Why Ireland has changed utterly

The visit of Pope Francis to the country serves as a painful reminder of the evil inflicted on the nation by an all-powerful clergy

Ahard rain or a soft mist are the only things that last on the bog lands of western Ireland where County Galway butts up to neighbouring Mayo. There’s one broken road that’s a nightmare to drive between Tuam and Knock, the only two small towns in the area that are anything of note. The village of Ballindine is midway between the two on the 38-kilometre road, and hardly warrants a mention or a second glance. Besides, you’re through it before you notice you’re even there. On a good day — one with soft mist — it takes 45 minutes in a car, often far longer because of the farmers on tractors taking milk to the creamery. Mostly, this is a desolate Godforsaken land. Mostly, this past weekend, Knock was the focus of the international media, following the progress of Pope Francis as he made a 36-hour visit to Ireland.

Unless you had your head buried in the sand, you would know of the significance of the pontiff’s visit to Ireland. Popes don’t go there often, and the only other time one came, John Paul II, was back in late September 1979. More than half of the island’s population of five million or so back then came out to wave and cheer and hear the Polish-born vicar of Rome. It was a holiday like no other, and the Papal Mass in Dublin represented the largest single gathering ever in Ireland’s long and pained history. I was there, along with another two million. It was historic.

Back then, the Roman Catholic Church was a moral and political influence like no other. It controlled most aspects of Irish life. There was no divorce, same-sex acts were criminal, family planning was virtually non-existent, and God help any girl who “got into trouble”. The church controlled every aspect of life in the Republic, from before the cradle to after the grave, a clerical theopoly with unparalleled power, where questioning was quashed and the disaffected shunned to move to Britain, America, Canada or Australia.

But that was then. This is now, and all has changed, changed utterly, as the poet William Butler Yeats wrote.

While Pope Francis was speaking to some 45,000 faithful who stood in the pelting rain in Knock last Sunday morning, down that broken road that sideswipes Ballindine, a thousand or so others gathered in Tuam at a memorial that has become a painful reminder of the institutional abuses inflicted by that all-powerful clergy on the plain people of Ireland.

Over the past five years, thanks to the efforts of one remarkable local amateur historian, Catherine Corless — a true saint if ever there was one in the truly good sense of that word — the details of the mother and child home in Tuam have emerged. In an old septic tank, the little bones of just under 800 children were discovered. These victims, some just weeks old when they died, most under 10 years of age, died from natural causes. Common illnesses such as measles or influenza took their lives. They were, in the minds of the church and those “carers” who looked after them, not worthy of proper attention and medical needs. They were born out of wedlock, innocent victims of the teaching that pre-marital sex was a grave sin, and the girls who were weak and succumbed were sinful and of loose morals.

Buried as anyone else would

Corless paid from her own pocket to track down the death certificates of all 796 children in that septic tank — there were burial records lest their final resting place be noted in official papers. These little children were, in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, non-persons in death who lost the right to be buried as anyone else would.

Pope Francis did not speak to this issue while he was in Knock. Nor did he take a trip across that broken road and Godforsaken landscape to visit the site of the Bon Secours home in Tuam. If he wanted to see more of the County Galway countryside, he could have visited the site of the former Christian Brothers Industrial School in Letterfrack. There, at least 100 boys put into the care of that order were killed, while the exact number of those physically and sexually abused there is unknown.

Or while in Dublin, he could have visited the former site of Artane Industrial School, where no one knows for sure the number of children abused there. At any one time, there were nearly 900 boys there, put there by courts and agencies for misdemeanours such as missing school regularly.

Then there were Magdalen homes, where pregnant girls were made to work in slave-like conditions. The babies were given up for adoption and sent around the world. To contact those children later was deemed the gravest of sins by the church.

Yes, while in Ireland, Pope Francis did ask for forgiveness for the sexual abuses carried out by members of the clergy on boys and girls under their moral and pastoral care. Given what’s transpired, asking for forgiveness is one thing, rooting it out and dealing with the evil perpetrators and handing them over to justice is another. That has yet to happen under his papal watch.

Is it any wonder then that Ireland has changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty has been scorned, as Yeats might write today.