It was the Worst of Times

What a way to end the year. In so many respects, 2009 was an unmitigated disaster, as Ireland Inc. staggered from one crisis to another. But it ended on a new low, with fresh revelations, in the Murphy Report, on the Catholic Church’s handling of allegations of child sexual abuse against members of the clergy in the Dublin archdiocese over a period of 50 years. It doesn’t get much worse than this. But first the bad news…

In January, we knew Ireland Inc. was in the shit, but we had no real sense yet just how bent, broken and mis-shapen the little tub we occupy had become. We would soon find out: as we orbited ever more eratically, the gyre seemed to widen and we turned and turned in a sickening downward spiral. Things were splintering, falling apart. There was no certainty that the centre would hold at all.
The ascension of Barack Obama to the White House at the start of the year had provided a ray of optimism. There was a feeling that maybe if we could surf on that for long enough we’d emerge from our long dark night of the soul into a brighter light without too much pain having been inflicted.
Some hope. Gradually, the full extent of the economic calamity into which we had been (mis)led struck home. Our financial institutions were effectively bankrupt. Share prices collapsed. People’s pension funds were wiped out. Workers were thrown out on the street. Wages were slashed.
Living in the eye of the storm felt like being a rank amateur landed with the impossible task of going 15 rounds with Mike Tyson in his pomp. The blows rained down mercilessly. Every time you turned on the radio there was a fresh cacophony of ill-tidings to be digested. Factories closing down. Dole queues lengthening. Receivers being appointed. Liquidators on the prowl. We were punch drunk and yet we had to carry on. Fighting.
The decision was taken to save the banks at all costs. No one knew how much it would cost but it was done anyway. And so we blundered into NAMA-land, heaping an as yet uncalculated and possibly incalculable burden of debt onto every single Irish citizen, in order to keep the bankers in their cushy numbers.
The effect on public morale has been catastrophic. The focus has been almost exclusively on book-keeping; creativity, imagination and entrepeneurship have been all but forgotten or sidelined. The mandarins are flailing around trying to identify sources of revenue to fill the gaping hole in the public finances but to little avail. There is no end to the gloom in sight. More and more people lose their jobs, tax revenues have been plummeting again. There is a lot of useless anger about.
2009 – it was a very bad year. And then Murphy put the tin mitre on it.
It wasn’t so much the report itself: it didn’t require a genius to have worked out that the Catholic Church was rank with corruption and that the bishops had been guilty over the years of the most appalling collusion in covering up the crimes of paedophile priests. But it was listening to the weasel words and the mealy mouthed half apologies which followed the publication of the report that was truly gut-churning.
By general consensus the current Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin is a decent sort of fellow – but even he doesn’t seem to get it. I watched him on a very strange debate on Prime Time and for all of his befuddled apologies, and bumbling expressions of regret, he pointedly refused to apportion blame to the bishops who were responsible, or to his masters in the Vatican who had ignored requests for information from the Inquiry.
In defence of the Vatican, and the Papal Nuncio who represents the Vatican in Ireland, he suggested that the proper channels had not been utilised by Judge Murphy – as if that was an acceptable reason for not responding to an inquiry of such importance. Would there have been there any real difficulty in responding directly to the Inquiry, by providing the information that had been sought? Of course not. But the Pope preferred to give the Judge the two fingers.
The sheer rudeness and arrogance of the Vatican in simply ignoring the letters is an eloquent statement about the values and attitudes of the Church. They are, they assume, entirely above the law. But of course Archbishop Martin didn’t have to go along with this – and yet he did. In effect he was engaged in the same old self-serving legalistic manoeuvering that has defined so much of what is wrong with the Catholic Church’s response to the reality of paedophilia within its own ranks.
He also dodged the question, asked by Mary Raftery on Prime Time, as to whether or not bishops who had colluded in the cover-up of child sex abuse should remain in charge as the patrons of schools. The fact is that a number of the still current lords of the Church failed to act when to have done so might have saved innumerable children from abuse. These men were not idiots. They knew well that in leaving paedophiles out there, or moving them around, it was inevitable that children would continue to suffer at the hands of these twisted monsters (and I do not abuse criminals lightly: it was children they preyed on). But they made their decisions because the institution of the Church was more important to them than the safety of children. That was and remains the Catholic Church’s bottom line.
Among the worst of all was Archbishop Desmond Connell, who is now a Cardinal. Connell provided £30,000 to Father Ivan Payne to make an out of court settlement with a victim of abuse. Connell subsequently denied this, specifically claiming that he hadn’t paid money to any victim of clerical sex abuse, apparently applying the criterion of ‘mental reservation’, which allows a lie to be told on the basis that ‘God’ knows. In the end Connell began to comply, and provided information to Judge Murphy. But only after he had spent many years knee deep in the evasionary tactics which effectively amounted to an attempt on the part of the institutional Church, and the bishops, to pervert the course of justice.
The truth is that these men have no moral standing. They allowed children to be abused. They condoned and covered up that abuse. They hid the perpetrators from the law. They put other children at risk. Deliberately.
And then in the relatively early stages of the revelations, and without due consideration or proper Cabinet authorisation, the then Minister for Education Michael Woods did a deal with the Church on abuse claims that will cost the State – that is the taxpayers – close to 2 billion euro. Well, the terms of that deal should be torn up. The State should insist now on payment in full by the Church, to cover the damage inflicted as a result of clerical sex abuse. And they should insist on the resignation of any Bishop named in the Murphy Report, or others in a similar position, as having failed in their duty of care to children, from their roles as trustees of schools. What happens to them in the context of the Church is a matter for the Church. And why should any of us care? But they should not be left in positions of responsibility over children.
It was the worst of times alright. Happy Christmas.