For a people renowned for nostalgia, we Irish sure know how to move on. We travelled from shame to pride within a week.
Having stopped to consider our darkest history for a few days, we decided we didn’t like the view and headed straight for green-lit buildings and shamrock. The U-turn was performed by well-tuned hands. Ministers abroad on extravagant trips which we’re constantly told are worth millions to the economy. We’ve been told a lot of things, and most of it turned out to be as fake as a March tan.
The Ireland they promote today is an apocryphal tale of national pride, where we're the best of fun with a wicked sense of humour.
There are no Paddy's Day ballads about how the <a href='javascript:window.parent.actionEventData({$contentId:"7.1213540", $action:"view", $target:"work"})' polopoly:contentid="7.1213540" polopoly:searchtag="tag_location">Vatican</a> and its legions of sycophants bullied and controlled citizens, especially women, with the support of pillars of community
What’s more authentically Irish is hypocrisy towards our past. How we forget many of the 1916 heroes we celebrated last year turned over the nation from one brutal foreign power to another.
There are no Paddy's Day ballads about how the Vatican and its legions of sycophants bullied and controlled citizens, especially women, with the support of pillars of community.
The pillars of today made lip-quivering speeches last week claiming that plain citizens were also to blame for church-led crimes. The families of “fallen” women and wider society bear some responsibility, but turning a blind eye to abuse does not equate to carrying out the abuse itself.
Soulful speeches
Elected a TD in 1975, Enda Kenny was in a better position than most to do something about the horrors that continued in his time but only seemed to shock him 40 years later. Ditto President Michael D Higgins, a Senator in 1973, who also made soulful speeches last week about disgraces that went on while he too was part of an establishment which idly tolerated it.
The two men are the foremost purveyors of phoney Ireland on this day, which is all shamrock blinkers and pleasant poetry, while their soliloquies about national shame are locked away in last week’s cupboard.
Since they both love to quote better men, Enda and Michael D would know the phrase from Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Small acts of kindness may have occurred amidst the monstrous acts of wrong that we shall never know about. Consider too what faced good people who spoke up against their betters in a society commanded by the church in the last century. We need only look at the nightmare faced by whistleblowers who expose wrongs by the pillars of our society in the 21st century.
Bishops who moved abusers around, who put canon law before common law, were retired into opulence
In true Irish style, then and now, very little is done to make amends. Workers today, who were mostly not part of the docile society that tolerated a church state, have paid 87 per cent of the compensation for abuses while religious orders got off with an indemnity – a gift in 2002 by a Fianna Fáil who were at the time gambling away our economy, but not their pensions.
Penance
For that calamity, politicians would also blame ordinary citizens and force them to fund the fallout again, while those mostly at fault remained intact. History repeats itself like a Taoiseach and a President repeat soft-spoken sermons about dark times while their Mercs purr out of view to take them back to the phoney Ireland they prefer to convey on days like today.
We’ve conned ourselves into thinking the fall of church control of society is penance enough. Bishops who moved abusers around, who put canon law before common law, were retired into opulence. Religious orders remained so wealthy they had the sort of dream accountants who can hide assets from the hungry hands of justice in trusts.
Some could even afford powerful spin artists who appear on radio and television to promote themselves but cleverly advise their gimlet-eyed clients to say and do absolutely nothing, knowing that everything in Ireland soon blows over.
The pain and hurt in the voices of those outing their experiences as demonised citizens on RTÉ radio’s Liveline on a Friday carried no echo into Monday. By the time floats trundle down O’Connell Street this afternoon, those voices will be smothered by the hokum, tinsel and surface falsehoods of “being Irish”.
St Patrick’s Day is a national day for phoney Ireland. The “economy”, mainly corporate empires washing their capital through us for little in return, is more important than anything, as our holidaying politicians keep telling us this week.
Shame doesn’t sell, but the Yanks are suckers for saccharine pride and, like moving on from unpleasantness, no one does it quite like the Irish.