A manifest wickedness that held cruel control over us all

NOW we’re at risk of heading off in a completely different direction in an attempt to understand fully the true horror of what happened in this country to countless women and their babies in so-called care homes run by nuns in the 50 years after independence.

Since the nuns won’t tell us where they buried the huge number of babies who died in their care, then the broader public in the vicinity of those horrible mother-and-baby homes should be prevailed upon to reveal the truth.

We’re now being encouraged to believe that regular people in the locality such as teachers, nurses and doctors, shopkeepers, tradesmen and suppliers to those homes had to be aware of what was going on – they, too, had to know where the little children ended up. Where the sins were buried.

So the focus broadens. And, unfortunately, so also will the responsibility and the blame.

Because we’re all culpable, nobody is to be singled out as accountable.

And, in that way, the real source of this unspeakable purge against innocent and defenceless women and children in the living memory of many of us, will be confused and lost to view.

It happens all the time. After the war, ordinary Germans were made to endure the burden of blame for Nazism; in the North the broader communities on both sides of the sectarian divide were told they should carry the can for atrocities perpetrated in ‘their name’. And here it’s happening again in what is nothing more than classic victim blaming.

The truth is, many ordinary people did in fact know what was going on in those homes run by nuns but, like Germans during Hitler’s tyranny, or Northerners during the murderous evil euphemistically referred to as the Troubles, they were powerless to do anything worthwhile about it.

They were all prisoners and victims of a system of control which at that time was supreme and unchallengeable in almost all respects.

A cruel, dark, warped and hateful version of Catholicism had infiltrated the corridors of power in Ireland and insinuated itself as controller-general. That form of Catholicism took much of its inspiration from Jansenism, a movement based on the work of Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen who

died in the middle 15th century.

Jansenism held a pretty negative view of humanity, concentrating on our dark side and capacity for evil. With such an attitude there’s little surprise that strict obedience, strong authority and harsh control formed part of the Jansenistic menu for an Ireland which after the Famine was hungry, impoverished, ignorant and illiterate.

We were a nation in need of sorting out and the Catholic Church stepped up.

Orwell himself could hardly have composed a more appropriate title for groups of nuns committed to dealing with the perceived detritus of a society that required strict observance to the sick principles of sexual abstinence and self-hate – the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the Sisters of the Bon Secours. Jesus wept. The inhumanity that occurred in these care homes, the neglect and injustice, the disproportionately high mortality rate, the contempt and disregard, the lack of common decency and respect are, taken together, a direct consequence of manifest wickedness that held the upper hand.

This was a perverted cruelty perpetrated by a controlling Catholic elite possessed of a dark soul. Society generally was not to blame.

Identifying the real culprit is a duty we have to the victims and to ourselves in order to ensure that such brutal leadership, in whatever guise, can never be allowed to return.