Care and control: The experience of the Sisters of Mercy run Irish industrial school system, 1868-1936
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Date
2022-09-20Embargo Date
2024-09-05
Author
O’Brien, Jane
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Abstract
This thesis is a historical investigation into the experience of the Catholic Sisters of Mercy run Irish industrial schools, from the introduction of the system in 1868 to the publication of the Cussen Report in 1936. It uses convent archive sources from five industrial schools to illuminate the lived experience of the system for both children and their families. In doing so, it explores the nature and impact of the powerful emotive relations and cultural expectations that existed within these institutions. The research relies heavily on personal correspondence and manager's school diaries, in conjunction with parliamentary records, newspapers, and other relevant public and private sources to explore the experiences of committal, life in the school and eventual release. It focuses in particular on the lived reality of the schools, looking at daily life, discipline, care, relationships, sickness, and death.
The close analysis of the role of the family in the schools facilitates a greater understanding of the behaviours, responses and protocols that arose from poverty and dependency while revealing the complicated nature of familial relations and how bonds could be maintained and rekindled. The exploration of the lived experience of the children allows a unique window into the micro-processes, interactions, and emotions that made up the industrial school community. It reveals how children lived their lives within the framework and requirements of the institution, how they utilised the options that were available to them, and how they demonstrated their agency through both resistance and assent.
The revelations of abuse towards children in Ireland’s industrial school system in the twentieth century means that the schools are frequently viewed through a negative lens of trauma and oppression. This thesis seeks to complicate that view by exploring the experience of both care and control within the cultural context of the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century. In bringing these strands together, it scrutinises the renegotiation of the child self within the emotional regime of the schools and how their personal worth, belonging, and identity emerged, took shape, or failed in daily life. By evaluating the construction of care and control, and how this culture was experienced as a relationship between child, family, state, and the institutional community, this thesis contributes to our knowledge and understanding of the Irish industrial school system and its evolution.