THERE are straightforward historical reasons for the scandal of Goldenbridge. First, there were bound to be bad nuns. "Entering religion", as it was called, was an extremely difficult road to take, and many young women must have taken it for the wrong reasons. There were social pressures on girls to enter.
To the world, it was the height of respectability to have a daughter a nun. To a girl educated by nuns, as most of us were until the 1970s, to continue in that milieu often seemed a more plausible option than trying to get into the civil service or going to dances till you found a husband. Becoming a nun meant you didn't have to deal with sexuality at all your parents would be pleased with you; you would be secure, and you would have much more status than most women. In the fervent atmosphere of the old convent schools, this might easily present itself to a girl as being madly in love with God. But if she wasn't, really, madly in love with God, she was stuck in a relationship calculated to drive her mad.
What's more, even if she was a fulfilled Bride of Christ, she might have to teach children or run an orphanage or nurse sick people to prove it. Even though having "a vocation" in no way qualified her to do these things, and she may have been grossly unsuited to her lifetime's task.
There was a concept, very popular when I was a girl, of "breaking the will" to make one worthy of God's love. It was a fascist's charter, of course, which is why it was so popular with administrators. Lots of schools were keen on breaking the wills of bold, sinful, children. But the teachers themselves were controlled by this idea.
If you longed to go on the missions, they made you teach maths in a suburb. If you were gifted academically, they put you in charge of a kitchen. Generations of young women went along with this, and humbled and disciplined themselves and confessed sins of pride when their perfect docility gave way and flogged themselves and fasted and poured out prayers so as to fit the square peg of themselves into the round hole provided for them. No wonder some of them went mad.
There was a silliness surrounding vocations. A. big, spotty, adolescent girl would come into class alight with excitement. She'd whisper to her friend; the friend would whisper to her friend, and finally the news would be out: "So and so felt a hand laid on her head and heard an unearthly voice saying `Come, Follow Me!'" And soon after, so and so would be taken away for an intimate talk with a popular nun. How many of those girls eventually found themselves full of anger, and turned that anger to rage? How many of them used the strength of a thwarted personality to infect their communities?
Entering religion, then, could be done in bad faith. That's the first thing. But society as a whole was in bad faith towards nuns. By the 1950s, the great 19th century orders of nuns had been reduced to serving the Irish patriarchy, the same as everyone else. The care of children, especially, was fobbed off on them.
And nobody valued children, unless they were well heeled children - a system then and now promoted by the priests who insisted on running expensive private schools so that there would always be an "us" and a "them". It was no wonder that a nun here and there internalised the cruel values of the power structure. You could do what you liked to ordinary children, and you could take any amount of frustration out on poor children. I don't know why the Sisters of Mercy are standing in the pillory alone. A great many other "religious" should be standing beside them.
YOU cannot talk to a group of Irish men about their schooldays for two minutes before someone starts telling tales of brutality. An ear deaf from a blow: a stammer from constant humiliations; a terrible episode of incontinence in public from fear, and - over and over again - a brain never used because all the boy wanted from school was to get away from it. The kind of mad sadism many men remember didn't happen in respectable girls' schools. But physical punishment was common.
I went to schools run by four orders. One was the Irish Sisters of Charity. I was cast as St Gabriel in a tableau when I was seven or so, posed at the end of the school concert, standing above the Holy Family with my wings spread protectively. But I saw my friend in the audience and waved my wings at her. The nun beat me around the room afterwards with the leg of a chair.
Later, I was a pupil at a Sisters of the Holy Faith school. The nuns had a long leather strap as part of their habit - it was attached to their belts. But the head nun had a special, double thickness strap which was kept in a cupboard. I was strapped with it many times, and it reduced me to a snivelling supplicant, squeezing my red hot hands between my knees and begging for forgiveness.
This was trivial stuff, but it suggests a context for Goldenbridge. And the lid hasn't been lifted yet on the industrial schools, or on the runaways the farmers hunted - at £5 a head - and returned to those schools, or on the gardai who put women who had children outside marriage into mental homes for life at a nod from their respectable families, or on the awful things done to "boarded outs" - the slave labour of modern Irish agriculture. Almost everyone supported the regime. A man I met yesterday, for instance, told me that a Brother beat him so badly he was in bed for a week, after emergency treatment in hospital.
As soon as he could walk his mother marched him back up to school, to the same brother. She asked the brother to continue to put manners on the boy, and said how grateful she and her husband were.
People are reluctant to face the truth. But I believe the truth is that what lay behind the cruelty perpetrated on children in care was Catholicism itself. It developed the concepts of sexual wickedness and maternal sin which were used to facilitate the expression of sadism.
The more general ordinary abuse of children was in part a consequence of more Catholic teaching, this time on contraception. It was known that almost all the children of large families - almost all children - would never have a stake in Irish society, never have children here themselves, never count for anything. Their eventual unimportance in London or Springfield, Massachusetts was visited upon them early. Why would their minders or teachers value them? Their country didn't value them.
Why would you cherish the orphans in your care? What was their destiny? Well, one destiny was to become a skivvy in a convent. Every convent had a pecking order, and the skivvies, scrubbing the mud off tons of potatoes, in their poor broken boots, were at the bottom. Why would you lavish love on a child who is only going to be a skivvy when she grows up? The burghers of the town came down to the nun and got a skivvy . . .
Contemporary Ireland floats on a sea of grief. Many, many people are guilty of causing it. This isn't about one nun or group of nuns, though they have much to answer for. But they are scapegoats, too, for others still hiding.