Breda O’Brien: Shiny, secular Ireland still fails children

I have been thinking about my mother a lot recently. She will be 18 years dead this October.

I find myself remembering odd things, like finding her wedding dress and realising that it had obviously been let out at the waist.

She told me that someone she knew had “got into trouble” and had to get married fast. She did not have a wedding dress, so my mother let out the seams of her own dress and loaned it to her.

There was absolutely no tone of judgment, just practicality and kindness. For years, I used to hear her voice in my mind whenever I was too harsh on one of our children. “She’s only a child. Have a bit of compassion.”

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My parents were farmers and ran the farm together, with my mother working just as hard as my father, carrying buckets to feed calves and getting up at all hours to milk

I can still see her at our door, all five feet 1½ inches of her, whenever neighbouring men came to ask, “Is the boss around?”

It’s a classic country question, but the answer was not.

Her answer was always, “Yes, and what can I do for you?” Her green eyes dared the man shifting uncomfortably on the doorstep to object.

My parents were farmers and ran the farm together, with my mother working just as hard as my father, carrying buckets to feed calves and getting up at all hours to milk.

Although she was a quiet person, no man was going to tell her she was not a boss in her own right.

My mother never had the privilege of third-level education and indeed, did not have much of second level, either. Neither did my father, who was ferociously bright and a voracious reader. He used to bring my siblings and me a new, cheap hardback every time he went to the mart.

Most of them were Bancroft Classics. I read them all, with no sense that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, or Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was an odd choice for an eight-year-old girl.  Those hardbacks all got burnt in the fire that consumed our home more than 20 years ago. I would love to have those books with their gaudy covers today, as a tangible link to my father.

My parents were traditional Irish Catholics, a category of people the majority of opinion-formers now characterise as representing everything regressive and shameful in our past.

Their kind of faith is despised now by most of the opinion leaders in our country

My dad is only seven years dead but I think he would find Irish culture unrecognisable. For example, he would not see the Religious Sisters of Charity leaving the hospital they built to a world-class level as proof of people power. I think he would see it as proof of the sad success of an older concept – bullying. And perhaps of a still older concept – bigotry.

Compassionate

My parents were deeply religious people, with the kind of faith that made my mother compassionate towards a girl who got into trouble and towards small children.

His faith motivated my father to work for years with the St Vincent de Paul and to be a “foul-weather friend” – the kind of friend who shows up, not when things are going well, but when you need help.

Their kind of faith is despised now by most of the opinion leaders in our country, who did everything bar light a bonfire and dance around a burning effigy of a nun in their joy at their great victory – driving elderly women to give up everything they had worked for.

And for what? So that there would be no obstacle to carrying out abortions in Irish hospitals. It was as crude and as ugly as that.

But perhaps before you sing and dance in victory as you destroy something, you should take a sober look at what you are putting in its place.

Our new, shiny secular Ireland still fails children. The new mantra is that it is all down to lack of resources and that things are getting better. But are they?

Damning report

This week alone, there was yet another damning report from Geoffrey Shannon pointing towards inadequate training for gardaí, poor to non-existent interagency co-ordination, and a systemically flawed after-hours service for vulnerable children.

In a separate development, the Child Care Law Reporting Project reported a clinical psychologist describing the way in which a child was interviewed by a garda about allegations of sexual abuse as “abusive” and “relentless”.

Six interviews over three days were carried out, some lasting an hour and 20 minutes. The level of intensity and questioning was completely inappropriate to the child’s age and situation and was probably the reason no conviction was secured.

The faith that inspired my mother's and father's belief in practical compassion is being systematically silenced and vilified

In yet another case, a child was left in a foster home after making allegations of sexual abuse against another, older child also in care in the home.

The fate of children (and adults) in direct provision is an ongoing scandal.

The faith that inspired my mother’s and father’s belief in practical compassion is being systematically silenced and vilified. I don’t want to return to the past with all its well-documented darkness. But triumphalism about the present inevitably blinds us to the darkness we prefer not to acknowledge in our own time.