We in media must face up to our own abuse demons

Ireland is the most media-saturated country in the world. But that saturation doesn’t supply variety. For example, radio, on the afternoon the Ferns Report came out, offered an infinity of choices but no alternative. If you went for talk radio, you got a bucketful of Ferns, no matter where you went on the dial.

Of course, the story had a lot going for it. It had sex (albeit perverted), power (albeit fading from the Church), money (in pay-outs), secrets (the legal agreements attached to the pay-outs) and children. But most of all, it had villains. Individual villains like Sean Fortune. Institutional villains like the system allowing men like Fortune to operate.

Media itself, of course, was not to blame in any way. Media would like to ring-fence what happened in Ferns and elsewhere as a product of the institutional church alone. The reality is that media played and continues to play a contributory part in this saga.

Media in the 1980s and 1990s had a number of onscreen jobs on offer. Jobs carrying the perk of frequent soft media appearances. One of them was Acceptable Bishop. Another was Acceptable Priest. In looking for people to fill these posts, media did some pretty hairy recruitment. They picked Eamonn Casey. They picked Michael Cleary. They picked Brendan Comiskey. They picked all of them on the most facile grounds.

Brendan Comiskey, for example, became a national figure because he was available, good-looking and willing to make mildly anti-establishment noises. That was all it took to render him so popular with media that neither his behaviour nor his theories were rigorously questioned.

Only Justine McCarthy has expressed regret for the positive coverage she gave a man who had presented her with evidence on the basis of which she could have written so negative a piece that the Vatican would have stepped in immediately and removed him, thereby perhaps obviating some of the later abuse perpetrated by some of his priests.

The fact is that Bishop Comiskey was supported long past his sell-by date by media in general because he was handy and quotable. Less easy to explain is why Sean Fortune was supported, financially, by state agencies which poured taxpayers' money into him to train young people in media skills about which Fortune knew only the second-hand smidgeon he had gained on a short course in Britain on which he'd been sent to cure him of raping boys.

This wider culpability hasn't been widely noted. Mainly because it's easier to stick with a small cast of characters like sleazy priests and defensive bishops. And to ask rhetorical, rather than real questions: "How could a priest who supposedly believed in God and the Hereafter and the sacredness of the sacraments get little girls to fondle him on the altar?"

We ask the question and answer it with an unspoken assumption of pure evil. Revulsion and categorisation is easier than understanding what we find difficult to imagine and hard to bear.

Freud said that our own death is unimaginable to each of us.

"Whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators. No one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in another way, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality."

Just as all of us convince ourselves that this death thing isn't going to apply in our particular case, clerics interfering with children were serial self-convincers. They convinced themselves, first, that the children wanted it. They convinced themselves, secondly, that it was good for the children. They convinced themselves, third, that they would never be caught. They convinced themselves that they were exceptions, serving God in a special way. Some of them managed to convince their bishops to share at least a part of their rationalisations.

Oh, I hear you say, they were just pretending. No, they weren't just pretending. Sean Fortune believed he was going to heaven after he killed himself. Brendan Comiskey believed there had been no walk-out in the Church to which he brought a child abuser and stood shoulder to shoulder with him on the altar. He probably believes it still. We know enough about eye-witness testimony to know that each of us remembers what it suits our sanity and self-esteem to remember.

Bishops who moved men on to other parishes believed that the shame of being exposed as having done something so morally disgraceful would prevent recurrence, projecting their own sense of sin onto men possessed of a quite different mindset. Remember, the Bishops were men steeped in the concept of conversion, of Road to Damascus challenges that move the most recalcitrant onto a different set of behaviours. They were men amenable to emotional manipulation by abusers who wept and promised and showed remorse. Just as media were amenable to clergymen who could simplify and sloganise and charm. And sing an oul song, into the bargain.

Giving substantial space to an issue doesn't necessarily mean the full truth is being told about that issue. For example, we know that the HSE's management of child sexual abuse allegations shows no allegation made against priests in the past year. Undoubtedly, the publicity around the issue has contributed to this, as have the guidelines introduced in most if not all dioceses at this point. We also know the number of priests in each diocese against whom allegations have been made, how many of them are before the courts, how many of them are deceased.

But this very focus on the clergy ignores the fact that paedophilia is a constant. An ever-present strand within humanity, an unchanging percentage If it cannot find expression within the clergy, it will go elsewhere. Suggesting children are safer because of recent hierarchical steps is as daft as saying that if you took trucks off the road, children would be protected from death in traffic. The majority of road deaths are caused by vehicles other than trucks, just as the majority of child sex abuse is caused by friends and relatives rather than priests. However, the extent and focus of coverage over the past week would leave parents with a quite different impression.

Misleading, too, is the hushed kindness of media questioning of victims who talk about being "in counselling" as if counselling was a state of being that was inevitable, imperative and permanent, when real questions about the efficacy and end results of counselling need to be asked.

Saddest of all, in the short term, media gives victims the illusion that they are valued, when in fact, all that's valued is their narrative of what was done to them.

Then the media caravan moves on. To another issue, another outrage.

The message left stuck to the wall for all but a handful of victims is: "Go back to anonymity. We're done with you."

And we in media don't see that as abuse at all.