FROM THE ARCHIVES:Michael Viney described
the physical conditions in
Daingean reformatory in
Co Offaly, which housed 105 boys over 13 in a run-down 18th century cavalry barracks, in this extract from a series of articles he wrote on
“The Young Offenders” in
the mid-1960s.
– JOE JOYCE
‘THE ONLY solution for Daingean,” I was told, “is obliteration.” The manager was showing me the school’s largest recreation hall: a loft condemned as unsafe in 1939 and again in 1956. It now gives access to a small and shadowy schoolroom. Here an unqualified, but painstaking, teacher was using a well-thumbed assortment of books to interest his class in the use of the written word.
About half the boys who enter Daingean, at whatever age, are illiterate, and many of them can’t even write their name.
One of the class, however, engrossed in Wordsworth’s poems, confided that he had written a poem – a “saga” of 14 verses. What was it about? Well, it was about a boy who ran away from Daingean and got a job with a goldsmith. And he was wrongly accused of stealing gold from this place, and put in jail. And when he came out of jail he became rich and respected, and he gave a job to the goldsmith. And then he found out it was the goldsmith who had taken the gold and got the boy blamed for it.
Such are the fantasies of the children of Daingean. Theirs is a world of overriding shabbiness and decrepitude. Their everyday clothes are greasy and unkempt and even straightforwardly tattered. There are 17 showers for the 105 boys now in residence, so they average a shower about every three weeks.
The boys eat in a refectory which used to be the cavalry stables, with an arched ceiling and few windows. Their food is a lot better lately, but still high in starch and low in vitamins. Many of the boys sent to Daingean are already stunted through malnutrition at home: lemonade and chips is their idea of heaven. So a boy of 15 may well have the physique of a child of 10.
The boys assemble in a long bare room with a bench around the walls. The Tuairim report described it as being “like a station waiting room without the posters”. To Daingean’s staff it is “the corral”. When all the boys are gathered in and puffing at their cigarette ration, the air rolls blue around the flaking walls.
Only the dormitory wing shows acceptable structural and decorative standards, even if it does regiment the boys into very large L-shaped dormitories with a night watchman brooding from the corner.
There is a small hall built as a gymnasium – but with a floor of concrete. And beyond it are the high-walled concrete playgrounds where the boys play most of their games. There are playing fields on the farm, used under close supervision. But although a clear canal runs past the reformatory gates, the boys can’t swim in it “for fear of polio”.
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