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March 1 - April 14, 2023
And so, the great monument to the state’s founding fathers turned out to be a row of grey slabs that loomed over the city like giant tombstones, making the new town a necropolis of modern aspirations.
Ballymun recreated in a new form the old slums it was meant to replace. History did not begin anew – it repeated itself.
But the Jewish cemetery expressed difference, otherness. It was the most outside part of the outside world.
The evidence of my own eyes was easily routed by an inherited idea of Jewish meanness.
My mother told me about the raid and marvelled that the Nazis had been able, even in an attack on neutral Ireland that was supposed to have been an accident, to pinpoint the holy place of the Jews.
This can hardly have been true – the Germans had hit the nearby Presbyterian church, too. But people believed it, and so did I.
It dawned on me that we were involved in a protection racket, that the threat implied in the words was that, if the owner did not pay up, something nasty would happen to the car. I felt ashamed and uneasy, conscious that we were menacing people that the Germans had tried to bomb.
They had fled Tzarist persecution in the 1880s. When they got to Dublin, even the small, established Jewish community looked on them as outsiders, referring to them as ‘Russians’ and ‘foreigners
But the name of their home place, the name on their tombstones, Akmijan, was by the time of my childhood, already a ghost. All traces of the Jews who lived there were systematically erased in pogroms and then in the Holocaust.
And I saw the priests arrive for seven o’clock Mass, having tumbled out of bed, their hair askew, their eyes heavy with sleep, and throw on the sacred vestments, transforming themselves from flawed mortals to messengers of the divine.
Perhaps, in retrospect, this familiarity ought to have made the priesthood seem less glamorous. Instead, it made it seem like the kind of job that you could imagine yourself doing.
While we slept five-to-a-room, priests had nice, spacious houses. The parish priest’s was by far the grandest on the estate.
He put out his hand and shook mine, as though I were not a boy but a friend. ‘Now this is a true Christian. The rest of ye are pig-ignorant heathens.’
I could see his distress and I knew I had colluded in causing it. But I felt a tug of power, the pleasure of cruelty made even more heady by the odour of sanctity that permeated it.
Perhaps for McQuaid, this funeral was also a kind of exorcism, a momentary banishing of the evil spirits of liberalism that has possessed the body of Mother Church.
As he patted my hair, I felt thoroughly known, not just because the most important man in the public world was asking me my name and how good I was at school, but because he seemed somehow not to have to ask.
was a good boy and now the man who, for me, embodied God on earth, was letting me know that a perpetual light was shining on this truth.
Perhaps for him, too, these were moments out of time and history, of freedom from the anxieties of his vigilance against the constant threats of pollution and degradation that he had to ward off. I was innocent and pure and if he could see that in me, he could also see in me an image of an Irish future that was not debased by modernity.
He knew, for example, that the chaplain of Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin, a short walk from Saint Bernadette’s, Father Paul McGennis, was a paedophile who assaulted patients aged between eight and eleven.
In a manifestation of McQuaid’s power, the police in Ireland did not launch a criminal investigation.
McQuaid did record his interview with McGennis the next day and his own response to it: ‘The children were playing about, lifting their clothes. He rebuked them. Seeing this was a chance of discovering what the genitals were like, he pretended there was no film in the camera he was carrying and photographed them in sexual postures, alone and seated together, chiefly
in a way or posture that opened up the parts.
McGennis continued to abuse children until he was finally convicted in 1997. McQuaid made no effort to find the children or to warn the hospital.
Over the next six years, Payne abused at least sixteen children there, almost all of them boys.
He already knew that Father James McNamee was a child abuser. The priest had been active in one of Dublin’s best schoolboy soccer clubs, Stella Maris. He had been seen swimming naked with boys and this had given rise to complaints to the Archbishop.
In 1969, he built a swimming pool in the back garden of his house. He made it clear that only little boys were allowed to come in and use the pool.
What is so striking about all of this is how open it was.
For there to be a real scandal, there would have to be open revelation. This would require four huge things to happen. A child would have to tell a parent – what language would any child have to speak of this? The parent would have to make a formal complaint to the police – what parent would call down such shame on the family? The Gardaí would have to actually investigate the crime – was it not better to inform the Archbishop and let him ‘take over the case’? The state would have to launch a prosecution – and the state believed, as the church did, that such a thing would cause too much
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This was the church’s great achievement in Ireland. It had so successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were ‘quite apologetic’. It had managed to create a flock who, in the face of an outrageous violation of trust, would be concerned as much about the abuser as about those he had abused and might abuse in the future. It had inserted its system of control and power so deeply into the minds of the faithful that they could scarcely even feel angry about the
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Ours was a society that had developed an extraordinary capacity for cognitive disjunction, a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time.
One senior Irish theologian, Revd James Good, described the encyclical as a ‘major tragedy’. He was immediately suspended from his priestly functions – a disgrace that had not been visited on any clerical child abusers.
Open clerical dissent was crushed. The message was implacable and clear: no condoms, no Pill.
The leading obstetrician Professor John Bonner noted that ‘Ireland would [appear to] have the highest incidence of irregular cycles in women in the history of the human race’
He insisted on the very strict regime of Lenten fasting in his diocese: the faithful could eat one meal and two ‘collations’ each day during the forty days before Easter. A collation was something like a biscuit taken with a cup of tea. Moyra Riordan, who ran the Greendoor coffee shop on Patrick Street in Cork, invented a huge biscuit, and most of the other bakers in the city copied it. The biscuits were known as Connie Dodgers. The law of God was not defied.
But just because everybody knew the lie for what it was, this did not mean that the sham did not have to be maintained.
Control of their own fertility was a favour to be bestowed on women, not a right to be asserted. It was an intimate lie that required an authority figure to suspend disbelief. Women had no power, except that of playing up to the sexist stereotype of feminine duplicity.
This was a way of functioning – through silence, evasion, creative ambiguity – that could be normal only in a society in which power seems permanent while ordinary life is changing.
Irish people in this era – and perhaps in the long colonial period before it – were masters of ingenious hypocrisy.
He said he’d like to but he’d feel a hypocrite because he did not believe. ‘But sure none of us believe.’ ‘Why do you go then?’ ‘We go for the old performance. To see the girls, to see the whole show… We go to see all the other hypocrites!’
If the people were to keep making the considerable mental effort to deal with great changes in their lives without challenging the moral monopoly of the church, the church for its part must be its predictable, straightforward self. To know how they themselves should dance, the people had to know where the church stood. This was the seed of destruction that was already present in 1968: the church was not the counterweight to our hypocrisy. It was the greatest hypocrite of all.
He had, in his paradoxical way, demonstrated the majesty of the church – only a priest could get away with what he had done.
This was a familiar episode – priests breaking up dances and hunting courting couples out of ditches with blackthorn sticks were standard characters in the soap opera of Irish sexuality.
England, as an idea, terrified me. I knew from history lessons in school that the English only ever did bad things to Irish people.
And I knew that the heart of that badness was Protestant. There was one true faith, which was, of course, Catholic, so England by its very nature was deviant.
He would use it, he told us proudly, to fight the communists if they invaded England.
It did not strike me as especially mad that he kept it under his bed, though that night as I was going to sleep I could hear raised voices from downstairs as Kevin and my dad, who was a thoroughgoing socialist, argued politics.
so even though Ireland was neutral, my father had three siblings at war.
Together with Kevin’s sub-machine gun, it opened up a different history – not the endless, dreary tale of Ireland’s oppression and martyrdom, but one that was both vast and intimate. It was European, English, German. But it was also familial.
This astonishing upheaval lay between me and the Irish past as it was packaged for us in school: 800 years of oppression, keeping the faith through the trials of religious persecution, heroic risings that always ended in failure, the winning of our freedom – except, of course, for the unfinished business of the Fourth Green Field.
McCloskey and Devenney were the first two fatalities of what was not yet called the Troubles – a euphemism that still applied to the revolutionary period between 1916 and 1924.
