Not all priests are paedophiles
Kevin Myers says that the sex abuse scandal in Ireland is being exploited by ruthless lawyers and a guilt-ridden government The nightmare of the Catholic Church in Ireland continues. Last month a US law firm, Manly & Maguire, announced it was suing the Irish diocese that trained the busy paedophile priest Oliver O’Grady. This worthy is now at the centre of at least 17 multi-million-dollar child-abuse lawsuits in the Californian diocese of Stockton.
Worse is to come. Another 18 Irish priests are facing multiple-abuse charges in California alone, with law firms hustling for their share of the action against the Irish dioceses from which they came. Lawyers in many states across the US where Irish priests sowed their paedophiliac oats, turning Catholic children into unwilling catamites, are now eagerly watching the Manly & Maguire case, mean while sizing up juicy Church assets in Ireland. This promises to be the largest seizure of ecclesiastical land since Henry VIII.
That Irish priests have been responsible for a truly appalling catalogue of sexual crimes, both in Ireland and in the Hiberno-ecclesiastical empire across the English-speaking world, is not in doubt. But what is equally not in doubt is that the degree to which priests abused children, sexually or otherwise, has been exaggerated. For abuse is no longer a subject of empirical observation, but of ideological dogma. The ginger group for victims of abuse, One in Four, is so named because that — allegedly — is the proportion of young people under 18 who have been sexually abused. It barely matters where this figure comes from, or what ‘abuse’ means: it is now established doctrine that 25 per cent of all people are vic tims of abuse, and this is no more available to ratiocination or analysis than are any of the items of faith of the Catholic Church itself.
In a way, the vast abuse industry — of which One in Four is merely one expression — has come to resemble inversely the organisation which it has been created to oppose. The place of Satan is taken by the Catholic hierarchy, and his minions are Catholic priests. An allegation of abuse is almost proof that abuse occurred, much as all those crutches at Lourdes are confirmation that miracles have taken place. And, of course, waiting on the sidelines are lawyers scenting booty as avariciously as the Church once sold indulgences to the faithful.
It is not only the Catholic Church which stands to see vast amounts of money lifted from its coffers. The Irish government advertised across the English-speaking world, urging victims of childhood ‘abuse’ (my inverted commas) at Irish orphanages run by religious orders to claim compensation, with the state undertaking to cover most of the costs of such claims. Naturally, it did not take long for armies of claimants — or, better still, their sleek attorneys, with their fiscally adhesive fingers — to discover that if the alleged abusers were (rather helpfully) dead, no defence against abuse was possible, and the claim would be automatically upheld. There are other ways for a state to lose vast amounts of money — offering free hurricane insurance in Florida, for example — but, all in all, this will do to be getting on with.
This behaviour is so illogical that the benign folly of accepting financial liability for deeds of sexual and physical abuse by individuals, over whom the state had little or no control, must presumably satisfy some communal need for the people of Ireland to express their guilt over past sins. In a sense, this is only right. The Catholic Church was not some alien power parachuted in from outer space. It was, and is, an indigenous organisation whose virtues and iniquities were in large part those of the Irish Catholic people, who until recently would simply not have tolerated any criticism whatever of the Church.
Any newspaper that attempted 30 years ago to reveal the truth about the multiple rapes by Catholic clergy would have been torn limb from limb in the courts, and Irish politicians — often noisy braggarts for whom the exercise of their diseased profession is often no more than a holier-than-thou morality competition — would joyously have joined in the lynching. Moreover, the savagery of the Christian Brothers was known to everyone and, for all their capacity to inflict pain, they also educated generations of Irish politicians, lawyers and businessmen.
So it must be reasonably concluded that the violence of Irish schools in the past had the assent — if unspoken — of the Irish people. To be sure, recent revelations of the sheer scale of clerical rapes have shocked many people. But just as grievously unbeliev able has been the emerging picture of family rapes: of fathers, uncles and grandfathers raping both boys and girls. This suggests that Ireland had a gravely dysfunctional and often sexually infantilised society, whose numerous evils were concealed under an all-enveloping cloak of elaborate sanctimony.
Indeed, the true state religion throughout much of Irish independence seems to have been hypocrisy: the daily communicant could also be the persistent pederast, and the parish priest the systematic sodomite. Yet these characters were nonetheless clearly in the minority — even Colm O’Gorman of One in Four admits that his organisation treated just 235 clients (his word) last year; however, the behaviour of the perpetrators was so flagrant that they clearly thought they were quite beyond discovery. And why not? For who would possibly believe the complaints from the little girl raped by her father before Mass, or the altar boy buggered in the presbytery afterwards? Now the boot is on the other foot. Clergy are presumed guilty by accusation alone, with innocence almost impossible to prove, especially if the alleged offences occurred 40 years ago or more. Worse still, some false accusers have been exposed, but none prosecuted.
Perhaps the abuse of the past was made easier because Irish society has been inclined traditionally to authorise certain sins. Thus a truly perverse and egotistical à la carte morality is still able to justify the 1916 Rising in Dublin; and if some men can exercise some divine authority over the right to life, why should others not be similarly ethically selective over sporting sexually with children? No, it is not quite the same thing, to be sure: after all, urban warfare is child abuse at its most wicked — apart from the many who were bereaved, some 28 children were killed in the 1916 Rising, and I know of no children killed by Catholic priests.
However, as if keen to prove how both forms of deviant egotism can be embodied within a single wretched individual, one of the leaders in 1916, John MacBride, had been found to be sexually violating his 11-year-old stepdaughter, Iseult, a decade earlier. Irish nationalists hushed the matter up, and MacBride was later executed by the British for his role in the Rising. A little late, but still, nice shooting, boys. How much healthier might 20th-century Ireland have been if one of the great ‘heroes’ of independence had been revealed earlier as a child-abuser?
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