Liz’s irrational tirade against the Church serves no useful purpose

IT IS one of the more simple and predictable tricks of public relations that when you are about to put the boot in, you should start by saying something nice about your victim.

That approach has a number of positive results. It catches your opponent off-guard and it adds dramatic effect to what you are about to say. It also establishes your credibility as a fair and honest broker in the ears of your listeners.

So it was, perhaps, that when Deputy Liz O’Donnell rose to address the Dáil last week about the relationship between Church and State in the wake of the Ferns report, she had “a word of support” for all those priests who had done no wrong. “They deserve our support and sympathy at this difficult time. The majority of priests are living out their Christian message in an exemplary fashion,” she said.

But what followed had little of that spirit of fairness and balance that had gone before. O’Donnell was not wrong about the destructive effects of abuse on victims or about the “silence, betrayal and inaction on the part of the Church”. Her diagnosis of “systemic maladministration and dereliction of duty” was also fair and accurate in the light of the Ferns report. But she then embarked on a remarkable rant in which she painted a relentlessly dark picture of Church and State collusion that, she would have us believe, continues into the present.

The key point of her speech was her call for an end of the ‘special relationship’ between Church and State, and her demand for specific acts of decommissioning “to demonstrate that disconnect”. There must be “no more consultation”, O’Donnell insisted, between Church and State on IVF, abortion, stem cell research, adoption, etc.

The Church’s role in the provision of education should be radically addressed, and the Church’s finances should be probed. She also seemed to take direct aim at Bertie Ahern: “The cosy phone calls from All Hallows to Government Buildings must end.”

O’Donnell’s speech indicates there are really two kinds of anger to be seen in the public’s response to revelations of child sexual abuse and institutional incompetence and mismanagement within the Church. The first kind of anger is shared between believers and non-believers alike. It is sharp and focused, and shot through with sorrow. It is honest about the wider reality of society’s failings towards abuse victims.

Its ultimate aim is to correct and reform Church leadership structures - to make sure that when problems arise in future they will be swiftly and competently handled. And that people, especially children, are protected.

The second kind of anger is much more irrational. There tends to be a lot of confusion between the wrongs of the past and the realities of the present. Judgement is often clouded by memories of past abuses or heavy-handedness by the Church. This second kind of anger is destructive because, in its fury, it hits out at good people doing good things in the present. It can also be manipulative. It may even try to harness people’s outrage to further a separate agenda, entirely removed from the issue of child abuse.

You expect, in a time of crisis, politicians to recognise that public anger is something that has to be focused so that it retains its constructive, reforming force, while not damaging social cohesion.

It is fairly immediately obvious from O’Donnell’s speech that she failed that test. For one thing, we had this peculiar reference to All Hallows.

At best, O’Donnell perhaps imagined that All Hallows is where the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin operates and she therefore felt that, given Bertie Ahern’s personal links with the place, it was a situation too close for comfort.

At worst, she knew well that All Hallows was merely a centre of lay and priestly formation, but chose to make the link anyway - the better to pretend that faceless Churchmen were running the country.

Or perhaps she believes that no Government minister should have any informal contacts with Churchmen, full stop. Which party, I wonder, should stay away from the St Vincent de Paul fundraisers, the myriad public welfare project launches, reports and think-ins, the hurling matches, the school plays, the parish concerts? O’Donnell’s speech contained various inaccuracies and exaggerations. “One recalls,” O'Donnell announced with great clarity, “de Valera’s drafts of Bunreacht na hÉireann being edited page by page by the hierarchy”. But this was tabloid-level Dáil debate on her part.

ONLY last week I heard Dr Gerard Hogan of Trinity College refute the much-touted argument that Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was the closet author of the Irish constitution. The credit, according to Hogan, must go to civil servant John Hearne, the one-time legal adviser to the Department of External Affairs.

Much of the Church’s wish-list for the constitution was in fact rejected by the drafters. O'Donnell would not have had to Google for very long to clarify that.

None of this is to deny that there was some truth in what O’Donnell had to say about the past relationship between Church and State. On the contrary, it is precisely because there was ‘some truth’ that it could be so misleading in other ways. There are several problems with her call for an “end to consultation” between the State and the Church.

First, does she not realise that, even if the Catholic Church leadership is not democratically elected, it still speaks for a large number of people in this country? And is it only the Church that should be excluded from the great public discussion about abortion, IVF, adoption, homosexuality - to name just a few areas of public policy she mentioned?

And does she feel the same way about the right of other churches, trade unions, the GAA, the IFA, etc, to lobby or be consulted about issues of concern to them? Should we be suspicious about the fact that O’Donnell’s list of prohibited topics was so selective? There was no mention in her speech of the Church’s representations to Government about aid to the Third World, for example. Would she ban Trócaire or Archbishop Diarmuid Martin from doing a spot of lobbying there?

Or would the fact that she is broadly in agreement on these points lead her to keep schtum? If, in fact, O’Donnell is running a selective agenda of her own on the back of public outrage over the Ferns report, should we be concerned?

Colm O’Gorman, of One in Four, seemed to take issue with Bertie Ahern’s decision to contradict her. But the rest of us may wonder whether, in fact, O’Donnell was doing a disservice to victims of abuse by trying to ram home her own agenda.

By presenting an outdated notion of a priest-ridden society, in order to exclude the Church from consultation on sensitive social issues, O’Donnell was doing us all a disservice. “Get off the stage and make it easier for us ‘liberals’ to get our point across,” would appear to be her message to the Church.

Now that would be a cosy arrangement.