Barry Clifford: How Do Good People Turn Bad?

                                                                 Nazis On Parade

How do good people turn bad and some even stay that way? That is if they are good people to begin with for it needs weakness to help the decay and maybe that overrides what good really is about; Knowing the difference between right and might makes the former an easy bed partner to the mind and is life to the soul; the latter is an appeasement to a lesser God and a more dangerous corrupt ideology. Rarer still, is that a good strong person rarely goes bad for within their supports is individuality though it may not mean that they are good either. That is what I believe in general describes the variables at work when we want to use the analogy of the Nazi regime and the Catholic clergy that sets about their work of murder either in a concentration camp or from the apparatus of an inquisition; or what separates a Catholic nun from throwing an infant into a septic tank full of hundreds more babies, and we can only hope they were dead when they went into it; or what makes any person wearing any uniform succumb to the gravest of crimes. Indeed Nazi or Catholics do not have a monopoly on extremism yet all are in uniform of some sort that succumb to the mob mentality. All it needs then is a little bit more stoking.

  

                 The Former Prime Minister And President Of Ireland kissing the A Bishops Ring 

And to allow any of it to exist at all needs a certain token support, even if albeit a reluctant one, along with the belief that they are untouchable and forever un-accountable. When these conditions exist we will have crimes of the worst kind, and that to look at it with moral outrage can only mean that a person was living on a remote island alone without any knowledge or co- existence of any other since they were born.

Recent history alone has proven all of these things to a reasoned person though the defenders of these crimes will tell us it was a different time and circumstance. But time is indifferent to these events, and circumstance does not change in any great measure the variables at work already mentioned. In microcosm you see it in the workplace and all too often in the family home everyday, or waiting in a line like a beggar and allow yourself to be humiliated to get an underpaid job just to keep your head above water so you can feed your child.

Yes, a bad economy helps, a no-way out mindset does too, but the tie that binds is the security of the mob that empowers the weak, the feeble minded and  the downright ugly. Without that support they become a fragile water bug that requires no effort to kill it. The mob in Ireland’s case was a Government theocracy that married religion with politics and wrote it into a constitution. Hitler’s reign was little different in it’s design. It’s execution had many similarities that included concentration camps, and only in Ireland did that mean you had to be a Catholic and a child: 160,000 children alone over a 35 year period in a country that never topped three and a half million people.

The Magdalene Children Prisoners At Work

The Germans were suppose to have been a cultured and en-lightened people since the renaissance and Ireland bragged that they were the Island of scholars for a thousand more and yet nothing could stop their return to the dark ages for almost the entire time of the 20^th century. It could be argued that Germany is at pains still regarding it’s past and was best explained, by a now very different point of view, given by a former German soldier that was once part of the mob from that 2^nd World war: “The American’s can say that they were fighting for freedom, the British theirs. What can we say we were fighting for.” 

It is in stark contrast to a nun from her mob that is one of Ireland’s wealthiest  religious orders who said recently about the Magdalene laundries/prisons that they ran for profit: “It was part of the system and the culture of the time.” 

Barry Clifford

Stories of survival should not be hidden in 'shame'

It was wrong to give a guarantee of anonymity to both victims and abuser

IT IS exactly five years since the Ryan report into the residential institutional abuse of children was published. When he presented his report, Mr Justice Sean Ryan said categorically that the State authorities had been systematically and continuously "submissive and deferential" to the religious orders which ran the hellholes that were industrial schools (and also the Magdalene laundries, although they were not included in the scope of the report).

When his commission of enquiry had originally been set up, it had been headed by Ms Justice Mary Laffoy; she resigned in despair because she found herself faced with a brick wall in attempting to get co-operation from the religious orders involved.

Judge Ryan stuck with it; and he gave us a report which proved in the face of every attempt at denial and justification, that children were denied their rights, denied an education, physically abused, frequently sexually abused, half-starved, and terrorised. Thirty five-thousand children were committed to industrial schools over the years.

When the Ryan report was published, Brother Kevin Mullan, the head of the Christian Brothers in Ireland, one of the orders indicted, said he and his people would continue to co-operate with "those seeking to explore" what had happened. But the exploration would not include the naming of the individual members of the order who were responsible for the inhumanity. The Irish State had, after all, guaranteed them protection and anonymity.

A few months after publication of the Ryan report, Judge Yvonne Murphy presented the report of her enquiry into the sexual abuse of children in the Archdiocese of Dublin. Its findings, let us remember, were equally damning. The then Vatican Ambassador to Ireland, Monsignor Giuseppe Leanza said in reaction that communications between the Irish Government and the Vatican would be "improved" to avoid "misunderstandings".

What he described as misunderstandings had been the deliberate attempt to prevent Ms Justice Murphy gaining access to files in the Vatican archives which contained documentary proof of the abuse.

But the evidence came out despite church obfuscation, denial, and obstruction. It came out in no small part thanks to the men and women, the dispossessed who had been abused, often to the point of emotionally and mentally destroyed lives, who found the courage to tell their stories in face of the awesome power of the Roman Catholic Church, the monolith that had been buttressed for generations by the Irish State.

And many of them later went on to give evidence to the Residential Institutions Redress Board, an indignity in itself: their suffering had been proved, but the State was still prepared to subject them to a further ordeal which seemed to many of them to be an attempt to minimise the monetary compensation to which they were morally entitled.

In return for their courage, the State guaranteed that the documents which contained their testimony would be destroyed. It was to be their "protection", giving them some kind of empowerment over their personal dignity.

The guarantee of anonymity applied alike to victims and perpetrators. But neither guarantee should have been given, in the interests both of justice and of compassion. The guilty men and women of the religious orders did not deserve to escape their shame, for whatever reason: "the culture of the time" or any other spurious excuse. Nor should they have been immune from prosecution where their behaviour merited it, regardless of old age or infirmity.

Equally, and for entirely different reasons, the victims of abuse should not have been assured by the State that their documentary testaments would be destroyed. The assurance was akin to the legal custom of not revealing in court the identity of a rape victim: but a victim has nothing to be ashamed of.

The abuse victims whose sad stories formed the evidence for the Ryan report had learned to keep their stories secret: they had been well-trained in the industrial schools which stole their youth, and often their innocence. They had lived their lives believing they were worthless, their childhoods something to be ashamed of, bewildered and bereft. When they summoned up the courage to have their stories heard, they should have been helped to realise that they had nothing to be ashamed of, and that the only people shamed by their experiences were the religious authorities and indeed, the State authorities who had allowed themselves to be browbeaten into complacency by the prevailing Catholic culture.

The victims should have been given the opportunity and encouragement to understand that they could be proud of their stories and their will to survive.

But not having taken the trouble to help the victims to come to terms with that simple premise, the State assured them that what they had lived with as their "shame" would remain a secret. They were assured when they gave testimony to the Ryan Commission and to the Redress Board that more than two million documents which had been the basis for both reports would be destroyed.

And now the Government has agreed in principle that the Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn may bring forward amending legislation to retain the documentation instead of destroying it. It is to be deposited in the National Archive, and sealed for at least 75 years, with access after that to be subject to very "strict safeguards".

Not merely is that a betrayal of a solemn promise to the victims, it is also pointless. In my opinion, the only reason to retain the documents would be for them to remain as a scar on our national consciousness, available at all times to remind us of our inhumanity as a society. It is a reminder that should hang over us, rather than having it concealed until the generation which colluded in the guilt is long dead.

The victims should have demanded, and should have been encouraged, to name themselves in pride. That they weren't was a betrayal. And this latest move is a double betrayal.

Emer O' Kelly

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Barry Clifford: Throw The Wee Things Into The Ould Septic Tank

Sr Theresa looked up at the Mother Superior for a bit of direction. “Ah, sure another bastard child died last night. What will I do?”

“That’s the one from the illegitimate whore I expect.” Mother Superior replied dryly.

“ What will I do with the bag of bones that’s left?”

“ That is left Sr Theresa.” Mother Superior corrected as proper diction was one of her strong points. “Throw the wee thing into the ould septic tank.”

Sr Theresa hated the job. It was the air you see and even once she peered inside. She would never look there again, throwing the skeleton bodies in with shut eye thereafter.

The rancid smell of the other 700 and more infants decaying and decayed bodies was heaven within, for many battalions of insects with their families had set up permanent camp in the tank. There was the larger feeders about: rats, cats, and foxes that found their way here by that sweet scent of death. Some of them did not make it out of the tank either for gluttony killed a few here and there, while many more robust rats bred within the hollow stomach walls of the dead children. It was survival of the fittest as the only reward for second prize was death.  

Sr Theresa busied herself for someone had to do the job and knew she was doing God’s work. She knew too other infants did not die quick enough in this place over the years work for starvation can be a slow process, so the other nuns and her improvised. Drowning was quick, a pillow quicker, and throwing them over stairwells was the quickest of them all. But she was irked a bit recently for it was said the sound of crying was coming from the septic tank, babies crying.

And the talk of it was growing.

So one night she waited to find out for herself. She crept tip-toe from the convent hall to the tank without telling anyone. The wind picked up as she waited in the darkness under a tree. Then the rains came. She craned her neck, pricked her ears until her whole body was a satellite dish wired for sound. Then she heard it and sounded as clear as her conscience. She heard it again and could formulate at last the words: “Mama, Mama.” Her heart missed a beat.

Then she saw it: Two cats in mating frenzy; one wanting and the other not. She threw a stone at them and another as they scurried in full retreat. She fell back relived. That was all it had been she thought. She turned to go back. By the first step she heard the crying again and this time it was louder. One part of her told her to run and the other was a promise to herself that this must not happen again.

She was not a superstitious nun and talk of ghosts was irrational which drove her forward to open the septic tank. In the almost total darkness inside it looked like everything moved. A heaving mass of pulsating animals feeding and gorging only on death and within its vortex the sound of crying started again. Its plaintive tone grew, it’s pain with it. The panic started with the throbbing of her temple and then Sr Theresa felt something gnawing at her foot. A large rat was not for letting go for the frenzy of his hunger did not part the living from the dead. Her eyes widened in terror but the utter horror was yet to come as the wind howled around her lifting her from the mantle of the septic tank to drop her within the grey and dark liquid of decay and bone. Her black habit dragged her down and the last thing she ever saw before she hit the bottom of the pit was…………..                 

  

By Barry Clifford

In memory of the 796 infants whose bodies were found in a septic tank in a Mother’s and babies home for profit run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam Co Galway. Many of the mothers of the children were buried on the grounds of this prison that closed in 1961. They were classed as whores and their children as bastards, and all this murder was done under a quasi- legal pact between Church and State that were inseparable even within its constitution.

May they rest in peace.

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