The story of 150, 000 boys and girls abused in the care of the church, supervised by the state, has been described as a holocaust of sorts. I find the notion distasteful, but they do share a common bond. The cowardice of ordinary people to do the right thing.
Whilst some will demand pots of money from religious orders, and whilst Diarmuid Martin does his best say what needs to be said, much of the outcry over the report ignores the fact, that we, our elected officials and our civil servants failed to hold the church to account, as was our duty. We failed to get beyond parochial defensiveness when the failings of our industrial schools was exposed by outsiders, irrespective of their pre-eminence in the field of childcare. We failed every child and woman and man who was ever sent to places that Dickens would have lambasted a century before.
Ireland is at a low ebb. The economy is in tatters, our morale is rock bottom. People are scared and leaders are doing nothing but grin offensively from posters or fast tracking passports. In the midst of that, you can be guaranteed we will be told not to dwell on the past, not to examine who we are and who we were, to repress what cannot be repressed.
We have never defined ourselves beyond crude caricatures, a reaction to the London Illustraed News showing us to be dressed monkeys. We never came to terms with the famine, with colonialism, with the Great War or with our movement from the apron strings of Britain to those of Rome.
It's more than just about money. It's about looking at our true selves and the ugliness of our national soul, gnarled by decades of self deception and complacency.
