Long shadow of the hierarchy still hangs over Government Buildings
This looks like a blatant attempt by the hierarchy to reassert their former primacy, especially in educational matters. Even though the latest meeting was described as unique, contacts have been going on behind the scenes since independence.
It has long been believed that Fr John Charles McQuaid provided an early draft of the 1937 Constitution for de Valera and his promotion to Archbishop of Dublin probably had a lot to do with his friendship with the then Taoiseach.
Archbishop McQuaid developed more political influence than any elected representative. However, he did not get his way in 1937, when he tried to stitch into the constitution a clause stipulating, “the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church”.
Minister for Justice Gerald Boland threatened to resign and leave the country with his family if that recognition was written into the constitution. De Valera inserted a clause instead recognising “the special position” enjoyed by the Catholic Church “as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens”.
McQuaid and the Cardinal objected, but de Valera got the approval of the Pope behind their backs.
Eventually even that clause was seen as a mistake. We were told that the special position really meant nothing. If that was so, why was it included? The reality was that hierarchy did enjoy a special position, especially when it came to education, which was broadly interpreted.
They asserted their primacy in education by interfering in the likes of Noel Browne’s efforts to tackle the country’s high infant morality rate with the Mother and Child Bill, which was designed to provide education in infant care to all mothers and treatment for all children.
But Archbishop McQuaid insisted on a means test and Browne was forced to resign when he balked.
Taoiseach John A Costello complained that the whole thing should have been “adjusted behind closed doors”.
In other words, he did not want the people to know what was happening, especially the fact that the Archbishop of Dublin was allowed to dictate government policy behind the scenes.
So much for the so-called Republic of Ireland that the Costello Government declared a couple of years earlier!
In January 1955, when Minister for Agriculture James Dillon tried to establish an agricultural institute under the aegis of Trinity College, the bishops objected. The secretary of the conference of bishops warned the Government that the plan was “another incursion of the State into the sphere of higher education”.
They were essentially bringing that debate to its absolute absurdity in suggesting that cattle, pigs and sheep were entitled to be cared for by people trained in Catholic-controlled schools.
The irony was that the Church did not even care for the proper education of people. The children in industrial schools and orphanages, who were under the care of the religious, were not provided with a proper education.
When the postmistress in a Co Galway town put up a petition calling for a local secondary school, she was told by the parish priest to take it down. He said young people would make better Catholics without a secondary education.
Presumably he thought that they would remain stupid enough to listen to an idiot like him. Fortunately, Mrs O’Sullivan was made of sterner stuff and she pressed ahead and they got the secondary school.
In 1956, Minister for Education Richard Mulcahy decided to legalise the leather strap being used by the Christian Brothers. There was such an outcry that he dropped the matter, yet the Christian Brothers, behaving as if they were above the law, continued to use the strap.
The State turned a blind eye while some of those so-called Christian Brothers besmirched Christianity by abusing the children in their care, both physically and sexually. And Bertie Ahern’s Government has agreed that the State should assume much of the tab for the damage done.
SHEILA CLONEY was another woman who balked at being dictated to by the clergy in 1957. She was a Protestant married to a Catholic. She resented being told by the local parish priest in Fethard-on-Sea that her children had to be sent to a Catholic school. She fled to Belfast with her two children instead.
Desmond Boal, who later co-founded the Democratic Unionist Party with Ian Paisley, took up Sheila Cloney’s case, while the clergy in the Co Wexford village called for a boycott of Protestant businesses because local Protestants had helped Sheila to flee to the North.
Her father had provided her with £30, but in their perverted sense of justice the clergy sought to victimise the Protestant business people in the naïve belief that they would compel Sheila to submit to the clerical dictates.
Suddenly the whole thing became both a national and a cross-Border issue. “The unhappy events in Fethard-on-Sea are a reminder to the loyalists of Ulster as to what could happen if Northern Ireland were submerged in an all-Ireland republic,” declared Lord Basil Brookeborough, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.
Preaching to a congregation in Wexford that included John Cardinal D’Alton and six other bishops, Bishop Michael Browne of Galway endorsed the sectarian boycott by describing it as “a peaceful and moderate protest” in response to what, he said, “seems to be a concerted campaign to entice or kidnap Catholic children and deprive them of their faith”.
Seán Cloney eventually learned that his wife had taken refuge in the Orkney Islands and he went there and reconciled with her. Their solution was for the children to be educated at home.
Our Church-controlled education system in the 1950s was a disgrace. Some 40% of children quit school at 14 and more than half quit by the age of 16. Many of their teachers were not qualified.
Some 20% of the lay teachers and 32% of the religious teachers were not properly trained. Classes in urban areas usually contained from 60 to 70 pupils, which was more than twice the recommended size.
The teacher-training colleges were producing little more than 400 new teachers a year, but more than 300 teachers retired annually. At that rate it would take over 90 years to come up with the necessary number of qualified teachers.
Removing the ban on married women teachers was an obvious solution, but the politicians thought the hierarchy was opposed and the absurd situation continued until 1958 when the Minister for Education, Jack Lynch, consulted privately with Archbishop McQuaid and got his permission to abolish the ban.
If the archbishop had said no, do you think that Lynch would have had the guts to do the right thing? Dream on!
It is a sad reality that what some of the bigots in Northern Ireland were saying about us was actually true.
This did not justify their behaviour, but nothing justified the craven submission of our politicians to the bishops, who have no business in politics.
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