Can it be that we have been looking at the wrong features in our shared view of this country? Traditionally, certain landmarks - 1916 and so on - have steered our greater narratives, even when those narratives run differently. But have we all missed the more pervasive and more influential narrative which is finally seeping like blood through the floorboards beneath the executioner's block, which makes its drip-drip-drip disclosures in daily court reports, and which occasionally spouts in carotid-haemorrhage from television programmes such as Mary Raftery's recent harrowing examination of the treatment of orphans?
That narrative is one of child abuse on an industrial scale, perpetuated by an interlocking system of taboos and denial. That abuse might well have had a far greater real impact on the lives of the Irish people than any of the "political" acts of history books. We are beginning to see in our courts the harvest of abuse from the 1950s and the 1960s, with the victims themselves now middle-aged and their abusers old. Was this abuse coined only then? Or did it form some vast and informal continuum in Irish life, made possible by Church, State and personal denial at every level? Is abuse the silent engine which has driven so much of Irish life?
Catholic Church
To blame the Church alone is simple and not good enough. The Catholic Church was not beamed down from outer space. It is the creation of the Irish people. A kind of psychotic consensus was needed to unite the political establishment, the Church and the administrative classes in their failure to see the elephant dancing on children's skulls in the very centre of the room.
No party could have been ignorant of the wicked deeds done in State-funded, religious-run homes for unmarried mothers, in orphanages and in schools. Civil servants must have known what was going on. Priests knew from their pastoral work that children were being sexually violated at home and school. Religious superiors knew of the violence which filled the institutions which they ran. There was a vast body of unconnected knowledge about the scale of the abuse; denial ensured that the necessary connections to verify its scale were not made. Like the Inca and Aztec, we sacrificed our young to appease the gods; our gods were expediency, cowardice and, most of all, shame.
Shame. That is the great taboo which drove Ireland for so long. Any sort of proper analysis of this defeats me, but without quite understanding why, we can certainly see what happened. With self-government, Ireland isolated itself from the values of the rest of Europe. Severity was acclaimed. State-aid for the elderly was denounced as a creation of British imperialism, and old-age pensions were cut. In Mountjoy Jail, the first prison in Europe to have personal sanitation for prisoners, the plumbing was disconnected and prisoners were once again obliged to slop out. Ferocious laws on censorship and homosexuality were enforced, divorce and contraception were prohibited. A virtue was made of sexual ignorance and a State-assisted cult of blood-sacrifice encouraged, as Ireland extolled itself as the most Catholic country in Europe even as the most barbarous events were occurring in its institutions and its homes.
Land of taboos
This Ireland was a land of taboos around class, sex and illness. Two of my aunts, one my father's sister, the other my mother's, died of TB; their lives, their deaths, vanished from their family narratives. An uncle contracted syphilis and, out of shame, it went untreated. When it attacked his brain, he was packed off to a lunatic asylum in England, never to be spoken of again. Even his mother's death notice didn't mention his name, though he outlived her by 20 years. My generation only learned of poor Aidan, barking mad behind high walls in Oxfordshire, in adulthood.
This Ireland was violent. My father was beaten by the Christian Brothers, without fail, every day of his life at Synge Street, as he told me bitterly over 40 years later. What else might have happened to him that he wasn't able to bring himself to describe? Maybe nothing; maybe a lot. We can't know. In matters of sexual abuse, those of his generation, men and women alike, went to their graves in silence. Victim-hood's most poisoned chalice was the guilt it brought to the victim's wordless lips.
Conspicuous piety
How many tortured people must there have been back then? Even the unabused were torn between taboo and natural appetites, with the latter invariably denounced as sinful by authority figures who might themselves be engaging in or permitting private violence and sexual abuse. Ireland's public culture acclaimed the daily communicant as paragon and revelled in conspicuous displays of piety, amid a dreary blizzard of ceaseless moral self-congratulation. Is it surprising that so many people went mad or turned to drink, when the world they actually experienced was so totally at variance with the one they were told they were experiencing?
Whatever the origin of this dysfunctionalism, we must know now that the oft-lamented old Ireland was largely a sham, a tyranny of taboo and exploitation and violence and insufferable loneliness. Repression and ignorance were the tools which enabled the locally powerful to abuse children sexually and physically. However much we might deplore the present, it is in its liberality and honesty infinitely better than the hell we left behind. It is time, yet again, to re-examine our history.