Confronting our past - Our response will tell us who we are

WE have been reminded more vividly than is comfortable of the great wrongs, the great hatreds festering in our past over recent days and weeks.

The crushing Ryan report has forced horrors that were ignored for far too long into our lives in a way that would have been far more appropriate decades ago.

Yesterday’s sentencing of former Government press officer Frank Dunlop to two years in jail and a fine of €30,000 for bribing councillors to rezone land on behalf of developers or speculators points to another layer of immorality in our public affairs.

“The word must go out that the corruption of politicians, or anyone in public life, must attract significant penalties,” Judge O’Donnell declared, before handing down the sentence.

Let us hope that Judge O’Donnell’s declaration has relevance for bankers or members of religious communities who have broken our laws. Most of Mr Dunlop’s clients would, after all, have been irrelevant without the support of banks.

The death, in Belfast less than two weeks ago, of William Moore, revived buried memories of one of the most appalling episodes of the Troubles.

Moore was one of the Shankill Butchers, a gang of alcohol-fuelled Loyalist psychopaths who, even in those awful times, reached depths of depravity that, if you believe in these terms, can only be described as Satanic.

That legacy of hatred still cripples communities in the North and was active again this weekend when a Loyalist mob launched a murderous pogrom after a football match involving Glasgow Rangers.

Coleraine community worker Kevin McDaid was kicked to death by a gang of up to 40 people.

Mr McDaid’s widow Evelyn – a Protestant – was savagely beaten as she tried to protect him. Another man, Damian Fleming was critically injured by a gang that had driven to a Catholic area of the town because, as the North’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness put it, they “decided it was a good idea to attack a Catholic area”.

Whether religious difference – or religious “formation” – is at the root of these hatreds, or is just a conduit for something deeper and darker, is a question we may never resolve, but it is one we must ask.

What we must accept is that the hatred that led to the violence – sexual, physical or psychological – recorded in the Ryan report must be confronted and rooted out of this society. Be it the self-hatred of the clerics, the casual hatred shown by a society that tacitly supported the abusers, or the lives of hatred and pain inflicted on abandoned children, it must be confronted.

Yesterday’s first statement from CORI, that the orders involved were not prepared to re-open the Woods deal, suggested that they have yet to realise how sick we have become of their prevarication and self-serving hypocrisy.

A later statement, from the Christian Brothers, in which the order accepted it has a “moral obligation” to people who were abused under its care and plans to review how its resources can be used to help victims, offers some degree of possibility.

However, it must be the State that decides how the resources of the culpable communities are used, the only role the orders can have now is in providing these resources. Otherwise we would have a situation where the culpable decide what the settlement might be.

It does not seem likely either that the orders involved can have a positive hands-on role in this as it is unlikely that any of the abused children, now adults trying to confront these demons, would wish to have any dealings with them.

To even suggest it shows how disconnected some of the religious orders have become from the world the rest of us live in.

In the Dáil yesterday afternoon Taoiseach Brian Cowen reiterated that the present situation is not acceptable and that he intends to consider how it might be resolved. There is huge social and political support for that position and the Taoiseach should do all he can to harness it.

Our first attempt to resolve these issues – the Woods deal – failed, not least because its architects’ world view was formed in the Old Ireland where croneyism was not confined to capitalism. How we respond now is far more important than we imagine. It will tell us what kind of people we have become, if we have learnt from our past. It will tell us if we have the courage to confront one source of some of the hatreds that have destroyed too many people in this society, or if it’s business as usual for the powerful and unaccountable.

It will tell us if we deserve to be considered civilised.