Brilliant post.
It may not be popular to say but there are a lot of a really, decent and charitable priests and nuns out there. I feel sorry for them in all of this. But most of them follow blindly to the Church (Capital C). The aforementioned McVerry is an exception.
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Great post. Iām sure the racists and bigots on TFK will line up to like it and see nothing of themselves in it.
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If the state is morally liable should it set up a generous redress scheme?
In my view, yes.
Not necessarily. I believe the report states that beyond 1970 there is no evidence to say the women were mistreated within the homes.* Itās the moral debt as to how they came to be in that situation in many cases. I believe the state has committed to including women from beyond then in redress mechanisms.
*Obviously some homes were worse than othersā¦
Donāt forget the Gardai were also up to their eyeballs in this, often escorting the parish priest and the nuns to the home were the poor woman who got pregnant was to take her away.
My own wife told me how her great grandfather had to run them from the door when they came to take the children away when the wife died. Evil cunts.
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In these cases the mother may not have been dropped into the home, but conveniently relocated to a relative abroad, or even worse, in Cork.
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And what form should the redress scheme take, do you think?
Letās be blunt here. Those at the lowest rungs of society paid the highest price at the hands of the church .
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Those on the lowest rungs always pay the highest price.
Thereās a few ways of looking at it ā The church had little sway over the masses pre famine. A priest would get a belt of a stone as quickly as another transgressor. Iāve argued on here before that a lot of it started with OāConnell - He mobilized the middle classes - the shopkeeper- big farmer and put the priests at the front of the war effort to mobilize and ācivilizeā the peasantry. As you rightly say the famine broke us as a peopleā¦ but the start of the control @TheBird mentions comes back to OāConnell and I suppose the Temperance movement as well. We often hear of this catholic shame ā¦ thereās no such thing. No other catholic country has itā¦ thereās an Irish shame, this is where the famine really played itās part. Post Famine, anything seen as Irish, including language , folk stories, songs etc. etc was seen as backwards - Anything English was seen as progressive and the future. The Famine broke the last of Gaelic Ireland and the church and middle classes used it as a way to beat the already broken peasantry. Kids were badly beaten in schools for speaking Irish. The poor labourers were denied credit by shop keeper or big farmer if they didnt fall into lineā¦ So a strongly placed middle class , headed by the church, slowly took over Irish lifeā¦ through the various struggles you outlined the church became the leading voice and the ordinary person, confused the Irish national / land issue with the church - they were seen as one and the sameā¦ Shame and shaming the poor in particular became a huge instrument of control and one solution for it was to send our problems away behind big walls. The convents, work houses, the mad house etc. - they were all behind big walls. Out of sight out of mind and no one dared question what went on behind them as thatās where we placed our shame.
I could go on and on ā¦ but we still see a lot of that middle class brow beating and urge to shame in society today ā¦ we all do it to a degree when it comes to accents, where people come from or what they wear. The tans have a degree of this as well but our society is a lot tighter knit so more apparent - but OāConnell was in awe of the English victorian middle class, with their puritan ways and aversion to dirt and crudeness, and his vision for Ireland was to emulate that.
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Well the fucking Church should anyway!
They barely contributed to recent redresses. If they were really Christian they would do what ever it took and if necessary have Mass out in the field.
But no.
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So itās all Daniel OāConnellās fault? Interesting.
Old churches should be listed and protected imo. They are beautiful buildings. Turning them into boutique flats or Tesco carparks should be avoided.
The Vatican is awash with stuff they can sell.
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He is trying to contextualise something that is so complex and hard to understand which I find interesting. The Irish physche and the role of epigenetics is something that needs examining. Of course attitudes like yours just look for the longest stick to beat something with.
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Ah - he was a man of his time doing what he thought bestā¦ Not laying out a plan to wipe out a way of life or anything. But you can certainly trace the fabric of 20th century Ireland back to his movementsā¦ Ireland really only became uber catholic post famineā¦ He is just one strand of it.
It was a joke. Chill.
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Well, the problems beset by the sexual abuse redress scheme should provide good learnings on what not to do.
The orders and state should come to an agreement on this and not like the handy one they got the last time. But ultimately the state is responsible for what happens in the state. I believe we, Ireland, owe redress to the people affected.
And even at that itās very hard to contexualize - shur thereās loads of different strands at play that can shape an individualās life, not to mind a society or country.
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The Field film touched on that whole area and in particular the role of the Church. The gap between the priest in the fancy house siding with the middle class Yank, and the peasants working the land exposed directly to the horror of the famine.
The Bull saw it and gave the Church little respect. āNot one priest died during the famineā. Supposedly. And Seamie, his son who was lost to suicide buried on unofficial Church ground.
That really was a class film.
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