Radio: How to make a Mafia clan look like the Waltons

The longer the story of the Tuam mother-and-baby home reverberates, the more uncomfortable truths emerge about an all-pervasive institution that once so dominated Irish life that its position was enshrined in the Constitution. Anyone listening to the tales of humiliation, cruelty and grief from the past as recounted by unmarried mothers and adopted children on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) will have noticed how these people were marginalised and betrayed by a body that was supposed to protect and cherish them. Never mind the Catholic Church: the Irish family increasingly looks so ruthless and callous that it makes the average Mafia clan look like the Waltons.

On Wednesday Joe Duffy talks to Catherine, who recalls how she was forced to give up her newborn baby for adoption after an unplanned pregnancy when she was 21 years old. The twist, she acknowledges, is that her parents, not some stereotypically unfeeling nun, made the decision for her.

With the memory clearly still raw, Catherine chokes up as she remembers being sent to Dublin for her son’s birth, so as to avoid local gossip. At the maternity hospital the treatment she received as a single mother was scarcely less demeaning than that from a clerically run home. “I was treated like dirt,” Catherine says. She was told to strip by nurses, who then “got tongs and threw all my clothes in a bag”. The baby was taken from her four days later.

Catherine sounds more upset, however, at the memory of her family’s behaviour, from her father’s brief bedside visit – “He put his hand on the baby’s head, said, ‘God bless you,’ and left” – to the reticent atmosphere on her return home: “It was as if nothing had happened.” To cap it all she lost her job, “because of the times that were in it”. Here it should be noted that this happened in 1976, not back in the murky mists of some impoverished Catholic Ireland.

Throughout the account Duffy persists in his trademark technique of putting an obvious question in order to maximise impact – he asks if Catherine’s stern mother felt shamed by the pregnancy, akin to inquiring after the pope’s religious affiliation – but also sounds taken aback by the icy family attitude described by his caller. This is no mean feat, given that the presenter spends much of the week hearing heartbreaking testimony from those mothers and children churned through the home system.

His empathy for Catherine is enhanced by the revelation that when she married, her next child suffered cot death, lending an added poignancy to her decision to look for her son. In this quest she at least has the full support of her husband and children, proving that the Irish family isn’t a lost cause yet.

It's the kind of draining human drama that Liveline at once excels at and revels in, particularly when the issue of institutional abuse is in the news. But for all Duffy's occasional lapses into prying the emotions, he allows the space for people to speak truths that they were long prevented from telling.

The powerful relationship between church and family is at the heart of last weekend's Documentary on One: Mairéad's First Communion (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), which tracks the progress of a young girl as she prepares to take the sacrament despite the misgivings of her lapsed Catholic parents. One of the parents is the programme's producer and narrator, Anne Wayne, an expatriate Australian who, though raised a Catholic, is bemused by the enduring importance of the first communion ritual in Irish society.

What follows is part history of how this rite became pivotal in school and family life and part personal account of how the Waynes approached the ceremony.

Having somewhat reluctantly decided to support Mairéad’s wish to make her communion, Wayne feels “squirminess” when she first attends preparatory church services. But she is soon won over by the friendliness of the priest and the warmth of her fellow parents, “joined together by the feeling that these children are the most important things in the world”. Such fuzzy moments underline the crucial social aspect of the communion ritual: Wayne, who lives in Co Wexford, says the experience brought her closer to her neighbours.

The joyful personal aspect is a huge factor too, of course. “I felt so proud of Mairéad. She was radiant,” says her father, Joe. In the end, Wayne feels she made the right decision in allowing her daughter to make her communion despite her initial doubts and continuing nonbelief. Bonds were strengthened, she says, religious beliefs discussed.

“We’ve shown our daughters that it’s okay to question, to compromise and to choose their own path,” she says. That this path is the same time-honoured one the hierarchy has for generations successfully used to imbue influence is hardly coincidental. As long as religious rites are entwined with family values, the Catholic Church in Ireland isn’t going anywhere.

radioreview@irishtimes.com