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The Joe Horgan Column
By Joe Horgan
It is difficult to convey just how much of an impact the Ferns Report
is now having on Irish society. We often think at the time that things are
never going to be forgotten before they are quickly filed away and rapidly
become yesterday’s news. This feels very different, though. If the power
of the Church in Ireland was fading before, this report, and those that
are likely to follow it, may well finish that power altogether.
Again, what has stung people most — even more than the horrendous abuse
carried out by those in holy orders — has been the Church’s response to
it. While there are now those within the Church attempting to come completely
clean, the institutional response was the same as any other powerful organisation.
It was a resort to lawyers and an exercise in damage limitation. Even now,
with Irish society still shocked by the details and extent of abuse revealed
by the Ferns Report, many people have noted that a Vatican that has managed
to convey to us its concerns over the possible damage to children being
done by the Harry Potter phenomena, has remained silent at the actual abuse
carried out within its own Church. Arrogant, uncaring, cold. If the new
Pope’s heart has been broken by the revelations of what his Church in Ireland
did to innocent children he has yet to reveal that pain to any sector of
Irish society.
The Church and its lawyers would have been well aware that a lot of those
abused as children were unlikely to hold positions of power in Irish society
today. Those reared in orphanages or industrial schools were unlikely to
have risen far in a society as far from being egalitarian as the Irish one.
They would have been without power and in many cases would have left Ireland
and become ‘non-persons’ in the UK and elsewhere. Which likely came into
the cold calculations of those hired lawyers. The Church in Ireland was
happy to see all that human misery disappear into Britain’s bedsits.
Of course, many people have argued that the power of the Church has been
broken by the rise of secular Ireland anyway and the days of Catholic Ireland
are over. Perhaps. In many ways there is a lot of truth in this. Shopping
and endless consumption is the new religion and the family Sunday of old
has been replaced by a new family Sunday that is as likely to involve a
visit to a Dundrum shopping centre, as it is a visit to the local parish
church. In many cases the Church has actually sold off former grounds to
commercial enterprises who have built these said centres, these new centres
of worship. Yet rural Ireland, at least, still has healthy mass attendance
and the priest is still held in some esteem. Catholic Ireland isn’t dead
yet but after Ferns it does look very, very sick.
The predictable, meaningless political squabble has quickly followed
on the back of the report. A TD from the junior coalition partners — the
PDs — has stated that it is time to break the cosy relationship between
Church and state; time for the Church’s role in education to be scrutinised.
Bertie Ahern has reacted with personal affront and deemed this to be an
attack upon his family background within one of the main Catholic establishments
in Dublin. Now, this column is no fan of Bertie Ahern but I think most people
would accept that if the man has any principles at all they are those that
make him a regular Mass-goer and I see no reason to attack him upon the
basis of his faith. The PDs are just seeing an opportunistic opening and
such comments are fairly meaningless as, whatever else, the days of De Valera’s
Catholic Ireland are well gone.
Some things are worth noting, though. The most enthusiastic disciples
of the new consumer, greed-driven society have been the PDs and they are
far more likely to be at home in a shopping centre than a Church. The spiritual
life of Ireland is never something that really concerns them. And while
Bertie Ahern is well within his rights to defend his personal faith, he
might do better to explain why the main organisation representing those
abused as children had its government grant cut. And, lastly, on the very
page on which I recently read about the horrors in Ferns there was an advertisement
for the said Dundrum shopping centre that contained a girl — a child — dressed
in adult clothes, suggesting that the powerless children of yesterday’s
Ireland are merely the economic units of today’s.
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