Rite and Reason: The claim that Fr Flanagan condemned the industrial schools as 'Ireland's concentration camps' is unsupported, writes Daire Keogh.
The mistaken notion that, as early as 1946, Boys' Town founder Father Edward Flanagan blew the whistle on Ireland's industrial schools has gained currency in the current debate on institutional child abuse.
Most recently an expert witness at the Ryan Commission repeated the unsupported claim that Flanagan condemned the institutions as "Ireland's concentration camps".
However, a detailed examination of the records of the priest's visit to Ireland reveals that he made no such condemnation of the industrial schools. His concern was essentially the island's penal system, which he repeatedly described as a "disgrace to a Christian nation".
Flanagan visited two industrial schools, both of which he described in glowing terms in subsequent speeches.
Of Artane, he could "not speak in too high terms of the great work being done there by the good Brothers" and of "the magnificent training" they provided.
Of St Patrick's in Belfast, he praised the De La Salle Brothers and their "fine work for the education, comfort and rehabilitation of . . . boys".
Flanagan's remarks on the Belfast school, however, were not without qualification and he delivered a scathing attack on the state for its failure to adequately fund the institution - "the school was so poorly equipped. The Brothers and the boys deserved better".
Mid-way through the tour, however, Flanagan's criticism of the State became more specific, following the presentation to him of a controversial call for prison reform, I Did Penal Servitude'(1945), written by Walter Mahon-Smith, a bank official who had served three years for embezzlement. Flanagan read the book with avid interest; he described it as a "horrible statement" of prison conditions which "tore the heart out of him".
At subsequent engagements in Cork, Waterford and Limerick, the priest abandoned his prepared texts and received a rapturous applause when he denounced Ireland's Dickensian prison conditions as "a disgrace . . . unChristlike and wrong".
Prison reform was a sensitive issue for the Government in the summer of 1946. Republican prisoners were on hunger strike at Portlaoise, where volunteer Seán McCaughey had died in horrific circumstances on May 11th.
The Labour Party had conducted a rudimentary survey of conditions at the prison and published a damning report of Government policy.
In the Seanad, there were calls for an inquiry into prison conditions while the Minister for Justice, Gerry Boland, claimed that "the prisoners concerned \ determined to break the whole system - to run the prisons themselves".
Added to this, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation was engaged in a marathon seven-month strike, which the Minister for Education believed was "not an industrial dispute but a challenge to the Government".
Within this context, the establishment rounded upon Flanagan's intervention as irresponsible and subversive, suggesting that he had become a gullible mouthpiece for the republican prisoners.
Gerry Boland mounted a campaign of character assassination in which he was ably assisted by Fine Gael deputy James Dillon, who denounced the priest's criticism as "a farrago of ill-informed nonsense" and dismissed Mahon-Smith's book as "a dirty, lying, slanderous, fraudulent publication by a mean hound".
Significantly, too, Boland introduced the Christian Brothers into the debate with his assertion that Flanagan's criticism was an assault upon their good name, in what was a calculated attempt to draw down ecclesiastical censure on the priest.
Ireland was buzzing with talk of prison reform and newspaper columns were filled with a wide range of contributions, varying from those who recommended old-fashioned 'stick-ology', to a distinguished group, including Maude Gonne MacBride, Seán O'Faoláin and Roger McHugh, who supported the cleric's call.
It is significant that none of this debate addressed the issue of the industrial schools; prison reform remained the focus.
Gradually, however, the establishment view prevailed and debate was guillotined; an Irish Press editorial rejected the priest's comments as "hearsay . . . from tainted sources" and only the Irish Catholic continued the debate.
Flanagan was conscious of his disadvantage - he had not visited a single jail in Ireland, yet half of the cabinet had served time.
Conscious of this and of his ignorance of the penal system, he began a correspondence with Mahon-Smith. In this exchange, which forms the core of the Irish material in the Boys' Town archive, Flanagan attempts to tease out the complex distinctions between reformatories, industrial schools, borstals and prisons. He was anxious, too, to ascertain the role of the Church in these institutions.
Mahon-Smith readily supplied this information, along with detailed reports of the horrific physical abuse of a youth at Glin, Co Limerick, the death of a boy in St Joseph's Home for the Blind in Drumcondra, Dublin, and brutality at Sandford Park, one of Dublin's most prominent Protestant schools.
Throughout this confidential and often confused correspondence Flanagan refined his thoughts.
His anger at the Irish political establishment is palpable, particularly his condemnation of Gerry Boland's unjustifiable "stewardship and activities", the arrogance of a government in power for 15 years and the ineptitude of a weak opposition.
Similarly, his critique of the Belfast institution hardened as he recalled "conditions there that would make your heart pain".
Flanagan held out little hope for Ireland's ability to address the cruelty of its penal system, but this he attributed not to the establishment exclusively, but to the "smugness and satisfaction" of a Christian people who allowed those guilty of cruelty go unpunished; "when will the people learn their tremendous responsibility towards children and that we are Godly appointed to be their guardians and protectors?"
It was in this context that Flanagan referred to the contemporary punishment of the Nazis for their sins against society and wondered "what God's judgment will be . . . \ those who hold . . . the faith and fail in their God-given stewardship of little children?
"May the suffering Christ hasten the day when the beloved country of my birth will beget a consciousness that will resurrect it from the levels of despair."
Dr Daire Keogh lectures in the Department of History, St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin. He is currently researching a history of the Irish Christian Brothers