FROM THE ARCHIVES:Three years after its foundation in 1870, Artane Industrial School was raising funds through a public concert, helped by this report in The Irish Times, which laid the foundation for the event. – JOE JOYCE
‘HE WHO has a trade, and is industrious, has a fortune.” These words are painted in big letters on one of the rough brick and timber structures that stand on the Artane School grounds, and convey a truth which the daily exercises of the place drive home to the minds of its youthful scholars. Of these there are at present about 400. Most of them are orphans; only some 15 or 16 have both parents living; too often the father or mother is, for all moral or material benefit to the offspring, a Cypher or a negative quantity.
The true parents of this numerous household are the benefactors whose liberality purchased and equipped the place, the State which contributes a weekly 5s to the maintenance of every rescued child, and the fraternity of Christian Brothers who give their patient labour, their self-denying lives, their whole hearts to the good work they have taken in hand. That work is the conversion of the street Arabs – or of the boys who are in visible danger of becoming such – into useful, self-supporting citizens – into soldiers of the great industrial army who will strengthen and support the State, instead of preying on its vitals.
Those parents who are now suffering from the institution known as the long vacation, and are at their wits’ ends to know how to make the idle summer days endurable to the young folk home from school, would learn a secret worth knowing if they would pay a visit to the Artane Industrial School. Among the 400 boys collected here there is not a peevish or a listless face. They are happy because they are fully occupied, and because the natural activity of childhood finds in their case a vent in wholesome, useful work . . .
The daily programme is to rise at six a.m., and one hour in trade work before breakfast. From nine to two, trade work; then dinner, and from three to five trade work again, with an interval of half-an-hour for play. After tea, two hours are given to school, and all are in bed by 9 p.m. The boys are comfortably clad, and look well nourished and cheerful.
When the school was first opened, boys were sent into it in greater numbers than there had been time or means to provide for. They were crowded into temporary and ill-equipped sheds, and suffered from the effects of bad sewerage and impure water. Taken from the gutters and back slums, impoverished as the constitution of most of them was by insufficient food and miserable clothing, and the want of fire and every other comfort in their poverty-stricken garrets – tainted, too, as many of them were, with hereditary scrofula, it is no wonder the close crowding to which they were submitted, unavoidably on the part of the Brothers, resulted in a lamentable amount of illness and some deaths.
Happily, however, there is a different tale to tell at present. The establishment has had time to right itself, and, thanks to many generous benefactors, the 400 inmates at present on the registry are fairly accommodated.
There is, however, a demand for more admissions, and apart from existing debt, funds are wanted for the required extension. We cannot conceive money more judiciously expended. Let any one consider what a street Arab grows into, and what his too probable future career costs the community, and he will see that the sum saved by converting him into a self-supporting and respectable member of society overwhelms . . . the modest sum which his maintenance and training by the Christian Brothers requires.
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