The Irish Times – Tuesday, June 2, 2009
A District Court judge brought the issue of abuse to the stage, writes CAROL COULTER , Legal Affairs Editor
IN VOLUME 4 of the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse , which describes the political, social and economic context of the industrial school system, there is a short sub-chapter titled A Play at the Abbey Theatre .
This describes how, in January 1961, a play called The Evidence I Shall Give was premièred at the Abbey, running initially for 42 performances, followed by four other runs and totalling 87 performances over the year, which, Mr Justice Ryan comments, was “most unusual”.
The play was written by Richard Johnson, a judge of the District Court in Co Kerry, and was a court-room drama depicting a day in the life of a District Court judge.
The main case concerned a 13-year-old girl, the subject of an application to transfer her from an orphanage to an industrial school because of her alleged indiscipline.
The main protagonists were a humane solicitor who argued that young children needed “kissing and caressing” and a mother superior who argued that they needed harsh discipline in order to learn “humility”.
The six children of the family had ended up in two orphanages following the death of their mother because their father could not afford to hire a woman to look after them.
The solicitor calculated that with the capitation fee of £2.10s per week, the institutions involved were getting a total of £760 a year.
“Would you not agree,” he asked the mother superior, “that for £150 a year he would have got someone to look after all six?”
The play ended with the girl taking off her scarf to show her shaved head, a punishment for absconding.
According to the Ryan report, the play was well received and enjoyed an unusually long run for the Abbey at that time.
Judge Johnson’s son, also called Richard and now president of the High Court, remembers his father’s preoccupation with this issue at the time.
He was in Dublin, having just been called to the Bar, and his father had spoken to him about it.
“He felt there were things going on he was not happy with,” Mr Justice Johnson told The Irish Times .
He said the incident at the centre of the play was a true one, where a girl who ended up appearing before his father was sent to school with one shoe and her head half-shaved.
“Children were coming into court every day. The ‘cruelty man’ was bringing them in. There was no representation for them. That was the way it was, everyone thought it was a good thing that the children went to the nuns or brothers. There was nowhere else to put them.
“If the evidence came in that they had to go into care and there was no other evidence to counter it, the judge had to accept it. There was money going to these people, and if the money went to the parents, they could have maintained the home.
“This was a very important thing to him, and he felt it had to be exposed. It was gestating for a number of years, and he had a lot of difficulty getting it on in the Abbey, it took a good 2½ or three years,” Mr Justice Johnson explained.
“There was a lot of criticism of my father at the time,” he said. Asked if he had experienced the proverbial “belt of the crozier”, he replied that he had not.
“He was there too long.”
This was the only play Judge Johnson ever wrote, though he also did some writing in Irish, according to his son.
Ed: yours 13.02.10
Many thanks for that link to Titicut Follies.
I visited long-stay wards in an English mental hospital (a Victorian “Asylum” called Storthes Hall) back in the 1970s so I expected this film to be pretty gruesome. Its worse than I expected. I’m shocked.
The casual dehumanisation and ill-treatment of the inmates is discomforting, as you say. What has the most chilling resonance for me is the how the institution deals with the patient diagnosed as “paranoid” who argues that he should not be in Bridgewater and that the place is doing him more harm than good. A compelling argument! But the more he argues his case the more the psychiatrists take his argument as confirmation of his paranoia. When he presses his argument with the review panel the psychiatrist increases his medication.
Like most of the Irish inmates, I was falsely branded as a delinquent and unlawfully imprisoned. I protested long and loud. I kept telling the prison guards that I was not a delinquent and I should not be in their prison. They conveniently interpreted my protests as confirmation that I was an intractable delinquent who had to be beaten into submission. The more I protested the more they increased the “medication”.
Jim Beresford, former Artane child prisoner 14262, Huddersfield, England
jim.beresford@btinternet.com
Jim: yours 10.02.10
Based on our earlier comments, I did some more research, and found a copy of “Titicut Follies” available on the Internet. I must say, as I watched it once again, I felt that in many ways not much has really changed in the field of “mental health” over 40 years). Please be warned that the film is “cinema verite:” it contains (non-“sexual”) male nudity, intubation, preparation of the dead for burial, and other “discomforting” features. In other words, it shows daily life experiences for those incarcerated at that time. Here’s the link: http://www.egtvonline.com/video/titicut-follies-mental-institution-documentary/ Please note: there are some brief, unrelated visual shots at the beginning, inserted (I think) by the Web host. These are only there for less than a minute, until the opening “Follies” scene (“Strike Up the Band”) begins.
I almost feel bad in sending you this catalogue of man’s inhumanity to man. Hopefully, once the depression from seeing this wears off, it will steel your soul for increased advocacy for justice!
Ed : yours 04.02.10.
Unfortunately I haven’t yet had a chance to view Titicut Follies – though I understand it is now available on DVD. From what I’ve read about the film, Richard Johnson’s play, The Evidence I Shall Give, is pretty mild fare compared to it.
The Ryan Commission protected the privacy of Ireland’s former child prisoners by hearing their testimony behind closed doors and anonymising them in the Commission’s report.
Johnson’s play is set in a courtroom so we never actually see the inside of the institution or the ill-treatment of the inmates.
An innocent girl prisoner of 13 (Margaret) is cruelly persecuted by a perfectly monstrous prison guard (a nun) who then tries to deceive the court about her own wickedness while incriminating the girl for the purpose of having her transferred from the industrial school to a reformatory. The girl has had her beautiful hair cropped as a punishment for absconding. Former inmates of Ireland’s child prisons will tell you that head shaving, humiliating as it was, was far from being the worst of the ill-treatment they suffered in the institutions. The girl gets justice of a sort and the nun gets her comeuppance when the wise and kindly Justice McHenery (Mr Johnson Snr’s alter-ego) takes the child’s side and insists that she is given legal representation. The idea of an Irish judge taking the side of an oppressed child against the religious jailors is laughably improbable.
Indeed, even allowing for artistic licence, the scenario painted by the play is pure fantasy, bearing no relation to the reality of what was done to the children in the Irish courts. Inmates were usually transferred within the prison system without resort to the courts and so cases of this kind seldom came to court – and even when they did, the religious jailors never appeared in the court (Johnson’s play has three nuns in the court in full garb– all that’s missing is Julie Andrews).
The reality of the court system was on public display all across post-independence Ireland every day of the week. Had the Abbey theatre-goers wanted to see the reality rather than a fantasy they could have taken a short walk to Dublin Castle any day and seen children by the dozen being processed in the Children’s Court. It took about ten minutes for a legally innocent child to be given a sentence of anything up to 15 years in prison. The children were denied legal representation and any opportunity to offer a defence or call witnesses on their own behalf. They were sentenced without a trial or inquiry of any kind, and without even being heard by the court.
I was sentenced in 1961, while the Johnson play was running at the Abbey. The first thing I noticed on entering Artane (the notorious Dublin child prison) was the shaven heads. The Abbey theatre- goers could have walked to Artane and seen what I saw. Indeed the shaven heads were visible to the general public every weekend when the prisoners were force marched around the streets of Dublin. The State and the Irish public knew perfectly well what was going on in the courts and in the child prisons. The State’s reformatory rules authorised the jailors to punch a prisoner in the face and to whip the prisoner naked with a cane, strap or birch. The current pretence is that the State and the public “failed to detect” the suffering of the child inmates.
Ryan’s inaccurate description of Johnson’s play appears under the heading “The Beginnings of Change” – suggesting that the play was somehow instrumental in changing the lot of the child prisoners. There is no evidence that the play had any effect on public or official attitudes to the ill-treatment of child prisoners. It certainly did nothing to mitigate the ill-treatment. Three years after the play’s last performance at the Abbey eight girl escapees were dragged back to Bundoran “industrial school” (Co Donegal) where their heads were shaved as a punishment. The incident was reported in the News of the World (a British Sunday newspaper), much to the embarrassment of the Irish authorities.
The essence of the Irish child prison scandal (and this is not mention in the Ryan Report) is that the vast majority of the inmates should never have been imprisoned in the first place. They were unlawfully imprisoned by order of politico-religious kangaroo courts. And it goes without saying that they could not have been abused in the prisons had they not been in the prisons. Ryan pretends that the majority of the children were in State custody for reasons of family poverty. But where’s the evidence for that claim? It is not presented. I was imprisoned because I was the child of a “mixed marriage” (father ex-C of E Freethinker, mother lukewarm RC) and the State authorities alleged that my brother and I were not being raised as “good Catholic boys”. There was no family poverty. Indeed we were well-off – so well off that the court ordered my father to pay the full capitation grant in respect of myself and my brother, £234 per year (present value about £8,000 or about 5,000 USD). The evidence is that most of the children were incarcerated for similar ideological reasons of State.
Now you might have expected that any inquiry into the child prisons, especially an inquiry lasting ten years (As Ryan did), would have investigated the illegal imprisonment of the children. But the Ryan Commission was designed to avoid that topic. The Ryan report says absolutely nothing about illegal imprisonment.
A proper inquiry (as distinct from the Ryan sham) would be bound to reach the very disturbing conclusion that had Ireland not wasted resources on illegally imprisoning thousands of children the country could have afforded first class residential provision for that small minority of children who, for whatever reason, may have genuinely needed to be in State custody. Ryan doesn’t even touch on that subject. He perpetuates the State lie that all of the inmates needed or deserved to be in prison.
Johnson Jnr paints his father as a man who was concerned about the plight of the child inmates (the kindly judge portrayed in the courthouse drama is undoubtedly Johnson Snr). I’m afraid the facts don’t support that picture.
Johnson Jnr reports, “Children were coming into court every day. The ‘cruelty man’ was bringing them in. There was no representation for them”. Indeed, every day, all across Ireland, children were being dragged before the kangaroo courts by inspectors of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (the ISPCC ‘cruelty men’) and were denied legal representation. The private prisons paid the ISPCC inspectors a commission for each child procured through the Courts. The perverse incentive meant that the inspectors fabricated evidence against the children. That happened in my case. I was a smart, well-educated 13-year-old at the time and I knew exactly what was going on.
Richard Johnson Jnr, the former President of the High Court, makes the extraordinary statement: “If the evidence came in that they [the children] had to go into care and there was no other evidence to counter it, the judge had to accept it”.
Johnson Jnr knows, and his father knew, that no judge “had to accept” untested and uncorroborated evidence against a child. Indeed the law (section 58(1) of the Children Acts 1908-57) required expressly that the court conduct an inquiry into any evidence given against a child. And only if the evidence was proven to be factual and if the circumstances warranted a custodial sentence could the judge pass such a sentence. The law is unambiguous on the matter. And the Irish Constitution (at 40.4.1) states that “no citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty save in accordance with the law”. Every judge was sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution.
Any judge who ordered the detention of a child on the basis of untested and uncorroborated evidence was breaking the law and contravening the Constitution. Judge Johnson Snr and his colleagues broke the law every day of the week by passing such sentences. These corrupt judges were implementing the State’s politically-inspired illegal mass-incarceration policy. The result of this endemic judicial malpractice was that in the decade 1951-61 Southern Ireland imprisoned about ten times as many children per head of population as did England. (That horrifying statistic does not appear in the Ryan report).
If you dropped the requirement for an inquiry from section 58(1) of the 1908 Act (as Ireland’s judges did, illegally) then the Act became a charter for arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and the court’s only function was to rubber-stamp predetermined decisions. That saved a lot of time. Like Stalin’s OSO courts, the Irish District Courts empowered themselves to sentence “socially dangerous persons” without trial. And since the court hearing was a mere charade, it was frequently dispensed with altogether. The child would be dragged straight to prison without a court appearance and the judge would sign the detention order at his leisure. A child could be in a prison for weeks or months before the illegal detention order was signed.
Catherine McGuiness, President of the Law Reform Commission (and former Supreme Court judge) was asked, on RTE Radio in May 2009, how she would characterise the relationship between the various parties involved in the child prison system – the ISPCC, the private prison owners, the courts, etc. She replied:
“[The Children Act 1908] … facilitated I think the kind of almost conspiracy between those who were committing the children, those who ran the industrial schools and, I have to say, the District Court.”
Ms McGuinness is right about the conspiracy. However, it was not the Act but the abuse of the Act that facilitated the conspiracy to imprison children unlawfully.
Richard Johnson Snr, through his alter-ego, Justice McHenery, poses as the champion of the oppressed child. That is rather like the Ku Klux Klan posing as the champion of black Americans.
Incidentally, Richard Johnson Jnr recently expressed the view that Ireland should re-introduce hanging.
Jim Beresford, former Artane child prisoner 14262, Huddersfield, England
jim.beresford@btinternet.com
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Re play “The Evidence I Shall Give” by Justice Richard Johnson Snr.
I first quote from the Ryan Report (2009) Volume 4, p.34, pars 1.169-1.173:
“A play at the Abbey Theatre
On 30th January 1961 a play by Richard Johnson, The Evidence I Shall Give, was premiered at the Abbey Theatre. It ran for 42 performances, and then was restaged in July of that year when it ran for a further nine. It returned in August for 21 more, in September for nine, and finally in October for six. Such a run, with a total of 87 performances, was most unusual.
The author was a District Court judge. The play depicted a day in the life of a District Justice and the principal case was an application to have a 13-year-old female inmate of an orphanage transferred to an Industrial School because her alleged disobedience made discipline impossible. The protagonists were the defending solicitor, who was a kind and humane character, and who argued that ‘small children need kissing and caressing’ and the Mother Superior of the home, who was unloving and was driven by the need to enforce severe discipline and through it to bring the children ‘to humility’.
The children had been committed because their father could not afford to engage a woman to look after his six children. The solicitor then calculated that with the capitation fee of £2.10s per week per child, the Order was being paid £390 for the three sisters, and the other institution was being paid £370 for the other three. ‘Will you agree’, he asked the mother-general, ‘that for £150 a year he could have got somebody to look after all six?’
The play ended with the young girl removing the scarf covering her head to reveal it to be shaven, her punishment for absconding. The solicitor then addressed the court, saying ‘…what a dreadful commentary on our so-called Christian State that the soul of a little child should be thus crucified in order to instil humility’.
Far from being controversial, the message of the play was well received by the audience and its success reflected the readiness of the public to hear the criticisms made by the play.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Judge Sean Ryan, the author of this piece, tells us that the principal case in the Johnson play concerned “an application to have a 13-year-old female inmate of an orphanage transferred to an Industrial School…”
Judge Ryan is mistaken.
In fact, the case depicted in the Johnson play concerns a fictional 13-year-old girl (Margaret Raffigan) who is already an inmate of an industrial school. As described in the play, an application is made by the manager of the industrial school (Mother Superior Cecilia) to have Margaret transferred to a reformatory for alleged breach of the industrial school rules. The application is made under section 71(2) of the Children Act 1908 (incorrectly cited as the Children Act 1906 in the Johnson play).
Section 71(2) of the 1908 Act sets out the grounds for such a transfer:
“If a child of the age of twelve years or upwards detained in a certified industrial school is guilty of a serious and wilful breach of the rules of the school, or of inciting other inmates of the school to such a breach, he shall be liable on summary conviction to be sent to a certified reformatory school, and to be there detained, subject and according to the provisions of this Part of this Act”
No application could possibly have been made under section 71(2) to transfer a child from an orphanage to an industrial school.
I’m astonished that Judge Ryan has evidently failed to understand that material fact and that he has hence failed to understand the substance of the Raffigan case as depicted in the Johnson play.
But then accuracy and honesty are features conspicuously absent from the Ryan report.
Jim Beresford, former Artane child prisoner 14262, Huddersfield, England
jim.beresford@btinternet.com
Sadly and with a certain despair, we have revealed to us, more evidence of man’s inhumanity, to what we realy were, just innocent children.we speak of the words used after world war 2. ‘LEST WE FORGET’.NO we survivors will NEVER EVER forget those children who died in the ‘gulags’. here in our own country.these so called ‘ men of the cloth’ some are answering to a higher personage GOD. NEVER TO BE FORGOTTEN.jack
Just when Ireland is described as unique regarding sexual abuse of children by the high flying arrogant Cardinal Hummes then Germany erupts in anger as a major crime wave comes to light in Jesuit boy schools. More and more men are coming forward and reporting abuse in more and more Jesuit schools.So much for the arrogance and smugness of the Vatican and their “Only in Ireland” stance. It,s early days yet but if we are to go by our experiences of the Roman Church here in Ireland then we shall see the usual apoligies and crocodile tears. Former pupils of the elite Canisius Jesuit school in Germany would do well to study the experiences of the Irish survivors so as to be well prepared for what lyes ahead.
Slowly, slowly the true meaning of neglect is seeping out to the public. The death of children at the industrial schools is of course the one thing that the government and churches will go to any lengths to conceal. So it may be only through an act of god or through the surviviors that this information will come into daylight.The unthinkable is what we should now be thinking that children were killed in the Letterfrack Gulag and other such places.Our Protestant brethren were not excepted from these crimes and it is only thanks to people like Derek Leinster that this dark secret is unfolding. The churches both Catholic and Protestant will not be forthcoming with information, rather it will have to be prised out of them by dedicated survivors who refuse not to allow the dead their names and resting places.
By Valerie Robinson
Southern Correspondent
A former resident of a Dublin orphanage for young Protestants has called for a memorial to be erected for the infants and young children who died under its care.
Derek Leinster, who spent his early childhood in Bethany Home in Rathgar after being born to an unwed Protestant teenager, claims to have found evidence of a high mortality rate for infants and young children in the institution.
The home was founded in 1922 and run for unwed Protestant women and their children by members of the city’s Protestant community.
Mr Leinster, who is waging a campaign for redress for those housed in Bethany Home, has obtained a copy of an official report stating that 14 infants out of 57 pregnancies had died between inspections.
The Britain-based campaigner is now attempting to find out where the graves of those children are located.
“I’m determined that these children will not be forgotten,’’ he said.
Mr Leinster said that a memorial should be erected to acknowledge that the children were born, and that those who survived until childhood had lived in an atmosphere of neglect and disease.
“We lived in appalling conditions. I still have health problems today relating to the neglect I suffered as a baby,’’ he said.
Dublin-based academic researcher Niall Meehan, who is working on an article on Bethany Home, has found that as many as six children died in a single month in the institution.
“Some of the monthly minutes record relatively high mortality. For instance in April 1929, 6 died. In December 1935, 6 died and in June 1936 5 died,’’ he said.
Mr Meehan is also attempting to find out the names of the children who died and where they were eventually buried.
Mr Leinster believes that all those children born in Bethany Home from 1921-1972 and those children who died before the age of 5, as well as those who survived live with the effects of neglect should be remembered in a memorial.
“The Irish government was hoping that no-one would ever find out,’’ he said, adding that Protestant Churches, including the Church of Ireland, had been “missing in speaking up for these children’’.
Mr Leinster said that he had been deeply disturbed by reports of the conditions some children lived in after they were placed with foster parents by the home.
One inspector reported that in January 1939 he visited children boarded out in Co Monaghan. While he found that most of the homes were “good and comfortable’’ in one case the children were “insufficiently clad’’.
In a second home children were untidy and clothes appeared to have been unwashed for several weeks, “there was no excuse for this neglect’’, the inspector wrote, recommending the hasty removal of the children.
He also reported finding a young baby in one home who appeared dirty, sore and neglected, with a “filthy’’ nappy which “cannot have been changed for a very long time’’. He urged the authorities to prosecute the foster mother.
Mr Leinster wants Bethany Home to be included in the Republic’s list of institutions covered under the Redress Bill.
You can send your views as to what you want as a memorial to survivors at: memorial@education.gov.ie
Barry
Thank you, Mr. Johnson! This is exactly the point I was trying to make the other day about the need for common-sense support for families. Interestingly, while Mr. Johnson was busy with his production, on the other side of the Atlantic a film was made in Massachusetts during the 1960s called “Titticut Follies.” It depicted life in a State forensic psychiatric prison, with the guards and staff justifying all the horrors they were perpetrating. Of course, in the ever liberal, holier-than-thou State of Massachusetts a court order was issued NOT to correct the terrible abuses going on, but to ban the film being shown, so that the “privacy” of the victims could be “protected.” We managed to show a “pre-banned” copy once a year when I was teaching at Syracuse University in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The ban may still be in effect today!
There should have been outrage from the public, but no, not our bunch, you can lead the sheeple to drink but you can’t make them think!