Belief in Catholi-cism enabled the Irish to survive 800 years of occupation. It helped bind us together, and was jealously guarded when other aspects of our identity – such as our language and culture – were being stripped away.
It set us apart from the occupiers, acting as a rallying point for our national aspirations. And it also gave people personal strength during times of unimaginable darkness. So it was hardly surprising that the Catholic Church quickly filled the political and cultural vacuum in the years after independence.
Today, however, I find it hard to see why anyone would give these people the time of day. The church leaders’ abuse of power in Ireland was incredible. They had a string of governments in the palm of their hand and took over the running of whole swathes of what should have been State infrastructure. They dominated education, the health services and orphanages, and had an iron grip on every parish in the country.
They were permitted to have an incredible level of influence over the Irish people, and the depths of the corruption this triggered were remarkable. The church had a free hand to do what it pleased – and a seemingly huge number of its priests, nuns and brothers used their positions to systematically abuse the most vulnerable people in Irish society in all number of ways.
The worst aspect of this was of course the sexual abuse dished out to thousands of Irish children.
Church leaders were given the responsibility of taking children into care in many parts of the country, and were provided with an amount of money per child by the State. The church soon realised that this could be a money spinner and started issuing orders and rounding up children – on many occasions youngsters who had someone to look after them.
This was the case with my mother and her three sisters – they were forcibly taken into care in the 1960s, despite the fact that their father was taking care of them at the time. They were neglected, physically abused, periodically left malnourished and forced to work long hours in small farms on or near the site of their orphanages. They were essentially slaves – and all before they even hit their teens. One of my aunts caught TB and almost died. The church even had the nerve to charge my grandfather – on top of what they were taking off the State – for housing the daughters they took from him.
When they eventually emerged, all four sisters were badly traumatised by their experiences, and were barely literate due to the pathetic excuse for an education they had been given.
Two of the four – the two youngest, who spent the longest time in the care of the orders –never fully recovered, even into adulthood. They were institutionalised and spent many years of their adult lives in hospital. Both died before their 45th birthdays. They were not victims of individual paedophiles hiding within the church – they were victims of the church itself.
Barely a week goes past without more evidence that this wasn’t just the work of a few bad apples – the crowd was rotten from top to bottom. Indeed, just recently the church’s Irish head, Cardinal Seán Brady, admitted he was present when two teenage victims of a particularly disguising excuse for a human being, Fr Brendan Smyth, were called in for a meeting with high-level figures in the church in the 1970s.
The pair had been sexually abused by one of their number, but rather than supporting them in having him thrown in jail, they told the victims to sign an oath of secrecy and moved Smyth on to another parish. But he kept on abusing children and was not jailed until the 1990s.
Cardinal Brady knew Smyth was abusing children and failed to stop it. But stunningly, he had the barefaced cheek to defend his actions, and it looks like he won’t be forced to resign.
And that’s not all. Just weeks ago the Bishop of Ferns asked parishioners to help cover the church’s bill for compensation over sex abuse claims. So what we have is a situation whereby the church sexually abused the community’s children, and now is asking that same community to pay for it. Meanwhile, the Vatican sits on literally billions of euros – but the Irish church hasn’t the nerve to ask for any of it. Far easier to leech it from those they’ve abused physically, sexually and financially for centuries.
While I’m sure there are some good people in the Catholic Church in Ireland, to me they would be overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Robert Carry has worked as a journalist in Ireland, Thailand and Australia
