Apologies sometimes cannot go far enough

LIKE many people, I watched RTE's Prime Time interview with the most demonised woman in recent Irish history wanting to hear the truth, for once and for all.

Was Sister Xavieria a sadistic fiend who had beaten children and thrown them into furnace rooms and tumble driers at Goldenbridge Orphanage, as some former residents had alleged? Or was she actually the caring and motherly - if formidable and efficient - figure remembered by others?

Her strongly lined face could have belonged to either image. W hat was unassailable was that this was the face of a woman who had suffered enormously over the past few months from the negative publicity about herself.

This frail, yet strong, woman also seemed deeply embarrassed and ashamed as she answered the charges put to her. "I'm very sorry", "I am truly sorry", "I am sorry" she kept saying, over and over again, and there, gas no doubt that she meant it - as she dropped her gaze, unable to meet her interviewer's eyes.

But, while her apology seemed genuine, how genuine was her recollection of events? As she answered the allegations, it became clear that in nearly every case it was a question not of truth or lie, but of perception or degree. Things happened, but people remembered them in different ways.

For example, Sister Xavieria denied ever causing an injury which required at least 80 stitches, but she admitted slapping children too harshly and said that she would never slap children today.

She never put a child into a tumble drier, although she conceded that she may have threatened to do so.

She never personally locked a child in a furnace room for days, although she admitted that there had been an incident, which she had neither known about nor approved of, in which someone else had locked a child up for 20-30 minutes.

She never personally made a child wait for hours on a cold, dark landing, although other staff did this without her knowledge.

She never personally humiliated bed wetting children by making them parade their soiled sheets, although she thought that something like that may have been orchestrated by others.

She did not strap babies to potties, forcing them to defecate so that they developed prolapsed rectums, although there was one child who had this condition before arriving at Goldenbridge.

Could it be that the sight of one baby with a rectum hanging beneath its body had been multiplied into a dozen such babies by the traumatised children who had witnessed it?

AS the interview progressed, it seemed more and more that this was, indeed, the sort of psychological mechanism we were dealing with, and that we would have to be satisfied not with objective "truth", but with accepting that there would always be different versions of "reality" regarding the events at Goldenbridge.

As Dr Patricia Casey, a professor of psychiatry, seemed to suggest in the preamble to the interview, it may be that what some former Goldenbridge residents recall as truth may actually be an exaggerated version of the "truth" they have used to explain their real agony, the pain of rejection by their birth parents.

Just as other former residents with positive memories have done the opposite, denying their pain by viewing their childhoods at the orphanage through rose tinted spectacles.

In other words, the interview presents us with a choice: either Sister Xavieria is lying and the women of Dear Daughter are telling the truth; or both Sister Xavieria and the women of Dear Daughter are telling different versions of the truth.

I am beginning to wonder if we should really be looking for an objective "truth" at all. To me, the enduring emotional truth of the Sister Xavieria interview is that a woman who wanted to help children ended up being forced to admit that she unintentionally harmed them and is now deeply sorry.

This apology seems to me to have been an extraordinarily healing gesture on her part, and it is certainly more than any of her male counterparts among the priesthood have given us.

Unfortunately, however, judging by the subsequent reaction to the interview by some of the women of Goldenbridge, even the deepest apology may never be enough.