There is no such thing as a bad boy. This phrase was etched into public consciousness by a 1938 film, Boys Town, a sentimental tear-jerker starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. It is based on a heavily fictionalised version of the life of Roscommon-born Fr Edward J Flanagan.

This week, the Vatican declared Monsignor Flanagan as venerable, the second step on the road to sainthood. The title venerable signals a person of faith whose heroic virtue deserves emulation.

Boys Town, formally established in the United States in 1921, was extraordinary for the time. It was a home for boys in trouble with the law or out of home, but without prison fences or locked doors. Influenced by Saint John Bosco, who refused to use corporal punishment in the 19th century, Flanagan believed that through kindness and being given responsibility any boy would thrive.

His sister, Nellie, was central to the family atmosphere. Boys Town was essentially governed by the boys themselves, including electing a boy mayor.

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Boys Town was never segregated either by colour or creed, a reality ignored by the 1938 film – in contrast, the US army was segregated until an executive order from Harry S Truman in 1948.

While Flanagan may have believed there is no such thing as a bad boy, the noted orator and later leader of Fine Gael, James Dillon, and Gerald Boland, a founder of Fianna Fáil and minister for justice, considered Flanagan to be a very bad boy indeed after he visited Ireland in 1946.

A large number of those in the cabinet, including Boland and Éamon de Valera, had been imprisoned by the British. Hundreds of anti-Treaty republicans had in turn been imprisoned by the fledgling State. One of them, Sean McAughey, convicted of kidnapping and torturing Stephen Hayes, had just died in squalid conditions in Portlaoise after a hunger and thirst strike. The still-young State was highly sensitive about imprisonment.

Flanagan spoke passionately in Ireland about incarcerating children, which he abhorred. Addressing a crowd of more than 2,000 at the Cork Savoy Cinema, he thundered, “You are the people who permit your children and the children of your communities to go into these institutions of punishment.”

In the Dáil, Dillon accused Flanagan of a “farrago of ill-informed nonsense” and “a series of falsehoods and slanders”.

Boland expressed surprise about “such offensive and intemperate language about conditions about which he has no first-hand knowledge.”

Boland was responding to a parliamentary question about a front page New York Times article after Flanagan’s return to the US. The newspaper reported that the founder of Boys Town deplored the “Borstel [sic] system” in Ireland that allowed “wayward youths of 16-21″ to be incarcerated and subjected to physical punishment, including “the cat o’ nine tails, the rod and the fist”.

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Dr Eoin O’Sullivan and the late Mary Raftery believed Flanagan was primarily referring to industrial schools in his condemnation of locking up children. Dáire Keogh, now president of DCU, suggested he was criticising the juvenile prison system. He had praised industrial schools in Belfast and Artane during his Irish visit, although deplored how poorly resourced they were, as reported in contemporaneous newspaper accounts.

They all agreed that Flanagan’s attitude towards industrial schools hardened after his return to the US.

His reference to the cat o’ nine tails possibly refers to 14-year-old Gerald Fogarty, who was in Glin Industrial School for playing truant from school. He ran away in 1945 and when returned, was flogged by a Brother using “a stick with several leather thongs”.

He ran away again and walked 32 miles through fields to his mother in Limerick, arriving in a terrible state with his blood-soaked shirt stuck to him.

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His case was pursued with remarkable tenacity by Martin McGuire, an Independent Limerick TD. When all his efforts were stonewalled by the Department of Education, which was responsible for industrial schools, he sent copies of almost all the correspondence to Flanagan in July 1946.

Although McGuire is an honourable exception, Irish people were not unique in tacitly endorsing incarceration of children primarily for the crime of being poor.

Initially, Americans scoffed at Boys Town. Flanagan was considered too soft-hearted and soft in the head. He could not have started at all without a $90 donation from his Jewish friend, Henry Monsky, and barely survived financially for years.

He planned to return to Ireland to lead reform, but he died in Germany in 1948. He had been dispatched by Harry S Truman after the second World War to tour Asia and Europe to see what could be done for displaced children.

And in case we are tempted to smugly judge those who condemned him in 1946, what would he say about a wealthy Ireland where Judge Conor Fottrell declared the State’s continued use of unregulated emergency placements for children in care a “national scandal”? The Ombudsman for Children’s Office issued a grim report this week of children in care being groomed, sexually assaulted and going missing, including out of the State. There is still no public outcry.

© The Irish Times