Children Of The Poor Clares Read Online Free

were almost 7,000 children, under the care of religious orders.
     
    The Roman Catholic Church, given a ‘special position’ in Eamon de Valera’s new constitution of 1937, had taken on a clearly defined character: narrow, censorious, repressively intrusive, and obsessed by sex. Under its influence, laws had been passed since the foundation of the State, banning divorce and contraception; a heavy censorship was imposed on films and all printed matter with any sexual content. The Church was anti-socialist, opposed to state assistance to the poor, and accommodating towards the Fascist regimes of Spain and Portugal. The number of priests had doubled, and despite the Church’s ambivalent loyalty during the birth of the new state, it had become a formidable and all-pervading independent power that few dare defy. It owned and operated schools, hospitals, institutions for the old, the infirm, the mentally ill, and for so-called ‘fallen women’—known as Magdalen Homes, as well as Industrial and Reformatory Schools. It had become the single wealthiest organisation in the State, paying neither taxes nor rates, and was, in effect, a state within a state.
     
    The war was being felt: an Emergency had been declared; farmers were making good money exporting produce to Britain; imported goods, tea, tobacco and clothing, were rationed; there was a shortage of manufactured goods and limits on the use of electricity. Fuel oil was allotted only for essential services: public transport, tractors, doctors’ cars, fire engines, a few taxis. Coal was virtually unobtainable and the only readily available fuel was peat-turf: a situation which would contribute to the tragedy about to unfold in Cavan town.
     
    County Cavan, an area of rocky hills, bogland and lakes, was one of the poorer parts of Ireland. Its county town, of the same name, had a population of 3,400. There were old stone houses built along the side of a stream, and rows of small brick terraced houses farther up the hill. It had a typical wide eighteenth-century street, with a courthouse and handsome Georgian houses owned by the professional and well-to-do merchant classes. There was a slum, known as the Half Acre, where the poorest of the town lived, the old Market Yard, the Town Hall, and a street along which were located most of the shops and stores. This had recently been officially renamed Pearse Street in memory of the rebel poet and educational reformer executed in the 1916 Uprising, but it was always referred to, even in official documents, as Main Street. The town was dominated by the domed cathedral of the diocese of Kilmore, then nearing completion.
     
    One of the buildings on this street was Sullivans, a large general store of a kind to be found in those days in every country town in Ireland, selling everything from building supplies to bread, and with its own stables, workshops and vegetable garden. As was the custom, most of the unmarried staff lived in. It was a pleasant place to work; the atmosphere was easy-going and the food was good. Next to Sullivans stretched the extensive premises of the Poor Clare Sisters. Behind the main buildings, the Poor Clares’ farm with a steward’s house and farm buildings, an orchard and well-tended vegetable garden, reached up the hillside. Below lay the convent, a national school and the Industrial School, or, as it was always known, St. Joseph’s Orphanage, in whose walls, facing onto the street, were barred opaque windows. The occupants of the convent were never seen outside; the orphanage children rarely. Perhaps an older girl might be sent out on an errand to Sullivans, or old Maggie Smith would walk slowly through the town. She had been in the orphanage in its first years in the 1870s, and had returned because, as she told the nuns who took her back in again, it was where she wanted to die.
     
    The isolation of this small community behind its high walls in the centre of Cavan town was to have ghastly consequences. On