious who are now seeking personal salaries as in the case of teachers".
The main concern in Sister M Josephine's corres- pondence seems not to have been the issue of salaries for the religious but for the lay staff, who were pushing for equal salary scales with those workers in Lusk and Finglas.
The lay staff had decided to join a trade union and were putting pressure on the sisters to join also.
Sister Josephine feared a rift could be driven between the religious community and the lay staff noting how not only did the present system not provide enough funds to employ the most competent staff, but it did not allow the sisters to act as fair employers.
Bruton explained to Cosgrave that it would not be impossible to have a nationallyfixed salary scale while a capitation grant system continued to operate and that this would probably entail some modification of the straight capitation system in order to cater for the varying staff costs.
However, despite this, Bruton explained how his department "strongly favours the straight capitation system since it gives the homes greater freedom to manage their own affairs and decide their own priorities".
He added that the department was reviewing the position of a residential childcare course held in Kilkenny as a result of his suspicion that some of the pressure for salary scales had arisen "from the expectations generated among graduates of a professional training course".
He wondered whether the course, in its aims and content, was pitched at too high a level and whether a course of that level "was required by the department's needs".
In February 1977, Brendan Comiskey, the secretary general of the Conference of the Major Religious Superiors of Ireland wrote to the minister for education, Peter Barry, once again seeking the removal of the capitation system and an increase in the level of childcare and domestic staff.
Comiskey, warned about "serious developments" as his colleagues had "exhausted all options known to them in trying to keep their residential childcare homes in operation".
"In the event of the government's failure to take effective action, I have been formally requested to issue immediately on behalf of six major religious superiors a six months' notice of closure of eight residential centres.
As of the same date, I am also authorised to announce on behalf of 12 major superiors, their intention of accepting no new admissions into 17 centres under their care, " Comiskey wrote.
The letter prompted government action. Both Bruton and the minister for health, Brendan Corish, met a delegation of Religious Superiors on 4 March 1977 and the latter agreed to defer its protest action until a subsequent meeting on 20 April.
Working group An interdepartmental working group compiled a memorandum for the government in the interim. This memorandum has also just been released. It was considered appropriate to adhere to a capitation system of financing, at least for an interim period of about three years.
The memo contends that "this will give the homes more flexibility in the use of resources and make it more likely that the substitute parenting nature of the work will not be diluted".
Those who were to negotiate with the delegation of Religious Superiors were empowered to do so on the basis of an improved capitation grant of not more than IR£30 per child.
These new files from the late 1970s reflect the financial pressures of government departments and a willingness to subject the most vulnerable members of society to a mediocre and often abusive system rather than finance its reform.
The new files also reveal that, in the same year, a government grant of IR£5m was sanctioned to build civic offices at the Wood Quay site in Dublin.
This was despite reservations about the project expressed by the Department of Local Government, which cited the constraints that had been placed on public sector borrowing.These two funding decisions demonstrate how political will goes a long way.
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