State, family and compulsory schooling in Ireland

Abstract

Legal sanctions to compel parents into sending their children more regularly to school were widely applied in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1950s, following which the practice declined substantially and changed in nature in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper documents the history of these sanctions and draws attention to their application as an extensive and intrusive form of state intervention in the family prior to the 1960s. It argues that the prevalence of the coercive measures they deployed contradicts the idea that state approaches to the family in this period were dominated by an anti-interventionist ideology. It suggests instead that compulsory schooling advanced a new form of normative regulation of certain aspects of child-rearing and so provided an important historical development of state action on the family in Ireland.