Irish abuse scandal

John Waters

In denial then, in denial now

The Ryan report on the barbaric abuse of children in church-run institutions, released last week, laid bare an evil that was sensed at the time but can only be faced from a ‘safe' distance. If contemporary society were to regard itself as too ‘advanced' for such barbarity that would be both mistaken and dangerous

Especially in what is termed a "modern" society, you would think that, given the speed of communications, what is known to one is known to all. But it doesn't work like that. Tempered by fear, prejudice, deference and collusion among the powerful, the mind of society at any given moment "knows", or admits to knowing, only what the powerful are content to have acknowledged. There are occasional exceptions, but generally the rule holds. Power is never accountable until it is on the wane.

And yet, underneath the official, formal intelligence is another form of knowledge, existing at the level of rumour, humour and gossip, in which everything, or almost everything, is understood. Here, nothing is really surprising. Indeed, among the characteristics of this layer of communication are speculation, exaggeration, embellishment and innuendo.

What, from a distance, is most striking about last week's publication of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, is what it revealed of the capacity of a society to evince shock about things it knew for some time. Most Irish people over 35 recall being beaten in school, corporal punishment in the education system having been abolished only three decades ago. In my childhood, 40 years ago, the threat of being sent to the reformatory at Letterfrack, in beautiful Connemara, was one of the most effective instruments with which to subdue an unruly child's spirit.

The report of the commission chaired by Judge Seán Ryan is, of course, the first substantial official examination of this dark history. The sheer volume of the report is itself shocking. And there are, too, shades of detail that add something to the texture of popular understanding. But, substantively speaking, there is nothing particularly new, nothing in the general picture that has not been widely known and understood for decades.

The filigreed letter of these horrors has been met by ritualistic expression of shock, horror and disapproval. In a strange reversal of earlier cultural responses, the details have been greeted with ostentatious shows of outrage. Now that these events are safely in the past, Irish society has become enthusiastic in their condemnation. It appears to be a characteristic of such phenomena that the level of outrage becomes an almost precise replication of the earlier denial. It is not, however, that the scales have been lifted from the eyes of society, but that, as a result of the easing, by the passing of time, of collective guilt and powerlessness, a new generation feels able to ventilate and excoriate the sins of its predecessors.

Perhaps the most important and useful study to be undertaken of these matters relates to what they tell about a society's capacity to turn away from things that are known. Instead of smugly condemning the past, we need to look closely at what this saga tells us about the toxic dynamics of an ideological apprehension of reality, in which prejudices and fears are given the run of a society to an extent that empowers authorities to abuse those from whom the affection of society has been tacitly withdrawn.

There has been a tendency in Ireland, as elsewhere, to look backwards and imagine the middle of the last century as some monochrome reality in which un-enlightenment and primativism combined to create conditions for unspeakable horrors. This is dangerous condescension. The conditions in which these abuses happened were, of course, different to those pertaining today, but both contexts can be seen to exhibit dynamics allowing for particular forms of abuse. A future generation may read reports about the goings-on in today's family courts or psychiatric institutions with the same horror as the present generation reads the Ryan report.

It is said that the Ireland of these horrors was a theocracy. In as far as the word has any meaning, this is probably correct. It is difficult to outline now the fabric of a culture in which the Catholic Church was the effective moral government of Irish society, deferred to by state institutions and personnel. Violence was taken for granted in a way that is certainly no longer the case. Although I was never in one of the institutions implicated in this week's report, I grew up in a culture wherein men and women in the uniform of the Catholic Church would make daily attempts to inflict on me serious physical pain. They did not do this because they were stupid, or because they had not watched enough current affairs programmes on television. Curiously enough, they did it because they were trying to "civilise" me. The irony at the heart of this story is that the brutality now adumbrated arose not from any condition of backwardness, but from a desire to drive a society towards what was understood as civilisation.

Nothing outlined in the Ryan report could have happened had the state not colluded, had the police and the courts and even the (alleged) national child protection agency not arranged for a steady flow of victims to be provided to the Church-run institutions of torture and degradation. The report describes a wholesale state-sponsored system of child abuse and mentions in particular the "deferential and submissive attitude" of the Department of Education towards the religious congregations on whose watch the abuses occurred. It is clear now that state-run systems of the time operated according to a reflex impulse of denial, at the heart of which lay a knot of ideological rationalisation, with each component called upon to justify its own role. The dominant ideological proposition was that troublesome children were a threat to public order, rendering justifiable almost any means deemed necessary for their subjugation. A child sucked into this system was made beyond the embrace of public compassion.

The wider society knew that decency had been abandoned, but the corruption of state power and the felt powerlessness of individual citizens unleashed a deadly cultural concoction of fear, impotence, contrived scepticism, and impatience with those few who insisted that something evil was happening. It takes courage to challenge people with powers to incarcerate children in state gulags, and so the popular perspective on these obscenities was expressed in nods and winks and nervous jokes whispered behind hands.

Oddly, when RTE transmitted its purportedly groundbreaking television documentary series on the matter a decade ago, the public response comprised the same mixture of horror and surprise as greeted the Ryan report last week. States of Fear was a well-made series, outlining its case with sincerity and precision, but its essential content was not new. For 20 years, there has been a parade through the various communications media of former inmates of the Irish industrial school system, all seeking to draw attention to their experiences. There had already been a number of books, in which the facts were presented in a manner at least as compelling as in States of Fear. The truth is that, even in adulthood, those whose childhoods had been stolen were still far from cherished.

There has been a lot of talk about "the culture of the time", as though there must in the recent past have existed some less civilised understanding than is available now. What this analysis proposes is that, 50 or so years into the past, the underdeveloped nature of the human mind, as it existed in Ireland, was such that it was believed appropriate to beat and torture little children, and only the enlightenment of the present moment enables us to see that this was not a good thing. This is dangerous nonsense because it enables us to perpetrate in the present precisely the same culture of denial in respect of horrors happening today. It is, in particular, a strange defence for a follower of Jesus Christ to proffer in defence of their institution. For if the thinking of the 1950s has become so exposed in the glare of modern enlightenment, what might happen next? What view will the future Church take of today's Church? And where does this leave the eternal word of Christ?

There was nothing intrinsically "backward" about the barbarism of the 1950s, any more than there is anything intrinsically backward about the barbarism of 2009. Barbarism is barbarism, past or present.

Whistle-blowing from a safe remove supports our present-centred sense of moral superiority and the prevailing imperative to turn away from different kinds of inconvenient truths. We have unlimited appetites for hearing about obscenities which require us to do nothing about the "now". The present is less expendable than the past, but is held together by the same kinds of compromises, vested interests and loyalties that once glued together a different model of power and its corruption. To enquire too closely into what goes on now would not be containable in the manner of even the most rigorous examination of yesteryear. We might have to stand for something. We might have to confront those whose power threatens us and makes us afraid. We might have to grow up.