The British royal family should think hard on four words that doomed the Irish Catholic hierarchy: “I have compensated nobody.” It was May 1995 and my old philosophy teacher, Archbishop Desmond Connell, was lying through his teeth on the Six One News.
He told RTÉ’s religious affairs correspondent Joe Little that “I have paid out nothing whatever in compensation”. He insisted the finances of his Dublin diocese “are not used in any way” to make settlements in civil actions taken by victims of clerical child abuse.
This was news to Andrew Madden, who had been preyed on as a child by Ivan Payne, a priest Connell had promoted and protected. In 1993, Connell had given £30,000 from diocesan funds to settle out of court a case taken by Madden.
When Madden confronted Connell with his lies, the archbishop told him that he had used the word “are” advisedly: “By using the present tense, he had not excluded the possibility that diocesan funds had been used for such purpose in the past.”
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When an official inquiry into clerical child abuse in Dublin asked him about his denials, Connell patiently explained the concept of “mental reservation”, saying: “There may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression, realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be ... mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying”.
[ Inquiry into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s Epstein links not ruled out ]
All of this was fine with the Vatican – Connell, after lying to his flock, was rewarded by being made a cardinal, a prince of the church. But it was not fine with the flock who declined to behave like sheep.
Paying hush money to protect a child abuser, lying about it on television and then telling the public that they just didn’t understand the higher purposes behind it all was a display of corruption and arrogance that only the most craven could accept.
A revered institution made the fatal mistake of asking its people to sacrifice too much of their own self-respect on the altar of inherited deference. Once people decided that the sacrifice was no longer bearable, a whole system of hierarchy crumbled to dust. What had seemed impossible came to pass with astonishing rapidity.
For Madden, think Virginia Giuffre. In 2021, she sued the then prince Andrew for “sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress”, alleging she had been trafficked to England when she was 17 by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and forced to have sex with Mountbatten-Windsor. He “unequivocally” denied – and continues to deny – those claims.
In 2022, however, Mountbatten-Windsor reached a settlement with Giuffre. The sum involved has not been disclosed (and Giuffre, who subsequently took her own life, is not around to speak for herself), but The Daily Telegraph estimated it might be as much as £12 million (€13.7 million). It has since become clear, with the release of the latest batch of documents from the Epstein archive, that Mountbatten-Windsor lied on television, in the BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis, about his relationships with Epstein and Giuffre.
The potentially explosive question for the British royals is: who paid the hush money? Contemporary reports suggested that his brother Charles (who is now the British king) lent Mountbatten-Windsor much of it and that his mother, the then reigning monarch Elizabeth II, came up with a £2 million contribution, as part of the settlement, to a charity established by Giuffre to help other victims of sex trafficking.
I have no way of knowing whether these reports are accurate, but as this scandal unfolds there will surely be an imperative to establish the full facts. And if two successive monarchs were in any way involved in these payments, the implications are profound.
To understand those implications, Charles and his advisers should look very closely at what happened across the Irish Sea in the 1990s. They may not like to compare themselves to Irish papists, but the Catholic hierarchy had a very similar standing in Irish society to that of the monarchy in Britain.
In the Republic of Ireland, the hierarchy filled the gap left by the loss of royalty. All the habits of deference – the genuflections, the kissing of rings, the use of aristocratic titles (“my lord”), the obsequious complaisance – were exercised in the presence of episcopal authority.
I would suggest that, if anything, this authority was even more profoundly rooted than that of the royals: it compensated for centuries of religious persecution and national humiliation.
The collapse of this structure was unimaginable – until it wasn’t. This is the problem with deference. It is at once immensely potent and extremely fragile. It is, in a democracy, essentially a fiction. It requires not so much the suspension of disbelief as the suspension of dignity. We agree to place in abeyance our knowledge that these people are no better than us. But once that consent is withdrawn, we realise that they may, indeed, be worse.
Worse because the power we project on to them is innately corrupting. And child sexual abuse is the ultimate in the corrupt use of power – not just by those who commit it, but by those who cover it up.
It was not the rapists and molesters who brought down the Irish hierarchy. It was the bishops’ desire above all to preserve the deference of the faithful by covering up the scandals. When that cover was blown, the explosion was deadly.
It remains unimaginable for most British people that the monarchy could collapse. But those of us on this part of our shared archipelago have lived through just such a downfall. We know what happens, not so much when (in the cliche) you let sunlight in on magic as when you let dignity in on deference.
When people realise that an institution they have loved is lying to them and that their loyalty is being exploited to cover up the grossest forms of exploitation, respect curdles into revulsion. Mental reservations about the impossibility of change are snuffed out like church candles.
