A question: If the Unionist-run state of Northern Ireland had treated Catholic orphans with the savagery and sexual sadism with which so many were treated in independent Ireland, would it not have been presented as devastating proof of the rottenness of Unionism? asks Kevin Myers
Had the sub-Dickensian squalor of Baltimore Fisheries School been in Ballymena instead, might that not have become a staple of Irish nationalist propaganda?
The truth is that none of the allegations Ian Paisley ever made about the Republic came close to matching the true horrors of what we have discovered about this State in the past 10 years. To be sure, everyone knew that terrible things happened to children in places like Artane, and Christian Brothers schools; but the lines of communication which might have revealed the full and ghastly reality ran to government departments, where it was concealed.
Government after government was in a position to act to end the abuse, the rapes, the torture; and through cowardice, sloth and moral indifference, they did nothing. Blind eyes were turned. The Irish State had become a torture chamber for orphans and the poor, in which unspeakable depravities were inflicted on children - not just occasionally, but as a matter of course.
Yet the conspiracy was not just governmental, and it was not conscious: it was tacitly consensual. Twenty years ago I wrote a piece about the savage reminiscences of a writer who had been abused by the Christian Brothers. In the editor's office, all reference to the Christian Brothers was removed. When I enquired why, the only response I got was a sad shake of the head, as if I was out of touch with political reality.
The political reality was that the Irish people as a whole preferred to conceal evil than to confront it. The Valley of the Squinting Windows reached from Bloody Foreland to Carnsore Point. Just about every adult in the State was a mute accomplice to the institutional atrocities that were a defining characteristic of the Irish State. Nobody, of course, had the full picture; but everyone had a tiny part of it; and no-one chose to link the many parts up.
The Catholic Hierarchy must have known what so many Catholic priests were up to; and God alone knows - and for once that term is entirely valid - what was said and done in confessionals when priests admitted to buggering children. Certainly, we know of no priest who ever handed himself over to gardaí on the promptings of his father confessor. And even if he had, what would the police have done? Would they have prosecuted him? Or would they have told him to go away and have a bit of sense? And no echo of the reality of this Ireland ever finds its way into our history books. History records the deeds of famous politicians, the changes in the economy, the shifts in demography, and the operation of democratic institutions, but it doesn't record those aspects of society which a contemporary consensus preferred to hide.
The central truth about Ireland in the first 60 years of independence is that it was a barbaric, heartless State populated by a craven people, their cowardice made all the more insufferable by the Olympian scale of their pathetic self-regard.
Until they began their Final Solution, not even the Nazis treated Jewish children as this State treated its "orphans", i.e. bastards. The Irish people were a people full of loathing; they loathed their own sexuality or any representation of it, they loathed any inquiry into the truth about the State they lived in, they loathed freedom of expression and they loathed unfettered intellectual liberties. No democratic country used the power to ban things as the Irish State did: only fascist Spain and Portugal could match the all-seeing vigour and the puritanical philistinism of Irish censors. Moreover, any politician who campaigned to increase personal freedom, to abolish the censorship board or to allow contraception was a politician on his way out of the Dáil.
This was the State which boasted about its virtues compared with the "slum" of Northern Ireland. Well, it was a slum; but not as great a slum as this one. The Catholic population of Fermanagh and Tyrone were certainly discriminated against in Northern Ireland: but at least it continued to grow in the 50 years of Stormont. The Catholic population of Donegal and Sligo fell during that time - and the Protestant population of the southern State almost vanished. Even the arrival of "modern" Ireland brought only the outward raiments of modernity. With 30 years' hindsight we can see that respective governments didn't take the requisite action against terrorist subversion because of the tribal cowardice which had become a political and social norm.
The starving, raped, frozen and brutalised children of our institutions were not just the victims of their immediate abusers, but also of a neurotic and often hysterically dysfunctional society. We cannot do them all justice now, for many individual truths have been lost through time; moreover, there have been over 2,000 complaints to Mary Laffoy's Commission. Even if she hadn't resigned, and even with her vigour and intellectual acuity, she could never have investigated such a number.
Of course, a mere allegation does not in itself mean guilt; and we cannot allow a lawyer-driven witch-hunt through our ageing religious communities, looking for ready-made culprits and easy compensation. Terrible injustices have been done, and cannot now be undone. That is the legacy of how we treated freedom.