By trying to make sense of the Clonroche tragedy we risk dignifying the slaughter of children, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
THE HUMAN mind recoils from the horrors of a young family like the Floods in Clonroche being violently obliterated in one terrible evening by an apparent episode of murder and suicide. But it recoils even further from its own inability to put some structure of significance around such unfathomable events. The families involved will never be comforted, but the rest of us seek shelter in blame, or at least in explanation. "Numb, helpless and lost", in the words of the priest who spoke at Mass in Clonroche on Sunday, we need to rationalise the irrational. Priests, politicians and newspaper columnists rush to fill the vacuum with some kind of narrative that turns the unbearable mystery into a moral for our times. And in doing so, we accidentally tell a lie. We dignify an utterly senseless act by trying to make sense of it.
One available narrative is broadly religious, and seeks to draw a conservative moral from the horrors. It fits events like that at Clonroche into a bigger story about the loss of value and meaning in a secularising society. There is no evidence for such a notion. The Floods, like other families who have suffered similar tragedies in recent years, belonged to an Ireland that has not lost its traditional bearings of intimate rural communities, the GAA and the Catholic Church. If secularism were to blame, we would expect these things to be happening in wealthy Dublin suburbs, not in Wexford or the midlands. And other secularised Catholic societies in western Europe - Italy, Spain, Portugal - don't have our very high suicide rates.
The other narrative to which the tragedy at Clonroche can be assimilated is, broadly speaking, a left-wing one. It sees such happenings as an extreme expression of the personal stresses inherent in Celtic Tiger Ireland. The pursuit of material wealth has been undertaken at enormous personal cost. The pressures of making money, of keeping up with the trappings of status, of balancing work and family life, have been internalised beneath a surface of happiness and success. But they will blow up now and then in acts of extreme, self-destructive violence.
The pressures and imbalances of contemporary Irish life are all too real, but they don't explain - or excuse - anyone's decision to obliterate himself and all he loves. The fact is that the incidence of suicide here, though appallingly high, declined significantly during the classic Celtic Tiger period. There was a long rise in suicide rates from the 1960s until 1998, running through economic periods both of boom and bust. But from 1998, there has been a decline of about 14 per cent.
Nobody really knows why suicide rates have gone up and down over the past 70 years. Nobody can really explain why rates, especially among young men, fell over the past decade. Dermot Walsh, who knows more about the subject than anyone else, writes in a recent Health Research Board report that "in truth we are as unable satisfactorily to answer why young male suicide rose to 1998 as to explain why it has been falling since".
Walsh's report goes on to tell us exactly the kind of things we don't want to hear when we are trying to rationalise horrors. There is no evidence that suicide prevention courses in schools or crisis hotlines have any useful effect. The mental health services may be under-resourced and should be massively improved for other reasons, but even if people have access to them, they are not very good at treating depression - fewer than 30 per cent of patients are successfully treated and 4,500 people are re-admitted to psychiatric hospitals every year after previous treatment for depressive disorders. Feeding more people with anti-depressant drugs as a preventive measure does more harm than good.
Targeting those at risk of suicide (and even more those at risk of murder/suicide) is extremely difficult. Of the 10,000 people who turn up at AE departments with evidence of self-harm, 2 per cent will go on to die by suicide, but no one knows which 2 per cent. Conversely, most of those who kill themselves have had no known risk factors.
We don't want to hear any of this in a week when the desire to find a rational response to an awful event is so overwhelming. We need something to release us from our numbness. But Walsh, who has studied suicide in Ireland since the early 1960s, writes: "The understandable wish 'to do something' about the problem of suicide has led to a flurry of activity, little of it evidence-sustainable but most of it politically acceptable."
We should do what we can - build a better mental health service, try to control the use of alcohol, try to figure out why young men are so much more vulnerable to violence and self-destruction than young women are. But we shouldn't pretend that any of this will prevent the most horrible things from happening now and then. Some things should not be accorded the dignity of a meaning, and the slaughter of children is one of them.