There are two parallel revolutions taking place on either side
of the Irish Sea that will radically alter the relationship between
government and non-state institutions that exercise major temporal
power.
In Britain the ongoing revelations of wrongdoing within the
Murdoch empire and the public humiliation of a media baron and his son
may result in re-alignment in the relationship between politicians and
the press, with the former becoming less supplicant to the latter.
One
of the most important by-products of the last few incredible weeks has
been the end of fear.
Specifically, fear of media tycoons who used to
boast that some of their newspapers had "won" elections and had left the
prime ministerial ambitions of party leaders in ruins. The humbling of
Murdoch Senior and Junior this week marked the end of that fear.
Meanwhile, here in Ireland
the political classes have also lost their fear, namely of the once
almighty Roman Catholic church. The news reports both in the Republic
and the UK were not exaggerating on Wednesday.
Enda Kenny's attack on the Vatican
over its handling of yet another clerical child sex abuse scandal in
Ireland was indeed truly "unprecedented".
Even Kenny's Fine Gael, a
party with deep roots in rural Catholic Ireland, had lost its fear of
the men (they are always men!) who wear red cabs and wield crosiers.
Since
the mid 1990s the Catholic church's reputation has been slowly eroding
amid a deluge of damaging revelations about its priests, religious
orders and the institutions they run.
If you want to find a
starting point for this decline the best place to begin is probably in
1992, when under massive pressure from the Catholic right the Republic
tried to re-introduce internment on the island of Ireland – this time
for a 14-year-old rape victim.
The girl at the heart of this story
had been raped in Dublin and sought to terminate her pregnancy in
England. However, when the attorney general department learned of this
they attempted to force her to remain against her wishes in Ireland.
Thus
began a constitutional and legal battle over conflicting rights, with
the rape victim's lawyers arguing that under EU law she had a right to
travel and indeed a right to life, as an enforced pregnancy brought up
by rape might end in her taking her own life.
This became known as
the X-Case and it resulted in the Republic being tried in the court of
international public opinion and portrayed through the democratic world
as an uncaring society more worried about finger-wagging, moralising
bishops and cardinals than the child victims of sexual assault.
That accusation has come back to haunt the church and state over and over again in the subsequent years since the X-case.
She
won her right to travel to the UK to terminate the pregnancy and the
legal battle established a precedent in terms of right to travel and,
eventually, the right to abortion information although abortion itself
is still illegal in the Republic.
Following the X-case there were a
series of horrific stories that broke about members of the Catholic
clergy raping, beating and abusing children either in care or under
their pastoral guidance.
The most notorious of these abusers was
Father Brendan Smyth, a serial sexual predator of children who even
after the Catholic hierarchy learned of his crimes in the 1970s kept
moving him around not only Ireland but also the United States.
The
church's decision to keep the scandal hidden allowed Smyth to continue
abusing children for years before the police in Northern Ireland finally
caught up with him after receiving allegations from some of his
victims.
The Smyth scandal and the disclosure that the authorities
were complicit in the cover-up led to the collapse of the Fianna
Fáil-Labour government, which at the time was basking in the glow of
helping to secure the IRA's 1994 ceasefire. Yet it was only the start.
Hundreds
of victims started coming forward including one time "inmates" of
Dublin's Artane Industrial school which was run by the Christian
Brothers. One of the orphanage-cum-prison workshop's most famous
"rebels" known as the Steve McQueen of Artane came forward to the
Observer back in 1999 and gave a detailed account of the abuse, both
sexual and physical, that was rife throughout the school.
Thomas
"Anto" Clarke's testimony to the Observer indirectly led to the
establishment of one of the most tenacious, campaigning victims groups –
the Irish Survivors of Child Abuse.
Since there have been several
extremely detailed and devastating independent reports shining light
into Catholic dioceses where clerical sex abuse was not only rife but in
the main covered up.
The latest of these was the Cloyne Report
which showed that not only the local bishop, John Magee, but also the
Vatican were still obstructing the civil power, ie the Garda Síochána,
in their inquiries into allegations against priests in the County Cork
diocese.
The fact that this was going up to only three years ago
is part of the reason for the unprecedented outrage within the Irish
parliament this week.
Because despite protestations from the Irish
church and Rome that they had changed, that new guidelines on child
protection were being adhered to, the clerical authorities were still
behaving as if it was the old days when they dealt with this sort of
things behind closed doors, away from the rigours of the laws everyone
has to abide by.
What makes the verbal sortie on the Vatican so
groundbreaking however is that it is a Fine Gael taoiseach, whose
political base lies in the conservative west of Ireland, who has led
from the front.
Once upon a time not long ago Fine Gael leaders
were even more strident in their defence of the Catholic church's
"special position" within Irish life as drawn up in Éamon de Valera's
1937 constitution.
In the great battles of personal liberty and
sexual freedom from the 1960s onwards it was leading figures in Fine
Gael who manned the barricades for traditional Catholicism as they tried to hold back the tide of liberalism surging in from Britain, Europe and North America.
It
was only after the reformist Dr Garret Fitzgerald took control of Fine
Gael and tried to make the Republic a more secular place to live in that
the nexus between the church and the party finally began to break up.
And,
even then, there were still Fine Gael deputies and senators who played a
prominent role in resisting the introduction of divorce, in pushing for
the foetus to become a full Irish citizen via the 1983 pro-life
amendment campaign and in trying to stop the liberalising of laws on
homosexuality and access to condoms.
Once upon a time not very long ago politicians feared that denunciations from the pulpit at Sunday mass would end their careers.
Liberal
and leftwing TDs had to walk through gauntlets of screaming pickets
outside their constituency surgeries and even their homes as rightwing
Catholic agitators accused them of being "baby killers" because they
were pro-choice on abortion.
The latter was still going right up until
the early 1990s.
For the generation that grew up in the Celtic
Tiger years, in the era of a new national self-confidence, in a Republic
more open and tolerant than ever before, such stories of intolerance
and repression must seem like ancient history.
It would have been
unthinkable even perhaps back in the 1990s for a leader of Fine Gael to
go as far as take on the Vatican.
But this is exactly what happened this
week and it marks a significant, historic milestone on Ireland's
journey away from being a mono-Catholic state into a 21st European
republic.
Of course Kenny remains a devout Catholic like so many
millions of other Irish citizens. However, their faith is for the
private sphere by and large.
The loss of fear has left the Catholic
church, in the main due to their own crimes and their own ham-fisted
culture of cover-up, devoid of real political power.