These revelations bring me right back to the 1980s

THE scapegoated whistle-blower Fr Gerard McGinnity was not the only person who will, in the wake of the revelations about a culture of secrecy and gay dating at Maynooth, have experienced strong feelings of déjà vu from 30 years ago.

Back then, I was a student in a college which was in the process of transitioning into a mixed lay and clerical college. It was a curious place, where girls who might sunbathe in scanty dresses would be chased off the manicured lawns of the college by blackthorn-wielding clerical deities intent on protecting the virtue of their seminarians from these ‘strumpet Jezebels’.

Unlike the courageous Fr McGinnity, we were initially unaware that clerical celibacy was a construct of secrets and lies. Slowly, though, we innocent Catholic boys – for everyone was Catholic back then – began to realise that, to put it mildly, sexual abstinence was not a feature of the lifestyle of the average Maynooth clerical student.

Back then, clerical students were the natural aristocrats of the college – and for country girls, in particular, bagging a clerical student under the points system of that age was quite a catch.

One of the consequences of this was the Carry On Clerics-style spectacle of dozens of clerical students desperately climbing over the college walls at dawn just before Sunday matins. Though we picked up quickly on that particular issue, even those of us who were Catholic boys in transition were quite innocent on other things.

We wondered why part of the seminary was called ‘the Pink Palace’ and thought it might have something to do with the then-popular Pink Panther movies.

Sometimes we wondered why, given the presence of a low-cost movie in college on Sundays, so many clerical students got the bus into Dublin on Saturday night to go to the ‘movies’.

Even back in the Eighties, it was clear celibacy was the rod that would break the back of the even then still all-powerful Irish Church.

The lying and deceit it engendered did not create child abusers. It was, however, utterly corrosive of the moral and psychological fibre of those who stayed. Great talent was lost to alcohol in particular.

Terrible lies and vicious acts of scapegoating were visited on more people than Fr McGinnity in a desperate attempt by morally corrupt insiders to protect an image of the priesthood that was totally inaccurate.

Ultimately, the Church reaped a whirlwind that was of its own making. But, like all wars, it was one which also left too many innocent casualties in its wake.