UCC SONM 25 Year Book

UCC / School of Nursing and Midwifery

In 1891, Cardinal Cullen of Dublin encouraged the Irish Daughters of Charity to work for the moral, practical and spiritual welfare of pauper children in the North Dublin Union Workhouse School (Sweeney, 2010). From the 1870s onward, the growing numbers of people with an intellectual disability confined to the district asylums led the medical superintendents, through their professional organization, the Irish Division of the (Royal) Medico-Psychological Association (RMPA), began to take an interest in developing a trained workforce (Sweeney and Mitchell, 2009). However, psychiatric control of the care of people with an intellectual disability was stymied by the failure to extend the Mental Deficiency Act (1913) to Ireland, closure of the General Nursing Council of Ireland’s division for ‘mentally defective persons’, the War of Independence and Civil War (Sweeney, 2011).

Once the Irish Civil War ended, the government abolished all former Poor Law workhouse institutions and moved residents into County Homes, District General Hospitals or District Mental Hospitals in 1925. Here people with an intellectual disability were cared for under the supervision of general and psychiatric nurses or untrained workers. The Daughters’ of Charity model of residential care at St. Vincent’s Centre, Navan Road, Dublin was so cost effective that it inspired the Department of Public Health and Local Government, to fund other Catholic orders to expand service provision (Sweeney, 2010). With rapidly expanding numbers of female pupils at the Navan Road centre, the Daughters of Charity expanded their services through funding raised through the Irish Sweepstakes lottery. These homes catered initially for females beyond school age and concentrated on domestic, vocational and life skills training. During the 1940s, the order sent certain sisters to Liverpool and Manchester to undertake training in special needs education (Robins, 1992). Meanwhile, residential care for boys and young men with an ID was established by two orders - the Brothers of St. John of God (St. Augustine’s, Blackrock, Dublin 1931) and the Brothers of Charity (Our Lady of Good Counsel, Lota Cork, 1941). The male orders provided young men with rudimentary practical training in carpentry, metal work, gardening and boot repair. Recent research, however, has shown that the Brothers of St. John of Gods at St. Augustine’s

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