The nation is close to ‘apology fatigue’ and now needs restitution
FOR Irish politicians “sorry used to be the hardest word” – but now sorry seriously risks becoming a political commonplace and the nation is near apology fatigue.
Micheál Martin became the fourth Taoiseach in recent times to publicly say “sorry” to perhaps the most wronged and vilified group of people in the history of the State: those “inconvenient children and their mothers” whose only crime was to be poor.
The reality is that the burgeoning trend in Irish political apologies is part of an international pattern.
In his fascinating 2004 book, On Apology, the late Dr Aaron Lazare, a US academic, said there had been “a rush” on apologies and demands for apologies in the previous 12 years from 1990 to 2002.
This was proven by his own delightful unscientific method of reading and clipping from five major newspapers every day for several years.
Some other observers reckoned Pope John Paul II played a big part in this “sorry increase”.
By one count the much-travelled Pontiff had apologised for 94 Church acts going back 1,000 years.
These included things like the Crusades and persecuting Galileo for insisting the world went round the sun.
Matters got much tetchier when the late Pope touched on the Catholic Church’s response to the Holocaust under Hitler.
Dr Lazare’s apologia focus began with the personal. But he extrapolated out to groups and even nations.
In summary he found there are four parts to a good apology: 1. The most important part is the acknowledgment, or confession, which must be complete and honest; 2. Then comes offering an explanation which it is hoped will mitigate the seriousness; 3. There follows an expression of remorse or shame; 4. The fourth part is reparation, the ‘How can I make it up to you?’ It’s a healing.
If an apology fails, one or more those four parts is defective or not there. Granted, it’s not rocket science but it can help us understand what we’re going through at the moment.
Perhaps we could cite two examples of apologies which involved Ireland and our near neighbours Britain in recent years.
In June 1999, a month after he took office as UK prime minister, Tony Blair made a statement on the Irish Famine of 1845-47. It was read by the actor, Gabriel Byrne, at a commemoration in Millstreet.
It fell a distance short of a formal apology, but it was the first time that a British prime minister publicly acknowledged that his predecessors in government had failed the people of Ireland in their hour of greatest need. It met with a mixed reaction, perhaps because it did not really get much past number 1 cited above.
The second came in 2010 when another UK prime minister, David Cameron, apologised for the 1972 murders by the British paratroopers on what we now know as ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Derry. This was very well received – but it did not entirely meet point number 4 above.
Bertie Ahern opened our quartet of apologies in May 1999 to the thousands of victims of child abuse
in so-called “industrial and reform schools”. Mr Ahern lamented the State’s “collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue.”
Mr Ahern said too many of our children were denied “love, care and security”. For Ireland at the time it was ground-breaking stuff and it attracted global headlines.
Spool on to February 2013 and Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s national mea culpa – this time specifically apologising to the women who suffered in those terrible places known as the Magdalene Laundries. “I, as Taoiseach, on behalf of the State, the government and our citizens deeply regret and apologise unreservedly to all those women for the hurt that was done to them, and for any stigma they suffered, as a result of the time they spent in a Magdalene Laundry,” he said.
In July 2019 Taoiseach Leo Varadkar apologised to the victims of child sexual abuse in schools in the wake of the landmark European Court of Human Rights ruling in favour of Louise O’Keeffe. But Mr Varadkar’s apology was about the subsequent failures of redress
The clue to Mr Martin’s real problem lies in Leo Varadkar’s 2019 apology
for people in situations like Ms O’Keeffe.
It is too easy – and quite wrong – to deride Micheál Martin’s apology on Wednesday to the residents of the mother and baby homes. Indeed he is entitled to have his words taken at face value – for now. Let us park the philosophical dispute about whether the potent alliance of Church and State actually caused that catalogue of malevolence, or whether that dual alliance’s role was to reinforce a society’s deeply warped code of values which was the main factor.
But the clue to Mr Martin’s and his Government’s problems lies in Mr Varadkar’s 2019 apology. It relates to our ‘point 4’ in a good apology.
The time for sincere talking is over – now people will only believe in action and restitution.