Anthony Keating

Sexual crime in the Irish Free State 1922–33: its nature, extent and reporting

This paper explores sexual crime in the Irish Free State through the utilisation of hitherto unexamined files held in the National Archives in Dublin. An exploration of these files has provided a deepening understanding of the realities of sexual crime, societal attitudes towards it and the views of those charged with protecting the public. The files also provide valuable insights into attitudes towards female sexuality, the nations youth and the rights of children. Additionally, the files have facilitated the widest study, to date, of the reporting of sexual offences trials by local and national newspapers – a study that shows that the overwhelming majority of sexual crime prosecutions were never reported in the nations press and that those that were, were reported in ways that obscured the actual nature of the offence or portrayed them as alien, non-Irish crimes committed by outsiders. The article demonstrates that sexual crime in the Free State was an ideological as well as a law enforcement issue in a newly emerging state sensitive to the views of its enemies and the outside world and insecure about its place in it, a nation that legitimised itself, in no small part, as a beacon of Celtic Catholic purity in a world otherwise sullied by sin.

A Contested Legacy: The Kennedy Committee Revisited

The Kennedy Committee Report on Irelands reformatory and industrial schools, published in 1970, is an important, though contested, milestone in the history of Irelands childcare policy. The Committee found its genesis in Church/state conflict and conducted much of its work in the teeth of state and religious opposition. Its published report was watered down on the understanding that the state would act to curb the worst excesses of the system without the need for some of the more damaging discoveries reaching the public realm. Notwithstanding this the published report became the focus of political manoeuvring that stifled its potential effectiveness. Its legacy, therefore, is mixed, marking the beginning of the slow painful modernisation of the Irish childcare system whilst being an opportunity lost in terms of its potential to ameliorate the suffering of children detained in the system for a further three decades.

The Uses and Abuses of Censorship: God, Ireland and the Battle to Extend Censorship Post-1929

The passage of the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act marked a significant development for the inclusion of Irish Catholic teaching into the Free State’s legal system. Notwithstanding this, many on the fundamentalist wing of Irish Catholicism felt let down by the scope of the Act. Censorship, under the Act, was limited to issues of sex, sexual morality, contraception and abortion and excluded attacks on the Catholic faith and the denial of God, all of which were viewed as blasphemy, and therefore the legitimate focus of censorship, by many of those who had lobbied for the extension of censorship. The Catholic Truth Society of Ireland (CTSI) was in the vanguard of lobbying for the introduction of the 1929 Act and played the leading role in its policing. The CTSI was unstinting in its efforts to officially and surreptitiously extend censorship. This article traces the correspondence of the CTSI with politicians, the Catholic hierarchy and a leading print distributor, in order to demonstrate how the organization sought to extend literary censorship to encompass blasphemy, through the application of moral, economic and political pressure. A campaign that had at its heart the desire to control the actions and thoughts of the Irish people.

The Ideology and Mechanics of Ignorance: Child Abuse in Ireland 1922–1973

This chapter argues that there was a suppression of any public acknowledgement of the reality of sexual crime, immorality, child abuse, family breakdown and poverty in the Irish Free State. A tactic borne of a desire by the post-colonial elite to preserve the nation’s founding myth of religiosity, purity and virtue, seen as central to the survival of the State and its religious mission. It was a crusade to create a cultural myopia, prosecuted by Church and State, through legislative and non-legislative means. A cause pursued so vigorously that it left those who bore witness to the illusory nature of the founding myths, no matter how inadvertently, to be branded as other, non-Irish, anti-Catholic, taboo figures to be feared and despised. A reality that contributed substantially towards the unchecked abuse of children in Ireland’s industrial and reformatory schools for decades to come.

A Politically Inconvenient Aspect of History: The Unpublished Official History Of The Gaelic Athletic Association Of 1934.

ABSTRACT Modern Ireland’s founding political theorists often cited Ireland’s national antiquity to underscore the credibility of its claim to nationhood, one manifestation of which is the much vaunted unique and ancient character of its games; thereby embedding Gaelic games in the nation’s political and cultural iconography. Consequently the organisation which organises and promotes the interests of Gaelic games, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), established in 1884, has been a deeply political organisation, steeped in republicanism and Catholicism, with a keen sense of its role in building the nation and a determination to maintain its centrality to the nation’s identity. Accordingly, the GAA decided to celebrate its cultural significance in its jubilee year of 1934, with an ‘official history’, a project for which they selected James Upton as the author. However, Upton’s work was never published and was thought to be lost until 2015. An examination of Upton’s manuscript and surviving archival sources has established that the GAA believed that Upton’s history contained observations that could be deleterious to its wider political ambition, leading to a determination to remove the offending section. However, Upton’s equal determination not to amend his work led to an impasse that caused its publication to be abandoned.

Police Culture, Gender and Crime in the Irish Free State

Abstract Sexual crime in the Irish Free State was more than an issue of law, it carried ideological importance in a nation that legitimised itself as a beacon of Celtic Catholicism whilst struggling to maintain credibility in a contested post-colonial landscape. The nation’s police force, An Garda Siochana, had a central role in preserving the nation’s reputation for piety. This chapter explores the views of two of An Garda Siochana’s most senior officers regarding female sexuality and sexual crime; features that were to influence the level of protection and justice Ireland’s women and children were afforded under law.

Saving Tammoland: a microhistory of children’s action to save a wasteground playground, 1965–1968

ABSTRACT In 1965 a group of children living in north London discovered that an area of abandoned industrial land, which they had appropriated as their playground for over a decade, was earmarked for development for much needed social housing. The children decided to campaign against the development and contacted a local environmentally concerned artist to assist them in their campaign. Notwithstanding the children’s decision to seek adult support, they forged a child-led campaign that drew on the good offices of sympathetic adults, but never relinquished their control. The campaign was well-run and attracted both local support and national media attention, becoming something of a cause célèbre. The campaign, now all but forgotten, was to continue for three years and whilst its aim of saving the playground ultimately failed it has left a positive legacy of active social engagement for many of the children who took part.

Killing off the Competition: Fianna Fail's ‘Dublin Junta's’ attack on honesty

In August 1929, James W. Upton, Editor of the republican newspaper, Honesty, discovered that that Seán Lemass and Gerald Boland, the Secretaries of the Fianna Fáil party, had issued a circular to their members that blackballed Honesty and promoted the sales of The Nation, a publication that Fianna Fáils leader, Éamon de Valera, had recently brought under his control. The event that triggered this action was Uptons decision to publish an article critical of the Fianna Fáil leadership, something Upton did in the interest of freedom of speech. Upton, who was sympathetic to the Fianna Fáil cause, dubbed Lemass and Boland, ‘the Dublin Junta’ and accused them of launching an underhand attack to further their own careers and party ambitions. Fianna Fáil retaliated in the pages of The Nation, declaring that Honesty was no longer a republican journal and thereby destroying Honestys readership. An exploration of these events reveals political duplicity and a fundamental misfit between the views of a republican idealist and hardheaded professional politicians. Upton believed that republicanism without journalistic freedom was no republicanism at all, whilst Lemass and Boland focused on building a disciplined party machine intent on suppressing dissent, within and without of its ranks.

Administrative Expedience and the Avoidance of Scandal: Ireland’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools and the Inter-Departmental Committee of 1962-3

This article utilises the surviving working papers of the Irish, Inter-Departmental Committee on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders of 1962-3 (IDC) to critically evaluate its work on the industrial and reformatory schools. The industrial and reformatory schools were populated by vulnerable children, from largely poor backgrounds, who were not well regarded by Irish society. The work of the IDC in regard to adult prisoners is argued by academics and politicians to have been a turning point in Irish penal policy; representing the point at which a more enlightened approach to the treatment of offenders began to feed through into the penal system. This positive assessment of the IDC’s impact on adult penal policy is demonstrated to stand in stark contrast to its actions in regard to the children detained in the industrial and reformatory schools. Children, against whose interests, the IDC and its political masters chose to place economic expediency and the perceived interests of departmental and religio-political sensibilities. The actions of the IDC left these children exposed to the worst excesses of abusive institutions despite clear evidence of their plight. It was not until the years after the publication of the Kennedy Report in 1970 that the Irish State took it first hesitant steps in reforming the rotten and abusive system.