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Breda O’Brien: Time to defy mob mentality over religious orders

Toxic nature of commentary over St Vincent’s echoes previous groundless allegations

Prof Roy Greenslade was quoted recently by Kathy Sheridan in relation to the way the McCann parents were treated after the abduction of their daughter Madeleine.

“It was like being in front of a mob – and you realised there is no wisdom in the mob. Ever. And it’s been terrible since,” he said.

The Irish mob has been out in force in recent weeks. The toxic nature of some of the commentary regarding the Sisters of Charity and St Vincent’s Hospital is creating exactly the same kind of atmosphere that lead to the false conviction for rape of Nora Wall, a former Sister of Mercy, in 1999. She was accused of holding down a 12-year-old girl so that Paul McCabe, a homeless man equally innocent of the crime, could rape her.

In the aftermath of the States of Fear programmes, it seemed credible that a religious sister could do such a thing, but the rape allegation was absolutely, totally false.

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Yet Wall was the first woman in the State to be convicted of rape, the first to receive a life sentence, the first to be convicted on the testimony of a witness called against the advice of the DPP, and the first to be convicted of evidence given after “recovered memory”.

Wall had reared the two young women who gave false evidence against her but bore them no grudge, recognising that they had been damaged by difficult lives. One of them had been her “first baby”, that is, the first small baby she had looked after in the group home.

After the miscarriage of justice was declared, Wall approached the young woman with her hand outstretched, saying, “You are still my first baby.” The young woman collapsed into her arms, sobbing uncontrollably.

In a terrible irony, Wall was being made pay for the abhorrent crimes committed by other members of religious orders. This horrendous treatment of an innocent woman and of a man, McCabe, who was himself reared in an industrial home, still did not teach us that not every person in a religious order damages children, or tells lies, or is automatically guilty as charged.

Falsely accused

In May 2011, the national broadcaster in Mission to Prey falsely accused Fr Kevin Reynolds of impregnating and abandoning a young Kenyan woman.

RTÉ ignored his offer to take a DNA test. In modern, liberal Ireland, there was no need to check if the story was correct, because how could it be false?

From some of the commentary today, it appears that there could no greater danger to the women of Ireland than to have elderly sisters within a three mile radius of them.

Mary Kenny wrote recently that she asked a sister why she did not wear her religious habit. “Because I don’t want to be spat at in the street,” was the reply. Some elderly sister will be assaulted if this barrage of hate goes on.

The tragic death of the beautiful, lively Savita Halappanavar was invoked as proof as to why no sisters can be trusted, despite the fact that she died in a public hospital where there is no Catholic ethos.

Three separate inquiries, including a coroner’s verdict, found that she died of sepsis after obvious signs of an infection were missed.

Even though the most pro-life doctors in Ireland agreed that in the case of the threat of sepsis, aggressive, targeted treatment of the infection and the early delivery of her little daughter would have been the best treatment, the case is still being presented as though anti-abortion advocates oppose life-saving treatment for women.

It is a lie that will never be dislodged, and the lie that all religious sisters have a malign, controlling attitude towards women is beginning to be just as firmly entrenched. This is despite the fact that Irish sisters are often forward-thinking and radical – like the Sister of Charity, Sr Stan, founder and life president of Focus Ireland – the same order that runs St Vincent’s Hospital, that part-funds the Immigrant Council, and funds the Oasis Counselling Centre.

Savage commentators

Even a historian with a more nuanced view than some of the more savage commentators, Diarmaid Ferriter, failed in his discussion of the funding of St Vincent’s hospital from the Sweepstakes to acknowledge the hospital was also subsidised by unpaid work. The sisters, often highly qualified, took no salaries, right up to hospital managers.

Catherine McCann was a Sister of Charity from 1954 to 1979. In this newspaper she said that during those years she worked without a salary as a physiotherapist in public health institutions. Maybe an actuary could calculate how much she saved the State, and maybe some historian would like to calculate the cumulative savings to the State from the unpaid labour of thousands of religious women and men over the centuries?

But why would you do that? My mother would have said that “eaten bread is soon forgotten.” We should never forget the crimes carried out by members of religious orders. That is not an excuse to remain silent when innocent people are being vilified.