[Marxism] Institutionalised Child Abuse: Past and Present

[socialismor barbarism <socialismorb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

*Child Abuse - symptomatic of Connolly's Carnival of Reaction

*Before his death, James Connolly warned
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1914/03/laborpar.htm>that the
partition of Ireland would create a ‘carnival of reaction both North and
South’. The northern six counties become ‘a Protestant Parliament and a
Protestant State’ as Craigavon put
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Craig,_1st_Viscount_Craigavon>it in
1934. Meanwhile de Valera’s ‘Catholic Nation’ became a cultural and
reactionary backwater in which the Catholic church dominated and generations
were condemned to emigration to escape grinding poverty and social
conservatism.

*Socialism or Barbarism* considers that perhaps as no other episode of
post-independence Irish social history, the abuse of the 170,000
working-class children who passed through the industrial schools system
exemplifies the oppressive nature of those years. The new Free State
retained the patriarchal approach to managing the poverty of the youth
begotten by a working class surplus to the requirements of the capitalist
state. These Victorian-era institutions were first established by the
Industrial Schools Act of 1868 the provisions of which enabled legal
authorities to send children considered neglected, orphaned or abandoned to
attend residential industrial schools.

Such children were consigned to institutional ‘care’ under the hand of
church orders where in reality they were enmeshed in a degrading system of
abuse. Children were used as slaves working as farm hands, playing in
commercial bands (such as the Artane Boy’s Band) or working in horrendous
conditions in clothes laundries. Education was only an afterthought for
these children in a system that extended into the 1980s.

full:
http://revolutionaryireland.blogspot.com/2009/05/institutionalised-child-abuse-past-and.html
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