Open Letters To Our Past Selves

[Mowl]

THE WALKING WOUNDED'

It was many years ago yes, but the scars are still raw today. They're mostly invisible by now, but they weren't at the time. We all wore them, we all accepted them, and just like our parents before us, we did it in blind faith. We took them on their word when they said:

'You give us the boy, and we'll give you the man...'

Sad to realise all these years later that the man-child is still hurting inside: all the beatings, the thrashings, the getting lifted up by the ears, tossed to the floor, and kicked into the corner like a terrified puppy. And that was likely a good day. They said back then that this was about discipline, a sense of order, a Catholic pecking order. We were at the bottom and they were on top. These hollow men, their hollow words falling on our confused and doubting ears that were then slapped and reddened to remove any sense of anger or respite. Or doubt in the words of the baby Jesus.



We mostly thought of how much worse off we might be. Like the little black babies on the Trocaire boxes who looked close to death, half starved and bellies swollen with stomach acid trying to break down the bark of the trees they ate yesterday. I knew it was all too real. I had a second uncle who was Catholic missionary who served in Mombasa in Kenya for many years. He only ever came home to marry our relatives, or else bury them. In this way, every time I ever met the man and looked into his eyes, I could see that even he knew this was all wrong. This was no way to raise or educate children. With a strap of leather or a long cane to beat the information into them? Surely not, he must have thought. Surely we were safer and better off than the bush babies he went to care for? Weren't we? Or were we?

You know, those leather straps didn't sew themselves together. The canes were even more primitive but they didn't need to be manufactured: a stick from a cot bed would do the trick, and do it for free too. But those leather straps? Somewhere in Ireland, there's a man who's life work was creating these devices - to hurt children with. Please: just take a moment to stomach that? Think about who that man was, how he ended up with such a bizarre trade skill? Did he have a factory? Or did he produce them from his garden shed? What was he thinking when he sealed up another box full of torture instruments made for the children? As he tied it up with baling twine and stamped it forward at the post office? Did he sleep well at night? Had he a good appetite? Had he kids himself? Who knows? I know I don't and I doubt any of us ever will. But what we DO know is how much it stung. Cane or leather - they both broke the spirits of children in equal measure. We look and them both today and think how god-awful a society we must have been to need or want such gruesome items.

But then the lights switch on inside our heads as we slowly begin to realise that neither the stick nor the leather did the damage. The real damage was done by the man holding the weapon. And let's be clear here: they were weapons, actual weapons of massive destruction. We were conditioned to be frightened, too scared to stand up to the brothers and even more terrified of telling our parents lest they ask what we did to deserve our numbed and swollen fingers - and a hundred lines of apology still to write with a biro pen?

It broke us. Just like it was designed to. There was no way out of it either, the church had us all like rabbits in the headlights. Frozen to the spot in dread and fear, too scared to say sorry and far too confused to know what we were supposed to be sorry for. Talking to the guy beside you? Forgetting to dot those I's and cross those T's? Pea-shooting your mate in the back of the neck? Arriving late without a good excuse?

They really battered us for those minor infractions? Really? What kind of man enjoys punishing a child for being childish? What kind of animal bastard grins to himself when the child hits the floor in tears and panic? Should we blame our own parents for letting it happen? Surely they knew? Surely they went through it all too? Or were they just as confused and blinded to the reality of things as we were?

There was a boy in my class. His name is Derek, but that's not what he was called: he was known as 'Spacer', and the reason why was simple. He was simple. An exceptionally innocent 'special' child who was terrified of his own shadow, let alone what he had to endure every day. The lay teacher's name is John Sullivan. A Trinity College graduate sent out to deal with the knackers of Ballyfermot. That's you, me, yours, and mine. He singled Derek out for special treatment: every day of the week at half-past two, he'd send Derek up to the head of the class. Then whichever of us was chosen had to join him. The rules were simple, like the boy: you could use only your left arm, your right hand stayed in your pocket. You were encouraged to batter the kid senseless with your one good before he did the same to you with both hands and both feet flailing about, the poor terrified kid only trying to defend himself. And the only way he could save himself from a beating was to fly into an hysterical rage and fuck you up before you hurt him. He was an innocent, a simple-minded kid who loved to smile and laugh - if you took the time to chat with him. Derek took his beatings every day with an ever-growing rage deep inside like a cancer. Betrayed by the teachers, and betrayed by his class mates. All through my youth I saw him suffer. The tears would drop from his eyes and he'd get another clatter in the ears to stop them.

I met him again maybe ten years ago. He was out for the night with his Dad at the Bluebell Club, which my Mam went to for her club nights. I spotted him across the room and my heart was in my mouth. He sat very still. He stared straight ahead, trying to avoid anyone's eyes. I felt that same anger rise up inside me and I wanted to scream:

'look? Look what you did to this angelic little soul? He's still in agony.
How could you let this happen? What base kind of God allows for this to
happen to a special child, and angelic little boy? If there is a God up
there - then I fucking hate you. You, your church, your foot soldiers, your sticks
and leather straps, and the gold and silver on your altar,
I reject you, absolutely: I'll go my own way..'

And so I became the man I am today: an outspoken atheist and spiritual vigilante with a long list of names. When I approached Derek that night in Mam's club, he immediately smiled that boyish smile of his. We shook hands. He introduced his Dad to me and I my Mam to him. I asked Derek if he remembered me. He did. I asked what he remembered of school and his eyes quickly darkened. He looked at me with great sorrow, and we both knew why. I was chosen one day to batter him to a pulp at the head of the class for Sullivan's daily entertainment. Except when I went up, I put both hands in both pockets and let him beat me to the floor. I couldn't for the life of me raise a hand to him. So I refused point blank and out came the stick to finish off what Derek started. My hands were flayed, six of the best to both of them from the most patient sadist I ever met: he'd toy with us, bring the stick whooshing down while staring into your eyes. Except he'd deliberately miss and then laugh at your fear. He'd keep tapping the knuckles beneath the upturned hand to keep it at a prime whacking position. Move your hand? Jerk it back in panic? You got extra whacks for each one. Then he'd make you say 'thank you, Sir' and send you back to your desk trying not to weep or whinge. He'd have you back up in a second if you made even a whisper.

I could see the hurt in Derek's eyes and realised that he hadn't let any of this go either. Like me, he was still trying to process what he went through, and like me, his moral compass was broken. All these things he spent years trying to forget came back for him as they did for me. Most of the conversation was silent: arms folded in dejection, we just stared at each other. I went home that night with my Mam and in the taxi I tried to explain to her why I had tears in my eyes.

But I couldn't then any more than I can now. Last night, a close friend bared his soul to to. He sang it like I felt it, like we all did. No need for rhyme, no need for major chords: minor chords of blue and sadness, of hurt and rage, of sorrow and regret, and for the hope that no more children have to endure such brutality and hate from the men of the cloth who took our souls from us with a pitch-fork and buried them beneath the GAA pitches and the dried out ink wells on the desk top.

Give us the child, we'll give you the man' is right.

Except the men they delivered out the other end of their meat grinder were all broken inside. The child driven out along with the hope, the wishing, and the praying to a deaf, dumb, and blind God who never explained. They took the boy in me and beat him to a pulp. By the time I left their prison cells, I was as messed up and angry as the lads on the street corners who gave up trying at all. Instead, they turned to drink, drugs, violence, theft, assault, and even rape. Should we point our fingers at them and blame them? Or should we think: 'there, but for the grace of nature....'?

I can't forget it. I won't forget it. And I won't let any of you forget it either. Because when you give in and fall at their feet, that's the man they're trying to make of you: an indentured slave, a broken spirit, an unquestioning mind that's filled with torment and pain. If they can break you like that, then they have their happy slave. But I wasn't born to serve any master other than my Mother, the highest authority in my life.

Those hollow men? I promise you, if I can find the graves they're buried in then I'll dance
a merry jig on their heads before tramping the dirt down so hard that they can never rise again.

 

[Mowl]

I can't stop looking at our first holy communion shot. Half the kids in it are in the ground now. My childhood friend Terry-Lee, Martin K, the adopted coloured boy we all looked out for. Big Robbie with his hand on Martin's shoulder just makes me well up and spill out. We tried so hard to protect him, but they were too strong, too violent, and the fear sometimes took the heart of me and I couldn't act even though I knew I should have. The innocence in our faces hardly belies what we endured later on in primary school.

That's when they got their fingernails right under his tan skin. His wide-eyed wonder and confusion about the world he was in written in the sadness in his big doe eyes. Beaten, battered, buggered, bastardized. I can't forget it. It's a part of me that I try to contain every passing day. But some hurts are simply too deep to heal. Like Derek's little face: full of expectant wonder, that life was going to continue to be a barrel of laughs rather than the paltry and bare existence he was instead given. To say that they ripped the hearts out of us is testament to the trust and hope in our eyes.



Mrs White, our junior school teacher, a truly wonderful and gentle lady who adored us and made us all feel included and happy and excited about every new day. My Mam adored her too, and they'd often chat when Mam came to collect me. I'll always remember her dressed in white too: I vaguely recall her dressing in white most days, and I have an image of her in a pale blue blouse with a finely-knitted grandma style cardigan in white, and she smelled like fresh cut grass: inviting and captivating, as sweet as could possibly be.

Sadly, she was one of a kind: what came later destroyed us all - hence most of those pictured now being in the ground.

I'm just one man, but not the only one. I realised this last night reading personal messages from old friends. Yet they all know what I'm trying to do and they still call me Mowl, and The Mowl. That's just too sweet really. I thought I was the most discreet and deliberately forgettable kid, always trying to dodge attention of any kind. But that's not how they remember me: most of them are very grateful for what I've done and am trying to do still, that they're aware of me at all after all this time is something of a shock, culturally speaking. Decades in time and thousands in miles, and still they remember everything. Most details just too horrid to put out there, but in time, the healing will take forbearance over the hurt.

But right now I feel like I'm standing beneath an avalanche that's waiting to fall, all it needs is a few decibels of screaming children to shift it.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

The twisted psychology. There were always two invasions in our history, Mowl. One physical and the far more damaging one walked down a gangplank in the 6th century.

We're still in recovery from both quite frankly. But the invasive desperately dark and gothic form of mental illness that came as a flea on that 16th century black rat has plagued the Irish mind for 1400 years since to varying degrees.

Rarely worse though than in the second half of the 20th century. We're nowhere near seeing the extent of the damage.

There's a gentleman called Andrew or Andrew1 who posts around occasionally on Irish forums. Most often saw him on one of the forums in particular. I got to know his story over the years as we found ourselves battling the ethical knackers of the catholic church over issues around the institutions and the complete mentalists out of the seminaries empowered by our distorted society.

One of the rare few who came out of the institutions background and went on to live as normal a life as you would imagine. Married with a couple of kids, working, very intelligent and lucid fellow who patiently spent ages in the face of intense provocation from the scummier members of said cult on the subject of what Ireland was like for an 11 year old kid whose family fell apart and who ended up at that age holding his younger sister's hand as they appeared in a courtroom before a judge, to be tried for being poor and unfortunate in life. The charges appeared to be in that area, although not elucidated.

Can you imagine the traumatic effect of two children, at the age of 11 and 7 being made to stand in a courtroom after their family fell apart and being looked down upon by one of the overflattered bumpkin appointment to a District Court bench of the day.

Those kids will have assumed the family break up was somehow their fault. No one explained otherwise to these kids. Catholics love playing with guilt. Their own and everyone else's too. All part of the twisted psychology.

Andrew is a survivor, physically and psychologically. But in his story is the real cruelty of it all and a desperate insight into the sort of damage this twisted psychology along with our post-colonial attempts to ape what happens in other countries while hiding our 'little problems' away- also intensely irish-catholic as a psychosis.

The butcher's bill for one invasion is largely known in cemeteries up and down the land, memorials and monuments and in the history books. The scale of the damage done by an invasive cult in Ireland over 1400 years is a butcher's bill much bigger a stain on our country than any bondholders or finance ministers could ever arrange for the nation.

It won't be long before the chapter on the 20th century in Ireland hits the secondary school curriculum. That will be interesting. To see how much the cultural battle between the gothically mentally unhygienic old graspers of captive Ireland and those who want an end to it is actually mentioned in the state's officially sanctioned school history books.

They will try to get away with minimising the effect of the cultural war. In case it might offend a nun. The only thing the brave patriots of Ireland are terrified of, apparently.

An elderly nun and her capacity for offence. If only the British had known they could have hired a different regiment of black and tans altogether more effective than the sweepings of their jails stuffed into paramilitary attire.

 

[Mowl]

Back in the day when he was still drinking and doing drugs, myself and Mannix Flynn had some wild nights out on the piss and other dope. One Valentine's night we were walking along Suffolk Street towards the lower gate end of Trinity. A wild wind was blowing and the trees were dancing around in the darkness. A branch of a tree fell from above and landed out on the road, so Mannix grabbed it and started dragging it down the street. His then lady lived above a pub on the corner by the gate. He dragged this huge branch up the stairs and into the flat she lived in. Then he dragged it across the floor and squeezed it up against the corner so its branches all splayed out across the ceiling.

She woke up and came in, saw the tree in the corner and me and Mannix sitting under it rolling spliffs.

She went mental, so I got up and left, still laughing at the look on her face when she asked what the fuck the tree was all about. Mannix told her that he had no money left to buy her flowers for Valentine's Day and that this was his offering instead. Hilarious situation, yes: but kind of upsetting too.

Mannix was sent to Letterfrack. Mostly for being poor but on one other occasion for nicking a bicycle. The judge gave him five years. They beat him, battered him, abused him, drove him insane, and when he finally got out he hit the bottle pretty hard. Like Patrick Kavanagh, he was barred from most pubs in the city. He was an angry drunk, but sometimes I'd be able to talk him back down to earth. On the occasions I couldn't I'd leave him to do his own thing. Most mornings he woke up in the tank.

Years passed and he was a notorious wild man, but I liked him: he had stories to tell. Happy people have no stories. The rest of us have to fill in the silences. What I didn't know was that he was writing, constantly filling standard jotters with stories about his childhood. The physical abuse, sexual abuse, mental abuse, spiritual abuse. He eventually gathered all of his nightmares together and had them published in his first book called 'Talking To The Wall'.

He eventually got off the drink after many failed attempts. When I finally met a sober Mannix, that's when the real truth hit me like a hammer. His writing was terrifying, visceral, the smell of warm blood, of nicotine stained fingers and damp sheets in a ward full of frightened boys. Boys who stole apples from orchards for fun. Who ate the sweets in Woolworth's without paying for them. Who were poor. Who came from broken families. Whose parents and grandparents were trying to keep the tuberculosis at bay. The same Dublin my Mam's side of the family came from. Poverty, dozens of kids in the bed. Coddle simmering away for days on end. No shoes on their feet. Real hard times.

Mannix decided to turn the book into a stage show. The first night was at the DA Club, where I worked as house artist, DJ, and house band manager. He came in in the afternoon while I was packing up my gear from the previous night. He wanted to try a read through onstage to get his bearings. I packed up my stuff and went to the lighting desk and switched on a spotlight above him, then a spray of dry ice. He looked like Black Jayzus himself standing there, his face half-bathed in light making his eyes disappear and his mouth forming the words like the ballerina in Beckett's 'Not I'.

We found a pulpit in the store room so I put that on the stage under the spotlight for him to stand behind. It wasn't planned but it worked. Then he started the read through. I was the only person in there with him and he pinned me to the chair with his rage. The sheer anger, the hurt, the roaring and shouting. He was dragging all of his ghosts out and exorcising them in a rage. All the clatters and digs. The eating of his dinner off the floor. All the buggery, the oral rape, the violence, the fear, the sheer terror. All right there - in his eyes, in his words, in his broken self that outside stood tall and menacing, he was at once terrifying and piteous. He broke my heart. I cried for him. For his pain, his hurt, and the vast empty places in his soul where all the rage had burned a hole through his very being.

The show opened that same night and he asked if I'd set everything up just as we did earlier in the day.

I did, and stayed on for the performance.

He nailed his audience to the floor, you could hear a pin drop between his short bursts of rage and anger. He twisted and turned their hearts and nobody dared move in their seat. Silence. The kind of silence that even with a hundred and twenty people sitting there daren't make as much as a whisper. He stood under the one spotlight at the lectern and told his story slowly and with dry ice drifting through the air. It was hypnotic. Stunning. Arresting. But not in a good way. Everything he said I could connect with. He was telling our story too, of our childhoods in Ballyfermot. He helped us all come to terms with our own ghosts. It changed my life, it changed me. I started to write myself, but always with the same end result: once it was down on paper I tore it up and burned it, hoping it would take it all away from me in a flickering fame that died in moments.

But no, it doesn't work like that. It's like taking your finger out of the dyke. It flows out so fast and so hard you can't block it up again. It spills out and starts to rise, like being water-boarded, like drowning, gasping for breath. It takes a lot of courage to confront a horrible childhood. It takes even more to exorcise it. You can try, but it'll never really be gone, because it's part of who you are.

Some people think life is meant to be all happiness and light, but those of us who came from the gutter know better.

We weren't allowed an innocent childhood, and even with the age difference between Mannix and I, I could still relate; he was of my Mam's generation, the ones who survived the tuberculosis rife in the Dublin tenements around Mercier Street and The Coombe. I knew where he came from. I knew what he went through. And I saw it happen all around me in my own childhood - one cut short by evil in its most condensed form.

I never saw the inside of the gulags, but I did fourteen years with the De La Salle.

They 'educated' me.

They made me the man I am now.

I watched Mannix do something I had been too terrified to even speak about, but he did it live on stage and turned an auditorium into a confessional box. I'll always be grateful to him. I'll never forget that first night, him standing there in his trademark black Crombie overcoat, his grey hair slicked back across his head exposing the lines on his forehead. The grit of his teeth as he vomited up the horror of repeated rapes and beatings. The courage that that must have taken has always stayed with me. I still see him standing there, his fingers gripping the edge of the pulpit and his knuckles pure white with the tension.

They took the boy in him and destroyed him.

The man he became?

They'll never forget him now, not after his life's work in slamming the doors closed on that kind of mundane horror.

Yes, politics became his focus, he's a working local counselor and he does well in the polls.

But Mannix the politician and Mannix the boy?

Two different people - from the very same place.

 

[Brainticket]

Back in the day when he was still drinking and doing drugs, myself and Mannix Flynn had some wild nights out on the piss and other dope. One Valentine's night we were walking along Suffolk Street towards the lower gate end of Trinity. A wild wind was blowing and the trees were dancing around in the darkness. A branch of a tree fell from above and landed out on the road, so Mannix grabbed it and started dragging it down the street. His then lady lived above a pub on the corner by the gate. He dragged this huge branch up the stairs and into the flat she lived in. Then he dragged it across the floor and squeezed it up against the corner so its branches all splayed out across the ceiling.

She woke up and came in, saw the tree in the corner and me and Mannix sitting under it rolling spliffs.

She went mental, so I got up and left, still laughing at the look on her face when she asked what the fuck the tree was all about. Mannix told her that he had no money left to buy her flowers for Valentine's Day and that this was his offering instead. Hilarious situation, yes: but kind of upsetting too.

Mannix was sent to Letterfrack. Mostly for being poor but on one other occasion for nicking a bicycle. The judge gave him five years. They beat him, battered him, abused him, drove him insane, and when he finally got out he hit the bottle pretty hard. Like Patrick Kavanagh, he was barred from most pubs in the city. He was an angry drunk, but sometimes I'd be able to talk him back down to earth. On the occasions I couldn't I'd leave him to do his own thing. Most mornings he woke up in the tank.

Years passed and he was a notorious wild man, but I liked him: he had stories to tell. Happy people have no stories. The rest of us have to fill in the silences. What I didn't know was that he was writing, constantly filling standard jotters with stories about his childhood. The physical abuse, sexual abuse, mental abuse, spiritual abuse. He eventually gathered all of his nightmares together and had them published in his first book called 'Talking To The Wall'.

He eventually got off the drink after many failed attempts. When I finally met a sober Mannix, that's when the real truth hit me like a hammer. His writing was terrifying, visceral, the smell of warm blood, of nicotine stained fingers and damp sheets in a ward full of frightened boys. Boys who stole apples from orchards for fun. Who ate the sweets in Woolworth's without paying for them. Who were poor. Who came from broken families. Whose parents and grandparents were trying to keep the tuberculosis at bay. The same Dublin my Mam's side of the family came from. Poverty, dozens of kids in the bed. Coddle simmering away for days on end. No shoes on their feet. Real hard times.

Mannix decided to turn the book into a stage show. The first night was at the DA Club, where I worked as house artist, DJ, and house band manager. He came in in the afternoon while I was packing up my gear from the previous night. He wanted to try a read through onstage to get his bearings. I packed up my stuff and went to the lighting desk and switched on a spotlight above him, then a spray of dry ice. He looked like Black Jayzus himself standing there, his face half-bathed in light making his eyes disappear and his mouth forming the words like the ballerina in Beckett's 'Not I'.

We found a pulpit in the store room so I put that on the stage under the spotlight for him to stand behind. It wasn't planned but it worked. Then he started the read through. I was the only person in there with him and he pinned me to the chair with his rage. The sheer anger, the hurt, the roaring and shouting. He was dragging all of his ghosts out and exorcising them in a rage. All the clatters and digs. The eating of his dinner off the floor. All the buggery, the oral rape, the violence, the fear, the sheer terror. All right there - in his eyes, in his words, in his broken self that outside stood tall and menacing, he was at once terrifying and piteous. He broke my heart. I cried for him. For his pain, his hurt, and the vast empty places in his soul where all the rage had burned a hole through his very being.

The show opened that same night and he asked if I'd set everything up just as we did earlier in the day.

I did, and stayed on for the performance.

He nailed his audience to the floor, you could hear a pin drop between his short bursts of rage and anger. He twisted and turned their hearts and nobody dared move in their seat. Silence. The kind of silence that even with a hundred and twenty people sitting there daren't make as much as a whisper. He stood under the one spotlight at the lectern and told his story slowly and with dry ice drifting through the air. It was hypnotic. Stunning. Arresting. But not in a good way. Everything he said I could connect with. He was telling our story too, of our childhoods in Ballyfermot. He helped us all come to terms with our own ghosts. It changed my life, it changed me. I started to write myself, but always with the same end result: once it was down on paper I tore it up and burned it, hoping it would take it all away from me in a flickering fame that died in moments.

But no, it doesn't work like that. It's like taking your finger out of the dyke. It flows out so fast and so hard you can't block it up again. It spills out and starts to rise, like being water-boarded, like drowning, gasping for breath. It takes a lot of courage to confront a horrible childhood. It takes even more to exorcise it. You can try, but it'll never really be gone, because it's part of who you are.

Some people think life is meant to be all happiness and light, but those of us who came from the gutter know better.

We weren't allowed an innocent childhood, and even with the age difference between Mannix and I, I could still relate; he was of my Mam's generation, the ones who survived the tuberculosis rife in the Dublin tenements around Mercier Street and The Coombe. I knew where he came from. I knew what he went through. And I saw it happen all around me in my own childhood - one cut short by evil in its most condensed form.

I never saw the inside of the gulags, but I did fourteen years with the De La Salle.

They 'educated' me.

They made me the man I am now.

I watched Mannix do something I had been too terrified to even speak about, but he did it live on stage and turned an auditorium into a confessional box. I'll always be grateful to him. I'll never forget that first night, him standing there in his trademark black Crombie overcoat, his grey hair slicked back across his head exposing the lines on his forehead. The grit of his teeth as he vomited up the horror of repeated rapes and beatings. The courage that that must have taken has always stayed with me. I still see him standing there, his fingers gripping the edge of the pulpit and his knuckles pure white with the tension.

They took the boy in him and destroyed him.

The man he became?

They'll never forget him now, not after his life's work in slamming the doors closed on that kind of mundane horror.

Yes, politics became his focus, he's a working local counselor and he does well in the polls.

But Mannix the politician and Mannix the boy?

Two different people - from the very same place.

Bloody hell! They are some of the most powerful, honest, brutal posts I've ever read on any forum.

 

[Mowl]

Bloody hell! They are some of the most powerful, honest, brutal posts I've ever read on any forum.

Have you any historic stories yourself you'd like to iterate?

You'd be surprised at how healing it is to get things off your chest.

That's why we're all here: as Irish people we have many things in common, even if we all seem to despise each other.

But that's Ireland for you; it's as though the shadows behind us all are so long and dark that turning on each other and slapping each other down seems perfectly normal. Slight differences in outlook or allegiance aside, we'll keep on doing so until we destroy ourselves completely. The supposed 'Great Replacement' rumoured to be unsettling Ireland is I suppose less of a worry than what we do to each other. You'd be surprised how many Irish people out there find articles such as those discussed here to be funny, comical - and worse: deserved.

From all points across the spectrum, Irish people and Irish history are viewed rather differently by various different people. There are still those of an elderly age who think our bleak history regarding how we treat our weakest is a fulsome one. They still attend church, and still take counsel from the priests. They'll all be in the ground soon, and soon after that again - so will my kind: the first to break the ice and start the difficult conversation about all manner of things that must not be said.

I made my first witness statements at age thirteen. I was - by then, dizzy from the questions and the repeated nature of them grilling me over and again a few times to see if - I suppose, my story had any cracks. Of course it did. I also made a (singular) statement regarding a commissioner in a volunteer organization I joined at age ten. The list of people included in that particular case is still ongoing today, and as recently as last fall, one gentlemen who suffered rather terribly in that organization too k to picketing their headquarters on Leeson Street in Dublin. I know the man that got to him. I worked as a fee collector for his washing machine rentals to the poorer people living in the corporation flats on the south-side. Poor people, people buying household items 'on tick' as it were. He didn't try it on me, but he did leave items around for me to discover when cleaning and polishing our ambulance. Horrible things no child should see. But I did see them. He made sure of that. That he still lives in an area of Dublin festooned with large families living in two-up/two-down concrete box houses with few trees and no kids out playing, is a sort of testament to Irish life post-unseating the church/state.

But he seems to enjoy a sense of anonymity for some reason, even if he is dead.

A savage nation, Ireland.

I don't miss her at all any more.

 

[roc_abilly]

Article in the IT yesterday:

Darren’s abuse by the priest ended when he was 11. His story remains one of the worst I’ve heard

In an extract from his new book, the former Irish Times Religious Affairs Correspondent Patsy McGarry recounts the story of a victim of child sexual abuse perpetrated by notorious former priest Tony Walsh

www.irishtimes.com

Darren’s abuse by the priest ended when he was 11. His story remains one of the worst I’ve heard​

In this extract from his new book, the former Irish Times Religious Affairs Correspondent recounts the story of a victim of child sexual abuse​

Darren McGavin’s abuse by Tony Walsh ended when he was 11 years old, after the then priest was confronted by the child's mother.

Darren McGavin is now a middle-aged man in his 50s. Our first meeting, in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green shopping centre many years ago, was one of the few occasions in my life when I wept in public.

I belong, very much, to the “weep alone” brigade when it comes to emotional issues. But I couldn’t help it then, even though Darren and I, drinking our coffee, were surrounded by so many people at tables nearby. I kept seeing the small boy, not the man before me, being brutalised.

His recollection of incidents of sexual abuse by Fr Tony Walsh were vivid, detailed and told with the calm delivery of a man who had been over the ground many times. By then, having talked to many other abuse survivors, I was somewhat familiar with the consequences such abuse would have had for Darren in his life as a young adult.

I recognised the destructive pattern already: the addictions to drink and drugs, the utter turmoil, the confusions, broken relationships, the low self-esteem, the suicide attempts. Even so, I remain amazed at the resilience of survivors – women and men – who survive all that to live calm, ordinary, fulfilling lives. Wounded, but unbowed.

I cannot remember how Darren and I first met, but suspect it must have been through that sainted woman, the late Angela Copley, whose gentle ministrations saved the lives of so many young men in Ballyfermot who had been sexually abused as children by priests locally. She lost some too. They could no longer cope.

Angela, whose warm embrace was as big as her heart, was the “go-to person” for many of us in the media reporting on the abuse of children in Ballyfermot parish and beyond. She and I spoke frequently, and through her I met Darren and others who had been abused as children by priests. Many did not want to discuss what they had been through publicly and that was always respected.

Trust was crucial and losing that trust in just one case would be enough to end it where all others were concerned. And Angela was key to that trust. If she trusted you, then these people would too. She was like a great mother hen, fiercely protective of her damaged “charges”, with a typical no nonsense, down-to-earth Dublin sense of humour.

Some agreed to speak to me about what had happened to them as background for articles I was writing. Darren, on the other hand, agreed to be interviewed by me for The Irish Times. So we arranged to meet in the Stephen’s Green Centre, which he knew and was not too far from the paper’s offices. His story remains one of the worst I’ve heard.

In June 2018 Darren spoke eloquently at Angela’s funeral in Ballyfermot’s St Matthew’s Church. I was impressed by his composure as he spoke from the altar and remembered how he was panicking the first time he went to see her.

“She came out to the door to me and, the little nod – ‘Howya’. I says, ‘Can I have a talk with you?’, and she said, ‘We’ll have a cup of tea and we’ll go somewhere private.’ And we just started talking. That was 21 years ago. To say I was humbled and honoured to have her in my life would be an understatement.”

There were “many people like me in the Ballyfermot area,” he said.

Angela’s son Derek then spoke of how, in setting up a support group for clerical child sex abuse survivors in Ballyfermot, she “mothered” so many in the area.


“Myself and Gary are her sons, but there’s a lot of sons and daughters out there my ma helped, that she mothered through the years.”

He remembered one Christmas morning when the doorbell rang and a stranger asked, “Is Angela there?” and she said, “Bring him in, bring him in”.

Said Derek, “I thought it was just another visitor till he sat down and Ma starts bringing out the dinner. There was an extra plate there and I said, ‘I suppose I’d better get to know ya’. It was, he recalled, “very typical. It was kind of funny in a way, the seriousness of what she dealt with. After a while it became normalised in our house”.

Tony Walsh was sentenced to a total of 123 years for his crimes. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien

So extreme had been Darren’s abuse by Tony Walsh that the former priest was sentenced in December 2010 to a total of 123 years imprisonment. Five of the 13 counts, for buggery, attracted sentences of 10, 12, 14, 16 and [another] 16 years each. The remaining counts, for indecent assault, brought sentences ranging from four to nine years each.

As Walsh was to serve his sentences concurrently, 16 years was the maximum time he would spend in jail for those crimes. Four years of that were suspended when a psychologist’s report said it was unlikely that he would offend again. It was the most severe sentence imposed on a clerical child sex abuser in Ireland.

Walsh remains in jail and is likely to be there for many years to come because he has since been sentenced in connection with the abuse of other children. In more recent cases he has begun to plead guilty.


At the trial for his abuse of Darren McGavin, Walsh pleaded not guilty. Sitting in that courtroom, one of the most remarkable things I observed throughout the hearing was the ex-priest’s demeanour of complete indifference; there was not a hint of remorse.

He was also tried in connection with the abuse of a second Ballyfermot man as a child. This man had asked us in the media not to name him in our reports because he had just told his two sons days beforehand about what had happened to him as a child and one son was unable to handle it.

What Walsh did to Darren McGavin as a small boy is unbearable to recall, never mind what it must have been like to endure. As he told me himself at that first meeting, and as relayed in his victim impact statement presented at the trial, prepared with psychiatrist Prof Ivor Browne (who attended the trial also), in one instance Walsh raped him with his wrists tied to his ankles as he was made to lie across a coffee table at the presbytery in Ballyfermot, which Walsh then shared with Fr Michael Cleary and his housekeeper, Phyllis Hamilton, with whom, it emerged later, Cleary had two sons. Darren was “crying loudly” and “hysterical”. Walsh, who had turned up the music to drown out the child’s cries, took “about an hour to calm me down. I then went home,” Darren said. This assault led to one of the 16-year sentences.

Another incident took place at Enniscrone, Co Sligo. About 50 children from Ballyfermot were taken there for a break by Walsh and three other priests, including Cleary. Walsh took Darren to the sand dunes where he raped him. The child was bleeding so Walsh brought him to the sea where he washed off the blood, but the salt water stung the child’s wounds, adding to his pain and distress.

This was the incident which drove me over the emotional edge when Darren and I first met for that interview in the Stephen’s Green Centre. The callous indifference of Walsh to the suffering of a small boy of six or seven, already bleeding because of the rape, was bad enough, but then to add further injury by dipping the child in salt water to help cover up the crime seemed monstrous.

Darren was also raped by Walsh in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Afterwards, Walsh wiped him with “a purple sash [stole] he had with him”. He brought Darren back to the presbytery in Ballyfermot, “put on Elvis records . . . and gave me a glass of Coke”. “He then showed me a Bible with pictures of hell and said if I told anyone I would burn in hell and never go to heaven. Then he let me go home.”


One evening Darren told his mother a watered-down version of what was happening. They had been watching a BBC programme about child sexual abuse. Outraged, she went to the presbytery in Ballyfermot and knocked, accompanied by Darren’s aunt. The door was answered by Phyllis Hamilton, who denied that Walsh was inside.

Darren’s mother insisted he must be in because his car was there. They thought they had seen him through a window. Hamilton went inside and Walsh came to the door. He denied everything. As Prof Browne put it in the victim impact report: “then, knowing the game was up, Walsh stopped abusing Darren altogether and terminated their relationship”.

As well as Angela Copley, Prof Browne is a major reason Darren is still with us today. A pioneering psychiatrist, who helped remove the stigma from mental illness in Ireland and who was central in moving psychiatric care away from huge, forbidding institutions, this extraordinary man helped Darren stabilise a life that was out of control owing to substance abuse and turbulent, unstable relationships.

Darren McGavin is still in recovery. He trained as a counsellor to help other people. Photograph: Tom Honan

A tall, elegant, reserved figure, his calm presence in the courtroom during the Tony Walsh trial made a deep impression on all. His presence in the courtroom, as well as that of Angela, was the support that enabled Darren to give evidence with confidence. Over the following years, until Prof Browne’s death, he and Darren became like father and son, an addition to the psychiatrist’s already large family. They were so close that Darren was one of those at his bedside when he died at the age of 94 on January 24th, 2024.

Tony Walsh spent eight years trying to stop his trial from going ahead, exhausting the judicial review process en route. He had failed similarly in another case in 1997. That time, after another round-the-houses judicial review process funded by free legal aid, he eventually pleaded guilty and served time. But he forced the December 2010 trial involving Darren McGavin by denying all charges. The jury found him guilty, unanimously, on all 13 counts after just 94 minutes.

All these years later, Darren is still in recovery. He believes he always will be. He suffers bouts of depression but takes his medication and attends counselling. Darren’s abuse by Walsh ended when he was 11, but it took 10 years before he felt he could do anything about it. The intervening years were marked by much drug abuse and as many as “five or six” suicide attempts.

Then he decided enough was enough and went to the gardaí, who were sympathetic and supportive from the beginning. That was in 1993. It would take 17 years to successfully prosecute the case against Walsh, but Darren and the gardaí persisted.

Det Garda Brendan Walsh, now retired, was prosecuting garda in the case.

Darren recalled: “When I first met Brendan in Ballyfermot Garda station to give the statement, I’d never seen a guard step out of a room so much in temper and anger. Before we left the station that day he said to me, ‘This case is going to see me into retirement,’ and it did. It took that long to get the still ‘Father’ Tony Walsh at the time [he was laicised later] locked up.’

Darren has three children: two, both now adults, with one long-term partner, and a third with a more recent partner. He trained as a counsellor to help other people and has been in a good place for many years now.

Well, Holy God: My Life as an Irish, Catholic, Agnostic Correspondent by Patsy McGarry is published by Merrion Press

 

[Mowl]

Tick-tock, tick-tock. And there it is: the massive gaping hole in my life that reappears every time I confront the dark days of my childhood in Ballyfermot. There's absolutely no sense of relief or unburdening here: it's just more dead weight to carry, and every time I think I've surmounted the worst of it, it takes just one memory of a kid crying and weeping in terror and agony to strip away all the years, all the protections I built for myself to keep the horror at bay. I can still smell that musty odour of sweat and tobacco that emanated from Tony Walsh's sky-blue BMW two-door when he came cruising the streets in the summer evenings, the driver's window rolled down and his right arm leaning out. Elvis on the tape deck.

He'd cruise slowly along until he caught the eye of a kid he hadn't met before. We had to be really careful: there were kids we knew were going to get it bad if we didn't at least try to hide them from his sight. We're kicking ball or playing cards, sitting on the concrete pathway outside Mrs Walsh's house. She was kind and didn't mind us at all, she knew we weren't the car-thieving granny-beating type and she knew our mothers well. When Walsh cruised by, we made sure the littlest kids were behind the garden wall and peering out from the bushes that grew there. He'd stop anyway and start a chat about this and that. It was odd the way he handled himself and we handled ourselves. He knew what we were: innocent kids. Victims in waiting. And we knew what he was: a creep, a lying two-faced bastard of a man who loved hurting kids. We knew the rumours, we knew the stories, we knew the man and the man knew us. It was a losing equation from Day One.

There was a notorious place up along the east coast in Balbriggan called 'The Sunshine Home' which was part run by the St Vincent De Paul from charitable donations and part overseen by the catholic church. The idea behind it was to offer the poorest of the poor an option to let their kids have some sort of a summer holiday and at the same time offer a week of relief to the parents in not having to feed and care for them. Most kids came from badly broken homes as well as the poorest of the poor. The staff were all volunteers, so you can imagine the type that lined up to be given a week with confused and frightened little kids far from their families and friends and who were absolutely exposed to some of the worst dangers imaginable. Boys one week, girls the next. Each kid was numbered, not named. To find your bed and your assigned dormitory, you followed the numbers. That was the first step in depriving you of your humanity. The dormitories smelled rankly of piss, and every passing night the beds were wetter than the previous one. Kids crying, screaming, running up and down the corridors with adult voices shouting after them. Next morning all the wet mattresses hanging out of the windows to dry in the pale sun.

The sunshine experience the kids had featured lots of discipline: lining up for breakfast, following the numbers. Lining up for games and events, following the numbers. No skipping or dodging. No ducking or diving. Stand in line, hurry up and wait. Confusion. Fear. Darting, frightened eyes and the bare knuckles of tension of wanting to run and escape to home while you still could. But there was nowhere to run to. Balbriggan was a village then, not a bustling town like today. The train was the only way back to Dublin and lost little kids couldn't stow away too easily on one. Quite often kids were returned to the house after getting handed in to the coppers. Those kids were usually offside for a day or two afterwards. Then they'd come back, chastened, terrified, afraid to shed even one tear lest they get singled out again. Routine followed routine, and everyone was where they were supposed to be at all times. Or paid the price. Gurriers and 'trouble-makers' were given the treatment. It didn't always work mind, and most times they just acted out all over again because that was all that they could do to protect themselves. Wreck the place. Smash the windows to get out, climb down the guttering and off into the night. Then the awakening in the wee hours to blue flashing lights outside: the escapees now returned to their cells, but not before they were 'washed' and their clothes changed lest they infect the place with nits, lice, hoppers, scabies, bed bugs, or the stink of even more fresh piss.

I was watching Schindler's List a while back and it occurred to me that, towards the end of the movie where the oldest and weakest are lined up and sent into the gas chambers in slow procession on one side of the fence while the younger and stronger were sent to the others side for work detail, that this was exactly what they were doing to these kids. Not the gassing, but the being singled out for special treatment. Then the grilling about why they ran away and the inevitable sexual and violent abuse in the bathing rooms to follow (kids who ran away and got caught were 'washed' and prepared for an early night. They usually ended up crying and wailing, and there was nothing to do except try to ignore it). Some families made a point of sending the kids with their full school uniforms on, that way the uniforms were washed at least once a year. The rest of the time the rain and the damp took care of things. Everyone got a change of clothes to bring home: the parents likely relieved and grateful - but they had no idea of the real price of a wash and change of clothes from these charitable 'volunteers' who had dominion over them all.

The priests weren't permanent, they visited a few times a week and they took charge of dealing with the 'difficult' kids who had problems speaking and asserting themselves, and then the gurriers - who needed breaking in. The priests took that responsibility upon themselves. That was their holiday in a big house with the huge closed doors and a couple of hundred frightened kids who didn't know where they were or why they were there. Sports days were a terror: kids had to stand in line and undress and put on some second-hand sports-wear to enter the competitions. They were 'assisted' by either the volunteers or else a priest. There weren't any female volunteers, they were all men. Middle-aged men in culchie-style clothes with weird accents from across Ireland. Jumper over shirt and tie type dress. Aliens to most kids. Comb-overs and bald heads, some with full beards and some just scruffy looking. Men who liked kids. Who liked playing with kids. Talking with them, getting to know them. Getting to know where all the holes were, their weakest links, where the fear came from, where the horror began and where the muted and fearful silence kept it secret.

For many of these kids, keeping quiet about what was happening to them was an easier option than speaking up. If they were to report it, then they'd be reporting to another bastard who'd take advantage of them for doing so. There was more terror in confronting these men for the kids because they were all cut from the same cloth. Kid reports Adult A to Adult F. So Adult F now has that kid at his mercy. When the kid confesses to Adult F what exactly Adult A did to them, then Adults B, C, D, E, and G all got theirs too. The weakest links were passed around for them all to enjoy in their safe little haven in The Sunshine Home, where the sun never shone and there was little home comfort in either. By the time the week was up and the kids were packed up and sent home smelling of soap and wearing clean clothes, the parents weren't just grateful - they'd go out of their way to show their appreciation lest they not qualify next summer to send their kids on another 'holiday' in the big house.

This was the game the volunteers played: when the kids arrive, they assimilate them according to how broken/terrified/confused they were. Inconsolable kids who couldn't stop crying and waling for their parents were asking for it. Numbers were handed to every kid: your personal number, your bed, your seat in the dinner hall, your dormitory, and your laundry bag. The weakest and most fearful were all in one dorm, the gurriers in another, and the rest of them scattered here and there depending on where there was room for them. The volunteers basically had a week to work out who was who, who was fresh, who'd been through it before, and who had dangerous families the volunteers wouldn't dare cross. By midway through the week, they were already having their sick fun. As the weekend neared, they increased their joviality with it all. Some would come into the dormitories at night and take the kid out to the toilets and do them there, then send them back again. Then the crying starts. The wailing and screaming from somewhere over the other side of the house. The adult voices yelling and threatening. The fear in every kid's hearts pumping and stuck between fight or flight. The penalties from flight were more severe than than those of sticking around to get worked on. Some kids just measured it on those terms: the lesser of two evils: and the one that would make them suffer the most.

When the week was done and everyone was all packed and ready to go, the staff assembled them in the dining hall to sing to the old woman who ran the kitchen. Her name was Molly, and there was a song already written which everyone knew. Then the prizes were handed out for the competitions. This was the first time your actual name was used. It was even written on the wrapping paper of your prize. The kids who neither entered nor won nor lost in the games all got given some token items to feel better about themselves, that they weren't totally left out of everything.

And this suited the program perfectly: the mundane horrors of earlier in the week were by now jumbled up and lost in the confusion that crippled the weakest of the kids. Being called by your name, being given your due trophy with your name written on it, wearing your now pristine clean clothes and looking better fed than when you arrived, made it very hard for any of the parents to believe their kids if they spoke up. Most kids I guess just kept their mouths shut and tried to forget what happened to them. Those that did speak up would likely have to fight the doubts in their parents minds first, then the authorities. These things were far too 'big' and 'adult' for any kid to work out, so they simply let it go and got on with their lives. Sadly, that approach only works for so long. Most victims have to build walls around themselves to keep the reality out. In time, these walls are razed by natural maturation, and as adults they begin to see all the things that fucked them up are are still in there: raw, bleeding out, causing them nightmares, self harm, alcohol, drugs, violence against others, isolation, suicide too. A simple human being cannot stop these things from occurring, so as adults they try to heal the child inside by speaking up - in many cases decades after the actual events took place. By then their life has already been ruined and it cannot be revised by medicine or surgery. It's the cancer that cultivates itself within the thin borders of sanity and truth in the mind of the victim.

For those adults, it's far worse. Waiting decades to confront what you're enduring every passing day is not a life. It's a sentence. A punishment for being poor, weak, exposed, confused, and terrified. Some take it out on their own kids. They try to expunge the horror they were meted out by passing it down the family line to their own children, and Ireland's full of families who live exactly these type of lies. This is the weak link the sexual predators rely upon: fear inculcated by violence and rape. In the mind of the predator, the weakest link in the child is the strongest bridge into their fear, and from there - their bodily chastity. The more often the child is abused, the more fearful the child becomes. That equation never alters or changes in its outcome: the numbers are fixed, the process tried and trusted, the environment set for the game to commence, and hell-fire on the children who get caught up in the tsunami and dragged into the melee.

This is why I cannot for the life of me regret a single thing I did or said. I'm grateful I had moral guidance from those I trust. They didn't lie, they made sure I understood that by doing what I had to that my life would change, a limit placed on my option, and my name marked for life. I was shown that Ireland will not forgive or forget these things - not for decades yet. And I've seen it become truth. There are still too many victims out there, and indeed many more perpetrators who are sick and twisted enough to hold grudges for life. The victims, I can understand. The perpetrators made sure I wasn't going to be sticking around: their religious friends and catholic sympathizers work in all of the areas that can directly impact your life and lifestyle. From the coppers to the hospitals, the schools to the factories. There's no escape. And one must do as one must if one wishes to live a 'normal' life.

Thankfully, I made it out in one piece. I'm especially grateful that I made the choices I did even if I was in some sense of panic about where this was all leading to. I chose a wonderful country and culture to live in. Finland accepted me as I was, warts and all. No criminal record, no health issues, no debts, and no money either, strictly speaking. Looking back from here my perspective has changed, and I realize that I'm not finished yet. There are still loose ends to be tied up: other volunteer organizations I touched base with many years ago still haven't been given the treatment they handed out to the kids. There are still hundreds upon hundreds of guilty Irish folk out there likely wondering if they'll one day have to hear that tap on their front door one evening with all the neighbours watching. Charities and volunteer based groups are notoriously bulging with sexual deviants even to this day.

I also believe that most of these cases we hear about today of historic rape and abuse has rattled a lot of cages - and will continue to yet. Decades may have passed since the events occurred, but the cover's already been ripped off the whole charade and bit by bit, Irish people are coming out and confronting their abusers. This is also the reason that it can never happen again: there's no hiding anything any more. Just like in the minds and memories of the victims, It's all accounted for in ones and zeros and logged in some data system somewhere. You can burn paper, but you can't burn reality. I hope there are others out there still sweating, still waiting to see if that knock beckons their impending doom and disgrace. The guilt alone must be cancerous. I hope it burns. I hope it keeps them awake at night, ill at ease on the streets, and forced to own up before someone else grasses them out. Or someone they've met before shows up on their front door and snuffs out their last candle.

 

[roc_abilly]

Christ almighty.

I had some glimpses into that world. The worst of it thank god only comprising the threatening of violence, the deliberate instilling of terrible fear into a class of eight years olds, by an evil man, a brother, kept on our knees on a hard classroom floor for days, until a perpetrator was given up.

Every minute of every day in that week dragging by like a lifetime. Never, ever did time go so slow. That's what I most remember, how time seemed interminable, slowed down by literally eons.

But it comes to mind now how Joyce I think put it, that Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Today, obviously, our young pay with their productive lives, so much of those lives expected by the convention upheld today, to go towards rent, interest, unearned profit, overhead, other types of economic rent, that the old sow gobbles up.

As an example that no doubt comes across as trivial in view of Mowl's utterly heart-crushing piece of writing above, take the cost of motor insurance for young people in this country.

In places like Portugal or Spain, it used to be twelve and now fourteen, when kids could drive a moped, gain their independence, have a door opened to real fun on their own terms. At fifteen in Germany, a kid can be insured for a year on a moped for 50 euro a year.

Here, you're talking a thousand Euro for a year's insurance. Only when you're sixteen or seventeen and can afford it. Everything is crushingly expensive for them. The cafes, the arcades, cost a fortune. Signs everywhere saying "no skateboarding" or loitering. The young are seen simply as a captive market to sell video games and lucrative "experiences" to, a quick hit.

Surely all of that is a million leagues from what Mowl is writing about above so powerfully. And incredibly trite no doubt in comparison. But in a certain manner it belies the same lack of respect, lack of esteem for the young.

They remain something to be used, abused, not worthy of the same respect that those taking these personal advantages from them would give to themselves - those who today wear the suits, the corporate uniforms, in the businesses, the halls of government office, the institutional arbiters.

And the blind eye. That is what really hits me so hard about the seventies and eighties, when the then institutions, the zeitgeist of the day, revolved around the symbiosis of the catholic dogma; around its priests, and their servile political class, and servile private citizens.

All of this abuse was happening, and people could smell it, they knew it somewhere deep in their core, but they were not able to surface it, or acknowledge it, or listen to that little voice inside them whispering to them the truth. No one was able to speak out about it, believe that little voice, at least until that zeitgeist began to lift, and turn into the zeitgeist that currently is upon us.

There are terrible lessons to be learned from our past. I wish we could learn them. I don't think we have learned much, or enough.

 

[roc_abilly]

I feel like eveything that is wrong with Ireland today stems from both what done in those times, the refusal to acknowledge it, then the cover up of it, and subsequently a cover up of the cover up.

The one thing Irish people and our institutions have never been able to do is look inward, reflect critically on our own behavior, identify the ways we perhaps inadvertently contribute to our own problems, and the fact of such egregious wrongs occurring, right under the watch of our democracy.

We have never changed how we act.

Rather we went about defining these "problems", such as entered wider consciousness in the ninety three successfully convicted for pedophilia Irish priests and brothers, and the more than 1,300 formal reports of abuse made - in a manner that apportioned blame away from ourselves.

What was really the purpose of those convictions? No doubt one purpose was to dole out some measure, however inadequate of justice.

But was there also a purpose also to ease the minds, the guilty consciences, of the people of Ireland. Give them reassurance that all was taken care of now, they could sleep easy now that "justice" was done, the felons were taken care of, etc.

To use the word I used above, I think it is the central thing, that "zeitgeist" was coming to its natural end anyhow.

And my argument is the the people of Ireland themselves, were at the heart of the zeitgeist. Now onwards to the next one.

A new zeitgeist.

 

[roc_abilly]

Your man in the article above, Darren, talked of wanting an apology from the Pope.

Now re-reading the article and thread I feel that each and every individual in Ireland owes him and everyone else abused an apology from the deepest part of their hearts.

If they are young enough, for the sins of the fathers, or Uncles, or mothers, who went along with convention, a claimed "respectability", or conformance, thereby giving up their ability to hear that little voice inside them.

And from such a heartfelt apology might come genuine change.

 

[roc_abilly]

Though perhaps it is too late now.

As I suppose fifty somethings todays were just kids during it. I myself was a kid who was always top of the class, teacher's pet, winner of numerous feis ceoils, paraded around, I used to stay behind to talk to the teachers about the day we had.

Until I encountered the brothers who bent me over the desk and smacked me for reading ahead in the book we were reading in English class.

And after that, I never engaged with school again. I never trusted anyone in authority, always saw them as the enemy. The teachers christened me "Roger the Dodger". Because they could never catch me, I did absolutely no work, but still got by without much trouble.

Not that the smacks, the punishments bothered me much. The game was to rise above it, a grin or new prank to amuse one's classmates as soon as possible after the beating. Genuinely, those beatings made me stronger, added a renewed "fuck you" to my heart, made me more independent (in an ultimately anti-social manner I guess, as I turned into quite the juvenile delinquent).

But it is a different matter to wield that sexual power. Boys understand straight violence, and can deal with it. But the sick urges of an adult man is something beyond a boy. At least, I surmise, for a while.

I never encountered it thank god. The nearest I got was working the night shift in a hotel, at fourteen years old, deep in the service shafts at five in the morning, with the rest of the world asleep, a grown man on his knees in front of me, begging me, offering me money to sleep with him, trying to convince me that "people will do anything for money".

He wasn't dangerous. I laughed at him, pushed past him. But a horrible feeling stayed with me for a long time thinking about it.

I can only imagine that is so different to a really young boy truly abused in the way you describe, Mowl.

It is truly frightening.

And the broader, wider, higher horror is complicity. "Keeping the head down" to use that loathsome, loathsome phrase that you often hear when Irish people are trying to tell you that they are working for the man, "busy", rather than living like a decent, thinking, social being. At least for the moment is the implication, but they rarely do snap out of it.

I am convinced everyone does have the eyes to see, but the majority just keep them tightly shut to anything that might perturb their let us call it "schooling".

 

[David]

Another disgusting thread on Arsefield's - trying to make out that it's actually the institutional Catholic Church which is the victim in all of this.

The Ugly Mob and The Catholic Church

At the risk of upsetting the mob currently engaged in their witch-hunt against the Catholic Church, can we get a breakdown of the nature and scale of sexual abuse in Ireland over the last 60 years? How widespread was it? Was it solely confined to the Church, as many would have us believe? The...

www.sarsfieldsvirtualpub.com

At the risk of upsetting the mob currently engaged in their witch-hunt against the Catholic Church, can we get a breakdown of the nature and scale of sexual abuse in Ireland over the last 60 years? How widespread was it? Was it solely confined to the Church, as many would have us believe?

The way I see it is that you have an ugly mob (we'll call them shitlibs) circling over the dying carcass of the Catholic church, waiting for any opportunity to pounce. These endless reports and constant caterwauling about the dark past provide them with all the ammunition they need. Because these people don't care about sexual abuse. If they did, they would be just as outspoken about the widespread abuse in sporting organisations, charities etc. They care that it's the Catholic Church, their sworn enemy; an old institution that is antithetical to the to the selfish, soulless, individualistic shitlib worldview.

And I'm not defending the Church. No doubt they deserve plenty of scorn.

If you think I'm wrong, have a look at the Catholic church thread on gaychat, and the absolute state of the ugly mob who want to lock up churches, deprive grannies of their Sunday mass and run priests out of the country.

I suppose the traumatized gentleman in the video below along with people who've shared his horrifying experience are simply little more than shitlibs according to this despicable simpleton's logic.

---

 

[Mowl]

The last thing I want is to grow as old as that unfortunate old man and still be carrying the guilt and shame that comes with barely avoiding the same fate he suffered as a child, and subsequently, throughout his entire life. Except it isn't a life. It can't be. It's being left alone to the ravages of one's own mind pulled asunder from the shame and the hurt of having your life taken out from under you and it replaced with little more than a penance that never ends. Your entire being, your sense of yourself, all whipped away and the child left to fend for themselves because no one believed them and most walked away. Because that was a far easier option than the road less traveled.

Even within the family unit, if there's one child who got fed into the mincer because they were the last born and the family was on its last legs, then that child is a prime target for the predators who have access and power of dominion over that poor innocent soul. To the families eyes, they did their best and they failed, so they let the church and state step in to do what they couldn't. Now the child is completely exposed. There's nowhere left to hide. Running away will eventually see you caught and returned to the horrors you're trying to escape from. Except now you've broken some pretty big rules and you're going to pay for these sins in blood and spirit. And the violence the predator uses against you is thereby justified in the parent's eyes.

'Oh, he was always a loner, that one. He asked for it. If he was normal and did what he was told then maybe this wouldn't have happened to him..'

Except the truth is far more insane than the false logic of thinking the errant child caused this upon himself. By sticking out from the crowd. Too shy. Too tall. Too fat. Too stupid to learn simple math. To flighty to sit still. Too poor. Hyperactive, destructive, a vandal, a mean little bastard. When in fact the child is utterly lost in complete and unceasing fear and cannot adapt to life in the same manner as other kids. The child isolates and withdraws from the world. This too is a weakness to be exploited. To be used against the victim both during the act and after. The beatings will hurt, there may be blood, there may be bruises. But those wounds heal eventually, unlike the mind which continues to crumble every passing day. The real self-loathing starts immediately after childhood: into pubescence and those difficult teenage years with this ball and chain you learn to ignore but continue to drag behind you for the remainder of your existence. You begin to understand what has happened to you but you have no one to confirm or deny what you're thinking, feeling, or crying out for. The teenager begins to blame themselves, because there's no one to tell them anything otherwise. They fester in the guilt, wallow in the shame, with complete self-destruction so near it can be set off with mere words of indifference or accusation. The child now a complete stranger to themselves, their basic nature altered permanently, and thereby stealing their very lives away, leaving them to exist in a ghost-like state of constant disconnect and isolation. When you see young men and women with dozens of scars on their arms, each of those cuts tells a story. They bleed themselves because it's the only means they have of trying to exorcise their horror with the world around them. A world that ignores their fearfulness, their inability to integrate, their entire being walking a high-wire day after day, scared to fall but even more scared of reaching the other side.

I went to see a photography exhibition a couple of years back a friend was involved in. There were maybe two dozen large scale photos of teenage boys and girls, each in a setting apparently of their own choosing. This one in a forest, that one next to a railway line, the other sitting outside a church. At first I didn't get it. Then I looked more closely and studied each teen. Then I saw it: the lines carved into their arms, legs, bellies. Old scars that'll never heal because they've been opened and reopened so many times out of fear and loathing, self disgust and rage with the world. Since then I find myself seeing it more and more often. Not because it's happening any more or less than it did, but because I can usually see it in their faces first: they wear their scars with dignity. They may dress strangely or have blue hair, but their eyes give it all away. I see it there first, then confirm it by looking for their scars, which most don't bother to hide. This is their way of asking you to care, to give a shit about what they've been through. Naturally, they find each other far easier than they find you or I, and when they bond they'll share each others trust and pain and even join together to vent their blood - and their tears along with it.

The scars, like the mindset that causes them, last forever. They're deeper than any tattoo, they define the depth of hurt of the bearer and illustrate the calendar of their soul. How many, how deep, how often, and with what? Many keep their device on them at all times. They can never know when reality is going to creep up behind them and startle them into action. Rejection, judgement, disgust, disappointment, isolation. They live under a different clock, a different regime to yours. They answer to their inner turmoil by letting their blood, and in letting it go they find even momentary peace. Until the next problem arises. Until they can't look in the mirror without wanting to be dead. Until the next hurt or rejection gathers above them and smothers them into self-loathing.

One cannot measure the hurt in one child as opposed to the next. Each one is unique, each little life had its own unique triggers. There isn't any 'one size fits all' option either. Each previous personality, each broken spirit, all warped in uniquely bizarre ways and giving different results with every individual depending on what's happened to them, when it happened, and by whom. We each have our own personalities because life didn't deal us the blows it dealt them, so we cannot judge them by the same metrics. Yet we do it all the time.

That old man in the video is a clear example of that: we can imagine what he endured but we cannot imagine how it ultimately affected him. We can see the cold indifference in the minister's eyes, but we don't know the depth of his cold-heartedness. We can see the people sitting next to him shift uncomfortably in their seats, but we don't know if it's disgust or pity that moves them. Both are equally useless to him. His life ended the day his mind and spirit finally broke, and every day since then has been a penance to be endured in a world that doesn't care and must move on to the next great thing.

The only next great thing he has to look forward is his death, and he knows it: we all do.