Irish Church has bad track record wherever it’s gone

Leading the charge to absolve the clergy was the Taoiseach

In my other life – when I had to work for a living – a man came to see me in my office at the Derry Journal. This would have been in the mid1990s. He told me his name was Jim Breslin and that he was from Perth in Western Australia.

Over the next couple of hours he told me the story of his life. I have never forgotten that conversation.

Jim was born in Derry and due to difficult family circumstances he and his two brothers were put into the local orphanage.

Somewhere about 1947 they were sold this tale about a land where the sun shone all the time, where there was no shortage of food – didn’t the oranges fall off the trees, you didn’t even have to pick them – and it would be great craic altogether.

Jim and his younger brother were “selected” to go on the “Child Migrant Scheme” to Australia but his older brother, who was about 12, decided to volunteer to go to look after his two siblings; Jim was about 10, the other child eight or nine.

Here’s where the fairy story ends.

On arrival in Freemantle the Christian Brothers, in a gesture of casual cruelty, separated the siblings, sending them to various orphanages hundreds of miles apart. Jim didn’t see the older brother until more than 20 years later.

When I asked him what had become of them he didn’t really know.

The last he had heard was that one was an alcoholic sleeping rough under Sydney Harbour Bridge and the other was a hermit, living as a sheepherder in the outback in a tin hut where in summer the temperature could hit close to 50C.

He genuinely didn’t know when we spoke whether they were alive or dead.

When asked what was life like in the orphanage I remember he went silent, not speaking for quite a while. So I prompted again.

“I’ll tell you one story”, he said eventually. “One day two wee boys went missing from the orphanage. They had run away.

“One of the wee boys had only come over from the babies section which was run by the nun and he wanted to go back. Anyways, they were caught and brought back.”

“What happened?” I enquired.

“The whole orphanage was gathered into the main hall. The two wee boys were brought in, stripped naked and the Brothers beat them with leather belts until they were whimpering like dogs. The boy next to me s**t… himself he was so frightened.”

“And what about you?” “I’, replied Jim ‘I didn’t speak for two years. I became mute. Looking back I know I was suffering real trauma. I don’t think I have ever got over it.”

Jim’s story came back to me last week when I heard the same old lame excuses being trotted out for the horrific abuse suffered by women – unmarried mothers – in mother and baby homes for more than 60 years. Leading the charge to absolve the clergy was Taoiseach, Micheal Martin who suggested it was “society’s” fault. He has got to be kidding. Irish religious groups have a long track record of abuse wherever they have gone, be that in America, Australia or wherever. It seems to be some sort of character flaw.

Why is that? I can’t give you an answer. But whatever it is, for the Taoiseach to seek to give the clergy a free pass on this one won’t wash. Not when 9,000 children died in these homes, and several hundred of them were buried in a septic tank.

No way, Micheal.

EXCUSES Martin