I fully appreciate what you have said, Sir, because that has been my difficulty year after year. Each year, when I have raised this matter, both Ministers disclaim responsibility, and the result is that one is left, like Mahomet's coffin, suspended in mid-air, and each Minister says that it is the responsibility of the other Minister. The Minister for Justice gets up and says he cannot be expected to criticise the Minister for Education, and then the Minister for Education most piously says that he cannot be expected to criticise the Minister for Justice. Now, I am not asking the Minister for Justice to make alterations in Summerhill. It does not belong to him. It is a matter for the Minister for Education. I do say, however, that the place to which you are sending the children is quite unsuitable and that the Minister for Justice ought to provide a new place, just as he has reformatories, industrial schools, and so on, to deal with this particular type of person, placed in his charge. The place to which he is at present sending the children is not in his jurisdiction and, in fact, when a child in his charge is sent down there it finds itself alone, with the sword of Damocles hanging over its head for, perhaps, a week or a fortnight, and there may be only one other, or two or three children in the place.
I do not know if the Minister for Justice ever visited the place. It is a gloomy Georgian house with barred windows in as depressing a part of Dublin as could be found. There is no recreation ground attached to it, except a cemented backyard. The amenities and arrangements for the reform of children in such a place are non-existent and it is in every sense a thoroughly undesirable Oliver Twist kind of establishment. Now, that in this day and generation the only provision we should make for juvenile delinquents in this city is a place of that kind, is a gross reflection upon us all. There is no other civilised country in the world which would tolerate such treatment of children, and there is no Deputy in this House who, for one hour, would tolerate the removal of his own child to such a place. Why should we be content to allow the children of the poor of this city or of any other part of the country to be put in a place of that kind? It is not that the reform requested is going to cost an ocean of money. It is not. What is required at the present time is that the Minister for Justice should open his eyes to the fact that the question of juvenile delinquency bears little or no relation to ordinary criminal procedure.
Children coming before the children's court are not criminals and never should have been regarded as such. If their parents are capable and prudent people, the proper persons to deal with these children are their parents, and if they are not properly dealt with it is their parents who should be punished. There are cases, however in which the parents of children, who find their way into the children's court, are not capable of dealing with them. They either have not the character or the intelligence or the education to meet the peculiar problem that the Lord has seen fit to send them. Deputies will ask, what are these peculiar problems? The peculiar problem is this: that I would say that seven out of ten children properly brought before the children's court are suffering from some form of psychosis. They are really suffering from nervous disease and, if they were our own children, they would be brought to nerve specialists and dealt with in clinics or in a nursing home under the attention of a highly feed doctor. These children have no such facility available to them and, furthermore the parents of these children do not recognise that the children's delinquency is due to nervous disturbance.
If the child of one of us began breaking into our neighbours' houses or smashing up the furniture or doing the graver things that come before the children's court, no one would dream of assuming that this was normal conduct on the part of a normal child. We would take the child at once to a nerve specialist and get it examined to try to find out why, in the name of Heaven, the child did these things which no normal child would do. I have seen children brought up before the children's court—and these things must be mentioned, however distressing they may be—for sexual offences. I have seen a child of 13 years of age brought up to be criminally charged and punished for sexual offences. Now, neither the child or anybody else knew what he was doing. That child acted simply under an impulse the nature of which he did not understand. He did not realise the nature of the offence with which he was charged, and yet he was carted down to Summerhill and left to sit there brooding on the extremely distressing statements that had been made in his presence in the court. I do not say the child was a paragon of virtue. He was not. Clearly the child was abnormal, but I hold that his abnormality was very much intensified and worsened by the treatment he got in our courts. Unfortunately, these cases, not infrequently, come before the courts.
I ask Deputies to consider this: Suppose one of their own children did some of these kinds of things, what would they do? Would they punish them or lock them up, or would they consult the family physician and take his advice? I think they would certainly follow the latter course and that, further, they would go to a nerve specialist to have the child properly looked after. That is all I am asking for. It must be remembered that all these children, whether we like it or not, are going to be citizens of this State ultimately, and it is up to us to turn them into decent citizens instead of into criminally or sexually perverted people all their lives. I believe that it is a God-given opportunity to save them when they come into your hands at a time when they are still malleable and when their minds are young and untrained. We are dealing here in human lives, on which you cannot put a value, and I am asking the Minister for Justice to establish in this city, and possibly in Cork, a clinic which would be staffed with a trained personnel, where there would be a competent children's doctor—preferably trained in psychological medicine—with power to send for any consultants that he considered necessary; that there would be a competent staff which would comprise a matron fully trained in dealing with children's nervous diseases, and such other staff as might be necessary for the proper maintenance of the establishment.
In that way every juvenile brought before the children's court would promptly be segregated. There would be one kind of children who should be sent home to their parents, and their parents told to correct them, so that they would not appear before the court again. There are many cases of that kind, such as children who are playing marbles in the street, or who are making a public nuisance of themselves, and are arrested more for their own protection than as a deterrent; also children who are continually playing in dangerous streets and who have been repeatedly warned. That type of children ought to be sent home to their parents for correction. The second category is the class of case which the magistrate would ordinarily remand for consideration, and the class of case where the parents appeared to be quite incapable of controlling their children. I want all these cases sent on remand to the clinic, so that when the magistrate comes finally to dispose of these children he may have before him a formal report as to what is the real cause of their delinquency.
That advantage in itself is, I think, quite sufficient to justify the establishment of such a place. But it would have this additional advantage, that at present when children are sent to the remand home, you will witness in the court an almost distressing scene of desolation on the part of the children on the part of the parents. To be precipitating fearful agony of that kind unnecessarily seems to me to be a cruel thing. If we had an establishment of the kind I outlined, there would be no need for it, because the magistrate would say to the parents: "There is no need for bursting into tears or crying your heart out. Go home to your dinner, and if you want to visit the child you can spend the afternoon with it. Nobody wants to separate you. You are welcome to go there any time you like. The child is not being sent to a prison; he is being sent to an hospital. In my judgment he is not a criminal, but he is ill, and we want to find out what is wrong with him. There is no necessity for kicking up a row. You can see the child any time you like, and you will be welcome to do so." That in itself is an immense advantage. Furthermore, I think it would probably bring within the grip of a reformative system of that kind a great number of children whom magistrates do not attempt to do anything for at present, because they feel that the only machinery they have for dealing with children is so harsh and heartless that they would sooner send the children home and get them out of their jurisdiction than use the resources they have got.
I should like to see a procedure available to district justices which would be of clear benefit to the children concerned, so that nobody would have the slightest hesitation in putting it into operation; that nobody would feel that there was anything going on in the Children's Court on a Friday morning that they need be uneasy about; and that, far from hurting the child, contact with the Children's Court was designed to do it great good, and to do it good that would never otherwise be done if it had not come to the Children's Court. It is not an extravagant demand. So far as I am aware, both the Minister for Education and the Minister for Justice are humane men. I cannot doubt that if they addressed their minds to the problem they would be tempted to take remedial measures of this kind.
The Minister for Education set up a commission to investigate the matter and I must say that they produced a dreary kind of report. The Minister did not do very much even with the report. To be perfectly plain, it was about the worst report ever written by a commission in this country. It was a most futile and antediluvian kind of document. You would really think that it was a group of extremely conservative Department of Finance officials who were laying down the minimum possible that the public would stand for, instead of being a report designed to get the best possible, leaving the Department of Finance to chisel it down. But between the report, which was inadequate, and the activities of the Department of Finance, nothing has happened. I am asking the Minister for Justice to take this out of the hands of the Department of Education and to provide, within his own jurisdiction, the kind of place we ought to have. Then we can feel that we are abreast, but no more than abreast, of what is being done in other countries. If the conditions surrounding juvenile delinquency in this country were known in Great Britain or in America, we would be scandalised. In the worst and most backward city in America conditions such as we have in this country would not be tolerated for an hour. In no part of England would such conditions as at present obtain here be tolerated for an hour. Is not that a horrible reflection on us, who have a comparatively small problem to deal with, with no big industrial population, no complications, such as they have in the United States of America of mixed people from abroad; nobody but our own, and very few of them? We are dealing with them on the same lines as the United States and Great Britain were dealing with theirs 50 years ago.
It is only people, so far as I can find out, like Charles Dickens, or somebody who goes out and breaks somebody else's window, who can ever get anything done. There is not the slightest doubt that if somebody broke the windows in Summerhill it would be closed in three weeks. I have brought the matter up here year after year and nothing has been done. If a fellow went down and laid a bomb outside Summerhill it would be closed overnight. That is what is so maddening. That is true, and the Minister for Justice knows it is true. One meeting in Cathal Brugha Street, one procession to Summerhill, one eloquent oration by some lunatic old woman off the steps of Summerhill, and it would be closed overnight; and there would be demonstrations of congratulation in Gloucester Diamond for three weeks. But when representations are made in Parliament of the most moderate kind year after year, nothing is done. On the contrary, the attitude is that this fellow is a crank looking for a bit of publicity.
There is no publicity to be got out of this. Nobody gives a hoot about it. I solemnly warn the Minister that if something is not done he will be having meetings in Gloucester Diamond. I admit that it is a comparatively small problem, but it is the kind of thing that can be worked into a glorious scandal, and the Minister and the Government and the Dáil can be put on the defensive in this matter, because we cannot stand over what is there. It is a very small business, but what there is of it we cannot stand over. If it is made the occasion of a cheap and unscrupulous demonstration, we will be scandalised, and rightly scandalised. I ask the Minister to carry out the necessary reforms before the opportunity is afforded to persons to make it the material of cheap and dishonest publicity.
