I should like to hear from the Minister a specific statement as to whether he is now satisfied that the accommodation at Daingean Reformatory is as near the ideal for the purpose for which it is intended as we can hope to get it. This is a topic on which I have dwelt repeatedly on previous occasions, and I am glad to say that representations did succeed in closing down the wholly unsuitable premises in Glencree and that the Minister decided to transfer these boys to Daingean. I have never seen Daingean and I do not know what the accommodation is like there, but I should be interested to hear what the Minister's opinion is and grateful if he would say whether Deputies will have his approval, subject to the approval of the Superior of the institution, in visiting the institution if opportunity should offer.
We have frequently discussed here the special conditions of reformatory and industrial school teachers, and it has often struck me as odd that there should be any distinction at all between the qualifications required for the teachers who teach in industrial and reformatory schools and those who teach in the national schools. I understand that the obligation of the State is that, if circumstances require the State to remove a juvenile from its family surroundings, the State will afford to that juvenile the nearest approach which it can provide to the amenities which it would enjoy had its family life not been disrupted. The inmates of this reformatory institution are all boys between the ages of 14 and 17, or they enter the institution between those ages, and surely we ought to provide for them exactly the same standard of education as these children would enjoy if they were subject to the conditions of the Compulsory School Attendance Act.
It is true that if they were outside the school and over 14 years of age, that Act would not apply, but in that event they would be embarking on some kind of career. They would be starting as page boys in hotels, as messenger boys, as apprentices in shops or something of the kind. Constrained as they are to live in the limited surroundings of the reformatory and handicapped as they inevitably will be as a result of the necessity of incarcerating them there, surely, instead of giving them any inferior kind of education, we should exert ourselves to give them the very best possible equipment we can to help them to overcome the handicap which, by their own folly, they brought on themselves. I should be glad to know if the Minister intends ultimately to provide in the reformatory either some kind of suitable secondary education for these boys or some kind of special technical education.
I appreciate fully, and no doubt the Minister will say it to me at some stage of this discussion, that all this would, of course, involve very severe expense. I think we ought to spend money to retrieve these children. If they are turned out from the reformatory unskilled labourers and reformatory boys at the same time, the handicap under which they start is almost insuperable.
I apprehend that certain Deputies may say: "If you go on improving conditions in the reformatory on this scale, instead of being a punishment, it will become a kind of privilege to get into the reformatory"; but I am not sure that that is not the right approach. It does not matter how good we make the reformatory—no boy is going to clamour for admission to it. No parent wants to see his son educated in a reformatory. There is no danger that through making the reformatory a good educational establishment we shall be killed with applications for admission. It is the last place any child wants to go and the last place any parent wants to see his child sent to, and indeed, under the new dispensation, I am happy to notice it is the last place any judicial person in the country desires to send a child. They are sent there only as the last resort, when no other remedy will put them right, but once they get in there, surely none of us, the Minister included, is inspired by any vengeful desire to make the punishment fit the crime. Our sole purpose in putting them there is to get them back on the rails, to straighten them up and turn them into decent citizens.
With that in mind, we have continually to remember the heavy handicap which incarceration there will mean for the rest of their lives, and we have to lean a bit backwards in giving them rather more than might be ordinarily demanded of a citizen of the State by way of free education in order that they will get a good start the minute they come out. I do not think the standard of technical education provided in the reformatory is of a very high grade, and I do not suppose that the fees received by the Order responsible for receiving these boys are sufficient to permit of the employment of a very elaborate staff to provide the education we might desire them to have. Could the Minister tell us whether, in his judgement, more generous treatment would produce better results, and, if that is his view, whether he thinks it will be possible to do something in that direction at a reasonably early date?