FEBRUARY 15TH, 1910:
A proposal just over a century ago to provide day industrial schools to educate poor children was not favourably received in Ireland althoughThe Irish Times
of the day argued strongly in support of it in this editorial.
A YEAR ago the Royal Commission on Poor Law Reform issued a report which applied, with a few modifications, to Ireland. Ten months ago the clauses of the Children Act, providing for the establishment of day industrial schools, came into force. And, for all practical purposes, neither of those documents has been worth the paper upon which it was printed.
The children run about the streets to grow up to misery and shame; the general workhouse still harbours the aged victims of the battle of life and the thriftless vagabond of the road. The fault mainly lies with the people of Ireland. Sometimes the apparently callous inhumanity, the unreflecting cruelty, of the good and charitable people in Dublin must almost appal the ardent reformer . . . Every man in Dublin knows the ragged children that pester him for alms.
He gives a trifle, and passes on with a warm appreciation of his own charity. That man has been guilty of a profoundly immoral act. He has sinned against the State and against the child. At present he has but one excuse. If the child was arrested, imprisonment of a kind would follow.
The State has provided a way out. It has provided for the establishment of industrial schools in which children can be given a chance of earning an honest livelihood. The Treasury will give grants in aid of such schools, but the local authorities must start them.
In Dublin, where the condition of the children is a scandal which hourly cries to Heaven for redress, the authorities have taken no action to start such schools. The reason why they have taken no steps is the apathy of the good men and women of Dublin.
They send away thousands of pounds for foreign missions; they cannot spare the money, or the energy, to establish schools to keep the bodies of our children here from want and shame, and their souls from sin and vice. Mr Cyril Jackson has told us what becomes of these boys and girls as they grow up.
They beg as long as they are young enough to touch the fancy, and excite the pity, of the public. Then the boys loaf, and try to get odd jobs, and so glut the casual labour market. The unemployed in Dublin were never given a chance to learn a trade.
That is what makes poverty and crime, such as philanthropists and judges deplore in Dublin.
The poor of Dublin want schoolmasters and teachers and we give them Labour Exchanges and prisons.
It is something worse from the moral and human point of view. We appeal to the clergy and the philanthropists of Dublin to sit down and think, and then to make other people think, about this matter.
Is it well that children should be forced into sin and crime because the well-to-do, comfortable ratepayers are too lazy to provide schools for them? There are a lot of reforms which are urgently necessary in Dublin. But the most urgent of all, because it is at the very foundation of all, is this question of industrial schools.
We cannot usefully try to reform the inmate of the workhouse or the prison unless we stop the cause which brought him there.
The one way of helping people without pauperising them is to put them in a position to help themselves.
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