Fr Cleary, the obnoxious hypocrite, wasn’t half the man his son is

THE television programme on RTÉ on Monday night At Home with the Clearys was a reminder of the megalomania of the late Fr Michael Cleary, a man who was always happy to be in the limelight as long as he was telling other people what to do.

When confronted with his personal issues and domestic situation, however, he was a hypocritical coward. At one stage, as the net was closing, Phyllis Hamilton, the young woman he impregnated and turned into a troubled, self-harming and scared alcoholic, stabbed Cleary in the leg with a knife he was trying to take from her. He fled to his sister’s house for refuge — but was never honest with his family about his “housekeeper” Phyllis, who died in 2001, eight years after Cleary’s death.

It was an absorbing documentary, not just because of its exposure of the misogyny, bullying and manipulation that formed the spine of Cleary’s career but because it also revealed that his son Ross, who he refused to acknowledge, has battled with his own demons and emerged as a mature, insightful and emotionally intelligent young man who has dealt with the death of his monstrous father and traumatised mother with grace and dignity.

In stark contrast, Cleary was always a fraud, far more interested in his own profile and feeding his gargantuan ego than in showing any humanity towards the people he wounded, despite his image as a man of the people.

He couldn’t resist a microphone and an audience, whether it was with young schoolgirls he “advised” about dating and sex, lapping up their titters while he took them through the steps of light and heavy petting and telling them to use condoms, or joking with Catholic congregations about a woman who was pregnant with a neighbour’s child. He also indulged in self-congratulation about his ability to take troubled married couples into his confidence to dispense wisdom on modern relationships.

When Bishop Eamon Casey’s secret was discovered in 1992, Cleary was furious that Casey — “that bastard”, he called him — had not disclosed his secret to him, feeling betrayed because Cleary had told Casey about his own situation.

Even at that stage, all that consumed him was his sense of himself and what he was entitled to. He didn’t give a damn about his partner and son and could not even redeem himself on his deathbed by exhibiting an ounce of courage. Some members of his extended family have also mirrored his righteous arrogance; his niece, who was interviewed for the documentary, justified her family’s not having anything to do with Ross by blaming Phyllis for writing the truth about Cleary’s hypocrisy. To some, it is still her fault, as the destroyer of a good man, just as Gay Byrne, as host of the Late Late Show, blamed Annie Murphy for the downfall of Bishop Eamon Casey, after she gave birth to their son, Peter.

The nauseating arrogance Cleary represented was on display as early as the 1960s, when he featured in Peter Lennon’s documentary The Rocky Road to Dublin. A godsend to documentary-makers because of his comfort in front of the cameras and his childlike urge to please an audience, Cleary was filmed as the ultimate Fr Trendy, singing in a Dublin hospital while female patients looked on embarrassed, and dispensing advice to a young married couple about their future life together. As Lennon recalled, Cleary was a perfect illustration of how the clergy operated: “They were there to remind you, in the friendliest way, of your inherent tendency to evil and extol the virtues of celibacy.”

Only one woman spoke in that documentary, but she was not seen. She spoke off-camera of yearly pregnancies since her marriage at 21, followed by a “miserable three-year effort at birth control” through the withdrawal method, coitus interruptus. She said simply: “I felt all the time guilty, and I hated it.” She felt so guilty that she went to confession and told the priest about her efforts at birth control. The priest’s response was: “Go home, like a good child, and move into another room, because as long as you’re sleeping with him, you’re the occasion of his sin.”

Her conclusion on this exchange was as stark as it was accurate: “Anyway, they’re always on the men’s side in this country, and so are the doctors. They think women should grin and bear it and put up with it, because, you know, we’re Catholics and we shouldn’t be making it harder for the men.”

It was this view of a woman’s place Cleary also subscribed to; keep them hidden, let them endure pain and suffering and frustration while the priests get on with the business of sorting out the world. Cleary cherished celibacy and the priestly role in public while taking advantage of a vulnerable young woman in private.

Watching Cleary’s posturing, I was reminded of the observations of the late John McGahern, when he wrote about the strut of the arrogant priest in a typical Irish parish in the past: “In those days, it took considerable wealth to put a boy through Maynooth, and they looked and acted as if they came from a line of swaggering, confident men who dominated field and market and whose only culture was cunning, money and brute force. Though they could be violently generous and sentimental at times, in their hearts they despised their own people.”

CLEARY revelled in his status as “Ireland’s most famous Catholic priest” and glorious defender of Catholic traditional values, especially in the sexual realm. He wrote a regular column for the Sunday Independent, followed by another column in the Star newspaper and presented a phone-in radio show on 98FM, five nights a week, for four years. His son, Ross, was sometimes by his side in studio as Cleary reiterated the teaching of the church on matters sexual. A typical declaration from Cleary was the following: “The church can alter certain regulations and laws it makes itself, but it can’t change the laws of God. We give the maker’s instructions and we can’t bend them — they’re not ours to bend.” But bending the rules was the essence of his secret life.

One of the closing shots in the documentary saw Cleary staring out to sea and looking forward to his trip to heaven at the end of his life. It was another reminder of why Cleary was so obnoxious: a man who spent much of his life deceiving, manipulating, bullying and lying while telling other people about their failings, was still able to look forward to his final journey. Fittingly, the film ended with Ross stating simply that his father should have acknowledged him. Cleary wasn’t half the man his fine son turned out to be.