The deaths of the Dunne family at Monageer did not happen because of a systems failure, but because of cultural denial, writes JOHN WATERS.
ONE DAY when my daughter was three, she put her eye upon a bracelet in Dunnes Stores in Dún Laoghaire, picked it up and put it on. I had been thinking I was too soft a touch and maybe needed to teach her that money doesn’t just blah-blah, that sometimes there is a necessity for restraint and blah. Resolving this was the moment for some tough love, I took the bracelet and put it back on the rack. She began to cry. I launched into my lecture but she cried and cried so I couldn’t hear myself.
I picked her up and headed towards the car, parked up the road. As I strapped her in, still crying, a man emerged from a house opposite. “That child’s crying a lot,” he observed. I concurred with this analysis and got into the car. He gestured towards the window behind him. “There’s a woman in there thinks that child’s crying too much.” Reflecting that I had many times on these streets witnessed mothers battering the heads off children without attracting attention, I suggested he go in and tell the woman to mind her own business, and drove away.
On the way I explained to my daughter about limits and blah and how she needed to know that everything doesn’t just blah. By the time we pulled up at our front door, she was her usual happy self. I then noticed a Garda squad car approaching. We live on a quiet road, off the main thoroughfares. In 18 years, I have seen squad cars there perhaps three times, twice when young men threw themselves off Dalkey Quarry, just opposite. As I lifted my daughter out, I noted the squad car slowing and the two male occupants observing us carefully. By now my daughter was laughing, and, once this was noted, the squad car picked up speed.
There has been much talk this week about alleged systems failures and their putative contribution to the deaths of the Dunne family of Monageer. This misses the point, which jumps out at any sensible person who has absorbed the key facts.
Imagine an undertaker reporting that a single father had come in with his two little daughters to ask about white coffins and had said his girls would never grow up to be married. Is it likely this father would reach home before being stopped and his children taken away? Censored report notwithstanding, Monageer did not happen because of a systems failure, but because of cultural denial. Nothing was done, not because of a lack of information or resources, nor because the child protection agencies were closed down at the weekend, but because the system assumed, as the culture lays down, that the Dunne children would be safe because their mother was freely involved in their affairs.
The deep truth of why the authorities did not intervene relates to the default presumption in Irish culture, and in the systems deriving from that culture, that nobody tells a mother what to do about her own children.
There is a telling, uncensored section in the report about the experience of the local priest, who had been asked by the Garda to look in on the Dunnes. When he inquired about what they had said to the undertaker, Ciara Dunne became “indignant and irate”. The report states that “in a raised voice”, she asked the priest “if he thought they were going to hurt the children or harm themselves in any way. She said she would not allow anyone harm their children.” This fascinating tableau, resonating deeply in the psyche of this society, says it all: priest confronts Irish Mammy and is told where to get off. He gets off.
In response to the "redactions" in the report – the blacking out of key sections "for legal reasons" – there have been accusations of "whitewash" and "cover-up". But, having for years encountered legal problems trying to draw attention to abuses perpetrated by social workers, this strikes me as a most appropriate way of communicating the essential nature of the problem with child protection, Irish style. I have several times unsuccessfully attempted to write about one case in which a XXXXXfather has had his XXXXXchildren taken away, on the flimsiest of pretexts, by social workers who XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXin their expenditure of taxpayers' money in XXXXXXXXXXX this man and XXXXXXXXXhis children's lives. It never occurred to me that I could so graphically convey the essence of this obscenity with a few Xs or black strips.
The “redacted” section of the Monageer report provides a most eloquent representation of the denial and doublethink of Irish society. Under those black strips, I feel certain that I can read the following admission rising up from the cultural unconscious: “This is a sick society. Our thought processes corrupted by piety and propaganda, we deny human nature, regarding mothers as reincarnations of the Blessed Virgin Mary and fathers as sons of Satan. We haven’t a clue. And as for social services not being available at the weekend – well, given the official, women’s studies view of child protection, should the families of Ireland not be on their bended knees thanking God that social workers must occasionally take time off?”