Children, Childhood and Irish Society, 1500 to the Present by Maria Luddy , James M. Smith (review)

Abstract

One of the criticisms levelled at this book is that it contains nothing new or original. That is perhaps to miss the point. What we have here is not a historical monograph. It is an attempt to grapple with, and critique, some major issues in the interpretation of modern Irish history. One of the less satisfactory aspects of the book is that it lacks a continuous narrative. One would have liked to see the theme of oppression more explicitly linked to the other chapters, especially those dealing with the period 1912-22. An béal bocht, ‘the poor mouth’, is a well-established Irish idiom, not unrelated to sentiments of victimhood and oppression, which has a habit of making its way into Irish discourse, political and otherwise. Communal self-deception is not entirely unknown in the Irish public square. It is good that our historians or other public intellectuals should occasionally publish serious challenges to Irish beliefs, prejudices and received wisdom. Professor Kennedy’s book is a welcome addition to that genre. Dr Tony White worked with the Higher Education Authority and NCEA and was Director in Ireland of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, 1988-2007. His Investing in People: Higher Education in Ireland from 1960-2000 was published in 2001. Children, Childhood and Irish Society, 1500 to the Present, Maria Luddy and James M. Smith, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), 448 pages. Children are invisible. All the academics in all the towns in all the world can’t make it otherwise. The introduction to Children, Childhood and Irish Society says that ‘the last two decades alone witnessed the publication of dozens of Irish childhood memoirs and autobiographies, constituting a literary subgenre all of its own.’ Most were bestsellers – John McGahern, Nuala O’Faolain, Frank McCourt – and all gave penetrating insights into what it felt like to grow up in Ireland and how it shaped them as people. Alongside their contemporaneous accounts, the Ryan Report gave a different kind of insight. It described, in the sort of harrowing detail that is hard to read without deep gulps of breath, a culture, a set of relationships, that saw children as not just dispensable, but almost sub-human. It described cruelty beyond imagination, inflicted by the Church on behalf of, and with the connivance and blessing of the state. Spring 2017: Book Reviews 126 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 That can’t happen unless children are invisible. It can’t happen if childhood matters – but it did. When it was over, and we all found out about it, the Taoiseach of the day told the Dáil that there was only one possible response to the Ryan Report: ‘Everyone, including the general public,’ he said, ‘must reflect on what the report has stated about how vulnerable children were treated and resolve that, from this shame and evil, we will make Ireland a model of how to treat children’. The Leader of the Opposition at the time made a particularly powerful speech, one of his very best. Deputy Enda Kenny started by saying, ‘All I can do is speak as a citizen, the leader of my party and the father of a young family and try to imagine what those young boys and girls went through in the torture of their minds, given the extent of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Ireland cries silently with those survivors’. He told a story of a little boy in Letterfrack who … had his head shaved and was sent to Coventry for a period that was to end when his hair grew back. The child was isolated from his friends and companions, the only human contacts he could trust … The simplicity of his account of waiting to be let back into the human race is heartbreaking. He stated: ‘I do not know how long it was, but it felt like an awful long time’. I am sure that it did. As one who taught, and is a parent, I know, as do most Deputies, that children have an unformed notion of time. Any postponement is painful. Tomorrow seems forever away. The brother who shaved the child’s head and isolated him until the hair was long...