The more things change the more they stay the same

IRELAND has changed a lot in the last three decades and we have seen a sea change in Irish society’s attitudes and social mores. People can get divorced. Not only is homosexuality legal, we have a gay Taoiseach. There is peace, if not quite political harmony, in the North. The Catholic Church has lost its oppressive stranglehold on our communities.

Yet, despite all these most welcome changes, in the last week it has felt very much like Ireland as a nation still has a long way to go.

To draw a few comparisons with the Ireland of the early 1980’s we are, this week, once again investigating the Kerry Babies case and examining Irish attitudes to women; debating abortion; preparing for a Papal visit and discussing corruption, cover-ups and collusion at the very highest levels of the Gardaí and the State.

In addition – while the same may not be the case in Dublin and the major cities – the country also finds itself still mired in economic doom and gloom with many thousands of people and families all over rural Ireland barely scraping by every day.

We Irish have most certainly made a lot of progress in our efforts to become a truly modern, inclusive society.

However, the unfortunate truth is that we, as a society, started from a very low base and there’s still a lot of ground to be made up before, to paraphrase a famous old slogan, we can rise and take our place among the truly enlightened nations.

This is starkly illustrated by two Garda related scandals that have been the topic of much discussion across the country this week. We refer, of course, to the reopening of the Kerry Babies case and the continuing revelations coming from the tribunal investigating the smearing of Garda Maurice McCabe.

Last week – 34 years after the horrific events in Kerry that shocked and divided the country – the gardaí issued an unprecedented apology to Joanne Hayes for the treatment she and her family received during the garda’s botched investigation into the notorious Kerry Babies case.

The apology is welcome – as are the suggestions that the State is prepared, apparently without a fight, to offer significant redress to the Hayes family – however for many it is simply far too little and far too late.

The Gardaí, for reasons that remain unclear, have decided after three decades to try and draw a line under one of the very darkest periods in the force’s history.

That too is to be welcomed but it shouldn’t distract people from what is unfolding at Dublin Castle where the investigation into the smearing of Sgt Maurice McCabe is revealing disturbing new details about the culture of the Gardaí and the Department of Justice on a daily basis.

Three decades ago the Gardaí, the legal system and the State utterly failed Joanne Hayes and ‘Baby John’, the murdered fiveday-old, the discovery of whose remains triggered the appalling Kerry Babies saga.

Decades on, the McCabe scandal suggests that the State – or at least some elements in it – remains entirely willing and capable of using its considerable resources to destroy the life of a citizen in order to hide its own dirty little secrets.

When you look at it like that, has Ireland really changed all that much?