Edtorial / Summer 2010

There, we should be very grateful to the Democratic Unionist Party and the Paisleyite tradition in Northern Ireland, because they gave us the only truly juicy scandal of recent times. It was a relief to contemplate the straightforward misfortunes of Iris and Peter Robinson. The misdeeds that came to light are, in themselves, reassuringly traditional: money, sex, politics and planning permissions. Their story involves nothing about international finance, massive rezoning, greedy bankers, obtuse churchmen, self-affirming media, inept financial regulators, or even hysterical commentators. In other words: the daily fare of Southern life was missing in this Northern scandal; proof, if proof was needed, of the reality and depth of Partition. The North and the South now march to very different tunes.

Here, in the South, we forget about the North altogether. We hated being disturbed by it during the Troubles. Many of us felt superior to it during the boom years. We progressives patronised those unruly Northern siblings of ours and knew that they had nothing to teach us; they, with their anachronistic interest in religion and their outmoded forms of patriotism, represented only our past. The then Taoiseach was the greatest symbol of the new Ireland and, for a short time, became the greatest living Irishman. All was well, he assured us in the manner of Julian of Norwich, and all would be well into the future. Bertie Ahern is now the greatest living scapegoat for all our mistakes. We forget his role in bringing peace to the North and are convinced that he led us Southerners down the path to financial ruin. Many of us are so angry about this that we forget we voted for him. When we talk about ‘Ireland’, we don’t include the North.

Our government has yet to make a full confession of its mistakes, which would allow a bipartisan analysis of how we got into this mess. Unfortunately, some of our opposition politicians are in a competition to see who can be the most outraged, which leads to interesting soundbites and plenty of spluttering, but little intellectual analysis. There is a lot of anger, but it lacks direction and there is no evidence of any renewal in our political and constitutional structures, nor any faith in anything other than market forces, with the hope that, once more, they will weave their economic magic.

Not too long ago, the Catholic Church would have had plenty to say in this situation. Bishops would have pronounced and members of religious orders would have denounced and prophesied. The institutional Church has fallen silent. Clergy and religious are too filled with shame and embarrassment to talk about anything other than the weather. It seems that there are only three lay Catholics with anything to say: Breda O’Brien, David Quinn and Senator Ronan Mullen.

It need not have been like this, but no other outcome was possible, given the failure to take the laity seriously after Vatican Two. The eager and involved laity of that era, with its committed intellectuals, is dead or retired, having been patronised or ignored, frozen out or driven to despair. The only thing that mattered was that people should keep on coming to Mass and when, after 1990, more and more of them found other weekend activities, there was no adequate response from the institutional Church.

Equally woeful has been the loss of the Church’s ability to use the media. The splendid media strategies of the 1960s and 1970s were abandoned and, inexplicably, the Catholic Communications Centre was wound down. The collective response of the Irish Catholic Church to the current crisis has been weak and divided. The clergy is demoralised; the laity is bewildered.

Media reporting in the aftermath of the Ryan and Murphy Reports has become very repetitive: a small number of columnists write much the same material every week; a small number of victims of clerical sex abuse are interviewed yet again; certain bishops are asked to ‘consider their position’, but news reports of ‘increasing pressure’ on those bishops turn out to be yet the same handful of people repeating themselves.

A Church that was media-alert would question why the New York Times has trawled through Pope Benedict’s past, in the hope of finding something, anything, which would link him to paedophiliac clergy. A media-savvy Church would challenge the way the BBC misreports the Pope’s speeches. This would rekindle hope in the hearts of the vast number of devoted Irish Catholics. Alas, it is not being done, because our Church leaders seem to flee from the media or try to ingratiate themselves with it. A calm dialogue would be much more helpful.