Irish and Catholic values in the work of Maeve BInchy

Maeve Binchy follows the principle that you must write about what you know : She has never come across cruel, abusive or paedophile priests – so none of these appear. Rather, her priests, brothers and nuns are (on the whole) human beings trying to do their best. We hear of kindly clerical figures who care for alcoholics and for other people with problems. We meet, for instance, Father James Hurley : a good man who has never made career advances in the church, but who inspires love among his parishioners, and – “in a Dublin where anti-clericalism among the younger liberals was becoming rife, this was no mean feat”.

The cruel nuns featured in Suffer the Lrttle Children and The Magdalen Sisters are a world away from Binchy’s kind-hearted and at times maternal nuns. Mother Francis has a tenderhearted regard for an orphan girl living in the convent : she “felt an urge to take the child in her arms as she used to do when Eve was a baby given into their care by the accident of her birth”. And in The Glass Lake (1994), the “wise woman” who knows all the answers to life’s problems is a nun-hermit, Sister Madeleine – a wonderfully tolerant, imaginative and generous character.

In the more recent books, the theme of religion in the background to people’s lives had faded, and there is much less mention of priests, brothers, or nuns; this reflects a social reality – the dissolving, to some extent, of Catholic Ireland as a social given. Dublin 4 (1982) features a minor character who is about to leave the convent and marry a priest – his laicisation is awaited – whom she is involved with.

Tara Road (1998) includes a vignette characterising, in a conversation between two generations, the transition from old, holy Ireland to “lifechoice” modern Ireland : A mother urges her daughter to pray to the Virgin Mary’s own sainted mother – this will assure the daughter of the arrival of that second child which she (the mother) is convinced the daughter needs; but the daughter well knows that the discontinuing of the contraceptive pill will always be assurance enough. The topic of abortion is broached several times in the novels; and one subtext is : married men who have affairs with single women nearly always let them down. The abortion theme is not treated ideologically but through sensitive narrative – often with a consequence or a kickback at the end of the tale.

Mary Kenny’s Germany Calling: a Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw
(New Island Books) has recently been published in paperback.