Abuse by Catholic Church in Ireland

In light of the at-long-last publication of the damning report into institutional child abuse by the Catholic Church in Ireland, my best comment is to point you to two articles and a poem by Sean Matgamna, who has first-hand experience of the brutality of the Christian Brothers.

=====

Savage Violence in Irish Schools: Why Did They Stand For It?
9 February, 2005

The little boy, Tommy, perhaps eight years old, watched the schoolmaster, Sean Gormley, prepare to flog his brother, Mickey. Mickey was a year or two older than Tommy, but smaller.

The procedure was that the boy due to be flogged would climb up, or be lifted up, on the back of a bigger boy, who would reach over his shoulders and hold on to the smaller boy’s hands. The master would then slash again and again, as his mood dictated, at the victim’s backside.

The boy’s short trousers may have been pulled down first. I don’t know. “Flogging” was what they called it, and flogging is what it was. Tommy had seen it before, as had the whole class - had maybe himself been the victim.

As the master slashed at Mickey, Tommy picked up his slate — they used real slates, and chalk — and, moving towards Gormley, flung it at his head. He missed, and the slate clattered against the wall behind the teacher.

Mickey kicked himself free, and the two boys ran out of the schoolroom, across the narrow concreted yard, down the steps, and off towards home.

I have had to “fill in” some of the details, but in its essentials, it is a true story. I heard both Mickey and Tommy, decades later, tell the story more than once. Tommy was not above a bit of embellishment, but he was a truthful man, with a strong contempt for “liars”.

Continues here.

=====

A horror story to learn from
7 February 2008

An 81 year old retired Irish cardinal, Desmond Connell, has gone to the High Court in Dublin for a writ to stop his successor as Archbishop of Dublin from handing over church files on paedophile priests to a state-organised inquiry into clerical abuse of children.

He has called on the court to prevent the head of the Catholic Church in the Dublin diocese from handing over information about criminal priests to the government-appointed investigation. He has got an interim writ, freezing proceedings until there can be a full court hearing. He claims that some of the files contain solicitors’ advice to him, and therefore that they are privileged, exempt from scrutiny without his say-so.

This strange affair deserves the attention of socialists and secularists in Britain.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, Primate of the Catholic Church here, who plausibly claims that his is now the most numerous Christian denomination in the country, has a lot to say on social and political questions these days.

A lot of it is reactionary — its attitude to lesbians and gays, for instance.

His overriding concern is to have as large a part as he can of the affairs of society — its mores, its morality, what it allows and what it forbids to the citizen — regulated by the “laws of God”, as his church understands them. In Britain now it is an effort to have society ruled according to the teachings of a church which the big majority does not accept.

The attempt by Murphy O’Connor and his bishops to impose the prejudices of their church so that lesbians and gays could not adopt or foster children is only one recent example.

The Catholic people of Ireland are now once again, in the grotesque Cardinal Connell affair, being unpleasantly reminded of what rule by priests, bishops, and cardinals sometimes has meant for them. For many decades, Catholic priests, members of the Christian Brothers (a monk-like teaching order), and nuns, running Irish schools, orphanages, and reformatories, savagely abused children, beating and raping them.

That they subjected them to relentless and merciless violence was known to everyone. What was not widely known — scarcely known at all, except to its small victims and to maimed and troubled adults who had been small victims — and certainly never discussed in public, was that sexual abuse of children in schools, orphanages, and reformatories, was also an everyday thing.

The abuse of children is now understood to be a feature of all institutions where children are helpless at the mercy of adults. In Ireland, within a loose and light framework of state regulation to check such things as the qualifications of teachers, schools (etc.) were an archipelago of hell-holes run or supervised by priests, Christian Brothers, and nuns.

Officially, Catholic Ireland was a desert of lacerating, arid sexual puritanism — a place where for many decades the average age of marriage was 35, and many lay men and women, never marrying, lived entirely celibate lives.

The poet Patrick Kavanagh — he is also the author of the well-known song, “On Raglan Road” — borrowed the common name for the Famine of the 1840s, in which a million starved to death, the Great Hunger, for the title of a long poem about that, Ireland’s other great hunger.

In that Ireland, the priests and nuns were honoured as paragons and models, demigods more closely connected to the Big God than anyone else could be. They were the moral police for a strict and very puritanical morality.

Continues here.

=====

And finally, I'd never usually recommend Sean's poetry, but I'll make an exception in this case ...

MARY PLAYS NUNS' SCHOOL

Now, Mary places papers all along the kitchen,
On table, dresser, chairs: small girls at school;
Herself, the nun, alone with children in her den.

Mary is re-enacting school, convent school,
Where little girls are shaped, chastened, cut
By holy women strung alive to God's tight rule.

So she begins to teach: she stiffens, starts to strut
Facing the girls, like nemesis engaged,
A long thin stick in hand. Slowly she starts to “tut”.

“Tut-tut! Tut-tut! Tut-tut!” Soon anger sparks to rage,
Deep-rooted rage: a wounded eye-less Id
Seething with rancid, poisoned life inside a cage.

Now she begins to shout: she scolds her paper kids,
Upbraiding each as little fool, dunce, dim-wit:
Ne'er-do-well, bad little sinful Patsies, Neaves and Brids.

From shouting soon to action: she starts to hit
The table, the dresser, the unfeeling chairs
With the thin stick, face clenched, caught up, reliving it.

She “slaps” the table, the dresser, slashes at every chair:
Wood rings on nerveless wood, with rapid blows,
In frenzied mimic violence, 'till papers tear.

Mary slashes and beats, her eyes fierce that they glow,
Lost in fevered playing at nuns' school,
At home, in deValera's Ireland long ago;
Lost in that wounded re-enactment long ago.

1991

A scene I witnessed. Mary, who would have been about 9,
was a pupil at the girls National school, run by
the Sisters of Mercy, the only girls primary school in Ennis.
These nuns had a reputation amongst the poor of
the town for being very severe and violent with the
children, but selectively so. They were relentlessly
punitive, physically brutal and persecuting with the “Industrial girls”,
who were in their full-time custody, less severe, though still
very severe , with the children of the poor, and noticably less severe,
or not severe at all, with the children of the well-off.

Constance Markievicz: a life

As promised, here are my biographical notes on the 'Red Countess', Constance Markievicz, prepared for the London Socialist Feminist Discussion Group on 10 October. I have also posted them on the Workers' Liberty website, where you can download two one-page files giving a timeline of her life.

Constance Georgine Gore-Booth was born on 4 February 1868 at Buckingham Gate in London, the elder daughter of Arctic explorer and adventurer Sir Henry Gore-Booth, 5th Baronet, and Lady Georgina née Hill.

Sir Henry was an Anglo-Irish landowner, and the family lived on the estate of Lissadell in the north of County Sligo in the West of Ireland. Unlike other landlords, he was ‘enlightened’: for example, in the 1879–80 famine, Sir Henry provided free food for tenants.

Previously, there had also been a severe famine in 1845-9. Three decades later, in the 1870s, a land war raged between tenants and farmers, with the Irish National Land League – which campaigned on behalf of tenants, against evictions – had 200,000 members.

Constance and her younger sister, Eva Gore-Booth, gained a deep concern for the poor. But poor and working-class people do not need charity and ‘concern’ from the rich – the best a rich individual can do is come over completely to the side of the workers, which is what Constance went on to do. But not yet.

Eva became politically active first, moving to England (Manchester), where she was a lifelong suffragist and socialist along with companion Esther Roper.

The sisters were childhood friends of the poet W. B. Yeats, and influenced by his artistic and political ideas. Later, Yeats wrote a poem, In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markievicz.

The 1890s saw a movement for Gaelic cultural revival. In 1893, the Gaelic League formed, the first nationalist society to accept women on the same terms as men. The Celtic Literary Society, Irish National League and others excluded women.

Constance decided to train as a painter (something she has in common with Sylvia Pankhurst), but at the time only one art school in Dublin accepted female students. So in 1892, she went to study at the Slade School of Art in London. There, she became politically active and joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).

Later, she moved to Paris and enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian where she met her future husband, Kazimierz Dunin-Markievicz, Count Markievicz, a Ukrainian aristocrat of Polish ethnicity. In 1901 they married, and Constance became Countess Markievicz. She gave birth to their daughter, Maeve, at Lissadell shortly after the marriage. The child was raised by her Gore-Booth grandparents and eventually became estranged from her mother. Constance also undertook the role of mother to Nicolas, Kazimierz's son from his first marriage, and was very close to him.

In 1903, the Markiewiczes settled in Dublin in 1903 and moved in artistic and literary circles.

In 1905, along with others including John Butler Yeats, Constance formed the United Artists Club. Through this, she met leading figures in the Gaelic League, and met other republicans.

In 1906, she rented a small cottage outside Dublin, and read old copies of The Peasant and Sinn Féin, left behind by the previous tenant.

In 1908, the Irish Women’s Franchise League set up by Francis and Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington.

Also in 1908, Sinn Féin was founded. Although it was not anti-feminist, neither was it actively pro-feminist. Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith was disinterested in feminism and hostile to the labour movement – he called for the 1913 Dublin strikers to be bayoneted.
In 1908, Constance joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann ('Daughters of Ireland'), a revolutionary women's movement founded by the actress and activist Maud Gonne in 1900. Markiewicz came directly to her first meeting from a function at Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule in Ireland, wearing a satin ball-gown and a diamond tiara.

The same year, Constance played a dramatic role in the women's suffrage campaigners' tactic of opposing Winston Churchill's election to Parliament during the Manchester North West by-election, flamboyantly appearing in the constituency driving an old-fashioned carriage drawn by four white horses to promote the suffragist cause. She had plainly not yet broken from her upper-class background!

In 1909, she founded Fianna Éireann, a para-military organisation that instructed teenage boys in the use of firearms.

In 1911, the Countess as jailed for the first of several times, for speaking at an Irish Republican Brotherhood demonstration attended by 30,000 people, organised to protest against George V's visit to Ireland.

In 1912, the Sheehy-Skeffingtons launched the Irish Citizen, a suffrage weekly; and the Irish (Home Rule) Party voted down Conciliation Bill which would have given limited suffrage for women. The main party of Irish nationalism, it was forcefully anti-feminist.

The Dublin Lockout

The big turning point for Constance Markievicz was the 1913 Dublin lockout, in which she threw in her lot with the workers.

By 1913, Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport & General Workers had 10,000 members, and had won significant improvements for workers.

Larkin was a union organiser, who had worked in Liverpool then Belfast then Dublin. He advocated women's rights, and with his sister Delia, established the Irish Women Workers' Union in September 1911.

The other leading figure of Irish labour movement was James Connolly, who had founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896. He wrote that, "The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave", and was widely recognised as a champion of women's rights. The Sheehy-Skeffingtons described Connolly as "the soundest and most thoroughgoing feminist among all the Irish labour men".

The labour movement’s male leaders were noticeably more pro-feminist than other political leaders.

On 2 September 1913, more than 400 firms, working together through the Employers' Federation, announced a general lockout of workers. They issued workers with a statement to sign, pledging to resign membership of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (or never to join it) and to obey all instructions from their bosses.

Countess Markievicz ran food provision for locked-out workers at Liberty Hall, union HQ. But it would be wrong to assume that women only played this sort of supportive, backroom role. On 13 September, a women workers' demonstration marched to Inchicore, site of a tram garage which was a Larkin stronghold, held up tramway traffic. Women also took an active part in mass pickets and demonstrations.

Constance also joined the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), a small volunteer force formed to defend demonstrating workers from the police. In the ICA, women and men drilled together, unlike in the Irish Volunteers, a similar force set up by non-labour movement republicans.

In late October, social worker and feminist Dora Montefiori suggested the kids of locked out workers go to stay with supportive families in England. The Catholic Church denounced the plan for fear of the children's religion being undermined. Archbishop Walsh attacked the mothering qualities of women who were prepared to allow their children to be cared for in England. Priests seized children from the Corporation Baths where they were being washed in preparation for their departure, and each evening, priests led many Catholics in pickets of Dublin Quays.

A special TUC conference voted down a proposal for sympathetic strike action by British workers. Many analysts at the time and since have blamed this decision for the eventual defeat of the locked-out workers.

Also in 1913, Kazimierz moved to the Ukraine, and never returned to live in Ireland. However he and Constance continued to correspond and Kazimierz was present by her side when she died in 1927.

In 1916, Constance Markievicz was made an Honorary Member of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, when the union and the Irish Citizen Army presented her with an address commending her relief efforts during the Lockout.

Biographer Levenson argued that "it was during this struggle that Constance learned from James Connolly that national freedom would be worthless without the overthrow of the exploiting class."

Constance was by this time living in Surrey House in Dublin, which she used as an organisational base for campaigners in the labour, suffrage and republican movements.

Easter Rising and Prison

The next major event in Constance’s political life was the Easter Rising.

In 1914, the leader of the Irish Party, John Redmond, declared his party’s support for Britain in the War. Anti-war republicans planned attack on British rule.

By late 1915, the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was planning an uprising. The IRB had been founded 1858, and was also known by the name of its American branch, the Fenians. It was a highly secretive organisation which excluded women. James Connolly joined them in planning an uprising.

The Rising began Easter Monday 1916. The rebels read out a Proclamation on the steps of the General Post Office, which had been seized as the headquarters of the rebellion. It was addressed to "Irishmen and Irishwomen", and claimed "the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman"; it declared the intention to establish a national Government for the Republic of Ireland, "representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women", with "equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens".

Constance was a member of the ICA, and very close to its founder James Connolly. She designed the ICA’s uniforms, composed their anthem, a Polish song with changed lyrics. Markievicz held the rank of an officer, making her a decision maker, and giving her the right to carry arms.

The picture of the involvement of women in the Rising is as follows. In the Citizen Army, there were two women commissioned - Constance Markievicz and Dr Kathleen Lynn, medical officer. Nine women were involved in the attempted capture of Dublin Castle. Thirty-four women took part in the occupation of the General Post Office. A party of Cumann na mBan women were stationed in Jacob's. During the Rising, 77 women were arrested and five women interned.

Lieutenant Markievicz was second in command to Michael Mallin in St Stephen's Green. She supervised the setting-up of barricades as the rising began and was in the middle of the fighting all around Stephen's Green, wounding a British army sniper. Inspired by newsreel footage from the Western Front, they initially began to dig trenches in the Green. British fire from the rooftops of adjacent tall buildings, including the Shelbourne Hotel, though, convinced them of the folly of this tactic, and they withdrew to the adjacent Royal College of Surgeons.

Mallin, Markievicz and their men held out for six days, finally giving up when the British brought them a copy of Pearse's surrender order. The English officer, Captain Wheeler, who accepted their surrender was a relative of Constance.

She was taken to Dublin Castle, and from there to Kilmainham Gaol. The prisoners were jeered by crowds as they were walked through the streets of Dublin.

Constance was the only one of seventy women prisoners who was put into solitary confinement. She was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life in prison on "account of the prisoner's sex." She told the court, "I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me".

16 men - including James Connolly - were executed by the British. These executions began to turn the tide of opinion towards the rebels.

Constance was released from prison in 1917, along with others involved in the Rising, as the government in London granted a general amnesty for those who had participated in it.

Around this time, she converted to Catholicism, having been born into the Church of Ireland.

In 1918, Constance was jailed again for her part in anti-conscription activities.

Election and beyond

In the 1918 general election, Constance was elected for the constituency of Dublin St Patrick's, one of 73 Sinn Féin MPs. She was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons (NOT Nancy Astor as many believe), but along with the other Sinn Féinners, refused to take her seat in a Parliament whose authority over Ireland they did not recognise.

Instead, she took up seat in Dáil Éireann, the unilaterally-declared Parliament of the Irish Republic. In 1921, she was re-elected to Second Dáil.

From April 1919 to January 1922, Constance served as Minister for Labour, making her the first Irish female Cabinet Minister (there would not be another until 1979) and the first female Cabinet Minister in Europe.

In January 1922, she left the government with Éamon de Valera and others, opposing the Anglo-Irish Treaty. She fought actively for the Republican cause in the Irish Civil War helping to defend Moran's Hotel in Dublin. After the War, she toured the USA, fundraising for the republicans. Because of these activities, she was not elected in the 1922 General Election.

In 1923, she was elected for Dublin South constituency, but did not take her seat. The same year, she was imprisoned again for Republican activities, went on hunger strike with 92 other female prisoners, and was released within a month.

In 1926, Constance joined Fianna Fáil on its foundation, chairing its inaugural meeting in La Scala Theatre.

In the June 1927 general election, she was re-elected as Fianna Fáil candidate, but died five weeks later, before she could take her seat. Constance died aged 59, on 15 July 1927, in Sir Patrick Dunn's Hospital for the poor in Dublin, possibly of tuberculosis (contracted when she worked in the poorhouses of Dublin) or complications related to appendicitis. Her estranged husband and daughter, and her stepson, were by her side. She was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. Éamon de Valera, the Fianna Fáil leader, gave the funeral oration.

Talking About The Red Countess

A quick reminder that yours truly is leading a discussion about Constance Markiewicz, the 'Red Countess' at the London Socialist Feminist Discussion Group this evening, 7.30pm, Lucas Arms, Grays Inn Road, King's Cross.

All - men, women and anoraks - welcome.

Support Abortion Rights in Northern Ireland

Sign this petition.

Here is the wording from the petition page:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, and grant women there the same rights to abortion as women in the rest of the United Kingdom. More details

Submitted by Dr Audrey Simpson OBE of fpa (Family Planning Association)
Deadline to sign up by: 02 September 2009 –

More details from petition creator

We believe that the UK Government and the Northern Ireland Assembly should extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, and grant women there the same rights to abortion as women in the rest of the United Kingdom.

As the law currently stands, no woman in Northern Ireland with an unwanted pregnancy (including women who’ve been raped, victims of incest, diagnosed with fetal abnormality/disability) has the automatic right to abortion.

Consequently, Northern Irish women:

• Pay the emotional and financial costs (up to £2,500) and travel to England or overseas for a private abortion.

• Have babies they have already decided they don’t want.

• Buy illegal and unsafe abortion pills on the internet in desperation.

fpa believes Parliament should change the law to end the discrimination against Northern Ireland women and give them the right to choose.

Tiocfaidh Ar La

Courtesy of the London Underground Celtic Supporters' Club, I recently had a good read of Tiocfaidh Ar La Fanzine - "for Celtic and Ireland".

The first thing I'd say is that the people running it have done something quite impressive and which should be of interest to those of us concerned about building a genuine base for left-wing politics in working-class communities. They produce a popular publication with a big audience by combining their political agenda with an important part of people's social and cultural life: football.

But the second thing I want to say is to knock that political agenda. The lead article in the latest issue - which I unfortunately can not find on their website - is an interview with an ANC member. The choice of interviewee itself says a lot - not a South African trade unionist, or community activist, but a government supporter.

There is very little discussion of common politics between TAL/Irish Republicanism and the ANC: perhaps that is taken for granted. But there is plenty of discussion - in fact, it dominates the interview - of the details of the bomb that the ANC member planted, the number of casualties, and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment. It comes across as though the fanzine's empathy with the ANC is about their common method of struggle rather than any common politics.

TAL does ask the ANC man about current problems in South Africa, but accepts his reply uncritically. He denounces the recent anti-immigrant riots - rightly perhaps, but with no acknowledgement that the policies of the ANC government might be responsible for some working-class people turning to reactionary xenophobic violence. The ANC has, after all, pursued policies of privatisation, cuts and union-bashing that keep many black people in poverty.

This is particularly interesting because TAL is proud of its anti-racist and anti-fascist stance, and many of its supporters would readily accept that New Labour's abandonment of the working class has fertilised the ground for anti-immigrant prejudice in Britain. If the answer in Britain is to assert working-class politics and to challenge the government, then that should be the answer in South Africa too.

It seems to me that the ANC should be a warning, rather than an example, to Irish republicans - or at least to socialists who support Irish republicanism. The anti-working-class ANC government shows where you end up if you cheerlead a national liberation struggle but allow it to be devoid of working-class, socialist politics, and do not insist on working-class political independence.