Let’s not forget the good that scouting has to offer
We have a habit in this country of rushing to judgement and misunderstanding a situation before we know the full story, writes Brendan O’Connor
IHAVE no doubt that there were people who were in the cubs and scouts with me who had bad experiences. To what extent I don’t know. I hear mutterings and whispers and now and again I go online for a look around, but I’ve never found anything.
At the very least, I know there were guys who were bullied badly, guys who had a hard time with being away from home sometimes, guys in whom the pack smelt weakness. There would always be the odd guy who went home from camp, whose parents came to collect him early and who slunk off in a kind of shameful silence.
The shame, I might add, wasn’t ours. It was his. We were kids. We didn’t wonder about who or what had made life unbearable for that kid in his tent. We just felt bad for him because he had been beaten by the experience, because he couldn’t hack it. Then there were stories of guys whose parents had to come half-way through camp to bring fresh supplies of underwear because every pair he had had been destroyed by “undie grundies”. Possibly not even true. The undie grundies were true, but possibly not the parents needing to drive across the country with underpants.
There were no women involved, and it was 30 to 40 years ago, so things were not as enlightened as they are now. If one kid became the lightning rod for casual bullying or teasing, the runt of the litter, a dynamic could easily take hold.
Though having said that, my memory is there were always honourable guys, whether they were patrol leaders, the most senior of the boys, or actual leaders, many of whom were barely adults, and these guys would often put a stop to things with a kind of firm decency.
There was an ethos of kindness central to the cubs and scouts that didn’t always survive in the reality of a mob of boys in Seventies’ and Eighties’ Ireland. But equally, scouting often brought out extraordinary kindness and maturity in the older lads. The militaristic notion of people ordering people might have been abused sometimes by kids who were drunk on power — but I have just as many memories of how the older lads looked after and encouraged the younger lads.
I probably escaped any bullying because my older brothers were involved when I started, and also because, as I went on in the organisation, I was lucky enough to have as leaders really decent guys.
Though there were nights where I remember feeling desolate and so alone, lying awake at night in an old army tent with seven or eight other guys, the air pungent with farts and bodies, feeling a million miles away from home, and feeling I was the only person awake in the world.
I look back on many of the leaders now, some of them not much older than 20 then, and it’s extraordinary to think about the time they took to hang around with a bunch of kids, to patiently teach us things, and I can only think of it as Christianity in the best sense, making that contribution, trying to do something useful for people.
We didn’t just camp overnight in those days. We’d head off for two weeks! Everywhere from Wexford to Wales to the Isle of Man we would set up camp, and out of bits of wood and string we built our tables and chairs, a dresser, a fireplace, boundaries around our area, even a boot scraper. We cooked over fires. We kept the place clean for inspections every morning. (Picking up wood chippings around the site was a popular punishment for messing back then). We sat around campfires at night singing, always ending with the traditional “Taps”: Day is done, gone the sun, From the lake, from the hills, from the sky; All is well, safely rest, God is nigh… Thanks and praise, for our days, ‘Neath the sun, ‘neath the stars, neath the sky; As we go, this we know, God is nigh
We hiked for miles in misery through wet woods, we put on shows, we had cooking competitions. We also always put the land back as it was before we found it. For a kid who wasn’t sporty, it was a great way to be part of something. For city kids, it was a unique opportunity to get out and live on the land.
I want to be careful what I say here, but you can see, looking back, how there was potential for bad things to happen in cubs and scouts. As we know now, safeguarding measures then were not what they are now. It was a more innocent time in ways. The upside of that is that we had extraordinary independence for kids. It started with being given the bus fare and allowed go into town for cubs, for being allowed to decide yourself if you were going to spend the bus fare home on boiled sweets and chance being able to duck the fare.
And the other side of that independence is that awful things happened under cover of the scouts, and under cover of men bringing boys away on trips, even if for the most part those men were guys the parents knew and trusted, rightly or wrongly.
None of what I’m saying above is to be disrespectful towards people who had their lives ruined by abuse and the covering up of abuse in cubs and scouts. And it seems that those historical issues are finally being properly dealt with. It won’t undo the damage for the victims but it will probably help them get some form of closure, and it will help to make scouting a safer place now and in the future.
We love a good hop-on in this country, and if we can react before we are clear on the full facts of the situation, all the better. By last Thursday morning the conventional wisdom very quickly became that the scouts, as an entity, was finished. We were being told that overnight trips should be stopped, and there seemed to be a pall over the organisation.
It can’t be easy for the vast majority of great people in Scouting Ireland who give up their time to give kids joy and adventure that most of those kids won’t find elsewhere. Obviously cub and scout leaders were always the butt of jokes and sarky comments in private. But this is a very public situation.
You wonder if we should rush to judgement yet on how safe or not an environment Scouting Ireland is. Ian Elliot, who is the child protection consultant to Scouting Ireland, has a considerable reputation for integrity in these matters following his work with the church and his willingness to speak out about the hostility he encountered there.
The fact that he is putting his reputation at stake here is one reason why we should perhaps pause for thought.
Also, we should bear in mind that Tusla hasn’t always seemed like the most efficient or functional of organisations.
This is not to suggest that Tusla is deliberately trying to do down the scouts, but it would make you question whose side we take about the incendiary Tusla letter that has baffled Ian Elliot, who says scouting is as safe as it can be and getting safer.
So, maybe before we get worked up, as we can tend to do, and misunderstand a situation, as we did with CervicalCheck, or blame the wrong people, as we did with the children’s hospital, maybe we should just stay calm until things become clearer.
If we destroy scouting in Ireland now in a rash manner, we will lose something we cannot easily get back. Certainly we need to take all possible steps to ensure no damage is done to any child, but let’s not give up too easily the joy and the independence and character-formation that 40,000 kids and hundreds of thousands more in the future will get from scouting.
There is a vogue now for tearing down the old institutions, and maybe scouting is one of those, and maybe its historic connections with religion make it suspect in some people’s eyes.
It would be a shame to let the cancer of abuse and sexual violence, which has already helped bring the Catholic Church to its knees, which has indeed stained civil society and the State in this country too, destroy something as patently good at scouting.
So let Katherine Zappone now work hard to give Ian Elliot any support he needs to work this situation out, to keep scouting safe for every child involved.
‘For city kids, it was a unique opportunity to get out and live on the land...’