I recently wrote a column in defence of Nora Wall, the former nun, and the unfortunate Pablo McCabe; I believe them to be two innocent people who had been gravely wronged by unjustified charges of rape. They are now free people; but it was largely through inadvertence that at least one witness who testified against them was found to have made other - unsubstantiated - rape charges. But for that discovery, might not Nora and Pablo be in indefinite solitary confinement, the objects of universal obloquy throughout the land?
My column attracted a large private correspondence, but only one letter to the Editor. I am well acquainted with the phenomenon in this country that if people want to say something vituperatively abusive and personally offensive they have no problem in doing so publicly. But praise or agreement, if offered at all, comes either to me personally through the post, or in encounters with strangers in supermarket car-parks: I was meaning to write to say how much I agreed with your piece. . .
Injustice
But I have never experienced such vast disparity between private and public responses as on the Nora Wall affair, which could so easily have turned into one of the greatest injustices in Irish jurisprudential history. On the one hand my own huge private mailbag; and on the other, a single submission to the Letters page of this newspaper. What is going on? Are we nowadays afraid to be seen defending the men and women of the cloth? Are we happy to see them corralled into the one great cattle-pen marked "abusers", and so to dismiss them from our history as no more than perverts and deviants?
Since the Brendan Smyth affair, we have seen a steady decline in the quality of public discourse about sexual and psychiatric disorders, almost to the point of medieval simplicity, as if the psychiatric advances since Freud had been totally forgotten.
Moreover, we have allowed crude, emotive words about the Catholic Church to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of that church's authority. For all that some dreadful things were done by people such as Smyth and Payne and others, they were exceptions to the rule. And what a rule it was, harsh and hard, exiling religious from the very sexual and emotional releases which make life bearable for the rest of us.
Nobody ever became a priest or a brother or a nun in order to advance some personal ambition, save, that is, for the uniquely single-minded pederast about some unspeakable long-term strategy. The overwhelming majority entered religious life for anything but selfish reasons, almost all of them subsequently experiencing personal sacrifices and deprivations which are beyond the understanding of most of us. If some erred, is that surprising? Are they not made of the same fallible flesh, the same vile bones, as the rest of us?
Indigenous
Are we a better society now that we turn our back on the people who for generations ran our schools and our hospitals, who selflessly served in the missions and orphanages? Whatever errors were made - and there were many and some were grave - they were, broadly speaking, made with the assent of the Irish people. The Catholic Church was not an imposed yet assimilated hierarchy from beyond, as the Manchus were in China or the Moguls in India. It was indigenous; its norms, its disorders, its failings were well and truly authentically Irish.
And now we have turned on these people with a perfectly Oedipal rage. They are the parents we scorn, and we beat them with the club of abuse, as if homes throughout Ireland did not in those days depend on violence for the rule of order and the maintenance of hierarchy. No priest or nun - as poor Nora Wall has discovered - is given the benefit of the doubt any more. The accusation serves as a conviction, the allegation as a proof: the hallmark of the true witch-hunt.
And I am reminded of another group, for whom I laboured so long to gain recognition, and who, like the clergy of today, were to become subjects of national denial: the Irish of the Great War.
Ageing clergy
Now that as a people we have acknowledged, for better or worse, that these men were merely doing what they thought was their duty, are we to visit the same sin upon the clergy of Ireland as was endured by that earlier generation of soldiers? Are we, metaphorically to jeer at the ageing clergy in their distress, just as shell-shocked veterans were bullied and tormented in towns and villages in Ireland in the decades after the Great War until they were no more?
The clergy are not the only victims of the lynch-mob mood in the country. I have received pitiful letters from adults who swear they were not abusers, yet now accusations are surfacing against them a score of years after the alleged incidents. How, in the moral frenzy which is sweeping the country, is anyone able to distinguish the genuine complaint from the bogus one after such a passage of time? Have other Nora Walls vanished unnoticed into our prisons? How many more to still to come? And for how much longer will tabloid headlines demonise human beings into caricatures of witchdom, the easier, no doubt, to burn them at the stake?
Brendan Smyth: his case marked turning-point in public discourse