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	The "Bad Eggs" of Ireland's Abuse Scandal By Frank O'Shea Eureka Street June 5, 2009 http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=14241 It's long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man –W. B. Yeats, 'The Fisherman' He was the saintliest man I ever knew. He was a teaching brother and a success in the classroom, though less so at the sports coaching which was expected of every member of staff — anyone who trains a football team with an open and well-thumbed book of the rules in one hand is not likely to produce a winning combination. He spent much of the second half of his working life in houses of formation, preparing the young brothers for their lives as religious. Those he trained told me that his own life was his greatest lesson. Later, in the community in which I got to know him, he would annoy his confreres by clearing the table before anyone had a chance for seconds. His view was that we should always get up from a meal feeling that we could have eaten more. In hospital on one occasion, his superior had to call on the vow of obedience to persuade him to drink the certain black alcoholic beverage which a kindly nun had suggested to build up his fragile frame. A biblical scholar, in his final years he was involved in a Christian-Jewish fellowship group and led small local prayer groups. All of this is by way of saying that Brendan (not his real name) was a humble, saintly man. He is one I 'call up to the eyes' as counter to the members of religious orders involved in the awful things perpetrated on children in institutions in Ireland in the early and middle years of last century, as revealed in the recent Ryan Report. Brendan thought orders of teaching brothers and nuns had long ago served their purpose and should be encouraged to fade quietly away. This opinion did not win favour among his confreres any more than his other belief that the Church should promote temporary vocations. His view was that teaching orders should have closed their books when the welfare state began taking seriously the responsibility to educate all children for free. If we were to take a frame of European history bounded by the French Revolution and the 1829 granting of Catholic Emancipation in Britain and Ireland, we would be in the era of the foundation of many teaching orders. The Christian Brothers, Marists, Presentations and Patricians all come from those years; so do the sisters of Mercy, Presentation, Holy Faith, Brigidine, Loreto and Irish Sisters of Charity. In Australia, the Good Samaritans and the Josephites were a little later. The De La Salle Brothers, the model for all of these non-clerical teaching orders, were founded a century earlier. In Ireland, the teaching orders played a crucial role in producing the first generation of civil administration after independence. While the emerging professional classes tended to come from elite private schools — Jesuit, Holy Ghost, Cistercian, Benedictine, Carmelite, Church of Ireland — the Brothers' schools, operating on a shoestring, provided the backbone of 'the excise', a catch-all term for the different branches of the public service. During the first quarter century away from the colonial umbrella, that public service had to cope with the Great Depression, a world war, and internal problems caused by dissidents keen to prolong old conflicts. That the country reached the second half of the century, albeit on wobbly feet, was no trivial outcome. In all schools in those times, the practice of corporal punishment was taken for granted. If it was more vigorously applied in schools run by members of religious orders, that is a shame with which they now live and in all cases, a betrayal of the often expressed wish of their founders. In those years too, the brothers and sisters took over special schools or other semi-punitive institutions set up by unenlightened state and church authorities. The Ryan Report shows how disastrous those ventures were for the unfortunate inmates, and also for the orders involved. Which brings me back to Brendan. After a lifetime as a student and teacher in schools run by different orders of brothers, I am inclined to take the view that abuse was perpetrated by 'bad eggs', in which case the word 'endemic' when referring to abuse is an appalling dysphemism. In a kind of perverse algebra, I try to persuade myself that Brendan can be used to cancel out the bad egg. The alternative, that the abuse was indeed as endemic in some institutions as Ryan concludes, is too awful to contemplate.
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