Guest Editors’ Introduction

This year marks the centenary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, a significant step towards Irish independence from Britain. The proclamation of Irish independence, read outside the General Post Office by P. H. Pearse—then the most prominent and pioneering schoolmaster in the country—refers to “children” in four of its six short paragraphs.¹ The proclamation initially portrays Ireland as a long-oppressed mother who “summons her children to her flag” in the struggle for freedom. In British propaganda of the time, Ireland was often represented as the unruly and ungrateful child of mother Britannia; in the 1916 proclamation, by contrast, Ireland is the maternal figure.² The “children” born to her are credited with agency in their readiness “to sacrifice themselves for the common good,” and it is acknowledged that Ireland’s struggle is “supported by her exiled children in America.” The term “children” is thus used in a figurative and broad sense throughout the document. In one of its most cited and debated lines, the proclamation refers to the Irish Republic’s aim of “cherishing all of the children of the nation equally.” As Liam de Paor has argued, this phrase “has been frequently misread to refer specifically to children,” when, in fact, “children” was meant as a synonym for “all the people of Ireland.”³ Nevertheless, the choice of language is not insignificant and serves as an indicator of the growing centrality of child-related rhetoric within Irish nationalist public life at the time.

The 1916 proclamation might also inspire us to reflect on fundamental questions, ambiguities, and contradictions regarding “children”—figurative or real—that dominate the study of the history of childhood: questions of age, agency, dependence, and independence. Following the precedent set by the proclamation, the idea of the symbolic Irish child was imbibed and regularly repeated by future generations of Irish public representatives. However, as recent reports on child welfare have revealed, while the symbolic Irish child was publicly revered throughout the twentieth century, thousands of real Irish children who were placed in care of the Irish Free State (later the Republic of Ireland) were not cherished equally; many of them were not cherished at all.

Recent reports and revelations—from the Ferns Report (2005) to the Tuam Babies scandal that made international headlines (2014)—present a damning account of the childhood of thousands of Irish people.⁴ However, they represent an episode within a much longer history of Irish childhood. This history, which spans many centuries, includes children negotiating the borders of paganism and Christianity (later Catholicism and Protestantism), embracing superstition and science, living in abject poverty or in abundance of wealth, in a family environment or workhouse or orphanage. Many rural-based Irish children were monoglot Irish speakers, immersed in Gaelic culture; likewise many urban children knew English only and lived in an Anglicized culture; while others still moved easily between both languages and cultures. By the early twentieth century, the border between childhood and adulthood had become increasingly defined due to compulsory school attendance and a growth in children’s and juvenile culture. As the century progressed, the new physical border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was to impact in several ways the lives of children on both sides of the divide.⁵

Irish children in any given era could have very different life experiences; however, in the nineteenth century in particular, two occurrences impacted the lives of the majority of Irish children. First, the introduction of mass education through the new National School System (est. 1831) led to a cumulative increase in literacy among the young, the effects of which were visible among the newly educated Catholic middle class by the turn of the twentieth century.⁶ Second, the Great Famine (1845–1852) affected children as it did adults: many children died, others emigrated with or without family, while still other surviving children stayed in Ireland, grew up, and carved a future for themselves and their own children.⁷ It may seem surprising that no in-depth study exists of Irish children in the context of...