|
Brian Rothery
1.The victims 1.The victims If you key ‘Ireland’ and any one of a number of victim related keywords into Google you will get advertisements paid for by Irish solicitors at the top of the results page. Here is an extract from one from Peter McDonnell and Associates: “We represent survivors of abuse worldwide. We have a department dedicated to pursuing claims arising from abuse that occurred in Irish state institutions. Abuse includes: lack of education, child labour, under nourishment, physical abuse, psychological abuse and sexual abuse. “If you suffered abuse in an Irish orphanage/industrial school you may be one of thousands of people who are now entitled to counselling, compensation and education grants as part of a scheme set up by the Irish government. The scheme makes awards to people who were resident in industrial schools and orphanages in Ireland.” The writer Joseph V Montville says that victimhood can be characterized by either an extreme or persistent sense of mortal vulnerability. He also describes it as a state of individual and collective ethnic mind that occurs when the traditional structures that provide an individual sense of security and self-worth through membership in a group are shattered by aggressive, violent political outsiders. The Great Famine burned the sense of mortal vulnerability into the Irish psyche while being ‘under the heel of the British’ ensured that the vulnerability had a long historical basis. What saved victimhood descending into failure and incompetence, a ‘Paddy the Irishman’ status, was the belief that part of the reason for the oppression was our unswerving defence of our faith in the one true church. Any effective assault on that was unthinkable. But what if it too were shattered by an aggressive, violent outside force? Which, as we shall see, is what also happened. Individuals, or groups burdened with a strong sense of victimhood, can be prone to a number of character weaknesses. A principal one of these is that they can be defrauded by predators. The predators offer two main rewards, each of which comes at a cost to either the victim or a third party. The first is a ‘get rich quick’ scheme and the second is ‘make someone pay for your victimhood’. The first damages only the victim who is suckered, but the second damages many innocent third parties and society itself. But first the ‘get rich quick’ schemes.
Pyramid selling schemes These come in many varying forms and some even try to claim to be legal, but regardless of their format all have in common that the participant who is persuaded to join is conned and loses money. This writer lives in a remote part of South Wexford and there is hardly a family on the surrounding roads who does not have a member who has joined a pyramid selling scheme, mainly in this area Amway. Here now is a very revealing story told to me by a local woman who had suffered years of deprivation. She and her husband signed up for some scheme, possibly Amway, years before and part of the experience was spending a motivational weekend in a hotel in Killarney, paid for also by the couple. This was not only the most extraordinary adventure she had ever experienced, but long after when telling me about it, she described it as ‘the happiest time of my life’. This memory of happiness even survived the knowledge that they had been conned and had not made any money but lost it all on the scheme. She had briefly bought happiness and the predators who had supplied it had made more money. In 1997 after the collapse of Communism, Albania, the poorest country in Europe, possibly at Third World levels came close to anarchy following the collapse of a number of fraudulent pyramid selling schemes that deprived domestic savers of an estimated two billion dollars. In 2008 thousands of Colombians rioted after being defrauded in a series of pyramid schemes in which many of them had been mocked by those who took their money. There has probably never been a time since such schemes came into existence that the people of Ireland were not falling for them. Not all the illusions that ‘victims’ fall for promise immediate financial gain: some offer spiritual salvation and cures for illness. Before the fall of the Catholic Church these were manifested mainly in Church-supported (guaranteed) indulgences, where you could both pray for and pay for the remission of sins and entry into heaven. Before them and still surviving after the Church crisis, there are both miraculous manifestations and miracle curers. There is a man in Bridgetown, County Wexford, who competes with Ireland’s top surgeons by removing cancerous tumours and shortly before this was written there were visions being experienced in the west of Ireland. For centuries the more devout Irish even treated water as holy once it was blessed by a priest. Deux ex machina One step up from the supplicant praying for miracles and seeking cures is the Irish inventor. The ‘Irish inventor’ differs from the real inventor in that he (and he is invariably male) appears to want to will his invention both into a manufactured and working state. The invention is usually on paper and untested as the inventor requires considerable state financial support to manufacture it even for the prototype required to test if it works. In most cases the expert he approaches knows at a glance that it will not work, usually because it tries to break some limit law of life such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics (as in a perpetual motion machine or cars run on water) or the Law of Diminishing Returns. The attitude of the Irish inventor is, “Look I’ve invented it; now you go and make it work and pay me.” Compensation Someone close to this writer reported a deprived woman, known to both, as saying, “Someone is going to pay for this.” She was referring to her physical, mental and financial state, all of which were at a low point. Within a year after this with the help of a counsellor she experienced a ‘recovered memory’ and went to the police, causing enormous damage to one man and his family and with a fall-out that affected many others. Before we come to the great moral panic of sex abuse, we have to acknowledge that the Irish were already well versed in the art of getting ‘someone to pay for this’. If you perceive yourself to be a victim, you look for compensation, for someone to pay you for your state, to compensate you. Decades before the Irish discovered sex abuse, the very environment and most leisure and venture-type activities had become areas of opportunity for obtaining compensation. From tripping over pieces of broken pavement to ‘whiplash’ from bumps in cars, to falling off horses in riding schools, the ‘compensation culture’, fanned by unscrupulous solicitors who advertised even on the sides of city buses, severely damaged Irish life and culture. Several years before this was written, this writer’s surgeon admitted that he would not help a stranger lying in the street and his nurse who was listening added that she would not either. Had the Good Samaritan carried out his good deed in the Ireland of the 1980s and 1990s, the one he had saved and placed in a hostel might have been visited by a lawyer asking if the Good Samaritan had lifted him properly or touched him improperly. By the 1990s it had become dangerous to help any stranger, in particular the young, the deprived or the handicapped. Voluntary work collapsed. The moral panic of sex abuse Just before the great emergency of the 2010 banking crisis, Ireland had been experiencing a different crisis. This was the hysterical moral panic about sex abuse and the need to acknowledge and compensate its victims. It remains to be seen whether the new emergency will cause the former one to abate or dissolve away altogether. These two crises, one real and one perhaps largely perceived to be real are related. On July 23 1999 in Ireland, Nora Wall, a nun, was sentenced to life imprisonment by Judge Paul Carney, who accused her of gang rape. She was thereupon savagely pilloried by Ireland’s society and media. Olive Braiden, director of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, hailed the severity of the Carney sentence, as ‘a landmark decision’. Significantly, she also pointed out that the state had responsibility for the home in which Nora Wall worked and noted the compensation potential for other ex-inmates, who might now make further disclosures. When one reads what follows in the Irish Residential Redress Scheme, she was not wrong in this. 21 year old Regina Walsh, a former resident in a home under Nora Wall's supervision, had claimed that when she was 10 she was raped in her bed in the home by a former male resident, while the nun held her down by her legs and ankles. A second ex-resident corroborated this by saying she saw it happen through the doorway. Since first being charged with the rape in April 1997, Nora Wall had made 32 court appearances. After her conviction on July 23, she was committed to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. Handing out the life sentence, Judge Paul Carney made it clear that he believed the charges against her, making her the first woman in Ireland to be convicted of rape and the first person to be sentenced to life imprisonment for that crime. She was 51. Two events of incredible good fortune, or perhaps divine intervention, saved Nora Wall. The first was that her main accuser Regina Walsh said in an interview with The Star on 17 June 1999 that she had also been raped by a ‘black man in Leicester Square’ in London. Then a Kilkenny businessman read the same newspaper article and recognised the name of the ‘witness’ Patricia Phelan as the woman who had made a false allegation against himself. In addition to these two, was the uncovering of a series of procedural blunders by the prosecution. Four days after she was committed to prison, Nora Wall’s conviction for rape was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal on the direction of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The ex-inmate, who had been convicted with her, was also cleared. The implications and consequences of this act of infamy almost defy understanding. Since the Nora Wall travesty, the Irish government has advertised for victims of residential abuse to come forward, make ‘disclosures’ and apply for compensation, by setting up what is now being seen as an even greater travesty in the form of the Irish Residential Redress Scheme. Solicitors jumped on the bandwagon and began to offer services that included trawling for fellow victims to strengthen each individual allegation and the writing of group scripts in which there would be conformity in the stories and which would create credible evidence. The response to the scheme was huge and at last count it had already cost over 1.2 billion Euro. The government that sanctioned it is the one that has since bankrupted the country. Police, prosecutors, judge and jury in the Nora Wall trial believed Regina Walsh’s bizarre accusations, and in the corroborative evidence of her supporting friend, because it was politically and ideologically correct to do so. Their mindset was that child abuse is rampant, so someone must pay for it and the victims must be compensated. UK barrister Barbara Hewson has called it ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’, and it appears that Judge Paul Carney was pandering to current victim ideology and not administering justice. Olive Braiden, of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, in a later major case of false accusations, once again spoke up for the accuser and not for the men falsely accused who faced prison. She was rewarded by the government by being appointed head of the Irish Arts Council.
2. The illusion
The concept of Ireland being the ‘Island of saints and scholars’ had respectable origins in its early centuries of monasticism and learning, but through deprivation, resentment against the ruling British and their apparent denigration of us, the illusion that we were a bastion against Godlessness and a great defender of the one true Church gave us strength and a sense of national pride. The 1932 Eucharistic Congress was perhaps the greatest ever public manifestation of the nation’s pride in its Catholicism. To non-Catholics of the time it must have appeared as frightening as Nazi rallies, as a million or more paraded up the Quays to the Phoenix Park. For Protestants already leaving the state it must have been an intimidating spectacle. An editorial in The Irish Times on January 1st, 1932, talked of the great sense of anticipation, adding that it would be ‘attended by so huge a gathering . . . as Roman Catholic Ireland has not witnessed . . . At a time when atheism is rampant in the world, . . . our country once more will be presented to the world as holy Ireland." And this was the Protestant newspaper. Welcoming the Papal Legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri, Eamon de Valera reminded him of Ireland's strong Irish faith, and recalled the role of the Eucharistic Congress in celebrating the 1500th anniversary of the arrival of Saint Patrick in Ireland. He went on “Repeatedly over more than three hundred years, our people, ever firm in their allegiance to our ancestral faith, endured in full measure unmerited trials by war, by devastation and by confiscation.” The Congress led to a new 1937 constitution that confirmed Ireland as a Roman Catholic state and ensured Catholic social and political thought as the very basis of all social and legislative action in the state. We may have been victims but our people were ‘ever firm in their allegiance to our ancestral faith’. No matter what we had suffered or lost our Church was our rock. But even that pride could go before a great fall, for what if in addition to our sense of victimhood we also lost the only nobility we had – pride in our Church and reverence for the holy men who managed it? Ironically, at the time of the Eucharistic Congress and for about forty years after it, there was substance to the claim that the nation had produced scholars, and was still producing them, in the form of great Irish writers. But these were suppressed and their work banned in the country, along with much else from outside and this did not ease until modern media and technology made it impractical. In her, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds, author Dawn B. Sova found that Ireland held the international record for banning books. 3.The illusion evaporates The second great national eruption of Catholicism was seen in the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul 11 to Ireland. The religious scepticism and demand for independent thought acquired in the 1960s appeared to have been once again swept away under a tidal wave of devout Catholicism as even young people in their masses joined with millions of their elders to celebrate the occasion. This time, however, live television, captured a moment that was to illustrate the Achilles heel of both the Irish Catholic Church and the illusion of a holy Ireland. At a special appearance before a crowd of 200,000 young people at the Ballybrit racecourse in Galway, the warm-up entertainment was provided by Bishop Eamonn Casey and the ‘singing priest’, Father Michael Cleary. The illusion of an island of saints, whatever about scholars, had only about thirteen years still to run, before these two men would begin its evaporation. One can only wonder what kind of society we would have had if the illusion of a holy Catholic Ireland had remained intact during the brief years that became known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, when we became apparently smart and wealthy and world-famous for it, the biggest illusion of all. The illusion of holy Catholic Ireland began to dissipate around 1990 with reports of a number of priests having been involved in child sex abuse. If one were to select a defining moment, however, when the unimaginable began to be imagined it could be a day in 1992 when a woman was televised outside the cathedral in Galway replying to the question about how she felt upon hearing the bombshell news that Bishop Casey had not only had a sexual relationship with an american divorcee, but had a teenaged son by her. She replied that she was shocked, very, very shocked. The illusion of a holy Catholic Ireland that had survived centuries was begining to evaporate. That his partner on the Papal stage in Galway, Father Michael Cleary, was also revealed shortly afterwards to have a wife and son completed the first stage of what was to be an avalanche of scandal for the Church. But even that enormous event which affected the very psyche of the Irish people was not as large as the tidal wave of the moral panic of sex abuse and victimology which continued to sweep over the country. Side by side with the collapse of the Catholic Church and the rise of the moral panic of sex abuse was another emerging revelation, which had also been largely swept under the carpet: we were a nation of dishonest opportunists, plagued by corrupt officials and politicians, whose main objectives were to work the system to their own advantage. Bribery and corruption were endemic and nowhere more so than in matters of planning, land re-zoning and the handing out of contracts. A nation of victims is hardly going to be a nation of honest men and women. The two main avenues of opportunity appeared to be using your position and influence to obtain personal wealth and, lacking any such advantage, finding an opportunity for compensation. This was the state and morality of the nation now offered an opportunity to join the greatest pyramid selling bubble yet – the Celtic Tiger property boom. When that bubble burst in 2008 all the illusions were gone. It is possible that even our sense of victimhood was finally shaken for who could we blame except ourselves? 4. The landscape Those of us old enough to experience the landscape of the 1950s, that is, those of us who took up youth hostelling and cycled the length and breadth of Ireland, may remember two striking images, one mainly in bog land and mountain regions and the other in the West and Donegal. The first was of near naked children standing in the doorways of cottages or stopping to stare from front yards, some as old as eleven or so, dressed only in tops made from old waistcoats or other hand downs from adults, legs often muddy as they played amongst the hens. In other words, scenes of poverty, the lingering legacy of the Famine. The other extraordinary and haunting image, for a future world traveller never to be seen again elsewhere was that of whole empty and ruined villages in the West and North West, still standing testimonies to a people departed in emigrant ships for life in exile. After the collapse of the property bubble in 2010, those whole empty and ruined villages, long since bulldozed, had been replaced with hundreds of new but empty housing estates all over Ireland, this time however follies, still brand new but about to deteriorate into ruins, built with the millions that had bankrupted a whole nation. Apart from bankrupted a people, this bubble had also damaged what had perhaps been one of Ireland’s proudest assets – its beautiful countryside.
5.A way forward What do remain after the financial disaster that has almost destroyed the people of Ireland are those that caused it either through greed or incompetence, those who were charged with the responsibility of governing us properly but who did not or were not educated or skilled enough to do so, or who practised cronyism or engaged in corruption and all those now paying for the consequences. Still lacking are guidelines or policies to ensure the future elimination of corrupt or incompetent politicians and mechanisms for exposing officials who give favours in exchange for bribes. Still in place, however, though greatly chastened in some respects and some only, is the culture of victimhood and the predators, mainly the legal profession, always ready to exploit it. Friends in America, who find themselves in a not altogether different situation, while not perhaps in lack of opportunity but more in what they perceive as excessive and even oppressive state control, gave us this advice: “To-morrow the sun will still rise and the crops will still grow.” We have to find a mix of being responsible citizens at least to the point where we do not encourage anarchy and of keeping some of the government’s incompetence and interference in our lives at bay. We also have to try to minimise the threat to all of us from the corrupt legal profession, which is ever present in the form of the potential for actions against us seeking compensation or in assisting others to make false allegations. There is only one way to do this and it is to operate in our daily business as much as possible within family groups or at least in small neighbourly initiatives where the culture of victimhood is discouraged. To see groups in Wexford and Texas that are trying to do this, look at Wexford emergency self-sufficiency initiative.
|