“THE MERE SIGHT OF YOU SICKENS ME”
Dec 9th, 2007 by Conor McCabe
There is no information in my Department regarding this case other than the statements contained in the Press report published on the 27th November. I am not therefore in a position to express any opinion on the matters raised in the second part of the question… The circumstances of the case appear to me to warrant a special investigation of the services provided in this institution, and this is being arranged.” (Dr. Frances C. Ward, Minister for Local Government and Public Health, 5 December 1945)
I came across the following by chance.
On 1 November 1945 Michael Joseph Dixon, a 14yr old inmate of St. Joseph’s Asylum for the Blind, Drumcondra, Dublin, died from a combination of lobar pneumonia and heart failure. The circumstances surrounding his death were such that the city coroner, Dr. D.A. MacErlean, ‘considered it advisable to hold an inquest.’ ‘There were suggestions’ said. Dr. MacErlean, ‘that the boy had been neglected.’ The Coroners’ Court heard that Michael Dixon was a native of Belmullet, Co. Mayo. He had been an inmate of St. Joseph’s since 1937, and that, according to witnesses, Dixon was treated very badly by staff member Tom Flood and by the head of the institution, Brother Peter Keogh. The newspaper report of the case is reproduced below, as is a copy of the original page. The case was raised in the Dáil by Mayo North TD, and Fianna Fáil member, Mr. James Kilroy.
Mr. Kilroy asked the Minister for Local Government and Public Health whether his attention has been called to a report of an inquest published on the 27th November, 1945, concerning the death of Michael Joseph Dixon, aged 14 years, an inmate of St. Joseph’s Institute for the Blind, Drumcondra, Dublin, who died in that institution on the 1st November last; if he is aware that allegations of ill-treatment of this boy at various times previous to his death were made, and that, at the end, he suffered from lack of timely medical treatment and died without the rites of the Church; and, if so, if he will state what action it is proposed to take in the matter. (Dáil report, 5 December 1945)
The minister’s answer opens this post.
His answer, along with the coroners’ court report and the newspaper article (page four of the Irish Independent), all point to at least one conclusion. This case was hardly hidden.
There is a tendency to explain the abuses of the past as having occured away from the spotlight - hidden behind doors and layers of secrecy - that somehow, if only the people knew, the abuses would have stopped. If only the government and police were informed, and the courts, and the public, and…
In the case of 14yr old Michael Joseph Dixon, not only did the police know about what had happened, they did nothing about it. It took the city coroner to instigate any type of proceedings. And as for the government… well, the minister’s answer is above. When the authorities turn a blind eye, where do people go to stop abuse from taking place?
Anyway, below, you can read it for yourself.
And the article as it appeared in the paper.
It is impossible to comprehend how much poor Michael Joseph suffered. The story of his fate is what really sickens. The treatment that boys got in these horrible places was nothing short of barbaric. I recall the Vincent Brown show covering the case of Peter Tyrell who was incarcerated in Letterfrack industrial school in conemara. It would take tears from a stone. And your main point is right: this savagery wasn’t perpetrated in isolation behind closed doors by a small group of twisted sickos. All of society was to some extent complicit. It was a cruel cruel society. When people talk of today’s violent society (and it is violent and especially drink and drug related random violence is far far too widespread) I always stop them from harking back to the gold old days. For back then, in the 40s, 50s and 60s (and later!) we had our own version of cruelty and violence. Terrible terrible stuff.
What gets me is that even when people make a stand and push for an inquiry - the coroner for example, and also the institutes’s librarian, Patrick Joseph Kelly, who made the point of telling Flood that the kid would not make it through the night and that he hoped Flood’s ‘conscience was clear’ - even with that, they go to the authorities and the authorities make the decision not to follow up. At one level, yes, society is at fault, but also, the direction that society is taking is being directed by the forces of the State. Enough people seemed to know that what was going on was wrong, but they did not have the power to change it. And those who did have the power, weren’t interested.
I mean, I was looking for stuff around the Labourers act, and it just so happened that Michael Dixon’s story was on the same page as a compulsory purchase order made for land in Edenmore and Coolock for the purpose of constructing labourer’s cottages. And that is not a one in a million. There are plenty of these stories in the newspapers, over the years.
Ordinary people (and in the case of the city coroner, not so ordinary people) brought these abuses to the notice of the State, and the State - the judiciary, the police, the political establishment - just wasn’t interested.
It’s a point that bothers me somewhat, as it is used sometimes by the Religious as a cop-out clause for their role in all of this - they were only doing the State’s work, after all, and that the State should cough-up for reparations as well.
Overall, though, the story goes some way to answering that thought in most of our heads: what would we have done in that situation? If we went to the guards, the guards would have ignored us. If we went to the politicians, the politicians would have ignored us, if we went to the courts, the courts would have ignored us.
And as for Michael Dixon? Blind, alone, and dead from neglect. All by the age of fourteen. “The mere sight of you sickens me”, Flood told him.
God. What a horrible story.
The institutions of authortity which you mention - courts, political system, etc - were completely detached from and impenetrable to ordinary people that the term citizen doesn’t really apply in that context. Those in positions of power would have seen it as a nuisance if anyone raised the brutality. The easiest way to deal with it was to ignore it or brush it aside - even agressively in some cases. For a person in authority to raise deep defects in the system would involve confronting others in power - and simply, no-one had the courage to do it, even if it meant allowing appalling suffering to continue. That’s a sad reflection on the kind of people who were in charge.
But this culture of disempowerment, of a stone wall between the ordinary man and the institutions which are in theory there to serve him, fed to a certain extent on the general deferential mentality towards the authorities. People didn’t feel they were citizens, they didnt’ live and breath the notion of where sovereignty - in theory at least - lay. This was a cultural handicap, a malaise which took decades to shake off (and is only still underway in institutions like the Gardaí and our attitude towards them).
It’s no that it was the ordinary people’s fault - but their submissive nature and their concept of the state was an enabler for the kind of icy, detached, uncaring exercise of power that prevailed.
True. Factor in massive emigration and you’ve got a situation where there simply wasn’t the critical energy available to challenge the consensus. I was reading over on Cedarlounge that on a recent hidden history Paul Bew said that if you wanted a quiet life, Ireland wasn’t a bad place to live.
More like, if you kept quiet, Ireland allowed you to live.
Tomaltach is exactly right - Ireland may have remained a democracy through the 30s and 40s but we never became a republic.