DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:THERE WAS A priest in my childhood who abused children. He was a fat, lardy gent, from a religious order, who lived close by, and had short hair, which reminded me of the bristles on a yard brush. He played golf, and he had a keen handicap, and lost his temper if his balls ever went into the rough. There was so much blubber on him that he reminded me of a rhinoceros I once saw in Dublin Zoo; and when he lost his temper he became even more like the rhinoceros – fast, and furious.
His body quivered with rage as he cursed, and watched golfballs fly across the ditch.
Twenty years ago I wrote a play called Una Pooka, about a priest who, on the outside, appeared to be as cuddly as Barry Fitzgerald in a cassock, but who on the inside was a destructive and demonic pooka, or phantom.
The heroine in the play was haunted by this mythic creature, who tyrannised her. He was ever-present to her, chastising her, undermining her; the Grand Inquisitor of her fragile mind, her tormentor and ultimately the orchestrator of her death.
The play also carried a simple and comic implication; that the papal visit of 1979 might hopefully be the funeral of clerical Ireland, rather than a fresh opportunity to paralyse and asphyxiate another generation of young people with the morbid legalities of religious orthodoxy. And while most people saw the play as funny, there were some astute critics who noted its darker side.
For my next trick in the theatre I decided to be more blunt: Misogynistwas not a play, it was a satiric performance that shone the spotlight on a man of prayer, learned in philosophy and theology, who leans on God's presence for consolation in times of anxiety, but who fundamentally hates women.
What I learned from writing those plays was that in Ireland nobody goes to the theatre to experience catharsis. We are a simple folk; we get our catharsis from journalism, radio talk-shows and public tribunals. We go to the theatre for entertainment.
But at least the courage of survivors has finally succeeded in exposing the minions who ran institutions of detention where so many Irish children were incarcerated.
And when the day of reckoning comes, and old withered men and women are being dragged into the dock to face the judge, perhaps the spotlight will also be turned on the judges and mandarins of the Irish judicial system, who did the dirty work of kick-starting the abuse by rubber-stamping children as criminals.
To ignore the judges who administered the system, and the lawyers and other professionals who benefited from it, would be as mad as conducting trials for the lackeys who ran the concentration camps, while ignoring the Nazi state that criminalised Judaism.
In Ireland the religious orders were the lackeys of a State which may eventually be seen as a failed political entity, simply because such sustained criminalisation of childhood, and such systematic neglect of the poor, and such inequality in our laws and statues, over decades, entirely obliterates our moral claim to be a sovereign republic.
In the 1970s I worked in Loughan House, which was then a detention centre for young offenders above the age of 16. The ethos was therapeutic rather than punitive.
One summer there was a conference, to examine how things might be improved. The staff were enthusiastic. They believed in rehabilitation.
On the last day of the conference, a senior secretary from the Department of Justice arrived. He listened with authority and sneered with condescension when people in the room quoted the various childcare reports of the day.
“Your work of rehabilitation,” he declared to the meeting, “is merely window dressing – never forget that!” Every prisoner in that place was poor, and all had previous records from institutions such as Daingean and Letterfrack.
We were gobsmacked that someone from the Department of Justice could be so cynical and negative.
It was as if all the reports on childcare ever written were just toilet paper.
A few years later the place was closed, and the law was changed so that the department could reopen it as a prison for children. Barbed-wire fences were erected. And a handful of despised 12-year-olds, demonised in the media as “the Bugsy Malones”, arrived through the new gates.
mharding@irishtimes.com
