It is carefully excogitated and deliberately uttered. In my respectful judgment they were flagrantly in conflict with the elementary obligations not only of charity but of justice. There is no more vigilant critic than I am of the Minister's activities in regard to prison, Borstal and industrial school administration, but when a Catholic monsignor uses language which appears to give the colour of justification for the cartoons in the American papers where muscular warders are seen flogging half-naked 14 year old boys with cat-o'-nine tails, then I think it is right to say in public of that monsignor that he should examine his conscience and ask himself, (1), if he has spoken the truth, and (2) if he has considered the obligations of justice and charity. If his conscience tells him that he has failed in one of these regards, I suggest to him that example is very much better than precept, and that it might be a useful thing, if he finds on closer investigation that the substance of what he is alleged to have said is grossly untrue, that he should have the moral courage to come out in public and say so, and correct in so far as he can the grave injustice he has done not only to the legislature of this country but to the decent, respectable men who are members of the Irish Christian Brothers, to the warders in our prisons and to the warders in the Borstal, and to the other individuals who are looking after young persons in the various places of detention provided by the State.
Now, I am not to be taken as suggesting that the conditions obtaining here are ideal, or anything like it. I have repeatedly stated in this House that I think them very far from ideal. I do not want to make any invidious comparisons between the care and solicitude shown for delinquents in this country—juveniles or adults—with that shown in the United States of America. They have their own problems, but having, as emphatically as I can, rebutted the farrago of ill-informed nonsense for which Monsignor Flanagan was responsible, I want to urge on the Minister that the natural indignation caused by the monsignor's follies, and worse than follies, should not force me into the position of defending, without qualification, many things that exist in our prison, Borstal and reformatory school system which call for early attention and remedy.
The position with regard to Borstal here is that that was a system evolved in Great Britain in the not very remote past. Great Britain has a peculiar problem. She has a peculiar kind of population. Hers is a great industrial population; ours is mainly a rural agricultural population, and institutions readily adaptable in Great Britain would require very considerable adaptation before they could be fitted into our particular mode of life. In Great Britain, for many years, the Borstal was a kind of modified prison, a juvenile prison, but under the administration of, I think, Sir Samuel Hoare, sweeping reforms were carried into effect, so that the old-fashioned system of Borstal treatment has completely vanished there. Its place has been taken by a system of approved schools, the atmosphere of which closely approximates to that of the boarding-school to which any of us might have gone.
There are various categories into which these adolescent delinquents are divided. One school will accommodate the very intractable; another school will accommodate the problem boy; and the third type of school will be designed for the fellow who stands in need of very little else but normal discipline. There are no keys or railings or school uniforms. The boys are treated, in so far as it is possible to treat them, as senior school boys. They repeatedly escape. It is one of the hallmarks of the excellence of the system that it is perfectly easy to escape, but 90 per cent. of them never try to escape. On occasion, shocking things happen. Recently, in one of these approved schools in England, six boys were misled by two really bad lads into planning a murderous attack upon the headmaster, in the course of which one of the assistant masters was actually murdered.
Many weak-minded people, in the presence of a tragedy of that kind, are frightened, and, in recoiling from the experiment, will cry out for padlocks and chains and bars. Of course, nothing could be more foolish in the effort to reform boys whose lives have been hopelessly misused and warped. There are bound to be dangers and difficulties, and it is an edifying and splendid thing that you will find a body of teachers, such as there are in Great Britain, who are ready to face these dangers and do face them. In the interests of the boys they are looking after they avoid all appearance of being jailers, or of having about their persons weapons to meet violence in case it should arise. They do that even though experience has taught them that violence may occasionally arise.
From that picture I want to turn to the grim spectacle in this country. Clonmel Jail was probably built in the 18th century or the early part of the 19th century. It is all that a jail might be expected to be. The men looking after the inmates of that institution are dressed in warders' uniforms. Now, you may explain until the cows come home to an adolescent youth that he is not going to jail: that he is going to a Borstal school, but if you bring him in through a 14-foot wooden door, studded all over with large iron nails, and he is there received by a body of men who are dressed in the same uniform that prison warders are dressed in, if he is then put into an apartment which is manifestly a prison cell albeit the door is left open and he is not strictly confined like the penal servitude prisoner —while it may appear to experienced men of our age that he is not in jail— the average youth of 16 or 17 going in there will feel that, if he is not in jail, he is in something very like a jail. He is not interested in philosophical distinctions. When we get one of these fellows who is manifestly on the high road to damning his soul and wrecking his life, our concern ought to be when he comes into the custody of the State—because it is no longer possible to leave him at large—to provide him with an environment and treatment which is best calculated to eradicate from his nature the flaws that brought him to where he now is, and to equip him to go out into the world at the end of his three years' detention with a fair chance of getting his feet under him and turning himself into a decent citizen. The results in England, I think, were that as high as 70 per cent. never come into the hands of the police again.
Of course, that is an immense achievement because the courts do not send a fellow to Borstal unless they regard him as virtually hopeless. I heard Deputy Commons, in the very measured speech he made here last night, plead with the Minister not to put first offenders in alongside hardened criminals. No court in this country ever put a first offender into prison or Borstal. They are always, and rightly so, given chances: put on probation. Every conceivable resource is exhausted before they are ultimately locked up and, therefore, it is a great mistake to over-sentimentalise about the fellows in Borstal. They are tough eggs; they would never have got into Borstal if they were not. Every one of them has had several chances. It is often a moving story to hear some middle-aged superintendent of the Gardaí in Dublin saying: "I know that fellow well. He had me persecuted trying to get him straightened out, talking to his mother and father, warning the boy, keeping an eye on him until, for his own good, we had to take him to Borstal". Nothing is more fantastic—that the courts go out after children or young men—youths—and ram them into jail. My experience is that the courts are very patient and that very often a penalty is not inflicted but ultimately some of them find their way into Borstal.
I want to see here in this country such a school as is at present available for these boys in Great Britain and, mark this well, in Belfast. It has not been beyond the resources of the Northern Government to provide a Borstal with suitable equipment, suitable surroundings, and a truly admirable spirit where—to their eternal credit—not only their social conduct but their spiritual welfare is solicitously looked after and no trouble is thought too much to build these boys up and restore them to the world as decent citizens. I want to say this. It is something I am ashamed of, but if the Right Reverend Monsignor to whom I have already referred had employed prudent language and stated the truth instead of the farrago of nonsense he did, we might have had reason to blush, because he could have said a great deal that we might have felt constrained to apologise for and most especially about the Borstal. I am told that building priorities make it impossible for the Minister to erect a Borstal as early as he would like.
We are dealing not only in the physical health of adolescent youths— to-morrow to be men—we are dealing in immortal souls, and I put it to the Minister for Justice that there is no priority which can conceivably take precedence over the opportunity to save the immortal soul of one of our fellowcitizens from damnation, and surely some of these boys are certainly as fated, if it is possible to say that of another human creature, to damn their souls if they do not get the kind of support and assistance they now stand in need of as it is possible to be. On these grounds alone, I ask the Minister for Justice to approach the Government and to ask for a first priority both on revenue and supply to get an institution built where real justice can be done to these wayward and pseudo-criminal youths and a genuine effort made to reclaim them to the nation.
Having said that, I will say no more about the Borstal this year but, with the help of God, if I am still a member of this House I will have plenty to say this time 12 months if more vigorous measures are not taken to provide the amenities which are manifestly urgently necessary, and which I believe the Minister for Justice in his heart knows are urgently necessary if individuals are not to be denied at the hands of the State in whose custody they are the minimum protection they are entitled to expect.
The question of juvenile delinquency has been raised. The Borstal cook caters for a different calibre. There is a lot of speculation about the causes of juvenile delinquency. Many people fall into the error of imagining that juvenile delinquency is a characteristic symptom of poverty. Statistics prove that that is not true. Juvenile delinquency is to be found in the families of the comparatively well-to-do just as frequently as it is in the families of the very poor.
Probably if the statistics were complete, it would emerge that juvenile delinquency occurs more frequently in the families of the well-to-do, because remember if the son of any member of this House played ball in the street or broke a window, is it likely that he would be brought before a police court? Would the neighbours go to the police about him? They would not. They would come around and knock on our door and say: "Tommy broke the window, what are you going to do about it?" and we would go out with a nice speech and say: "We will send the glazier and fix it up"; and there would be a lot of tarara-boom-de-ay and there would be no more about it. But take a young kid from Gloucester Street who takes it into his head to break a window. Very quickly the Guards pick him up and admonish him, but if he keeps it up, as unfortunately he often does, he is brought before the magistrate.
I beg Deputies to mark this clearly —no juvenile delinquent was ever sent, except by one magistrate who shall be nameless and who was a bit "daft", to an industrial school on his first, second or third offence. Every conceivable resource is exhausted. The probation officer looks after him and it is only when it is manifest that there is nothing else to do, he is taken from his family. That is as it should be. But bear in mind that a great many of the children of the middle class and well-to-do do not come within that experience because, long before it becomes necessary for the court to deal with them, their own parents take them to a doctor and say: "This young fellow is terrible; he has been repeatedly punished for smashing up the furniture and yet, if you take your eye off him, he goes on purposelessly with the smashing." Almost invariably, the physician or psychologist, after a period, discovers that there is something wrong, pschologically or physically with the youngster. That defect being rectified, the whole problem is resolved and the child becomes normal again.
That brings me to the fundamental point I want to discuss. When a juvenile who is guilty of incorrigibly bad conduct is brought before the juvenile court up in the Castle and accused of having repeatedly and deliberately gone out and smashed the public lamps, the justice is told that he has been warned, and the Gardaí have brought him home to his people, that they have chastised him and that, still, out he pops at the first opportunity and commences to throw stones at the lamps. The only course open to the district justice is to send him to an industrial school where there happens to be a vacancy for a committed child. If that child were taken to a competent doctor, he might very easily find that there was some physical or psychological defect in his make-up. The very fact of making it impossible for him to break lamps, without correcting the defect out of which that desire grew, will, in his adolescence, turn him into that very kind of pervert which is the most difficult prolem the Garda and educational authorities have to deal with. The comparatively harmless safety valve of smashing lamps has heretofore sublimated his particular complex. Cut him off from that completely, thrust it underground and it breaks out in some entirely different direction at a later stage of his life in a form desperately difficult to control and well calculated to bring misery and wretchedness not only to himself but to all related to him and responsible for him. All this because we will not provide what almost every civilised country provides—a clinic to which a child habitually brought before the children's court can be referred on remand so that, when he is brought back before the district justice to be disposed of finally, the district justice will have before him the report of competent observers as to the true cause of the child's delinquency.
I want to say with the utmost deliberation that I am as certain as I am standing on this carpet that seven out of every ten children convicted in the children's court and committed to approved schools are no more guilty of malfeasance than the angels in heaven. They are children with some internal conflict which precipitates them into a course of action they are not able to control. They may be as transparently honest as glass but it may test the ingenuity of a highly-skilled doctor to discover the cause of the trouble. Very often, the fault is not in themselves but in their parents. You find a child acting in a most extraordinary way and, when you proceed to ascertain the cause of that conduct, it is a complete mystery. But go home and meet his mother. You may then find that she is living with some man who is not her husband and the child, being conscious of the nature of that situation, has an instinctively deep revulsion and his whole problem is a constant protest against a situation which, subconsciously, he regards as disgusting and shocking but which he is quite unable to connect with his conduct when categorically asked: "Why do you do these astonishing things?"
Conceive that kind of situation and consider the remedy provided—shipping that child off, lonely, perplexed, shocked to the very foundation of his being, to an approved school which knows nothing of his problem and cares less and which merely tries to fit him into the ordinary activities of the normal world. Eighty per cent. of the occupants of an industrial school were never before a court at all. They were committed because they were orphans or because their parents were too poor to maintain them or because something happened to break up the family and made it necessary to put the children into the care of nuns or brothers. All I am asking is that, when a district justice makes up his mind that, for the sake of the child as well as for the sake of society, it is necessary to take him from the home of the parents whom God placed over him—and that will be a very rare case—the justice should be furnished with the minimum of information which he must have if he is to make proper provision for that child.
The expense of this will not be £10,000 a year. It will keep out of prison dozens of children who, for the want of this care, must find their way there in the long run. It will spare society the solution of some of the most painful problems it is possible for society to have to deal with. Let us not put a tooth in it. It will rescue many a child from drifting into the horrors of sexual perversion and thus clouding and darkening its whole life. If the truth were told, this perversion had its roots in the cruel misusage the child received from society when it first manifested the symptoms of the fundamental illness from which it suffered. These are matters around which one always like to skirt. I have been fighting for this reform for ten years. Nobody ever says it is wrong. Nobody ever disagrees with me but nothing ever gets done.
Can I reasonably hope now, after thousands of millions of pounds have been spent all over the world in blasting the world to pieces, that we should stipulate for £10,000 or £15,000 a year, in order to give those children who can be saved a chance that it is well within our power to give them? Or are we to go on for ever, watching them being shovelled down the broad, high road to hell?
I, therefore, ask that a clinic be established in this city, over which there should preside a motherly, highly-trained, qualified nurse, so that the first person a frightened, troublesome child will encounter, when brought from the courts, immensely distressed at being brought before the magistrate and taken away from its parents, would be a motherly woman, whose first concern is to smooth down his sorrows and restore his confidence, to assure him that no one is going to eat him, that everybody is anxious and solicitous to get him fixed up and that, maybe, after a week, he will be able to go home. I ask that there be attached to that clinic a competent Catholic psychologist and, if necessary, a competent non-Catholic psychologist, who, in collaboration with the minister of religion to which the delinquent child may belong, will proceed skilfully and competently to investigate not only the state of the child's mind but the family background from which it came.
During its period in that remand home, which ordinarily would not exceed a week, it will receive such medical treatment and such other treatment as should be necessary to restore it, as far as possible, to a normal state. I ask that such investigations may be made as may be necessary to unravel the true nature of the causes of the child's misconduct and that all this information be laid before the district justice, so that he may dispose of the child in the child's best interests.
Surely that is not an extravagant demand, either in its nature or in the expense it would involve? The dividends which it must pay are infinite and I doubt if there is a Deputy in this House who would not agree with me 100 per cent. Granted what I say about these matters is true—and I think the Minister will confirm most of it—the proposal ought to be put in hand forthwith and this financial year should not pass without its being put into effect.
I want to question the prudence of the regulation which prohibits prison officers from issuing writs for slander or libel when allegations are made about them that, in the course of their duty, they have transgressed the regulations which they are bound to observe. A disreputable person recently published a book in this country called I Did Penal Servitude. By the Lord Harry, by the time you had finished that book, you would think the only qualification for heroism or respectability in this country was that of serving a term of penal servitude. You would begin to feel, by the time you reached the end of the book, that one who had not served a term of penal servitude was rather a disreputable character and ought to apologise for not having done his bit. That is the author's own business, but it is different when it comes, in order to lend a veneer of versimilitude to his story, to describing a prison officer who can easily be identified and attributing to him, in the presence of the prisoner in his care, the foulest of foul language and conduct generally disreputable to himself and to the service to which he belongs. The facts are that the man has been 30 years in the service and never had any complaint made against him, except that he sometimes allowed his solicitude and sympathy for a prisoner to deflect him from that degree of rigidity which a prison officer must necessarily maintain.
This man was a regular weekly communicant, who had almost a fetish about bad language and who, as I say, has only one complaint against him— that from time to time his chief warder was obliged to say to him: "Don't forget that those fellows are tough eggs and that you cannot be coddling them."
That man goes at once to his superior officer and says: "I want permission to instruct a solicitor to issue a writ for libel against this blackguard—not that I can get anything out of him, as he has spent the proceeds of his thefts and apparently has no intention of trying to earn his living again, but in order to vindicate my good name." That officer is told the regulations will not permit him. He and his family have to leave that record uncontradicted and uncorrected, because the regulations say it is not in the general interest that matters of this kind should be raised by an individual officer. I have no desire to challenge or call into question a man who happens to have fallen into temptation which, because of its nature, involved his trial and sentence to penal servitude. That just happened to be his kind of condition. If the truth were known, the temptations into which I have fallen may be far worse and far more numerous, only their character was of a different sort, which did not involve me in penal servitude. Far be it from me to adopt a superior attitude to the man who did penal servitude. My complaint against him and my condemnation of him is that those who held out a hand to him, those who were kind, those who did not want to strike him in the hour of his affliction, are casually used for the purpose of setting his pot boiling and their modest reputation, which is as precious to them as that of the Taoiseach is to himself, is blackened and bespattered with dirt, in order to win the half-crowns of the sensation lovers in this country and of a visiting Monsignor from abroad.
I am bound to say that I think one of the principal reasons for juvenile delinquency in this country is that parents seem to be abjuring their duty to their children. One of the reasons is that, if a national school teacher gives a child a slap, he may find himself involved in something like the Nuremberg trial. By the time Papa and Mamma have finished describing the massacre that took place, Belsen fades into insignificance beside the scenes that took place in the national school, and a fat stump of a child is sitting beside them, ready to get up and tell his story like a man.
The gravamen of the complaint is that he was nearly beaten unconscious, by "this ferocious villain who beat their darling child". And yet we find people like Deputy Connolly—I was going to say "God be good to him", but I believe he is still going strong, although he is not a member of the House now—getting up here and describing, while rolling his tongue, how they were beaten on their bottoms and what an awful thing it was that that should happen. I think if Deputy Connolly had got a good few wallops on that particular portion of his anatomy, he would not have made such a silly speech. But the national teacher who beats the child and is then brought into court on that account, is singled out and, even when she is going to Mass, people can say: "That is the teacher who was up for beating the child. She got out of it, you know, but there were strings pulled, of course."
