Two years later Cosgrave became the first Taoiseach of the Irish Free State.
A hugely controversial 1960s documentary had also exposed the unpalatable truth about post-revolutionary Irish society. A year after the Jubilee commemoration, a Dublin-born journalist, Peter Lennon, returned from his new home in France to make the powerfully iconoclastic film The Rocky Road to Dublin. Lennon posed uncomfortable questions about the type of society that had evolved since the foundation of the State in 1922. He argued that the revolution that achieved Independence had failed to live up to its idealistic origins and had been hijacked by vested interests. In the opening sequence he put the question, ‘What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?’ He painted a bleak picture of a country which had ‘nearly sank underneath the weight of its heroes and clergy’. Lennon argued that the country of his birth had been stultified by a combination of religious oppression and cultural isolation. He described the Republic as ‘a country with its future in the hands of people who think in terms of the past’.
In the documentary the writer Sean O’Faolain, whose acclaimed short stories had charted the development of modern Ireland over forty years, gave his own brutally honest view of the Republic. ‘The society that actually grew up [since Independence] was a society of urbanized peasants; a society that was without moral courage, constantly observing a self-interested silence; never speaking in moments of crisis; a constant alliance with a completely obdurantist, repressive, regressive, and uncultivated church. The result of all this was that ’32, like ’22, simply spawned a society utterly alien to the Republic. It went on and has gone on, a society in which there are blatant inequalities and in which the whole spirit of 1916 has been lost. If those 16 men of ’16, before the bullet crashed into them and before the rope tightened on their neck, if they had seen the kind of Ireland that would come out of their sacrifice, they would have felt their efforts had been betrayed and their sacrifice in vain.’
The film, which won international acclaim, outraged the Church/State alliance and an equally conservative Irish media, who rubbished both the film and its maker. Although the documentary could not be banned by the censor, as it had no sexual content, the Government still managed to have it barred from cinemas and national television. The people of Ireland would not get to view The Rocky Road to Dublin until almost forty years later.
Further evidence of this political indifference in 1966 was the lack of reform in the system. In the case of children, The Children Act of 1908 had been intended to begin the process of humanizing reformatory and industrial schools and to reduce physical punishment. But the 1908 regulations were not changed in Ireland until the 1970s – even though more progressive regimes had been developed decades earlier in Britain and Europe. The 1941 Children Act even allowed for the reduction of the minimum age at which a child could be incarcerated to under six.
The Catholic Church, which had control of the education system in the new State, had also inherited the dreaded industrial and reformatory schools – a challenge they accepted with great enthusiasm. Industrial schools were established in 1868 for orphaned, neglected and abandoned children. In theory the industrial schools were intended as a training ground to turn out the well-rounded, productive, Catholic citizens that their families were unable to do, often due to poverty and death. In a repressive society, where contraception was a venial sin and there was a chronic lack of education among the poorer classes, large families were inevitable. When a mother had too many mouths to feed and could no longer adequately care for her offspring, the only alternative was these schools. Children as young as five and six were committed to these institutions, and they often remained there until the age of 16. Paying the Church to deal with the problem was an easier option for the Government than tackling the reasons why children needed care in the first place. Reformatory schools were established by Act of Parliament in 1858. They were essentially prisons for children found guilty of criminal offences, such as burglary and vandalism. The reformatories were intended to reform errant children and put them back on the right road. It was in places like Daingean and Letterfrack that many of the criminal Godfathers who would emerge from the 1970s onwards got their first taste of incarceration. There were at one time a total of sixty reformatory and industrial schools in the country.
In reality, the two institutions were veritable Gulags, asylums of appalling misery and suffering, run by sadistic, religious orders. With the full support of the law, they were dumping grounds for the orphaned, the deprived and the wrongdoers. Youngsters deemed ‘troubled’ or beyond parental control also qualified for forced admission to both institutions. Rape, gross sexual abuse, torture, psychological abuse and starvation were constant features of life in this barbarous regime. Childhood innocence ended as soon as an inmate walked through the front doors. Systematic abuse and violence replaced the child’s basic needs of love, affection and nurturing. The regime turned out generations of dysfunctional, traumatized and damaged people. In May 2009, the Ryan Report on the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) at state institutions since the 1930s found that the entire industrial/reform school system ‘treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential’. It also concluded that the sadists and paedophiles were protected by their religious superiors and that their crimes were covered up.
The industrial and reformatory school system was a major contributory factor in producing a generation of young criminals. They shared the life-changing experience of enforced imprisonment at the hands of the religious orders. Many of the gangsters who emerged in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s had also been brutalized while they were inmates in these institutions. But when victims began to reveal the terrible truth of what had happened to them there, former inmates who had become hardened criminals remained silent. In their world, admitting that they had been abused would be considered a sign of weakness. One notorious armed robber, interviewed by this writer, only spoke about his horrendous experiences in the reformatory school thirty years after he’d begun a successful career holding up banks and shooting at cops. ‘I was put away for two years for stealing from a shop. Even though these people claimed to be religious, there was no mercy or compassion. The beatings and the sex abuse were just part of life in the place. After a while you almost began to think of it as normal. Those fucking monks and priests destroyed a lot of lives.’
The future gangsters also developed strong bonds of loyalty and friendship, forged in reformatory schools such as Daingean and Letterfrack. These bonds would become an important factor in the organization of crime in later years. Reform school brothers-in-arms would eventually provide the nucleus of the country’s first organized crime gangs. One of them was Martin Cahill, who would earn infamy as the notorious gang boss ‘the General’. The two years he spent in St Conleth’s Reformatory School in Daingean, County Offaly, helped to mould the development of a sociopath. He would later recall bitterly: ‘If anyone corrupted me it was those mad monks down in the bog.’
These former inmates were released with a deep-seated hatred for the rest of society. They were poorly educated but they had learned one important lesson from the religious orders – that violence was the most effective tool in life. They would spend a lifetime fighting back and getting even.
The addresses on the rap sheets of the new generation of villains illustrate another contributory factor in the evolution of organized crime in Ireland. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of the gangland pioneers came from so-called working-class areas, plagued by high unemployment and deprivation. In 1922, the Free State had inherited a huge slum problem in Dublin city centre, where over 80,000 people lived in rundown tenements. The situation was similar in every other city in the country. Death and disease stalked the dangerously dilapidated tenements and by the mid-1920s Ireland’s infant mortality was the highest in Europe. By the 1930s, 112,000 people were crammed together, living in 6,300 tenements in Central Dublin. In 193
6, the capital was deemed to have the worst slums in Europe. Some tenement areas had 800 people living in a single acre. As many as 100 people shared a house, with individual families of up to 15 and 20 members wedged into a single room. A primitive toilet and water tap in the rear yard were shared by all the inhabitants. Unemployment rates were high and those lucky enough to have jobs were poorly paid and could barely support their large families. Alcoholism and domestic violence were commonplace, as was prostitution.
Attempts to clear the slums were seriously restricted, due to the huge economic difficulties with which the fledgling Free State had to contend. The financial burden of the cost of structural damage in the two wars – put at £30 million – absorbed a large proportion of government expenditure. The country’s fragile economy also suffered severely as a result of the worldwide Depression in the 1930s. De Valera’s isolationist economic policies and his neutrality stance during the Second World War contributed to maintaining the crippling levels of poverty. Inevitably ‘slum clearance’ slipped down the political agenda. It was no coincidence either that many of the rack-rent landlords who lived off the earnings from the overcrowded ghettos were ‘pillars of society’, and generous benefactors to political parties.
In the slums, most crime came in the form of the notorious street gangs. They were made up of idle young men, organized along street lines, with nothing else to do but fight and drink. On 21 September 1934, the Cork Examiner reported the upsurge in street violence: ‘A new trouble has broken out in Dublin. It is giving considerable anxiety to the Garda Siochana, for it is no less than a gang warfare.’
The most notorious of these groups was the Animal Gang. It was regularly involved in bloody street battles with gangs from other tenement neighbourhoods. Knives, potatoes laced with razor blades, knuckledusters and lead-filled batons were their weapons of choice. A Garda report at the time noted: ‘There is no political significance attached to the formation or activities of the Animal Gang – the members of which are hooligans, pure and simple.’
The street gangs never became organized enough to establish criminal empires like the ones developing in American cities such as Chicago and New York. In the hungry, jobless Ireland of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s there wasn’t very much to rob, and anyone who did commit that type of crime was quickly caught and jailed. Gardaí enjoyed an almost 100 per cent detection rate for many decades. At that time, serious crimes were so rare that a safe cracker was seen as a criminal mastermind. The Animal Gang eventually faded away, and now the first Irish criminal gang is barely even mentioned as a footnote in the history books.
In the 1950s the Government finally launched a series of building programmes to ease the centuries-old problem of the tenement slums. Over time, thousands of houses were built on greenfield sites on the edges of Dublin city, in places like Ballyfermot, Crumlin, Inchicore, Cabra, Donnycarney, Glasnevin and Marino. There were also major housing projects in Limerick and Cork. In the move to better living conditions, however, whole communities were uprooted and separated. The sprawling new estates were lonely places for many of the inhabitants. Lifelong neighbours, who had been crammed together in the slums, found themselves living miles apart. The overall effect was a breakdown in social cohesion and an unravelling of the ties that had bonded communities together. The new working-class suburbs had little to offer, apart from improved accommodation. They quickly became unemployment black spots and did not solve the poverty problem.
In 1968 an RTÉ documentary, The Flower Pot Society, examined the movement of the slum generation. An unidentified interviewee predicted the problems of the future: ‘Dublin Corporation are dealing with people all of whom are the same class. It’s much easier to treat them like an army and to transplant them from A to B. They have very little choice in the matter. If a child is to improve it will be in spite of their environment – and not because of it.’
The migration from the tenements continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s. More houses were built, pushing the boundaries of the city out even further, to gobble up fields in Finglas, Blanchardstown, Coolock and Clondalkin. New flat complexes were also being built in Central Dublin. In 1966, the Government marked the Jubilee of the Rebellion by commencing construction on its most ambitious housing project ever – a huge complex of tower blocks in Ballymun, a stretch of countryside near Dublin Airport. Completed in 1969, the complex comprised 7 15-storey tower blocks, and several long 8-storey spine blocks, which 30,000 residents soon called home. Each tower block was named after a leader of the 1916 Rising. The flats quickly became a dreary eyesore, and by 1979 they had become a monument to a well-intentioned but deeply flawed social housing policy. The complex was bereft of even the most basic amenities for its army of children and the 50 per cent of adults who were unemployed. For many it became a no-hope, desolate ghetto, with the highest rate of transfer applications anywhere in the country. Ballymun became a dumping ground for problem tenants and unmarried mothers.
While the vast majority of decent people who lived in the gloomy estates and new flat complexes struggled through life without involving themselves in crime, it is an escapable fact that they were criminogenic environments, in which the underworld thrived. Families such as the Dunnes, Cahills, Gilligans, Mitchells and Cunninghams had all been moved from the inner-city slums to places like Crumlin, Drimnagh, Finglas and Ballyfermot – areas which would eventually be claimed as gangland territory. It was from these new ghettos, using the links forged in the reformatory schools, that the ruthless young hoods would embark on their journey of mayhem. This was where the story of organized crime in Ireland would begin.
As De Valera watched the Jubilee celebrations in 1966, it was obvious that there was a lot more wealth in Ireland than ever before. Irish society was changing at a faster pace than at any stage since Independence. The country had begun to enjoy unprecedented levels of economic growth and prosperity, thanks mainly to Sean Lemass who had taken over as Taoiseach from De Valera in 1959. Under De Valera, the 1950s had been one of the worst decades in the nation’s short history. It became known as the time of the disappearing Irish. Between 1951 and 1961 an estimated 500,000 people had emigrated; it was accepted as a cultural necessity. It made life somewhat more bearable for those left at home, as it eased demand on scarce resources. The money emigrants in Britain and the USA sent home to their families became a major source of income for the country’s foundering economy. But Lemass’s Programme for Economic Expansion was the first glimmer of hope, and it finally dragged Ireland out of the dark ages.
It sparked a boom period in which the Irish economy enjoyed the fastest growth in Europe. The number of cars on Irish roads trebled between 1951 and 1968. In 1962, the marvels of the outside world, with its different values and cultures, were beamed into homes across the country with the launch of the new national TV channel, RTÉ. In the year of the launch there were 93,000 licensed televisions in the Republic; six years later, as wealth grew, there were almost 400,000.
Ireland was also becoming an urbanized society, as the population moved from the land to the cities, particularly Dublin, securing jobs in the growing industrial and public service sectors. Between 1950 and 1969 the numbers living on the land dropped from half the population to less than a third. The dramatic increase in demand for houses among the burgeoning middle classes created the country’s first building boom. As living standards improved there was more money and disposable wealth than ever before.
The new age of consumerism provided many lucrative opportunities for the emerging criminal gangs. Unlike their predecessors, in the likes of the Animal Gang, there was plenty for the new mobs to steal, as the gulf between the haves and the have-nots widened. However, despite an underlying and steady increase in offences such as burglary and larceny, Irish crime was still not a source of major concern in 1966. In fact the Government was giving serious consideration to closing down prisons, where the daily average population was 300 inmates. (Four decades later it would be over 4,000.) In the G
arda crime report for that year there were six murders and seven cases of manslaughter recorded nationally. Most murders and violent deaths were the result of so-called crimes of passion, domestic disputes or rows over land. There were no armed robberies.
The Gardaí enjoyed an almost 100 per cent success rate when it came to solving murders and an average of 80 per cent in all other crimes. The numbers of Gardaí were more than adequate to police a law-abiding population of less than three million people. The report on crime by the Garda Commissioner of the day noted that ‘no organised crimes of violence’ had been recorded.
Officially, at that time, there was no drug problem in the country either. But the seeds of the crisis were already germinating. Throughout Dublin, there were small groups of drug abusers and addicts, whose habits were fed mainly by the medical profession. Drugs were considered to be a health problem and some doctors were incredibly lax and irresponsible when it came to dispensing prescription drugs. In 1966, the Commission of Inquiry into Mental Illness warned the Minister for Health: ‘Drug addiction in this country could reach serious proportions unless a constant effort is maintained to prevent the abuse of habit-forming drugs.’ The authorities ignored the Commission’s early warning.
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