Recalling the Clonmel Borstal - Ireland's moral hospital

For many of us older Clonmel citizens, the occasion had a quality of deja vu about it. And that occasion was sitting in the County Museum on a recent Saturday morning listening to a lecture delivered by Dr Conor Reidy under the title “The Rise and Fall of Borstal in Clonmel, 1906-1956.”

This was the second lecture in the current Winter/Spring series, under the theme “Morals and Misconduct.”

 The feeling of deja vu was induced by the fact that we sat in a building, in the shadow of a section of the old walls of Clonmel Prison, and which later became the first and only Borstal in Ireland. Formerly, this section of the old north eastern area of the town was occupied by prisons and old mills and which was completely rebuilt under the Urban Renewal Scheme of some decades ago. It has now become an area accommodating official administration and postal services, side by side with recreational and cultural facilities, memoralising Mick Delahunty and dominated by a statue of Frank Patterson. The only sections of the old buildings that remain are portions of the high walls and the entrance prison gate.

There are still a few of us older citizens who can recall the functioning Borstal of our youth. It was  a fearsome place, where our contemporaries, described in the language of the time as “juvenile offenders - petty criminals” were kept. We only saw a few of them when, accompanied by two warders, they were confirmed with the rest of us in Ss Peter & Paul’s Church. And that was that.

It may have been a very important institution in the town, to which some citizens made voluntary, social and religious contributions, but I suspect to most citizens it was a place apart.

And now, Dr. Reidy has enlightened us. I was already familiar with the subject of his research because he lectured to Clonmel Historical Society on the occasion of the publication of his book in 2009. That book “Ireland’s Moral Hospital” shares space with Brendan Behan’s “Borstal Boy” on my bookshelves.

Conor Reidy describes the institution as a “weapon used by the Irish State in a never-ending fight against juvenile criminality” and it owes its name - Borstal - to a “village of its parent-institution in Kent where it was founded.”

Six years after that foundation the Borstal was established in Clonmel, taking over a section of the prison in 1906.

It was, in essence, a continuum in the process of justice and prison reform, going back to 1775 and initiated by John Howard and by the Quaker Elizabeth Fry. Prison conditions were not only inhuman in the extremes of punishment and conditions, as they saw it, but were ineffective, people coming out of them (if they ever came out) worse than when they went in.

At the time, young offenders shared very limited and overcrowded space with adult offenders and when released it was found, statistically, the vast majority gravitated to more serious crime. Meanwhile, the justice system was subject to continuing legislation and experimentation during which transportation from Ireland was ended, reformatory schools established, and the Juvenile Offenders Bill was passed in 1901 with the establishment of the Borstal system, the essential aim of which was reform and re-direction.

Here, it is interesting to look back at an institution in Clonmel - the House of Industry, founded at the instigation of The Religious Society of Friends (The Quakers) and which tried to give shelter and support to people affected by vagrancy, mental illness, extreme poverty, long before these issues became the concerns of the State. This was founded in 1818 and some years later the Mendicity Institute was established on the same site, but in a separate building, and the aim of which was the training of young offenders in some skills or trades to enable them earn a living. In other words diversion and reform. In this the Quakers were long ahead of their time in social thinking. The entire complex (in Upper Irishtown where some of the buildings are still extant) was subsequently taken over the State as one of the first Workhouses in Ireland.

 But back to the Borstal. Dr Reidy in his lecture explored its progress over its half century in the town, the legislation under which it operated, from its locale in the then Richmond Street, to the now Emmet Street, and from British rule to the jurisdiction of the Irish Free State. He looked at the family backgrounds of some of its occupants - boys and girls, because for a time there was no separate institution for the accommodation of girls - and there were in fact, very few girl offenders.

The Borstal in Clonmel was closed finally in 1956 and the institution - though it no longer bears that name - was removed to Dublin. The story of juvenile crime doesn’t end here, and in a way it has become even more a problem in modern times. While, historically, it may have been influenced by the extremes of poverty and parenting and lack of education and opportunity, more and more young people are becoming involved in what is now described as anti-social activity, destructive of themselves and society.

A very experienced Probation Officer told me that, in his experience, many young people, having gone through a period of experimentation in petty criminality turned their lives around in their mid or late twenties.

“They got sense,” he said, “they realised this was a mug’s game, they met a girl, got a job.” And then he sadly added. “That used to be the case when I started in the Service, but now the drugs have come into common use and drugs have changed everything.”

To which, it might be added from the shocking reports on the appalling crime committed by Boy A and Boy B, there are now the additional influences of modern communication and access to the extremes of pornography. Some things change. Some things