SNIPPET: In Ireland the 19th & 20th centuries saw a growing perception of children as both a state resource and a group in need of legal protection The Children Act of 1908 was the culmination of more than three-quarters of a century's attempts to regulate the lives of children by gradually outlawing most full-time child labour, by sending young offenders (including vagrants or homeless children) to reformatories or industrial schools, by setting out conditions under which children could be removed from parents or guardians, by acts for the prevention of cruelty to children in the 1880s and 1890s, and by the enforcement of compulsory primary education on all children from 1892. These acts were strengthened by further legislation in the 20th century. Per excerpts from "The Oxford Companion to Irish History," ed. S. J. Connolly, children always had a precarious grip on life, and infant mortality rates remained high until the middle of the 20th century, particularly in cities. The major childhood killer was diarrhoea (diarrhea) particularly in the first year of life. After that, the childhood diseases of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough could be fatal, and poor nutrition could cause permanent disability. Children with rickets were a common sight in the poorer parts of towns & cities up to the post-war period, when the introduction of comprehensive new health care systems in both jurisdictions reduced infant and child mortality considerably. Universal family allowances, also called children's allowances (introduced in 1944 in independent Ireland, 1945 in Northern Ireland), eased the burden of subsistence for working-class parents. "Illegitimate" children had, up to the 1950s, a much higher death rate than the "legitimate." Their survival rates greatly improved with the 19th-century development of orphanages and workhouses to replace the lethal foundling hospitals that had operated in Cork from circa 1750 and in Dublin from 1772. The foundling hospitals had been financed by local taxes to rid the streets of destitute children with providing care for them of secondary consideration. It should be noted that between 60-80 percent of the children admitted to the foundling hospitals died, with conditions in the Dublin foundling hospital particularly bad. After various attempts at reform its closure was ordered in 1830, and the Cork hospital closed in 1854. The orphanages and workhouses were an improvement, but their lives in institutional care were often grim, and developments in government-subsidized childcare were slow. In the early 20th century there were signs that childhood was being thought of in a new way. Catholic bishops' pastorals in the 1920s and 1930s might have advised parents to chastise disobedient teenagers, but they also urged parents not to be "austere" or "aloof," and to tolerate the noise and disorder of their children's playing. Numerous accounts tell us that Santa Claus started coming to many (though not all) Irish children, urban and rural, middle class and working class, in places as far apart a the Blasket Islands and Dublin city, as early as the 1920s. His appearance, spontaneously adopted by parents themselves, was in sharp contrast to the massive commercialization of children's leisure that has occurred since the 1960s.