In 1939 a group called the Civics Institute based in what is now the Dublin Civic Museum planned to set up playgrounds, children's clubs and child-guidance clinics with the help of Dublin Corporation. Its objective was to promote "good citizenship" and it floated various projects to that end: encouraging the National Garden Guild to help inner-city people develop their own allotments; running civic weeks; promoting information about mental health, especially that of children; and creating self-help projects for "slum-dwellers".
The plans sound innocent now. Then, they were considered "dangerous" by a group of people working discreetly to promote "the Catholic position". This was developed throughout the 1930s, initially by the archbishop of Dublin, Dr Edward Byrne, acting with concerned Catholics, and then by his agent, Father John Charles McQuaid, who stepped into the breach after Dr Byrne was disabled by Parkinson's disease.
The Civics Institute challenged the Catholic position on a number of fronts. First, it was not controlled by the church, nor by Catholics sympathetic to the church's social strategy.
Second, it involved a partnership with municipal and State authorities which was as such considered potentially communist. Finally, it involved professional intervention by almoners, now called social workers, who had been trained either outside Ireland or at what Father McQuaid called "the Trinity College School of Sociology". This was unacceptable.
The institute was visited by Muriel Jennings, Irish organiser of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. "I asked my friend Miss Muriel Jennings to call at the Civics Institute headquarters," McQuaid wrote to Byrne. "I feel I can trust Miss Jennings as a very solid Catholic, who combines unusual intelligence with great tact, secrecy and energy." Based on her information, McQuaid spent two hours with the city manager, who finally promised to stop the development - and did.
The Irish NSPCC was then a regional office of the British body and could therefore have been expected to lobby for changes to childcare and protection systems similar to those introduced in Britain.
It did not do so at that time. In Britain the casual powers of voluntary agencies and churches were being replaced by a system of regulated public policy, professionally-trained staff and appropriate reporting mechanisms. In Ireland, childcare and protection developed in isolation from the best practices identified in many other countries, rather than face the prospect of compromising its Catholic ethos.
That ethos appears to have valued religious status over professional qualifications and its version of Catholic faith over other professional opinion. Some Irish NSPCC members, for example, wanted to have the new British adoption Act extended to the Free State, which had no adoption laws, leaving Irish children at the mercy of individuals who were not accountable to the wider community.
The Act would have given the State considerable power and responsibility in relation to child welfare and made voluntary agencies, including church-sponsored groups, accountable to social and welfare workers, acting on the State's behalf. But besides Jennings, NSPCC board members, including Maud Walsh, acted in the interests of "the Catholic position", McQuaid records. The plans were scuppered.
The Catholic position was a product of historical and religious forces, particularly the campaign supported by many Catholics for equal status and recognition in the Free State. A guilds network reinforced its ethos by organising professional and lay sodality-type meetings for nurses, doctors, almoners and others.
Some may have seen it as a vehicle for professional advancement. In the hospital sector, for example, Dr James Stafford Johnson, a member of the devoutly Catholic Guild of St Luke, reckoned in 1934 that while more than 90 per cent of patients were Catholic, non-Roman Catholics had a majority of over 70 per cent on hospital boards. Whatever about their long-term objective of securing a denominational healthcare system, the medical and care workers who subscribed to it from Archbishop Byrne's days to those of McQuaid were intimately aware of the link between poverty and proselytism.
Being poor made you vulnerable, which could damage your faith. It was necessary that the church, not the State, control the care of all Catholic children and that their welfare be determined by Catholic "medico-moral" thinking.
Stafford Johnson noted this link when he confided to Byrne that if plans to amalgamate St Ultan's Hospital and Harcourt Street Hospital went ahead, "it becomes impossible to see how the just needs of the Catholic sick and particularly the Catholic poor can ever be supplied".
McQuaid wrote about it in a paper he drafted for his preferred paediatrician, Dr Monica Mary Lea-Wilson, in 1938. Like McQuaid, she was opposed to theories of psychoanalysis then prevalent in mental health theory. She was, however, vigilant against what she seemed to view as virtually uncontrollable forces of sexuality affecting even infant children: with him, she opposed having mixed wards for infants under 12 months at St Ultan's.
In her own work at Harcourt Street, Lea-Wilson saw to it that the medical board asked staff to declare their religious affiliation. The Byrne and McQuaid papers record without irony the Harcourt Street matron's reply when asked about her faith. "Hottentot," she retorted.
Lea-Wilson believed she and McQuaid, with their secret associates, belonged "to the Church militant, unlike poor Stafford Johnson, who either believes himself to be of the Church suffering or the Church triumphant".
"The Catholic position" which evolved during the 1930s was the governing philosophy that led not only to church-controlled children's hospitals such as Crumlin, but to church-managed institutions within the industrial and reformatory school system.
Its rationale was ideological, rather than charitable. Yielding power to the State could advance the cause of communism; thus State intervention was viewed as fundamentally at odds with the integrity of the Catholic position. The door was opened to responses on many subsequent social issues, leaving a shadow that still obscures the issue of acknowledging accountability in the public domain.