Tuam should not be reduced to a game of competitive outrage

After the national fury over the scandalous events, who exactly are we shouting at, asks Eilis O’Hanlon? Who are we arguing against?

COMPETITIVE outrage is the new craze, and the beauty of it is that anyone can take part. The rules are simple. Pick an issue. Any issue. Water charges. The Eighth Amendment. The fact that Hillary Clinton isn’t President. The reimposition of a hard Border post Brexit.

It doesn’t matter. Even a British journalist’s silly remark last week that Ireland had only a “tenuous” claim to nationhood can be enough to get the ball rolling.

Then just pick a side and let fly about how you’re so much more angry about it than everyone else, and how anyone who isn’t every bit as angry about it as you are, or who isn’t angry about it in exactly the same way, is complicit in the scandal, until the point is reached where you are the angriest person in the whole room. Congratulations, you’ve won this round of competitive outrage.

Now prepare for the next round, which should be along any moment now. The Tuam babies scandal is only the latest example.

Since the Commission of Investigation confirmed the discovery of a “significant” number of human remains in vaults at the mother and baby home, the fury has gone into overdrive. Understandably so, it could be argued.

The needless deaths of so many infants in the care of Catholic orders ought to shock anyone with a compassionate bone in their bodies.

But it’s still worth asking those who are eating the scenery in their desire to denounce the wrongdoers: who exactly are you shouting at? Who are you arguing against?

Do you actually know anyone — someone in the real world, that is, as opposed to the cartoon one in your imagination — who isn’t appalled at some of the things which happened in this country when the Catholic Church held sway? Do you know anyone who’s defending Tuam?

And by defending it, that doesn’t mean anyone who sees nuance in the story, or who tries to put it into historical context, or who thinks there is more than one way to describe what happened, because that’s a part of competitive outrage too — professing to regard those who dare to think the story might be complicated as collaborators with, and apologists for, evil.

Seize the Church’s assets, goes up the cry. Exclude them from running schools and hospitals. Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy even called last week for the banning of the Angelus on RTE, while there was a poll on boards.ie to make the Catholic Church a proscribed organisation, like Isil or the Real IRA.

The result was effectively tied, which is some comfort. At least not everyone has lost their minds on this issue.

One expects this overheated aggression and exaggeration on social media. Now it’s increasingly infecting mainstream media too. A piece in the Irish Mirror this week pointed out that the mortality rate in mother and baby homes was greater than that in Nazi concentration camps.

What are we saying here – that 20th century Ireland’s human rights record was worse than that of the Nazis?

The average age of death in slums during the Industrial Revolution was 13 years. Was Victorian England “worse” than Nazi Germany too?

The only purpose of these reference points is to convey such a one-dimensional impression of the past that anyone attempting to understand why things happened as they did can immediately be denounced as an apologist for acts akin to the Holocaust.

The Irish Times reporter Kitty Holland calls the people who ran mother and baby homes “monsters”, and who isn’t against monsters?

Only other monsters. Once the entire world has been reduced to “monsters” and “not monsters” in this binary way, morality becomes very easy.

Ireland is not unique in harbouring dark secrets. The nature of those secrets merely reflects the different characteristics of the societies which keep them. In Ireland, the darkness was religious in tone, because that’s where power lay. In Britain, it was militaristic and imperialist; a great nation waded through blood to make itself greater.

That shame has never been fully addressed either.

It makes little difference whether a country sits to the right of centre, such as Ireland, or on the far left, such as the Soviet Union. History piles up the victims either way. The poor were brutalised for different reasons, but they were brutalised all the same.

There’s no doubt that the Catholic Church’s hatred of women, and its terrified con-

trolling of sexuality, impacted hugely on how Irish society developed, but there’s an element of Irish exceptionalism in all this, the belief that Ireland has been uniquely worse than other countries who have done bad things. This “bad wee country” stuff is every bit as bad as the “great wee country” guff that it opposes.

These debates around historical abuses are never about then. They’re always about now. They’re never about them, but about us. That’s exactly what is happening now. Why, for instance, did Catherine Murphy feel the need to insert into her contribution to the Dail debate on Tuam that “the vast majority of the time since the foundation of the State, it was led or governed by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael”? That adds nothing to our understanding of how or why these things happened.

Murphy presumably just wanted some of the stench of Tuam to attach itself to FF and FG in the here and now.

In the same way, Brid Smith of People Before Profit took the opportunity, in response to Micheal Martin’s call for two hospitals to be taken back into the control of the State from the Church, to remind FF that it was de Valera who created the constitution which allowed the Church such enormous power.

If this is not using the deaths of mothers and babies for political gain, what is it?

It’s in this climate of competitive outrage that it becomes impossible to say anything without someone else seeking to deliberately misinterpret it. So when Enda Kenny pointed out that “no nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children”, he was roundly condemned for apparently seeking to minimise the enormity of the Church’s misdeeds, when he was actually saying no more than minister of state Katherine Zappone did when she told the Dail in a generally praised statement: “We must acknowledge that sometimes it was fathers and mothers, brothers and uncles, who condemned their daughters, sisters, nieces and cousins and their children to these institutions — and that sometimes it was not.”

Deputy Eamon Ryan of the Green Party made the same point: “As a people we are all part of that culture, it goes back to our grandparents and great grandparents.”

Independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice’s contribution was also worth heeding: “Somebody told me yesterday evening he would have been in the same circumstances only for his grandfather. When the local priest came to the house after his mother gave birth to him, his grandfather said ‘he will be all right, father; we will look after them’. The parish priest landed a few days later. They wanted to take his mother away. It is very easy to stand up here and blame the State for everything.”

The permanently outraged want to apportion blame only to politicians and the Church, absolving ordinary people of responsibility for what happened to the mothers and babies in their families, but people did know, and they too were guilty of colluding with it, of turning a blind eye.

Michael Fitzmaurice went on in the Dail to make what may well be the most important statement on this issue so far: “Every Deputy here is united on the matter.”

That can’t be repeated enough. This is an issue on which agreement is possible, but the urge to find villains takes precedence, and most of those who can be blamed are dead, and those who are still alive are old, so finding someone who can stand in their place instead becomes the priority, when the focus ought to be on ensuring that this doesn’t and can’t happen again, because, as Fitzmaurice said, there is no one now who wishes that it would. No one.

A proper separation of Church and State is a reasonable aspiration; but it feels as if those who are loudest in their attacks on the church long to go further than that.

What they really want is a silencing of the Church’s voice altogether, and something would be lost from that.

Not being of a religious mindset, I can only speculate, but surely Catholicism is bound up with identity; tradition and continuity; family and community; the search for meaning in an apparently meaningless, hostile universe.

None of those impulses are invalidated because of the treatment of vulnerable people in the past. Socialists do not cease to cherish their beliefs just because other followers of the same faith have done appalling, frequently worse, things. Catholics are no different. They should not have the sins of their mothers and fathers visited upon them to satisfy some vengeful desire on the part of those who see these tragedies as a chance for moral oneupmanship.

‘Reducing the entire world to ‘monsters’ and ‘not monsters’ in this binary way makes morality easy’