State did more to kiss hem of Church than ‘we’ ever did
SEVENTY years ago, Seán MacBride – acknowledged by many historians as one of the most progressive voices in Irish parliamentary life and a man who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and become a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights – wrote, on the day of his election to the Dáil, to then-Catholic archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, intoning: ‘I hasten as my first act, to pay my humble respects to Your Grace and place myself at Your Grace’s disposal,’ adding that he would, ‘always welcome any advice which Your Grace may be good enough to give me and shall be at Your Grace’s disposal should there be any matters upon which Your Grace feels I could be of any assistance.’
You want more evidence of how this State knelt at the foot of the Vatican? Look to the first Cabinet meeting of the inter party government a year later in 1948 – comprising Fine Gael, Labour and independents, of which Noel Browne and former IRA chief of staff MacBride were ministers. The taoiseach wrote to Pope Pius XII to say the following: ‘On the occasion of our assumption of office and the first cabinet meeting, my colleagues and myself desire to repose at the feet of your Holiness the assurance of our filial loyalty and of our devotion to your august person, as well as our firm resolve to be guided in all our work by the teaching of Christ.’
It gets worse. Fast forward to 1965 – three years after JFK visited this republic, the then-Fianna Fáil minister for external affairs Frank Aiken wrote to McQuaid seeking the ‘archbishop’s permission’ to attend the memorial service in Dublin for the late Queen of Sweden – because it was in a Lutheran church. I kid you not. The archbishop gave permission to attend – provided he did so ‘passively’.
That’s why the taoiseach’s phrase this week, ‘no nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children’ in response to the Tuam Mother and Baby home burial scandal upset me so much.
Enda Kenny kept referring to ‘we’, meaning Irish people were just as culpable for scandals such as that which took place in Tuam as the Church. But in truth, it was the powerful in Ireland that colluded with the Catholic Church to control society. And when good citizens like Catherine Corless – paid for and unearthed each one of the 796 death certificates of the Tuam dead babies – and told the story in this newspaper in May 2014, she was ridiculed by many of the great and good in Irish society.
Religious orders like the Bon Secours nuns were paid by the State to take care of ‘mothers and babies’. They did no such thing. And the agents of the State did not do their job in regulating these institutions – just as they have subsequently failed in areas from banking to foster care.
There is no mystery at the heart of this scandal, and no amount of ‘blame spreading’ can dilute the unavoidable conclusion that from the foundation of this State, governments have led the way in bending the knee to the Roman Catholic Church.
There is no mystery at the heart of this scandal , and no amount of ‘blame spreading’ can dilute the unavoidable conclusion that since the foundation of this state, Governments have led the way in bending the knee to the Roman Catholic Church.
In one of his last acts as a Fianna Fáil minister hours before the 2002 general election the then-education minister Michael Woods signed off on a deal which left the State paying 87% of the cost for compensation for former residents of industrial schools run by 18 religious orders – and they have not even fully paid their share. The Irish people have hopefully woken up at last from this nightmare.