He was an old man. A fresh 86. I was sitting in a city cafe reading the papers over a cup of coffee when he sat down beside me and said, as sometimes happens: “I know you.” But, and as also happens in this business, I didn’t know him. He didn’t expect I should.
Looking at me intently he began: “I never thought I’d see the day.” He was talking about the church and its standing compared to when he was growing up. It pleased him.
The reason became understandable as his story unfolded. At school he had been abused by a priest and, as he said himself, “I haven’t been right since.”
But what disturbed him even more was his mother’s reaction when he told her at the time. She didn’t react.
He told his father, who wrote a letter and escorted him to school with the instruction: “Give it to him first thing when you go into the classroom.” Which he did.
He recalled the teacher going white as he read it. No more was said by his parents. Nothing more happened. His disappointment in his parents was almost as bad as the effects of the abuse.
Working for a State company later in life he recalled how, whatever the unemployment levels at any time, a man or woman with clerical connections was practically guaranteed a job. Some didn’t hesitate in boasting about their clerical connections either, he said. “Corruption”, he called it. “There was corruption everywhere.”
It was only recently he began to understand why his parents reacted so timidly when he told them about his abuse. It was in a library and he had been reading a biography of the late Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and was discussing it with a young student there.
He told her about his experience of abuse and his parents’ reaction.
“She was only 23 but she understood immediately what I didn’t until then: that if my mother did anything about the priest she’d probably be ostracised by her neighbours and friends and my father could have lost his job.”
His father also worked for the State.
“They had such power,” he said, “I never thought I’d see this day.”
Comeuppance, "deserved reward or just deserts, usually unpleasant", is believed to have originated as an Americanism in the mid-19th century.
