Back in 1992, the country was rocked by the discovery that a Catholic priest had enjoyed a sexual relationship with a consenting adult woman and had fathered a child.
Those were the days.
The bar on sexual scandal in the church has been raised considerably higher since then.
Nostalgia's probably misplaced, all the same.There may be a temptation to think that Eamon Casey did nothing wrong in having an affair with American divorcee Annie Murphy when she was staying at his home in the early 70s, at least not in comparison with the paedophile priests who would, in later years, be sharing the same parish with the Bishop of Galway; but it would be hard to sustain that comforting argument after listening to the first interview in 20 years with his son, recorded for the first of a four-part TV3 documentary series on the hidden history of Irish journalism and broadcast last week under the title Print And Be Damned.
Speaking to Donal MacIntyre, Peter Murphy recalled his first meeting with Casey, when he was only 15, in a lawyer's high-rise office in Boston. How he tried to engage with his father "and him having really no interest in engaging back with me". How he eventually fled in tears, a "blithering mess". It wasn't hard to see the hurt and bewildered young boy behind the articulate and affable 39-year-old that Murphy is today.
The argument that Casey was a hypocrite because, while always known for his progressive tendencies, he nonetheless backed the church's position on celibacy, doesn't really stand up.
A man can have an affair while still believing that priests should be celibate. There's no contradiction.
But there are sins other than hypocrisy. We're supposed to disapprove of the damage that can be done by deadbeat dads who wash their hands of responsibility for their offspring, and it's no better just because the culprit is a bishop rather than a welfare cheat.
In many ways, it's worse. Eamon Casey may have been blindsided by what had happened to his life, but he had a moral education which should have shown him a better path, and it clearly never did. Peter Murphy knew full well that he was Casey's "dirty little secret", as he put it, and that's no way to make a child feel. It's cruel. Not so much "suffer the little children to come unto me", more "keep the little children away from me, no matter how much they suffer".
Simply being better than paedophile priests does not mean Casey was an angel.
The
great pity was that he went away so quickly after the story broke. No
sooner had the country absorbed the news than he was gone – summoned to
Rome, forced to resign, then dispatched to South America.
We didn't even
know back then if he would ever return.
Even when he did, it was
firstly to England.
Casey never really got a chance to tell his own
story.
Veronica Guerin
managed to track him down to South America for an interview, and there
have been intermittent comments since, but mainly what followed this
explosion in the church was silence. How typically Irish.
That
silence goes some way to explaining the famous comment made by Gay
Byrne to Annie Murphy when she appeared on the Late, Late Show: "If your
son is half as good a man as his father, he won't be doing too badly."
Last
week on TV3, Peter recalled watching that interview. "I'm an only child
to a single mother," he said. "I wanted to fly across the thing and
deck him. You know, the first thing you want to do is drop him."
It
was a funny and touching testament to his relationship with his mother,
with whom he was clearly always close.
Murphy added how proud he was
too when his mother pointed out to Gay Byrne that she wasn't a bad
person either. The love between son and mother was a sign of what Bishop
Casey missed by keeping his son so far away for all those years.
That
interview did not just happen in a vacuum, however. Annie Murphy had
put herself out there in the public eye. It would be naive to expect it
would all go one way.
Casey also wasn't there to defend himself.
Gay
Byrne may well have felt it was his duty as a public service broadcaster
to put the man's case for him in absentia.
Seeing the harshly
judgemental attitude still being directed towards the bishop last week
on TV3 by Nell McCafferty, it could be argued that it was all the more
important to remember the good that Casey had done for decades as well
as the mistakes.
Note, too, the large round of applause
in the studio after Gaybo's comment. It's another instance where we want
to blame other people for whatever attitudes in Irish society we now
find disagreeable, rather than admitting that they were widely shared by
huge numbers of ordinary people.
Eamon Casey is now very
sick, in his 80s and living in a nursing home in Co Clare. Some people
think that raking all this up again after so many years is unkind.
What
Print And Be Damned reminded us is that this wasn't only his story.
It
was ours.
The breaking of the silence by the Irish Times was a catalyst
in Irish journalism, opening up so many more ugly corners of Irish life
to the light, and it accelerated the diminution of the Catholic Church's
influence here.
Those who think this story should be left buried, where
it belongs, are missing the point in the same way that the Vatican did
when it sent Casey away in disgrace, even while it was covering up for
the infinitely more heinous crimes of paedophile priests, and threatened
to "destroy" the Irish Times for uncovering its secrets.
Silence
has never served us well as a country.
Avoiding difficult subjects is
what gives them their power. They should have trusted us better back
then and they should trust us now.
Peter Murphy isn't bitter.
"I've no
time for that s***," he says candidly, "there's enough stresses in my
life, I've to pay bills."
His experience mirrors our own. It was a drama
at the time, but we've left it behind. If the church hasn't, it's
because it still can't deal with unavoidable issues rationally and
openly.
It's their loss.