We saw the clergy and gardaí at their professional best in Midleton

THE last fortnight has been grim and harrowing for the town of Midleton and for those of us throughout the country who have watched events there from afar through the media.

We were all transfixed by the fact that a young boy had gone missing. We all shared the sense of shock when his remains were found and everyone was touched by the moving funeral last Saturday. This week the town was the scene for the detention and charging of a young student with manslaughter.

Amid all the tragedy of Robert Holohan’s death and the related events, two groups of people played a prominent role. The gardaí were inevitably to the forefront in dealing with this tragedy. From the initial organisation of the search for Robert, the garda approach to the investigation has been one of professionalism, thoroughness and humanity.

The garda effort combined the best aspects of traditional Irish policing with sophisticated modern practice and involved community engagement parallel with the application of forensic science and mobile telephony technology. There was always an assured sense from the gardaí that they would move the investigation along.

One particularly effective aspect of the garda handling of the investigation was the sophisticated media management. From the outset the garda approach to the media was organised and open but focused on advancing, not hindering, the investigation. The priority was to inform the public as much as possible. They worked with the media to focus public attention on particular detail in order to generate further information and leads. The gardaí also did very well to contain the inevitable swirl of theories, rumours and fears which attach themselves to a crime of this horror and profile. All along their primary focus was on the fact that they may ultimately have to prove every aspect of the chain of evidence beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law.

At a time when they face challenges and criticisms on an unprecedented scale their handling of this investigation is a timely reminder that our police force does its core job well, and at times very well. Beside the gardaí over the fortnight, playing a very different but equally significant role, were the priests of the parish of Midleton. The spontaneous round of applause at the funeral Mass for Fr Billy O’Donovan registered the extent to which the community appreciated the skill and care with which he and his colleagues had performed their many priestly roles.

They provided comfort and support to Robert’s family whose need can only have been unimaginable. At the same time the Midleton clergy also managed to articulate and to seek to assuage some of the wider community’s pain and anger.

The scale of this tragedy meant they were required to do this not only from the pulpit of the parish church but also live down satellite links to news studios. We were all part of their congregation at a time when many of us were moved to despair about human behaviour in the broadest sense. Fr O’Donovan was frank about how it was only natural that such events would shake anyone’s faith - it had shaken his own.

In a time when there are fewer priests, and when fewer of them are comfortable wearing their uniform in public, Fr O’Donovan was a particularly significant counterweight to much modern cynicism about the Irish clergy.

When it comes to death, the Church still plays a central role for most Irish Catholics. Even in an era when Mass attendance is falling dramatically and where religious practice within the institution that is the Church is declining, more than 90% of Irish Catholics still want to be buried after a funeral Mass (with similar figures for relevant funeral rites for those born into other faiths).

The commitment and effectiveness of police and Church leaders in Midleton over the last two weeks is comforting. It was not just a question of doing their jobs. They went that extra mile out of a sense of humanity for Robert and his family and out of a sense of commitment to the community in which they lived. There is comfort there for all of us in this increasingly disjointed, unconnected society in which we live.

Indicative of the commitment was the poignant story told at the funeral about the garda who was on duty preserving the scene on the night that Robert’s body was discovered. Not only was this garda moved to talk to the dead boy and keep him company overnight, but he went to the trouble the next day of contacting Fr O’Donovan to let him know, hoping it would comfort the parents that Robert was not alone overnight.

WE CAN draw some comfort also from the fact that our police force is not only sustaining its standards, but is reforming and improving. Hundreds of high quality recruits are being turned out in Templemore every year. Some of them will have the talent and success to be future superintendents, chief superintendents and even assistant commissioners of the quality and calibre of those who led the Midleton investigation.

By comparison, however, the Catholic Church has had very few clerical recruits graduating from its seminaries in recent years. These days priests must not only continue to perform religious services and functions for dwindling congregations but also maintain a heavy round of duties visiting the sick and comforting the bereaved. They do so with fewer colleagues and since the number of hands dropping notes or coins into the collection basket on Sunday has fallen, they are also required to live on diminishing resources.

As the age profile of the clergy rises and the number of new recruits remains small, the reality is that there may not be any Fr O’Donovans around to deal with tragedies like these when they occur in ten or twenty years time.

This clerical deficit is a fundamental challenge for the Catholic Church and will require it to give leadership roles to lay parishioners, male and female. There is also a challenge here for the State services. Last week the Health Services Executive set up a help and counselling line which performed a function for the wider community while, no doubt, social workers performed other functions.

However, one wonders whether in 10 or 20 years’ time, if something like this happened again, the social services would be able to fill the role played in the last two weeks by the priests in Midleton. One is left wondering who or what will replace the significant social infrastructure provided by our local clergy.

The role played by both priest and policeman has always been controversial in Irish society. I am reminded of the lyrics of the Boomtown Rats hit from the 1970s, Banana Republic, which speaks of an Ireland dominated by the power of Church and State: “Everywhere I go. Everywhere I see. The black and blue uniforms. Police and priests.”

Of course it is welcome that the authoritarian tone and approach once adopted by many clergy and the gardaí in this country has been superseded. Now to be leaders in the community, the local gardaí or local priests must earn our respect rather than rely on their position. There was much to respect about the work done by both police and priests in Midleton over the last couple of weeks.