A 30-year-old phone call popped into my head in Berlin last February, after the world premiere of Small Things Like These.
Released in Ireland on November 1st, the film stars Cillian Murphy and is an atmospheric adaptation of Claire Keegan’s bestselling novella.
Without giving too much away, the drama centres on Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in 1980s New Ross, whose livelihood and local standing rest on a conflict with the mother superior in a local convent.
As the credits rolled, my mind drifted back to the summer of 1996 when I volunteered at a local convent care home in northside Dublin. For weeks I sat in a dim office, inputting paper records into a new database. One evening the mother superior called me at home to say I had done such a great job that she had recommended me to their sister house across the city. I could start over there – 90 minutes and two buses away – on Monday.
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I heard myself say, “Thank you, sister, but that won’t be happening,” and put the phone down.
I never heard from her again but the momentary thrill of insubordination soon passed. Standing up to a nun in 1990s Dublin came at a negligible social cost. It was a very different story for people like Bill Furlong.
Fear of powerful priests and religious was very real in Catholic Ireland, where the threat of consequences was as effective as any clerical intervention. A deep pool of conformity was fed by tributaries of anxiety, cowardice and avarice.
To make peace with themselves, many people retained a deep conviction – shaped by colonialism and the Catholicism of the era – that priests and religious were godlike figures who knew best.
Watching Cillian Murphy’s quiet rage, it is easy – and comfortable – to forget that people like Bill Furlong, who dared to question church authority, were the exception and not the rule in Catholic Ireland. But even he looks on impassively at times, as a local mother drags her hysterical teenage daughter to the waiting open door of the local so-called Magdalene Laundry.
The film’s screenplay by Enda Walsh makes small, clever dramaturgical additions throughout the film to ramp up the stakes for Bill Furlong – and the complicity of the viewer.
By contrast, director Tim Mielants offers Irish moviegoers the same get-out card last dealt in the dramatic and divisive 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters. There, Londoner Geraldine McEwan was cast as a breathtakingly baroque Mother Superior. In Small Things Like These, the mother superior is another Londoner, Emily Watson, who turns in a mesmerising performance. But her scenes take place in a totally different film.
After an hour of grey 1980s Catholic drizzle, Bill Furlong steps, like Dorothy Gale leaving grey Kansas for Technicolor Oz, into a convent office with a blazing red fire. From nowhere, Watson’s mother superior materialises like the offspring of (Harry Potter’s) Voldemort and (Sleeping Beauty’s) Maleficent. We watch as this nun-chantress with a wobbly Irish accent, clearly not one of us, mesmerises the ordinary decent Irish coal merchant. We can rest easy in our seats, the lighting and direction implies: the plain people of New Ross – and Ireland – were clearly led astray by a terrible witch from elsewhere. Case closed.
But not so fast. Like our priests, our nuns were mostly Irish citizens. Catholic Ireland was always about us, not some fantastical them. So why deny the obvious?
Five years ago I took a trip to Tuam with only one question: who were the fathers of the babies whose remains were found under the old Bon Secours home?
A well-known figure in the town told me, with a laugh: “The fathers of those babies are the sons of the finest families in Tuam. And you’ll never get them to talk.” A decade after local historian Catherine Corless revealed a discrepancy between 798 death records for babies with no burial documents, preparatory work is ongoing to excavate the remains beneath the former home.
Any genetic testing to find siblings of the dead will, however, reportedly only involve so-called mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), a strand which comes through the maternal line. The sons of Tuam’s finest families can rest easy, even though many locals know who they are anyway.
The hot moral indignation the Irish reserve for our abusing priests and nuns cools off when it comes to confronting our men who impregnated our women, often through abuse of power and acts of violence.
Behind our modern, secular veneer, old Catholic Ireland thinking persists with its fallen women and blameless men.
And how much of the golden rule of Catholic Ireland – don’t give scandal – lies behind the battle over survivor files: where State officials redact information arbitrarily and religious orders block access entirely?
Contravening European data protection law and stringing along survivors for further decades are lesser evils, it seems, than lifting the lid on our collective complicity.
Yes, priests and religious exerted remarkable power in the past. Yes, many people had little or no agency to push back. But many people did have agency, opportunity and means – but still didn’t act. Acknowledging our choices as individuals and as communities in Catholic Ireland – and mourning the consequences for ourselves and others, even today – remains unfinished business.
Denying this truth leaves us emotionally blocked as a people. We superficially sympathise with survivors but, because we avoid gazing at ourselves in the historical mirror, cannot really empathise. That is why the lost souls of our Catholic past kept haunting us in the present.
Small Things Like These, released on All Souls Day, is the moment to ask yourself one question, in the darkness of the cinema and the quiet of your heart: why wasn’t I Bill Furlong?
Derek Scally is The Irish Times Berlin Correspondent and the author of The Best Catholics In The World
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