Notebook
This month I want to share three distinct reflections with a common thread.
- The recent scoping enquiry into abuse perpetrated in schools run by Catholic religious orders revealed another very sad chapter in our Irish social history. The media follow up inevitably led to an avalanche of personal stories detailing the physical, emotional and sexual abuse suffered by many people during their school days, often in the distant past.
The state authorities and in particular The Department of Education now must decide where the enquiry process goes from here. There is an ongoing debate about the shape of any such enquiry. I can understand why some would want to limit the perimeters to ensure a more efficient outcome. However, any enquiry which does not include schools beyond those operated by Catholic leadership would be woefully unbalanced and unfair.
Such a limited scope could be open to the charge of being sectarian in nature. While the majority of Primary and Post Primary schools in Ireland have traditionally been under Catholic patronage there have been many schools run by other religious denominations and by the state itself i.e. the Vocational Secondary schools which have been in place since the 1930s. Despite the impression sometimes given surely it was not only children who attended Catholic schools who were vulnerable to abuse in all its various forms.
- During the recent television coverage of the scoping enquiry, day after day we were presented with images of statues of Our Lady and the Sacred Heart, crucifixes and rosary beads hanging from bibles.
Images and pictures are very powerful tools when you want to create a certain narrative. I just wonder what the graphics department in RTE will do if they have to report on enquiries into abuse at state schools and ones run by other religious denominations? What images will be presented to illustrate those stories?
I can recall back in the 1990s when RTE was covering the infamous Kilkenny Incest case they again resorted to Catholic religious images to illustrate their reporting of the awful case. However, the perpetrator at the centre of that case was not a Catholic but this did not stop RTE from presuming he was.
- ‘Anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me’
The above passage from St Mark has been the gospel of the day in a number of masses recently. Conscious of that scoping report and the many others that have gone before, it is clear that we in Ireland did not always come close to what Jesus asked of us in that gospel passage. We welcomed children if they arrived through a socially or religiously acceptable door.
However, if they arrived through the door of a Mother and Baby home or an orphanage and as a result of an unplanned pregnancy, then our welcome for the little child or indeed for his or her mother fell far short of what Jesus had in mind.
As we hear new harrowing accounts of how children and young people were treated and ostracised in the past, we become very angry with those political and religious figures who controlled society. We would like to believe that we have learned from the mistakes of the past and we are in a better place and closer to what Jesus asks of us in that lovely gospel passage.
Truth
I’m not altogether convinced that we are in a significantly better place. Why did it take so many decades for the truth to be exposed about what happened in the schools and institutions which were caring for and educating our children and the most vulnerable in society? There are various reasons put forward but fundamentally there was a conspiracy of silence at the heart of much of our society. Whenever there is a conspiracy of silence in any community, in any institution, in any family then evil happens.
In many ways we have broken that conspiracy of silence about the past. But it begs a very awkward question. In fifty years’ time, will there be RTE investigates programmes exposing wrongs and evils that happened in our society in 2024.
What will it say about the 240,000 children who are living in poverty in Ireland, one of the richest countries in the world? What about 4,000 children who are homeless in our country and the substantial increase in the number of children taken into care in the early decades of this century.
Can we even mention the 10,000 children every year whose lives are terminated before they even get a chance to be born. And behind all those numbers and more there are children very vulnerable to all kinds of abuse. Why do these numbers not spark anything like the same outrage as do horror stories from the past?
Is it back to that conspiracy of silence again.