Ireland's Holocaust? Some Context, Please!

Following the publication of the Ryan Report, the Dublin 4 intelligentsia and chattering class have embarked on a frenzied irrational campaign to crucify the religious orders which administered the Irish State sanctioned system of industrial schools and orphanages. Due process be damned!

The Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy and other orders should be disestablished forthwith and their assets confiscated by the state. Priests, brothers and nuns, even if they had no personal complicity in the outrages, must be ostracized and expelled into an internal exile.

Rabid irrationalism from the intelligentsia on this issue is very much the norm rather than the exception. In typical overreaction, Sunday Independent columnist Emer O'Kelly denounced members of religious orders as "greedy, bloodsucking, cruel, dishonest, unprincipled, immoral men and women." Settle lady. Settle! Pardon us for thinking that the Fourth Estate should leaven the public discourse with objective intellectual discernment.

Such rabidity would be understandable coming from the abuse victims themselves. However, it is completely out of bounds from an arrogant self righteous intelligentsia, which was a chief enabler in sacrificing the Irish soul on the materialistic altar of the Celtic Tiger.

Flailing and floundering, the punditocracy is unable to come to terms with the economic collapse of said feline, and its own complicity in it.

In a supreme effort at psychological displacement, unable to countenance their own failures, the chattering classes and talking heads lash out blindly by putting a bull's eye on the back of every nun, priest and brother. Actual culpability is irrelevant!

Outrageous abuses - sexual, physical and psychological - have been illuminated by the Ryan Report. However, a sense of context and relativity is badly needed.

Recently, the horrific episode was described as "Ireland's Holocaust". The implication being that the religious orders provided the apparatus, the Mengeles and the Hoess and the ordinary SS functionaries, that ran the "camps" and perpetrated the horrors. But, if the contemporaneous judiciary committed the child victims to the custody of the abusers, did it not play the role of a co -conspiratorial Reich court system?

The Gardai and the social service system? Were they not the Gestapo and the SS who gave effect to the judiciary's decision by loading the trains? Perhaps they were just "following orders"?

And what of the politicians and senior civil servants? The Eichmanns? They funded and conspired in the administration and maintenance of the system.

The State supplied the resources and provided the victims. Without that support the abuses could not have occurred.

When it comes to assigning culpability, there are more than enough perpetrators to go around and they are not all wearing clerical garb.

Was the expenditure of millions of euros really necessary to reveal what was already a great open secret? The State, of course, will assert an incredulous deniability. However, Irish society smelled the stench from the "camps".

While there is plenty of evidence that politicos and civil servants were cognizant, Sean and Siobhan Citizen also had a strong inkling. And, the contemporaneous media also knew but were damming in their complicit silence.

Awareness was so pervasive that it was common for parents to threaten their misbehaving children with dispatch to these institutions. And, the institutionalized themselves, who were furloughed into the local communities to provide slave labor for local farmers, provided ample anecdotal and empirical evidence.

But State, Church and the establishment conspired in the maintenance of an environment of unquestioned authoritarianism. Group think reigned supreme.

In that context, ostracization, ridicule and ruin would have greeted any potential whistleblower, religious or lay, who dared to challenge the status quo.

It is rank dishonesty to demand accountability only from the religious orders for this Kafkaesque nightmare.

The punditocracy should be insisting on bringing the entire range of actors to book? Shouldn't the complicit agencies of the State also be in the dock? Without State complicity the industrial schools and orphanages could never have operated. As a more enlightened talking head opined, "It was a conspiracy between government, judiciary and Church."

To extrapolate these abuses from the context of their time is intellectually dishonest.

In the struggle for survival, which epitomized the early decades of the Southern State, society was brutal and harsh. Authority was sacrosanct. Corporal punishment was endemic in the national and secondary school systems. Many Irish people, whose school years occurred before the 1980s, will have their repertoire of class - room horror stories.

For many young minds, school was a place of tension, fear and arbitrary violence. Indeed, more Irish children suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of lay school teachers than ever did from religious educators.

So, should we now indict several generations of Irish lay teachers even though most, within the context of the times, were simply strict disciplinarians, demanding taskmasters and concerned educators, rather than perverse abusers?

A veteran garda sergeant, who had joined the force in the 1950s, bemoaned the fading of an informal, effective method of dealing with juvenile offenders. It had been acceptable practice at the beginning of his career for a garda to take aside a youth who might have been "acting up" and give him "a bit of a hiding" to "straighten him out".

The sergeant elaborated that usually the deviant saw the light. The youth's family was not embarrassed, as there were no formal proceedings to be reported in the newspaper. And, there was no criminal record to handicap the young deviant in later life.

This methodology, no doubt, squashed many a budding criminal career in its infancy. Yet, no doubt, in some cases, brutality and abuses of process resulted.

However, should we now indict several generations of gardai en masse for the excesses of the few, and for doing what was contemporaneously acceptable?

A mature reflection on the role of religious orders in Irish life will reveal their enormous contribution. The selflessness and self sacrifice of brothers, nuns and priests ensured that quality secondary education and further academic opportunity were available to generations of Irish children who otherwise would not have had that opportunity. Religious educators were tough and demanding. Certainly, some individuals were abusive and perverse.

Only the unsophisticated observer, or those with motives other than justice, would extrapolate what is effectively a now alien dimension of Irish social history out of its context and condemn an entire class of people.

Institutions, religious or lay, did not perpetrate abuses, individuals did. Certainly, any perpetrators that can be identified should be prosecuted. So, too, should complicit State agents, who knowingly delivered children into such horrors. And no! Millions need not be squandered enriching the barrister class in doing so!

The net should also be widened to include investigation and prosecution of abuses perpetrated in the national and secondary school systems, with full consideration being given to the context of the time.

This must be a quest for justice, and not yet another dimension of an ongoing campaign of anti religious zealotry.

Patrick Hurley blogs at: irish-american-news-opinion.blogspot.com