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	Kevin Myers: Our Mob-law Cowardice Is to Blame for Legacy of Abuse By Kevin Myers Irish Independent December 1, 2009 http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-our-moblaw-cowardice-is-to-blame-for-legacy-of-abuse-1959295.html Nineteen-seventy-four, and two evil young paedophile priests, Francis McCarthy and Bill Carney, were unleashed into the world. For years, they enjoyed the tacit protection of the Church, An Garda Siochana and the State, as they violated scores of boys. That same year, loyalist bombs exploded in Dublin and Monaghan, killing 34 people. Within days, Garda Special Branch had the names of 10 UVF men from the Portadown-Dungannon area responsible. But someone in government then decided not to seek the extradition of these men, because the Republic did not want the precedent established in one direction, leading thereby to extradition of IRA men northwards. For it was, implicitly, better that the IRA campaign continue, than terrorists of any kind face their just deserts. For this is the simple truth: if the institutions of justice are maimed for one, they are maimed for all. You cannot take tiles off a roof and tell it to admit rain but not snow. Law was already blinkered for the Church: it was no great stretch to blinker it for the IRA. Let me remind you: at around this time Martin McGuinness was caught with 1,000 lbs of explosive. He got six months. Moreover, the Catholic Church operated in a democracy. Its abuses were done with the connivance of generations of politicians, garda officers and judges and, ultimately, the Irish people. Any journalist who in the 1970s had written about those evil creatures McCarthy and Carney would have been destroyed by the courts and the institutions of the State. Home Rule was Rome Rule. As JM Whyte observed: "Mr Cosgrave refused to legalise divorce; Mr de Valera made it unconstitutional. Mr Cosgrave's government regulated films and books. Mr de Valera's regulated dance halls. Mr Cosgrave's governments forbade propaganda for the use of contraceptives. Mr de Valera's banned their sale or import. In all this, they had the support of the third party of Irish politics, the Labour Party." These are the parties which drew their inspiration from the so-called Republican rising of 1916. In reality, they were different expressions of a virulently political Catholicism, which -- with the assent of the Irish people -- effectively sought to guarantee state power to the Catholic Church. And yes, you can say that the Irish people were coerced and intimidated by the Catholic Church. But that church was not parachuted down from on high. It was the church of the people, and its authority was often enforced by cultural lynch-mobs, of the very kind which in the past week have been gleefully kicking the prone torso of the Catholic Church. Indeed, in many regards the Irish Catholic Church and Fianna Fail had so much in common. Both were authoritarian, hypocritical, philistine and arrogant. Most important of all, both intrinsically knew that the law did not apply to them. After all, it was Fianna Fail ministers who set up the Provisional IRA. Fianna Fail administrations largely tolerated the existence of IRA units throughout the country, and only the most blatant or the most stupid IRA men ended up in jail. Is this so very morally different from what the Catholic Church was doing? Yes, you can argue that the Catholic Church covering up for the child-abusers in its ranks was qualitatively different from the Irish State allowing the IRA to remain in existence. But this is mere pedantry. Which did more damage to the children of the island Ireland between 1970 and 1996? The IRA or the Catholic Church? And which is worse: to feel a boy's genitals or blow his father apart? At the height of the Troubles, Ian Paisley's vile rag, 'The Protestant Telegraph' specialised in apparently unsubstantiated and lurid tales of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests all over Ireland, alleging that these deeds were concealed by the State, by courts, politicians, and gardai. Such revolting fantasies were rejected and condemned by all right- thinking people. The Republic of Ireland might be bad, but it was not that bad. Oh, but it was. We know that now. Maybe no one in authority knew all the details, but almost all politicians had been certainly educated, probably flogged and possibly abused by the Christian Brothers. Many had been sexually violated, or were aware of boys who had been. But none, not even de Valera, did anything to stop such evil when in power. The Christian Brothers remain the only uniquely Irish contribution to global, post-Reformation Catholicism: and their great legacy may be characterised by institutionalised abuse, republican murder and institutionalised hypocrisy. This is hardly the Trinity that St Patrick embodied in the shamrock. And what is the great and enduring Irish quality which allowed this horror to continue for decades, just as that same quality tolerated the IRA murder gangs? It is the most defining of all Irish characteristics: moral cowardice. Mob-law cowardice will now deny the fourth part of the Brothers' legacy: the selflessness and devotion of the majority of them, as with all the clergy, who dedicated their lives to their Church and to the welfare of others. Contact: kmyers@independent.ie
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