Lumping together the guilty and innocent in the aftermath of Ryan

On the face of it, the processions and programmes on radio and television and speeches in Leinster House were the outward and visible sign of a nation offering long-overdue vindication to thousands of abuse survivors.

The pity is that it was boiled into a vengeful soup

They were punished because they were an easily identified minority. They were punished because a generation projected evil on to them. They were punished because it was satisfying to have them in our power and to know there was not a thing they could do about it. They were punished because, in the punishing, we could convince ourselves we were righteous, fearless and dedicated to the greater good.

History repeated itself, these last few weeks, except that instead of innocent children, the State turned on innocent elderly nuns and priests and brothers. Most of them are genuinely innocent. The rest are legally innocent. Until proven guilty, that’s how our law defines them.

Just as their vile predecessors de-humanised the children placed in their care by categorising them as criminal, intrinsically evil, misbegotten or abandoned and therefore the living definition of “bad seed,” so we de-humanised their successors as collectively committed to perversion, brutality and money-making. They all got it in the neck from media. In a general way. But some of them got it personally, as well. The nuns who don’t wear uniforms slid under the wire, unidentified. The ones in the veils and the long gowns didn’t. One had her veil yanked off her in public.

Another, bumping into a young woman on a pedestrian crossing, was treated to a theatrical shudder, as if she stank or was infectious. (Neither of the two was a member of an order accused of anything, or involved in any way in childcare.)

On the face of it, the processions and the programmes on radio and television and the speeches in Leinster House were the outward and visible sign of a nation offering long-overdue vindication to thousands of abuse survivors. The pity of it is that it was boiled into a vengeful soup that may prevent us learning the broader lessons necessary for us to become the egalitarian caring society we believe ourselves to be. We can decide that the offending congregations must pay up to the point of bankruptcy, that surviving sexual and other abusers must be convicted and serve time and that the religious be removed from education and healthcare. How that will serve the abuse survivors is not clear. How it will serve to prevent future abuse is not clear, either.

The silent procession from the Garden of Remembrance, with its applause from passers-by, its ribbons and children’s shoes, was purgative for the nation. Survivors, feeling attended to, feeling vindicated at last, wept. Brian Cowen spoke of developing the best possible response to the trauma of the thousands. Significantly, though, few experts came forward to suggest what might make up that response to 50-year-olds and 60-year-olds and 70-year-olds hard-wired for misery by being dragged through the barbed wire of a childhood spent in one of the damned institutions.

Sebastian Barry, in his The Secret Scripture, draws attention to the point at which pain becomes permanent and an abused young person loses the potential to shape their own lives – that distinguishing capacity which, as Ted Kennedy once said, defines us as human.

“There is a moment in the history of every beaten child,” writes Barry, “when his mind parts with hopes of dignity – pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain.

This is a ferocious truth, because a child knows no better. A child is never the author of his own history.”

Against that reality, making good on the Taoiseach’s promise will require more than an increased spend on counselling, into which some €16 million has reportedly been poured thus far.

Little, if any, objective data supports the value of counselling, despite its current unquestioned valency in public perception. Instead of making the self-comforting assumption that the millions spent in this area will in some way lead to healing, wholeness, greater life competence or that chimera, “closure,” it would be more honest to admit that – just as earlier taxpayers paid for children to be immured in institutions – taxpayers today are paying for someone to give a listening ear to those same children, now grown.

Out of sight, out of mind. It may be a legitimate, even a positive expenditure of money, since talking about their trauma is a visceral need of survivors. It does, nonetheless, raise a discomfiting question about current society, suggesting that paying attention, long-term, to survivors is a function the nation is prepared to unquestioningly outsource, just as it unquestioningly outsourced the care of children half a century ago.

Media has been more than willing to provide that ear in the last couple of weeks. Big deal. For decades, when a few survivors of abuse were introduced to reporters and researchers, initial interest in their stories waned as fears of libel action grew, together with doubts about the emotional stability of the witnesses. Stories died on the vine and the silence continued. But once all legal bets were off, thanks to the Ryan Report, once it was safe, media lined up, looking for survivors with vivid stories and – best of all – the capacity to weep on camera. (It was sadly ironic that a broadcaster who palpably prefers the cerebral to the emotional, John Bowman, was the one to capture the most dramatic confessional moment in all of the coverage.) Now, only emotional inflation and even worse stories will do. Because that’s how we in media operate. Once we’ve seen the tears and given space to the victims, we move on, looking for the next worst story. Because that’s the way we are.

One journalist will continue to take care of the survivors who contacted her, because she goes through life gathering those maimed by life. Only one. Other media people who have covered the story in recent months are likely to be contacted, more than once, by the survivors with whom they have dealt. They will listen intently to the first few calls. After a while, they will continue to take the calls but multi-task, checking their emails as they listen. Then they will arrange, in the event of a phone call, to be interrupted by a colleague after a decent period of time listening. Then they will begin not to take the calls. The law of diminishing returns applies very brutally to victimhood, and eventually, in another sad irony, some of the survivors will go back to the congregations, because the congregations will continue to listen.

The most frightening aspect of the discussion of the Ryan Report has been the belief that to examine any of the context was in some way an attempt to ameliorate the crimes committed by the religious involved. But to understand is not to excuse, and to refuse to understand the totality of what happened is in itself a version of the coercive stereotyping that leads to a lumping together of guilty and innocent, thereby empowering newer forms of injustice.