Our public anger is the incoherent expression of our private shame

IN Ireland there are particular circumstances feeding the recurring frenzies of first using nuns as guardians of female sexuality, and then turning on them for doing just that.

Post-famine Ireland, the development of a large Catholic class of smallholders and a smaller catholic middle class, was rooted in social insecurity and the craving for respectability. The norms of what is socially respectable have changed, but the craving remains unabated. The outburst of anger, the running of rhetoric ahead of facts, is as much a recoiling from the horror of ourselves as any love of justice — least of all for the afflicted.

The repetitive episodes of first handing over unmarried pregnant women into the ‘care’ of women religious, the employment, and then excoriation of those same women religious are part of a continuing theme. It has deep-rooted, but not extinct echoes, of a centuries old treatment of women who through their economic independence, social isolation or sexual apostasy, challenged the norm.