Church and State: Two institutions to be feared by vulnerable citizens

WHEN you have the privilege of writing an opinion column, you try as hard as you can to be fair. By inclination and temperament, I’m always inclined to take sides and I can get emotional about some things.

But it’s important, if you have the opportunity to express your opinions on an important page like this one, that you try to apply some reason to your argument, that you try to hear both sides of the story, that you recognise that some things aren’t as simple as they might be.

But there’s one area where it’s impossible to be impartial. When you see the way big, powerful institutions always move to protect themselves, we should always be willing to shout about it from the rooftops. Especially when powerful interests, with unlimited resources, start to hide behind the law and use it to crush anyone who disagreed with them.

It’s not that long ago since I wrote here about Louise O’Keeffe, who sued the State because she was sexually abused as a child by a primary schoolteacher — a servant of the State if ever there was one.

She lost the case on an outrageous technicality, and the State decided to pursue her for costs.

At the same time letters went out to other people who were thinking of suing the State, warning them that they too would be pursued for huge legal fees if they lost their actions.

It was a brutal example of the State using its power and resources, just as a totalitarian state might, to crush an individual.

And last week we saw more examples of the same kind of thing — huge and powerful institutions moving to protect themselves first. And it was ugly.

I remember thinking at the time I wrote about the Louise O’Keeffe case that there is a huge irony here.

The State is willing to turn its back on people who have been abused in school, but it will still stand up in court and argue that it knows best what’s good for children in education.

That argument was at the heart of the case of Seán Ó Cuanacháin. The case brought by his parents to try to secure what they believed was the necessary intervention for their son ended last week, with the family of an autistic boy facing a potentially ruinous legal bill.

I don’t know whether the Ó Cuanacháin’s lawyers will demand payment from this family. I doubt it somehow, but that’s not the point.

The legal fees mounted because the State fought the Ó Cuanacháin’s every inch of the way, producing all sorts of experts in the High Court for month after month to defeat the family of an autistic boy. The family had already won some damages because of unacceptable delays in diagnosing Seán’s condition and in providing necessary early treatment.

The one thing that nobody can argue about, where the development of a children with autism is concerned, is this: early intervention is essential and education must be intensive and geared to their specific individual needs.

If that doesn’t happen, the prospect of good development is hugely diminished.

Having failed to provide adequate early intervention, the State then argued in the courts that it — and it alone — had the right to decide what the appropriate form of education for young Seán should be.

And the State won that argument, apparently because the courts are becoming more and more reluctant to tell the State, on behalf of any citizen, how taxpayers’ money should be spent.

And that’s particularly amazing when you remember what our constitution says, in Article 42: “The State acknowledges that the primary and natural educator of the child is the family and guarantees to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children … The State shall not oblige parents in violation of their conscience and lawful preference to send their children to schools established by the State, or to any particular type of school designated by the State”.

In future, clearly, we are going to have to interpret that clause as meaning that parents can provide as long as parents can afford it.

What is doubly insane about this is the rigid persistence of the State in arguing that it must be free to provide the form of education it chooses for people with autism (which just happens to be the cheapest form), irrespective of what might be best. Could you imagine the outcry if it became government policy in respect of all forms of education that only the cheapest curricula, cheapest buildings and cheapest teachers would be used in future?

There is some controversy over the efficacy of ABA, the form of teaching the Ó Cuanacháin family was arguing for. There is little doubt that this form of education produces amazing results, although there is not yet enough evidence to prove that those results can be sustained during different stages of development.

Instead of trying to terrorise families to protect itself, our State should set out to become a world leader in testing and evaluating different methods so that we can start applying the best, and not just the cheapest.

The other example of institutions moving to protect their own interests, without regard to the interests of others far more vulnerable, was the attempt by Cardinal Connell to block access to church files relating to the abuse of children by priests in the archdiocese of Dublin.

Seven years ago, I wrote a piece here about the authoritarianism of then Archbishop Connell, as it was reflected in a row he had with Trinity College, of all things.

BACK then, I wondered how he would react to the Commission on Child Abuse which was then getting under way.

I remember expressing the hope that his priority would be to listen and learn from the proceedings of that commission whose work was bound up with the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland during all the years Cardinal Connell was growing into his authority and wisdom.

The work of all these commissions has been to seek to protect individuals. If you had ever met people broken by abuse, people who had suffered a lifetime of damage and pain because of terrible things done to them by a priest, you couldn’t feel anything but anger at the suggestion that the files should be hidden away.

It makes a complete piece of hypocrisy of all those pious utterings over the years about suffering alongside the victims.

To his eternal credit, the current Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has made it clear he is willing to hand over the files. He, no doubt, will suffer in due course for that.

Other priests have spoken out in the past, and they have been harshly treated for their honesty and courage. Because for some people, only the institution matters.

And when the institution matters most, truth and justice, and the suffering of individuals, doesn’t matter at all.