NSPCC inspectors claimed to be saviours of the poor. As Boy George discovered recently, they preyed on the working classes and women, writes Sarah-Anne Buckley

The BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are? recently explored fascinating aspects of Irish history through the lens of Boy George’s personal family history.

The programme revealed that the ‘Cruelty Man’, as National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) inspectors were known, was key to the story of how George’s maternal grandmother, Bridget Margaret Kinahan, was placed in Goldenbridge Industrial School in 1919, at the age of six. The committal form for Margaret stated she had been found ‘wandering and not having any visible means of subsistence’ on the street outside her home. She was placed in Goldenbridge where she remained until her 16th birthday on January 9, 1929.

The term ‘Cruelty Man’ refers to inspectors of the NSPCC, the principal child protection agency in the State at that time. The first branch of the society was elected in 1889 in Dublin, and by 1904, there were 14 branches in Ireland.

From the beginning of the 20th century, the society dealt with thousands of children and families per year. The committees involved in running the branches were initially from the Anglo-Irish class, women often and upper-middle class subscribers but the inspectors were originally all men. Importantly, they worked within the community and were not simply lone figures removing children without investigation or legal authorisation.

From its foundation until the 1970s, the society functioned as a semi-state body until the development of a more professional childcare system was introduced. An inspectorate kitted out in the society’s uniform provided it with the hallmarks of an official body, while its association with the police and its role as a lobbyist in political matters both made it an effective force within the apparatus of government.

Its collaboration with the State was demonstrated in its involvement in the prosecution of parents and, in the most extreme cases, its power to overrule parental authority and force the removal of children from their homes to state-run industrial schools.

From its foundation, a preoccupation with the role and suitability of parents was central to the philosophy of the NSPCC. The first report of the first Irish branch stated in 1889: “The society differs in its aim from all other societies seeking to protect the welfare of unhappy children, in that, whilst others seek to house and provide for the wanderer, the homeless, the destitute, it sought to punish those worthless parents who made children wanderers, homeless and destitute, and to render their own home unnecessary.”

The report shows that in the year 1889–90, 120 cases were investigated by the Dublin committee, involving 158 children. Overall, six parents were prosecuted by the society, 36 by the police, and six children ‘under notice’ died. While a genuine concern for the children involved in investigations can be seen in the inspectors’ writings, this was not the case with regard to the parents being investigated. Although abject poverty was a major concern, the society differentiated between the deserving and undeserving poor.

Intemperance and particularly ‘intemperate mothers’ were at the crux of this, and there was little sympathy for families in situations of poverty seen as being ‘within their control’.

Throughout the files, descriptions of poor and working-class ‘clients’ as ‘careless’, ‘useless’, ‘lazy’, ‘immoral’, ‘excitable’, ‘foolish’, ‘indifferent’, ‘fond of drink’, and ‘quarrelsome’ (to name but a few of the adjectives employed) depict images of degenerate, incapable and abnormal individuals.

In contrast, the inspectors’ personal writings project an aura of righteousness associated with their self-perception as saviours of the poor. Class often coloured inspectors’ perceptions of acceptable child-rearing practices.

Dr Noel Browne’s description of his own father’s work as an NSPCC inspector in Dublin shows that the job also contained an element of risk, with his father suffering at least two severe assaults during his career.

Many of the early inspectors were male, ex-policemen, more than 6ft tall, and dressed in the society’s uniform. This show of male authority was intimidating for working-class women.

From the 1920s, female inspectors became more prominent. In Ireland prior to 1922, cases were taken against mothers in 70% of instances. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, court cases were taken primarily against fathers.

The society initially focused on three types of cruelty: Intentional (beating, starving, systematic persecution), which all came under the law; unintentional (allowing children to suffer by want of personal body attention, sour and improper food), which did not come under law; and accidental/careless (drunkenness, gossiping, neglect or overlying of babies, falls, burns, scalds, runovers), which could be amenable to the law.

Yet when neglect became the principal focus, it could take a variety of forms, including physical neglect and poverty; neglect and desertion; and moral neglect.

Nevertheless, despite such vague definitions, almost all cases involved people living in poverty; the few exceptions related to family situations deemed inappropriate by the Catholic Church and/or society at large. The category of neglect also often included other issues such as desertion, illegitimacy, alcoholism, mental illness, and domestic violence. It was an ‘empty vessel’, as Linda Gordon has written about the society in the US.

In post-independence Ireland, both rural and urban poverty was rampant, resources were scarce, and much of the society’s work concentrated on the alleviation of poverty.

The placement of children in industrial schools was often requested by parents in acute poverty for whom the institutional care of their children represented a short-term relief measure, but, as too many found out, once surrendered, reasserting parental control and rights proved almost impossible.

As for the fate of children who were sent to industrial schools, well that is a story we, unfortunately, know too well, and it seems the class from which many of these children had come would continue to dictate their future.

Boy George’s grandmother was fortunate to exit the industrial school system but, as the programme demonstrated, the silence and pain of this experience resonated in her family long after.

Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley is lecturer in history at the National University of Ireland Galway. She is the author of The Cruelty Man: Child Welfare, the NSPCC and the State in Ireland, 1889-1956 (Manchester University Press, 2013). She is president of the Women’s History Association of Ireland and co-director of the Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class in the Moore Institute, NUI Galway.