Who vilif ies a teacher for providing a loving home?

PART two of the powerful RTÉ documentary, No Country For Women, recalled the case of schoolteacher Eileen Flynn who was fired from her job in 1982 for living with a married man and falling pregnant. Eileen, who died aged 53, had an eloquent surrogate in her stepdaughter Rebecca Roche, coincidentally also a single mother. Rebecca, who is living in England, returned here for the documentary and to try to unravel the forces that caused her stepmother to be vilified as a scarlet woman and robbed of her job. Eileen fell in love with publican Richie Roche after his wife ran off on him, leaving him with a young family. In the documentary Rebecca struggles with a mixture of anger and bewilderment about the scandal surrounding the woman who raised her from when she was eight years old. Her cruel treatment seems absurd and almost medieval from our present-day vantage where tolerance and respect have replaced a Church-imposed culture of fear and repression. Indeed the controversy was, in some respects, the last gasp of unfettered Church authority in Ireland because only six years after Eileen lost her High Court appeal against her dismissal, Father Brendan Smyth was arrested in the North. The paedophile priest then fled to the Republic and spent the next three years on the run. The arrest of the serial child rapist in 1994 eventually led to the collapse of the government and set in train a procession of clerical sex abuse cases and scandalous cover-ups that almost fatally destroyed the Catholic Church here. The rest, as they say, is history, and the punishment of single mothers like Eileen was thankfully brought to an end.