Greatest threats to growing up with family was poverty or parents in ‘mixed’ marriage

Almost 80,000 children were being raised by lone parents in 1926 – the majority of the parents women – a conference on childhood in the 20th century heard yesterday.

Dr Lindsey Earner-Byrne of the school of history in UCD, who delivered the keynote address at the Twenty Years A-Growing conference in St Patrick’s College, said poverty was the defining factor in whether a child came to the attention of State and Church as a “pawn in wider social, cultural battles”.

Other vulnerable children were those born into mixed marriages – ie those between a Protestant and Catholic.

“In 1926, some 79,331 children were raised by one parent. If this parent was a mother this invariably condemned the children to poverty and there were four times more widows than widowers in the Irish Free State,” said Dr Earner-Byrne.

Separation from family

For “countless” numbers of the children the greatest threat was not the poverty itself, but separation from their family because of poverty. The 1926 School Attendance Act “marked a significant increase in the level of State intrusion into Irish families”.

“In thousands of working class and lower middle class families a child might be required to miss school to earn money . . . It is estimated that this legislation (1926 Act) had direct consequences for one-third of school-age children who had previously been absent on a regular basis . . . (The Act) ultimately provided the grounds for the committal of thousands of children to Irish industrial schools for the duration of their legal childhoods – ie 16,” she said.

"There were many reasons cited for non-attendance but the majority of them boiled down to poverty. In 1944, the Dublin Corporation school attendance committee dealt with 480 cases of non-attendance and in at least 80 cases the reason given was the children had no footwear in which to attend school."

‘Grounds of poverty’

Lone parents were often forced to hand their children into institutions as they could not support them. Between 1936 and 1970 more than 170,000 children were committed to industrial schools – “the vast majority on the grounds of poverty”.

Dr Earner-Byrne cited a number of people in the 1940s, such as James Fitzgerald Kenney TD of Fine Gael, who argued that if the money that was paid to the industrial schools for the children had been paid instead to their mothers, there would be no need to take so many from their families.

The minister for education at the time, Tomas Derrig, rejected the proposal saying it “might affect the continuance of these industrial schools altogether”.

Dr Earner-Byrne also outlined the activities of Cissie Foley who “rescued” Catholic children from mixed marriages between 1922 and 1927.

Ms Foley “received at least £82 from the Archbishop of Dublin”.