Lessons of past will inform our children’s future

I remember a girl in my secondary school class at Goldenbridge who stood out as being different. We were all poor but she was poorer still. Maybe it was her badly cut hair, or the ill-fitting clothes given to her by the nuns in the next-door industrial school, but something about her set her apart from us. Later, when I began to understand the circumstances of my own adoption, I would come to realise that our lives had more in common than I previously thought. How easily her story could have been mine.

As well as her appearance, that girl was unusual in being selected by the nuns to progress to secondary school at all. Very few of the industrial school residents had that opportunity. But she must have felt even more self-conscious than the normal gawky schoolgirl. Self-conscious in school, surrounded by girls with homes to go to, and perhaps also self-conscious in her dormitory at night surrounded by the other industrial school girls who had not been chosen by the sisters for the gift of secondary education. To this day I often wonder if she cried in her metal bed.

She comes into my mind regularly when I think about the 2,000 or so children in direct provision centres across Ireland. This month they are settling back in the local schools in their areas, little bags on their backs with books and pencils and packed lunches.

Like my classmate from all those years ago, it’s the little things that set apart the direct provision children from the others in their classes. The small things that might have a lesser meaning to adults but mean a lot to children. The school lunch, for example. One of the few official windows into the lives of these children is a small paragraph about school lunches in the yearly or so statutory audit of each residential facility.

When the Mosney direct provision facility in Co Meath was audited by the Reception and Integration Agency last January, the standard school lunch comprised two apples, sandwiches and two juice boxes. Every direct provision child was allocated the same lunch, with a minor flexibility allowed to parents in terms of sandwich filling. Nowhere in that standard lunch box formula is there any scope for a homemade pastry or the types of shop-bought treats that other children in the local national or secondary school might have. With a weekly parental budget of €19.10 there’s not much opportunity for treating a child and the direct provision centres don’t normally allow residents to do their own home cooking. Their lunch boxes contain nutritious food certainly. But children don’t notice nutrition much. They do notice difference.

Subtle differences

I expect there are lots of other subtle and not so subtle differences that set these children apart from their educational peers. Language may be a barrier, but also the lack of a similar range of educational tools in their schoolbags. Extra books and fancier coloured pencils cost money. Homework and bedtime stories are a less effective part of education if parents lack the language skills and domestic facilities to properly assist.

The audit reports tell us that every bedroom in Mosney has a desk. Audit reports of the other 33 facilities throughout Ireland tend not to be so specific about on-site educational and play facilities. The reports have pages of individual residential assessments, noting structural inadequacies such as broken light bulbs, damp bathroom walls, rooms that need to be painted. But apart from the standard paragraph on the content of packed lunch boxes there’s very little opportunity to see the facilities through the eyes of a child. No State auditor checks the number of footballs and bicycles or measures the amount of green space. No State auditor comments on the absence of sleepovers or the ban on friends from outside coming to stay. No State auditor considers school report cards.

Many children are born in direct provision and many stay there, awaiting a decision on their residency status, for as long as seven years. Some arrive as teenagers and make sharp adjustments to the Irish secondary school system. None are entitled to grants for further education and no parent on an allowance of €19.10 per week can afford a third-level education for their child.

No career options

So the direct provision teenager entering Leaving Cert year this term does so without the anticipation and excitement of classmates that are planning a third-level education. Not for their ears are the classes where CAO forms are explained and career options discussed.

Even if their family is lucky enough to get residency papers this year or next, they still fall into the trap of needing to be a legal resident in the State for three of the previous five years before being eligible to apply for a higher education grant.

The student still in direct provision at the time of her Leaving Cert will not be attending college with her peers, no matter how brilliant and no matter how potentially valuable her intelligence is to the Irish economy and society.

More than four decades separate that young girl in my class in Goldenbridge from the children of direct provision who sat this year’s Leaving Certificate, yet significant aspects of their lives remain the same. As we await a decision on the terms of reference for yet another commission of inquiry into Ireland’s institutions, childhood and educational opportunities are being denied to a large cohort of today’s children. This has to change. If we can’t learn lessons from our past what hope is there for our children’s futures?

Anne Ferris is Labour TD for Wicklow and East Carlow and is vice-chairwoman of the Oireachtas Committee for Justice, Defence and Equality.