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In a significant development, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) has published extensive Curriculum Resources to assist the teaching of Ireland’s 20^th century institutional and family separation abuses through Junior Cycle History, CSPE and English units and classroom-based assessments. These resources are available to all teachers nationally, who will have the opportunity to be trained in their use through ongoing professional development activities. The fact that students will now have the chance to engage with this aspect of Ireland’s history is consistent with survivors’ and affected people’s oft-stated insistence that their experiences of injustice never be forgotten nor repeated.

The NCCA developed the materials in collaboration with the members of Justice for Magdalenes Research and the Clann Project (Mary Harney, Dr Claire McGettrick born Lorraine Hughes, Prof Katherine O’Donnell, Dr Maeve O’Rourke, Prof James M Smith and the late Mari Steed), and with Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley, Dr John Cunningham and Elaine Feeney of the University of Galway Tuam Oral History Project, and Catherine Corless. Mary Harney is an Irish Centre for Human Rights LLM graduate and current PhD scholar, and previous member of the Government-appointed Collaborative Forum of Former Residents of Mother and Baby Homes. Dr Maeve O’Rourke is a Lecturer and Director of the Human Rights Law Clinic at the ICHR.

Since 2019, postgraduate researchers in the ICHR’s Human Rights Law Clinic have contributed to the work of JFMR and the Clann Project. One of the Clinic projects in particular has focused on developing secondary school teaching resources, under the leadership of Mary Harney and Dr Maeve O’Rourke. LLM students developed pilot secondary school teaching resources focused on Ireland’s institutional and family separation abuses, which they tested with students and teachers in Galway schools and which are referred to by the NCCA. The authors of these pilot resources were Tomás Carlos Biggins, Jessica Howard, Helen McDonagh, Emily O’Reilly and Sijia Shen.

The NCCA materials incorporate a distinct focus on human rights and the testimony of affected people. They acknowledge explicitly the centrality of education to ensuring that similar abuses do not happen in the future. ‘Citizenship Actions’ suggested in the CSPE materials include inviting guest speakers with experience of institutional abuse; doing research and with this evidence proposing justice measures to local politicians or to the public via local media, investigating legal frameworks for accessing records, peer teaching sessions, and engaging with related issues such as the present-day human rights implications of the Direct Provision system, homelessness, and/or volunteering in international orphanages.

International human rights law establishes that public education is a key form of reparation that states must provide in response to gross and systematic rights violations. For decades in Ireland, people affected by institutional abuse and forced family separation have requested memorialisation, including education of young people, as a way of preventing similar abuses and honouring and acknowledging the truth of survivors’ and affected people’s experiences. Thousands have provided their testimony and made recommendations for public education to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse; the Inter-departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries; the Magdalen Commission; the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation; the Northern Ireland independent Truth Recovery Design Panel; Government-commissioned survivor consultations, and Oireachtas committees. Education of young people in schools was further recommended in 2018 by the Collaborative Forum of Former Residents of Mother and Baby Homes, in the Clann Report, and in the Report of the Dublin Honours Magdalenes Listening Exercise.

While the NCCA materials place a spotlight on Mother and Baby institutions, they acknowledge the broader system within which those institutions operated: one of forced family separation (including through adoption, boarding out and other systems not yet investigated or acknowledged officially), and involving a wide range of institutions including Magdalene Laundries, County Homes, Industrial and Reformatory Schools among others.

The NCCA resources are a crucial addition to the available educational material concerning Ireland’s institutional and family separation abuses. Many other resources can be accessed at JFMR’s list of educational resources, here: https://jfmresearch.com/educational-resources/.

Read more: ‘Mary Harney: My advocacy journey and experience completing the Human Rights Law Clinic’ (ICHR Blog, 2 June 2021), https://ichrgalway.org/2021/06/02/mary-harney-my-advocacy-journey-and-experience-completing-the-human-rights-law-clinic/

Listen to more: ‘Mary Harney – survivor and social justice activist’, Cois Coiribe Podcast (28 April 2021), https://impact.universityofgalway.ie/podcasts/cois-coiribe-podcast-mary-harney-survivor-and-social-justice-activist/