Book Review: Mary Kenny pines for Catholic Ireland of bygone days
- The Way We Were: Catholic Ireland Since 1922
- Mary Kenny
- Columba Books, €19.99
Many languages, unsurprisingly, have words that reflect the culture they spring from, words that defy easy, off-the-cuff translation and are regarded as having almost an exclusive relevance in their source society. They assume the characteristics that shaped their wellspring.
The Norwegian word-cum-philosophy of janteloven is powerful and simple — it puts society ahead of the individual in ways all but forgotten in the wider, more materially voracious and ostentatious West.
The Portuguese word, saudade, is another definition of difference. It is described as a deep state of melancholy stirred by a longing for something lost, a cutting ache for something that will never return.
That idea, that backwards yearning, is so alive in this society that it is surprising that we do not have a precise equivalent. Nevertheless, the saudade idea endures here with an unrelenting energy in how we think and behave, maybe even in how we hope.
Some academics suggest the Irish word, cumha, comes close but is usually not seen as carrying the layer of delusion implicit in Portugal’s saudade. Ever more desperate Fianna Fáil deputies, longing for the long-gone days they were a law unto themselves because they had been entrusted with a Dáil majority may be the most obvious Irish cohort wrapping themselves in saudade but they are not by any means alone.
Journalism is sometimes all too grandiosely described as the first draft of history and may well sometimes be. However, not all journalists, no matter how authoritative or respected, make reliable historians.
Some, often the very best, bring a personal perspective that elevates their work while serving a cause. They report to campaign, they record to achieve an objective. Others still are selective and avoid events or developments that challenge their worldview.
There seems little enough to criticise in this advocacy if it is openly and honestly done. Mary Kenny, a venerable figure of English language journalism, has worked like this for decades and her book, The Way We Were: Catholic Ireland Since 1922, continues in that vein.
The thatched cottage and the whitewashed walls of the cover illustration, the bicycle too, give a hint of what lies within — the contents may not be Hollywood hokey but neither are they likely to win the Wolfson Award. It is a softish-focus meander through the main events in this Republic over the last century, particularly those Kenny may have worked on over her long career.
The almost random structure of the first half of the book may not impress the Wolfson judges but its immediacy and its intimacy with transformative events in our recent history offers that most valuable tool for historians — feet-on-the-ground context. This is acknowledged on the contents page even if the balancing of the subjects chosen can seem skewed.
That impression might be strengthened if Kenny’s book is compared to Derek Scally’s very recent bestseller, The Best Catholics In The World.
It would be wrong — and too unkind — to say that Scally confronts while Kenny sidesteps. The writers are of very different generations and march in very different zeitgeists. The contrast in the two books does though raise a valid and pressing question for journalists and historians — how can the horrors of the clerical abuse scandals be, at this remove, discussed in a way that engages a readership, in a way that leads to understanding rather than destructive acrimony?
Kenny touches on the scandals that led to the collapse of formal Catholicism in Ireland, though not in any comprehensive way. They are acknowledged as facts but maybe not as the destructive forces they were.
She devotes far more attention to the divorce, marriage equality, and abortion referendums, and the political machinations around them, but then they are the defining issues of her time.
Even at this relatively short distance, it is very difficult to convey the sheer nastiness, the barely concealed hatreds generated around those issues. We may have forgotten all too quickly the real bravery of those who led that change. The reality is that some of the not-an-inch rallies of those years make a Trump MAGA rally seem almost twee.
She makes what can only be described as passing references to the Kerry Babies scandal — surely the most revealing of all Irish Catholic scandals — and the tragedy of the cold, lonely deaths of Anne Lovett and her baby.
The efforts, sanctioned by our parliament but resisted tooth-and-claw by conservative Catholics, to rebalance the patronage of schools funded by this state get just a few sentences — as does the impact the hierarchy’s old insistence that any child of a mixed marriage must be raised as a Catholic.
The second half of the book —Profiles From My Time’ — considers the legacies of a dozen influential individuals. Ms Kenny argues that these people, as diverse as Alice Glenn and Danny La Rue, were all to one degree or another made better people, better citizens by their Catholicism.
That may well be the case but it is not always possible to dismiss the feeling that you can sometimes get at a funeral mass when the chief celebrant reveals to the assembly that the dead person was, despite persistent indications to the contrary, a committed church goer with a deep faith.
In that section, she advances a view of Legion of Mary founder Frank Duff that challenges the conventional narrative. The man she describes was indeed saintly. She generously remembers Peter Sutherland — he helped fund one of her plays — but does not shy away from including comments from a very critical obituary.
Her piece on Gerry Fitt, a democrat committed to peace, and the reasons he and his family had to flee Northern Ireland is a timely reminder of what really went on in this island as it runs counter to the “there was no alternative” argument so often advanced today.
This, like the Irish Catholicism of half a century ago, is a la carte history but that does not mean it is not valuable.
It is if you accept it is offered with an over-riding sense of loss, of saudade — regret for what is gone and will not return.
It would be wrong too to imagine that this view of the past is not widely shared though it is hard to see how it might attract new recruits as time passes.
Ms Kenny has worked with language at the very highest level for over half a century so maybe she might find the comfort so obviously longed for in this book in that old Irish phrase: Níl cara ag cumha ach cuimhe — memory is grief’s only friend.
