A little more digging........
Days In The Life
Mr Walsh.......discovered an extraordinary secret buried in the public record office in Kew, West London, which dates from the time of the Dublin legislation allowing children to be committed to industrial schools. The law was introduced in 1941 when Britain was nearly on its knees after Germany had overrun mainland Europe and Ireland was a neutral country.
At that time some 50,000 Irish men and women had crossed the border and joined British forces fighting the Germans. In particular some 4,000 servicemen had deserted the Irish Free Army to fight on the British side. These "deserters" were regarded with particular contempt by Eamon de Valera, the Irish Taoiseach, whose administration was to pass a law in 1945 to prevent any of them getting jobs with the state for seven years. Many of the children of these "deserter" soldiers were put into care on the grounds that they had been abandoned by their fathers. The Kew documents contain correspondence between officials in Dublin and the British War Office and the Admiralty. The Irish government demanded that the family allowance that would have been paid to the Irish servicemen if their children had not been committed should be handed over to the Industrial Schools. Britain initially refused but the Irish were persistent, and Frederick Boland, a senior official who worked closely with De Valera, wrote increasingly trenchant letters.
In one he couples the demand with the comment: "There is the further incidental consideration that in not a few of these cases the lack of parental control to which the committal of the children is due is attributable to the absence of the fathers with your forces." By the end of the war Britain had capitulated and paid up. It then became clear, according to Mr Walsh, that the Irish had the servicemen's numbers and knew who was serving with the British. Mr Walsh said: "It suggests that if Dublin could supply the roll numbers of the troops involved - rather than the other way round - there was surveillance of the families at the time. The fact that the public record office is keeping secret some other files for up to 100 years on the connection between neutral Ireland and the Nazis suggests that more will come out."..........
Not Much Time To Right This Grave Injustice
...................The government of the day was condemned in the Dáil by the opposition party, Fine Gael. They argued, with some justification, that the government’s legislation was illegal. It had been framed as an Emergency Powers Act after the end of the Emergency. Fine Gael deputy leader, Dr. Thomas F. O’Higgins, described the government’s action as “brutal, unchristian and inhuman, stimulated by malice, seething with hatred, and oozing with venom.”
But the government’s actions were even more mean-spirited and vindictive than the opposition realized. Hundreds of these men had died long before they were publicly vilified and banned from employment. Men like Joseph Mullally would never cheat the dole queue and get a job with the council. He had already died on D-Day, June 6, 1944, fighting the Nazis on the beaches of Normandy – a year before his Kangaroo court martial.
As well as punishing the soldiers, the government also punished their children. In many cases the children were sentenced in courts of law, criminalized, and imprisoned. Now in fairness, even though the government’s response to those deserters was vindictive and unconstitutional, we can at least understand that they had to do something.
But what is beyond all understanding is the state-sponsored abuse of soldiers’ children. It is a grim irony that while Irish soldiers were amongst the men liberating Belsen concentration camp, the Irish government was running its own camps, set up to provide care for children whom the Irish state arrested and then handed over to the religious orders.
The regime in these camps – euphemistically called industrial schools – was characterized by physical and sexual abuse. Malnutrition and denial of medical treatment was the norm.
And in some of the more remote country locations children were even hired out to farmers to work in the fields as virtual slaves. Sometimes children’s names were replaced with numbers. I have a document in front of me now, the neatly written column of names, starting with Sinead D ***, better known as 652 – her camp number. But three names on that list have the designation “SS.” And “SS”, in the twisted lingua of the industrial schools, indicates the child of a soldier, one to be given “special treatment.”
Mary G*** was one of those children who received the benefits of special treatment. She was incarcerated in Goldenbridge (Dublin) at the age of two, as her admission papers state, “with her charge and sentence of detention,” until the age of 14. Mary was kept in Goldenbridge (a convict refuge originally built in 1855) for over a decade and only allowed out for one day every year. Her father, a soldier, wrote increasingly desperate letters to his young child throughout the Second World War, letters the Sisters of Mercy withheld from her for over half a century.
It’s hard to imagine the feelings of a little girl, frightened, alone, living a life of constant fear of the beatings that were a routine part of her day. She told me she wondered why her daddy never wrote to her. And what anguish must her father have felt. How does a soldier feel facing combat and possible death, waiting for a letter from his little girl – a letter that never comes.
When this was brought into the public domain in my book, “Spitting On A Soldier’s Grave,” Irish people responded with a mixture of surprise and anger. “That’s dreadful, I never heard of that before” was a typical comment. And there were many calls for restorative justice for the so-called deserters.............