Ireland’s historical amnesia

“Who controls the past controls the future” George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, his celebrated novel about totalitarianism, and “who controls the present controls the past.”

In Ireland, public discussion about our Catholic past is now controlled by media and public figures who are largely hostile to that past and extremely selective in how they present it. The Church, one commentator recently observed, “is the poisoned tree, begetter of a hapless society rendered toxic by the fanatical, near-fascistic (sic) control of the clerics.” Another argued – and one could multiply such examples – that Catholic Ireland post-independence was a place of book-burners and “pseudo-republican papist zealots” and that “the policies of Irish governments for decades were driven by the semi-hysteria of Catholic religiosity.”

The demonization of Ireland’s recent Catholic past is aimed more and more explicitly at changing the present. A TD thus asserted on RTÉ radio that the Tuam controversy was a “game-changer” and that response to it would be of great assistance to those seeking to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which provides Constitutional protection to the unborn.

The Tuam mother and baby scandal has caused great upset in Ireland and has attracted headlines around the world. The high rates of infant mortality in Tuam, coupled with the fact that babies and young children were buried in the grounds of the home, which closed in the 1960s, have led to lurid headlines about mass graves, evil nuns and repressive Catholic attitudes.

Church leaders have rightly called for a full investigation of all the facts relating to Tuam. Thus, the Archbishop of Tuam has called for an inquiry into all aspects of life during the time when mothers and their children were placed in institutional care.

Media coverage has nevertheless caused considerable concern. Brendan O’Neill, the editor of spiked, highlighted “an impatience with fact gathering” in relation to Tuam and “a preference for moral zealotry over reason”. Various writers have placed the Tuam home in historical context by highlighting the harsh social attitudes at the time to pregnancy outside marriage, as well as the poverty of the period, the poor housing, the high rates of infant mortality and infectious disease and the limited funding for social services.

It is often argued today that the independent Irish State “handed over” responsibility for social services to the Church. The reality was considerably more complex than that. Most Church-run services pre-dated Irish independence and in many cases were established at a time when State provision was extremely patchy. Thus, the absolutely essential Catholic contribution to healthcare and education in Ireland pre-dated Irish independence and can be traced back to Catholic emancipation in 1829. Hospitals such as the Mater and St Vincent’s in Dublin were established in the mid-nineteenth century when Catholic religious were finally free to take such initiatives after the Penal Laws ended and to make their immense contribution to the Irish population of that time. In the late nineteenth century, decades before Irish independence, religious providers such as the Daughters of Charity and the Brothers of Charity pioneered intellectual disability services in Ireland at a time when statutory intervention was minimal.

The first Christian Brothers school actually pre-dated Catholic Emancipation but such schools, and those run by other congregations or dioceses, developed rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is huge criticism today of the historical role of the religious in Irish life while their self-sacrificing and dynamic contribution is ignored. Clearly, grave scandals and major problems in governance have been set out in various reports, notably those relating to institutional child care. Nevertheless, if the religious orders were bankrupted or banished from Irish life, our society, and more particularly those in need, would no longer benefit from their important contribution. It is quite unlikely, to put it mildly, that strident media commentators would be filling the resultant gap in hospice care or care of the disabled or elderly.

Catholic Ireland post-independence is almost universally presented today as a priest-ridden cultural backwater. It is worth noting, however, that alternative views do exist in this discussion. For example, in his well-researched An Age Of Innocence. Irish Culture 1930-1960 (Gill and Macmillan, 1998), Brian Fallon sets out the lively cultural life of those decades in fields such as poetry, painting, theatre, music and links with France. He is highly critical of the literary censorship of post-independence Ireland but nevertheless offers a more nuanced view of it than is typically found in the media: “Though Irish literary censorship was no myth, it has been much mythologised and … its long-term influence on the development of Irish writing has been a good deal exaggerated” (p. 205).

At this time of relentless criticism of Ireland’s Catholic past, we need to preserve a cultural memory going back longer than a few decades and recall the profound inter-connection of faith and culture in Ireland over the centuries. I have always been moved by the links in the Irish language between the words muintir (people) and mainistir (monastery). Muintir, the Irish word for people, originally meant the people who lived around a monastery and came to have a more general meaning because monastic communities were so widespread at the time.

Pope St. John Paul’s pastoral visit to Ireland in 1979 was a moment when we were strongly reminded of our Irish Christian heritage. The Pope spoke powerfully about our historic links to the Apostolic See of Rome, our loyalty to our faith, even at times of persecution, our love for the Church and the Mass and our special monastic heritage. At Clonmacnoise, he highlighted the contribution to the Church and Europe of great figures such as St. Columbanus and the other missionary monks, or pilgrims for Christ, of that period.

Today, there is a disturbing historical amnesia about our Christian heritage going all the way back to St. Patrick and the missionary monks of the following centuries. One hears little either of later figures such as the seventeenth century Franciscan Míchéal Ó Cléirigh of Annals of the Four Masters fame, who contributed greatly to cultural life and memory through the preservation of ancient Gaelic manuscripts after the Tudor conquest of Ireland. We have a loss of cultural memory too about the heroic Irish martyrs of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, people like St. Oliver Plunkett, Blessed Margaret Ball, Archbishop Dermot O’Hurley, Peter O’Higgins OP or Dominic Collins SJ. Nearer our own time, pioneering Catholic founders of congregations like Edmund Rice, Catherine McAuley and Nano Nagle receive limited attention outside their own congregations and the services that they established in education, healthcare and social care are forgotten or presented as part of a power-seeking agenda. Nor is there anything like the same attention that there was a generation ago to the courageous and highly enterprising twentieth century Irish missionaries in Africa, China and elsewhere.

Clearly, Irish Catholics need to face up resolutely to scandals or shortcomings, and to periods of darkness as well as of light, in our Catholic past. We also need to follow Christ in the present, embracing our ecumenical and fraternal bonds with other Christians or those of other faiths or none rather than looking back nostalgically at the social landscape of any previous period. Nevertheless, rather than accepting the dismal rhetoric of a “poisoned tree”, I prefer the image of the Church as an old tree, with branches requiring sharp pruning from time to time but always capable of budding forth in new generations.

The image of an old tree comes from the late Cardinal Lustiger of Paris and it’s possible to apply his words about the Church in France to our current situation in Ireland. In a magazine interview thirty years ago, he suggested that European societies were rich with a Christian culture that was almost twenty centuries old. They had almost lost the memory of that culture because they had lost a strong awareness of their relationship to God. Now a new generation was re-discovering both that culture and that awareness. In view of so many signs of hope, the Cardinal suggested, it seemed that the old tree of the Church in France was about to bud forth once more!