We could use the truly appalling scandal of Ferns to learn a little bit more ourselves as a society, but we probably won't, writes Kevin Myers.
Justine McCarthy got to the heart of the matter recently in the Irish Independent. She told of an interview she had with Bishop Brendan Comiskey 11 years ago, and the anodyne report she had made of it. She wondered if her failure to report the full substance of what Comiskey had said might have somehow enabled the abuse in Ferns to have continued. "I was wrong. I should have written the whole truth then." Justine, you were not wrong. Had your editor been misguided enough to have published your account in full, the lynch-mob defending their beloved Brendan would have torn you limb from limb, just as they are now poised to do the same to him. And the courts would have awarded such damages to the "wronged" bishop that you and Tony O'Reilly would now be rheumily wheezing through a pair of harmonicas beside an upturned cloth cap on O'Connell Bridge.
For the child abuse scandal wasn't simply a question of a powerful church.
It was a question of a society which prefers the enforcement of prevailing dogma by unforgiving taboo over the truth, if not by coerced consent, then by the mob.
Our taboos used to be based on Catholic teaching, a frigid sexual dementia and a neurotic devotion to the 1916 Rising. Behind their cover, a minority - not, contrary to some of the more comforting recent fictions, a "tiny" one, but a quite substantial one - of Catholic priests felt free to rape little children, confident in the knowledge that no garda would ever investigate their activities. Libel laws silenced journalists, but not politicians, who could have voiced the truth in the Dáil: but of that voice, there was none. So, an abject passivity joined journalists, gardaí, politicians and people generally, all dutifully obeying the orders of the mob: leave our church and our precious priests alone, or else. Across Irish life, everyone was complicit in this informal conspiracy.
No Taoiseach over the past three decades would have dared to instigate a wholesale investigation into clerical child abuse, and survived even a day. The terrible truth is that Ian Paisley's vicious caricatures of Irish life, with its galaxy of sexually perverted priests, actually fell far short of the mark. The people of Ireland got the Catholic Church which they deserved, with a large and priestly caste of taboo-protected sexual deviants, measured not in scores, but hundreds.
And the determining factor in all this was not the priest, not the hierarchy, but the taboo.
Taboo cultures are quite ruthless in the defence of the taboo, and it is extraordinary how decent, honest people are cowed by them: but that of course is where the strength of the taboo lies.
It is not an external set of values, such as common law or a set of commandments, which is enforced by an external authority.
Taboos are internalised. They colonise not merely the conscience of the individual, but also his sense of social propriety - a far more vigorous censor of conduct than mere ethics.
Consider the approach of Dr Maccon McNamara, clearly a good man who now says that he was concerned about the sexual abuse of children by a local curate, Thomas McNamara, in Clare 30 years ago. Who did he go to see about this? The local Garda inspector? A solicitor in order to prepare affidavits? No. He went to Bishop Michael Harty of Killaloe, who was no better than he ought to be. One of the children that the "priest" McNamara interfered with was poor Brendan O'Donnell, who went on to be a troubled young vagrant, before killing Imelda Riney, her son Liam, and perhaps significantly, a priest, Fr Joe Walsh, in April 1994.
It's the easiest thing in the world to say now what Maccon McNamara should have done 30 years ago. But this is now, and our taboo-system has moved on. Back then, anyone who was suspected of attempting to damage the career of a young Catholic curate would have been hunted across the four Provinces by a righteous mob, while the authorities stood back, sucked their teeth, and tut-tutted philosophically.
We still have taboos, and they are still defended with a carnivorous savagery. But now they have shifted from dogmatic Catholic to doctrinaire feminist-secular-liberalism, with a measure of Godless touchy-feel Catholicism thrown in, and no one now knows quite where the boundaries of the frenzied-indignation minefield lie. Moreover, the price for straying into it is not a gentle rebuke, but that defining continuum of Irish life: the righteous lynching, with, nowadays, a few steel-capped peace-processing Sinn Féin boots to the forefront, just as they were in the Abbey riots 100 years ago, effortlessly assisted, of course, by RTÉ.
It is no coincidence that the formative legal actions of contemporary Ireland - the beef tribunal, the Slab Murphy libel action, and the Ferns child abuse revelations - were the product of British, not Irish, exposés. For they involved financial, republican and ecclesiastical corruption: the Bermuda triangle of Irish life, into which no Irish investigator would ever have dared go with any expectation of returning. For at the key points of identity in Ireland, we love truth less than taboo-backed dogma, at bottom truly revering not diversity of opinion but doctrinaire conformism. Which is why this is probably the only country in the entire democratic world where elected, self-styled "liberal" politicians regularly howl for the police to criminally prosecute people who say things that offend them.