PHILIP CAIRNS: AN AGE OF INNOCENCE THAT NEVER WAS
The disappearance of Philip Cairns ended our national naivety and sparked a healthy cynicism that made life safer for children
TWENTY-ONE years after the disappearance of 13-year-old Philip Cairns, his heartbroken mother Alice described her ordeal in a book about faith and healing. ‘I hoped every day for months,’ she wrote. ‘I left the light on in the hall downstairs and in the bed at night I used to listen to see if he would come in the door. You would be hoping the phone would ring and it would be him.’
In 2007 Alice still had not given up hope for her son’s safe return, although she recognised how his abduction had shattered an innocence in Ireland at the time.
‘Nowadays you would be more cautious,’ she explained. ‘Back then we would be saying to kids, “watch the roads, don’t be going out on the road” and that sort of thing. If it was after dark you would be worried all right but you wouldn’t have thought that something like this could happen at half past one in the day.’
Many of those who grew up in suburban Dublin, particularly on the southside during the Seventies and Eighties, still vividly recall the horror of Philip Cairns’s vanishing. But it’s not just disbelief and upset that a boy roughly their own age, from the same sort of house and family as their own, could disappear into thin air on his way back to school that is indelible in the minds of fortysomething Dubliners.
It is also how overnight their parents became vigilant about child safety and how sleepy suburban estates which hummed to nothing more than the sounds of lawnmowers and children playing suddenly became laced with danger and the threat of the unknown.
If Philip was apparently snatched in broad daylight from a familiar stretch on an ordinary road, then how could any child be safe?
In its immediate aftermath, the disappearance seemed to mark the end of an innocent time, the end of the myth of the suburbs as a byword for childhood security, a paradise where children could roam freely or play in streets and gardens, loosely supervised by their parents.
The unspoken assumption is that the loss of such innocence is regrettable, that childhood is somehow poorer as a result. Yet the breakthrough identifying the late king of pirate radio Eamon Cooke as a prime suspect in the case, shows us that for all its nostalgic power, the innocence that disappeared along with Philip on Friday, October 23, 1986, was no loss at all.
For the chief effect of that style of innocence was not to inject wholesome goodness into ordinary lives or provide a cushion of wellbeing and security. It was to disguise the dark underbelly of paedophilia and child sex abuse that ran through Irish society, trapping so many still unnamed victims in the clutches of sick perverts, and condemning them to suffer in silence. It was to make people blind to monsters in their midst.
According to the witness who has come forward after 30 years’ silence, Philip Cairns was in Cooke’s Inchicore studio at the time he went missing.
A row broke out and she later saw him on the floor covered in blood and unconscious. As he lay there, the suburbs of Dublin were in a terrible state of upheaval about the young boy’s fate, little suspecting how his disappearance would presage a series of child sexabuse scandals that would rock the Catholic Church to its foundations, but also various sporting organisations, care homes and, in the case of the selfstyled Captain Cooke, the pirate radio community.
The idea that the stern-faced Cooke, whose broadcast fame turned him into a magnet for children and teenagers, was a vile manipulator was as unconscionable back in the Seventies and Eighties as the garrulous broadcaster and much-loved cleric Father Michael Cleary having children with his housekeeper. Or some of the country’s most respected ecclesiastical figures covering up clerical sex abuse in order to uphold the sanctity of the Church’s institution.
Ireland had crept out of the dark ages of the Fifties and the stranglehold of the Catholic Church had been tested and found intact in two stormy referendums – the abortion vote in 1983 and divorce in 1986, the same year Philip Cairns went missing.
The country was at a crossroads between the priestly authoritarianism established by De Valera and the pluralism heralded by the then-taoiseach Garret FitzGerald. But the ideological tug of war between liberals and Catholic conservatism that we expected then never really materialised.
What we got instead was an ugly stream of child sex abuse scandals, of women incarcerated in Magdalene laundries, of cruel mother-and-baby homes where single mothers were dispatched, often by their families, and then forcibly parted from their babies.
Innocence disguised dark underbelly of paedophilia
The revelations shattered our romantic image of ourselves as a good-natured, easygoing people. They nailed forever our unquestioning trust in authority, our misguided belief in the goodness of our so-called betters and all the other ridiculously naive attributes of our much-vaunted innocence.
Cooke, a married man and father of 11, was for years the subject of dark rumours about goings on at his base at 58 Inchicore Road – but the only Garda raids that he attracted were a result of his running Radio Dublin, a successful pirate radio station.
During the age of innocence the veneer of respectability and smooth-talking charm was cover enough for the larger-than-life Cooke, known to his victims as the Cookie Monster, to bring children to his house to abuse them.
According to some who worked with him, day and night the offices swarmed with young teens trying out their DJ-ing skills and paying homage to the cult of personality around Cooke. Even when two court cases showed him as a man of terrifying depravity, and he was convicted for being a paedophile who groomed children as young as seven, he arrogantly protested that he was blameless.
We should be thankful we have grown up sufficiently to question the motives of figures like Cooke. We might have become cynical but our children are safer today than in the age of innocence.
IT IS now 30 years since schoolboy Philip Cairns went missing in Dublin. His disappearance and the continuing mystery that surrounded it has remained in the public imagination ever since.
That a woman has come forward to claim that convicted paedophile Eamon Cooke may have killed the teenager, is a disturbing development.
The 79 year old, who died last week, confirmed certain elements of the woman’s story but he refused to disclose the whereabouts of Philip’s remains. Knowing where he is buried would have given great comfort to the boy’s longsuffering family.
However, it must bring some relief for them to know that the mystery surrounding Philip’s disappearance is on the verge of being solved.
Nothing can compensate for this terrible loss but perhaps, in learning the truth, Philip’s loved ones may now receive the consolation they deserve.