What influence the Catholic Church has on the Irish national identity? What was growing up in Catholic Ireland like? And how has the self-image of the Irish transformed over the years? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Derek Scally, the “Irish Times Berlin” correspondent. He reports on both German and European politics and current affairs but also on business, arts, and European affairs. He is the author of the book “The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship” (2021).
Leszek Jażdżewski (LJ): You said in one of your recent interviews that what prompted you to write the book The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship (2022) is the inspiration of Germany’s reconciliation with the past. After the elections in Saxony and Thuringia, is this still the case?
Derek Scally (DS): A lot of people in Germany are really grappling with two still very much different Germanies. What we consider Germans coming to terms with the past, of course, came from the West German tradition.
West Germany, like all of Germany, spent decades in denial about the past, and it was only really in the 1970s and 1980s that they finally realized that the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler was not just about a small group of people committing crimes, but an entire society looking on and (either actively or passively) condoning it.
East Germany never had that, and with these election results, there are a lot of West Germans who never agreed with the idea of the broad historical responsibility for the crimes of Hitler, meeting an older group of people in Eastern Germany who were basically told, ‘Oh no, there is no Nazis here!’.
The official line in East Germany for 40 years was, well, the Nazis have gone West. They are not here. We are an anti-fascist state. It is a very clever little mind trick, and many younger people have heard this from their parents and grandparents. What we, therefore, face is West German deniers meeting East German never-admitters – and that is really at the back of it.
Obviously, these days in the political skirmish, they are still talking about political parties, power, and majorities and so on, but behind it, you really do have a clash. I have spoken to historians about this, and they have said that 35 years after the German unification, we are going to have to have a new discussion about what do we agree our past was and who was responsible for it, because there does not seem to be a consensus anymore.
LJ: When it comes to the special relationship between Ireland and the Catholic Church, what influence the Catholic Church has (or perhaps had) on the Irish national identity?
DS: This relationship is very much in the past at this stage because even since I wrote the book (I finished it during the COVID-19 pandemic), the decline in the Catholic Church in Ireland has been exponential. It was already declining slightly (like in Poland), but many people never returned to the church benches after. Therefore, it is really staggering to watch it. It collapsed slowly, and suddenly it just went off a cliff.
However, the special relationship was so strong because it needed to be. Irish people needed something to fill the gap after the English during colonial times, which is something Polish people will likely associate with. The Catholic Church was a source of comfort. Our people standing by us during this terrible time when the people from outside were occupying our land, were calling our culture and language into question (or perhaps even forbidding the culture), which is what was happening for a time in Ireland.
Therefore, the special relationship was born out of a time of hardship. Then, once the hardship passed and the oppressors disappeared, the Catholic Church moved in to fill the gap. As a result, the big house in town no longer belonged to the British landlord, but to the bishop or the archbishop. And people had a huge sense of pride. Finally, it was our people telling us what to do, and not the outside telling us what to do.
This special relationship was so significant that if you were a politician and you had the bishops looking down on you, telling you ‘You cannot do that!’, and they were going into their churches on a Sunday saying, ‘You cannot have your politicians do that!’, you had politicians being squeezed between their voters and the Church hierarchy. Many people in Ireland today forget that the special relationship was one where we had the Church hierarchy and the believers squeezing politicians to do what the bishops wanted them to do. So, it was very special and very strong.
As soon as the cracks appeared, they could not wait to leave. Therefore, it seemed strong until it was not. And then, we realized just how it was like a Potemkin village – a strong breeze comes and just blows it over.
LJ: Can you describe your own experience of growing up in the Catholic Ireland? Was something missing after you came back to write the book?
DS: Yes. I wrote from the point of view of somebody who is actually a believer. Many people will pick up this book thinking, ‘Oh, it is just another journalist taking a stick and beating the poor old granny Church!’. In Germany, there is an expression, ‘when granny is lying on the ground, you give her a kick in the shins’. The Church is still powerful; however, in Western Europe, not in the way it used to be. This is why I approached it from a position of sadness because I am an immigrant.
I have lived in Germany for 25 years and I wanted to understand what happened to the beautiful side of it, the positives I saw, because we seem to be drowning in negatives, what makes it all seem to be going down the drain. Many people in Ireland are actually reaching this stage now. We have had about 20, 25 years, or maybe even 35 years of revelation. Most people were exhausted for a time. They said, ‘I just do not have anything to do with it!’. Now, what we are starting to see is people realizing what has been lost – including community and our rules of how we engage with each other.
At the end of the day, the Catholic Church provided a framework and a moral code. Now, in a more secular Ireland, anything goes. While Ireland has rejected Catholicism or Christianity, people now have tattoos saying be kind. And I wonder, is this really the banality level we have reached? I am not nostalgic for the Ireland that has passed. I think we can all be a little bit nostalgic about the past, but I am not. This is why the reason I wanted to write the book is to try to find an answer to what we have replaced it with.
As Irish people, are we aware of our part in our past? Because it seems that what happened was that we went from this huge special relationship with a sense of pride in our clerics to an ‘othering’ process. As soon as the abuse revelations (about child sexual abuse or women who had babies out of wedlock being locked up in residential homes), people very much distanced themselves. They said, ‘Those terrible priests, those terrible nuns!’. I uncomfortably pointed out, ‘Do you realize that these people are Irish passport holders? You do realize you used to be proud of these people? You do realize they are us?’
I was trying to excavate it before it got too covered up with other stuff – I wanted to be like an archaeologist, just take the brush, brush back a little bit, and look at sometimes uncomfortable truths about how much we were a part of our own past, and how much agency many of us had to do or not do anything.
We have a double standard. On the one hand, we hold these priests and nuns to a higher standard. But, on the other hand, we did not cover ourselves in glory in that past either. Therefore, we need to try to accept the dark and the shade as well as the bright parts of Irish Catholic past.
Everyone goes through life just living their life because you only get one and this applies in particular to childhood. I grew up in the 1980s was very, when Ireland was not very wealthy, with my school being run by the Catholic Church, as they owned the land on which the school was built.
Once a month or once every two months at 10 o’clock, I would leave my classes, walk through the back gate, and go to the church to serve the weekly mass. I was basically missing out on my education to serve mass for a dozen or two dozen parishioners and the church. When I look back at old parish newsletters, the church was really in charge of everything – the flower group, the sports groups, the Cub Scouts, they were all Catholic, so the Catholic Church was offering far more than just Sunday morning masses, when everyone was expected to be present.
We had masses at 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, 11:30, 12:30, on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Religion was everywhere, it was inescapable. However, most people figured that this was a good thing. We must remember that Ireland came from tremendous poverty – the British withdrew from Ireland 100 years ago, they gave us back the keys and said, ‘Have fun!’. They withdrew all their welfare and so the Catholic Church moved right in, provided hospitals and schools (often at a very high level), so many people are ambivalent about completely attacking the Church because – unlike in Poland or elsewhere – there was no welfare state, the Church was the welfare state.
Life was very ordered. When I talk to my East German friends, my life sounds very similar to what they would have gone through. In East Germany, the party wanted you to be a part of their youth group, of their women’s groups, or work excursion groups. They did not want you to stay at home on your own. The collectivization from communist times sounds very similar to the collectivization in the Catholic Church in Ireland. Perhaps it was not as ordered, but there was a lot of social pressure – if you were not a part of it, you had to explain yourself. Ironically, now, we have a type of collectivization which is secular – and if you are not secular, you have to explain yourself.
When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979 on his way to Poland, you had to justify not being there; when Pope Francis visited Ireland in 2018, I met many people at the mass who said ‘Oh, no, I have not told anyone that I am here!’. People are social animals, and the Catholic Church provided the ultimate collective comfort.
It is very difficult for people these days to imagine how abuse could happen in these environments, but luckily we have gotten over the taboo of thinking that priests may be sexual beings, who may be preying on underage children. Nonetheless, there still are certain taboos about other untouchable institutions – and one of them, and the biggest one, is the family. We all have families, so if people struggle to understand what Catholic Ireland or the Catholic Church in Poland was like, why they were so untouchable, just think how untouchable the family is as an institution.
LJ: What prompted the fall of the Church in Ireland? Can you describe how those revelations were received at the time and how it transformed the self-image that Irish had about themselves?
DS: Although we do not have earthquakes in Ireland, and thankfully so, this was a real emotional societal earthquake. There were several reports in this area, but the Ryan report was the big one.
The Ryan report talked about how some institutions literally delivered children to the hands of abusers. These were industrial schools, where children were being robbed of their childhood. You could see these people going through town, you would know what they looked like. I spoke to a woman who worked with abuse survivors, who recalled coming home and seeing her mother sitting by the kitchen table with the newspaper spread out. She was holding her head in her hands and weeping because she had seen boys from the local industrial school who would come to a mass or go into a shop, and they always looked scruffy, dirty, and underfed. You saw them but you did not really see them.
The report caused such an earthquake not only because of the revelations alone, but also because everyone had seen pieces of this abuse, but they were not quite aware of it or did not want to think of how big it might be. These industrial schools were all over the country, they were often built to look the same, you could see them if you wanted to but if you chose not to see them, you did not.
In my book, I talk about the idea of the ‘continuum of knowing’. On the one hand, it is like a horizontal line (on one extreme you have the victims and survivors, on the other extreme of the line you have the perpetrators). I did not feel that it is my job to point the finger at the people in Ireland – as I did not grow up in the hard times of Catholic Ireland and I have been gone for 25 years, – so instead I asked the readers to determine where they are on that line. What was their social position in the town in which they lived, and whether they had agency to speak out or maybe they were completely dependent on the Catholic Church (for instance, given the need for business at their local shop). Did you stay silent because you could not or because you would not speak up (because you were scared)? Or maybe you really did not see anything?
I was trying to encourage people to place themselves on that line, which seemed to be far more constructive than pointing fingers at older generations and saying, ‘How could you be so stupid!’. We have seen through history that most people are stupid, scared, or cowardly most of the time, but if you understand the circumstances and you put yourself in their shoes, perhaps you would not have been that different.
The book is really not trying to castigate people but rather to understand if we have really learned that much as a society now. Many countries in Europe are grappling with asylum seekers, trying to decide whether they are good or bad asylum seekers, are they really suffering, and how much charity, money, and social welfare we can give them. These are the questions we are grappling with now – in different circumstances but with similar moral dilemmas. And still, many people would just prefer to look away.
LJ: How did you feel as a journalist and as a person talking to victims, bystanders, and even perpetrators?
DS: It was very awkward. You do not want to say anything triggering, so you are tiptoeing around some issues or feelings. But then I realized that I was doing something that they had not asked me to do. None of them asked me to tiptoe around them. And then I realized that I was actually ‘othering’ them, putting them outside of my own experience. And that is a problem that we still have in Ireland – these people are humans whose human rights were violated. You can literally boil it down to that.
Society has the right to either prevent human rights violations or, when they are exposed, to intervene, write reports, and provide compensation. Meanwhile, Ireland is still struggling with the second part. In this respect, I went one step further than the Irish society or most Irish people because most people are still viewing these people as a special group who are looking for special treatment.
They used to view them as strange little kids with the dirty legs and the dirty faces, and now they are viewing them as adults who are probably just looking for money. As a consequence, we are either tiptoeing around them (in the best sense of the word) so as not to trigger them, or we are isolating and viewing them as ‘other people’. And all they ever say is that they simply want to be treated like everyone else. That was very helpful.
It was also helpful in dealing with perpetrators. In the book, I talked to a retired cardinal, who had children telling him about priests who had abused them. He wrote a report, it was put on a shelf, nothing happened. And it was only decades later when he became the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, the Primate, that all this came out.
First, the abusing priests were exposed and then the children came forward, who are now grown-up men. Only later it was revealed that they had already told their story in the mid-1970s. The retired cardinal I have mentioned is now a pariah in Ireland.
Meanwhile, people feel very good about themselves. They point the finger at him and say, ‘You are a terrible man!’. I adopted the approach referred to in therapy as the ‘unconditional positive regard’. According to it, both the therapist and the patient are a person, so why not have an interaction? This does not mean that you approve of what they have done or the problem they have come to you with, but it implies that you do your best to put yourself in their shoes and listen to them.
If they feel you are really listening to them and not just waiting to come in with your clever line, you will have a very different conversation with those people. Now, I am not a therapist, and I was not trying to put these people through my amateur therapy sessions, but I just decided to do something radical, something very Christian – I wanted to treat them as I would like to be treated.
It was extraordinary how well this worked. I had far more interesting conversations, and the readers have said that they had not seen the Catholic Church being approached this way. I tried to move beyond anger and towards empathy.
LJ: Can you describe the case of the Magdalene Laundries? How is it possible that the were operating until the late 20th century?
DS: The concept of the ‘fallen women’ in Ireland was anything the men wanted them to be, so anyone in Ireland could potentially be a fallen woman. It was a very dangerous place to be a woman. Mostly, these laundries (also known as ‘Magdalene asylums’) were filled with women who had had children out of wedlock. Their families would bring them there because the disgrace of having a pregnant daughter or sister was just so great that it was better for them to disappear.
Wealthier (middle-class or upper-class) families could afford to have their daughter disappear discreetly for a few months to England. But for poor people, this was not an option. Therefore, either they would be reported by their neighbors, or the priests would come calling, or most often and most tragically, the family had to say, ‘It is either her or all of us. We will either all be destroyed, or we will offer her up’. So, the girl or woman would disappear to the Magdalene laundry, she would have the child, and she would work, work, work.
The laundry was called after Mary Magdalene, the most defamed woman in history. She was an apostle of Jesus, but in later versions of the Bible, she was conflated with a prostitute. These women were effectively prostitutes, and they would have to do laundry to wash away the stains on their souls.
It was a great business for many of the women’s religious orders run by nuns. They would take in laundry from the local town, and they would basically have slave labor, so they could offer very competitive rates. If you are not paying your staff, you can undercut the competition.
And so, all around the country an industry emerges, because all this was happening before inventing the washing machine. These women would be literally manually washing garments, with massive steam machines, folding machines, and pressing machines, which required huge manual labor.
These women were often pregnant, but not necessarily. We could also find there, for instance, people who were deemed by their families ‘problematic’ (maybe they were lesbian, or maybe there was some sort of an inheritance dispute, or she could simply be considered ‘too sexy’), so it was better if certain people disappeared. Ireland turned these laundries into a dumping ground for any woman. It was staggering. Anyone could end up there.
The last laundry closed in the mid-1990s in the center of Dublin. So, the entire population of Dublin was walking around this Bermuda triangle of human rights abuses and pretending they did not know what was going on. I have spoken to people who used this laundry. It was even used by our president (!). At every banquet at the president’s palace, all the tablecloths and the napkins had come from the said laundry. The effects of their labor were literally everywhere. And it did not close until the mid-1990s, even though a lot of the laundries closed down when the automatic washing machine came in, so people did not bring their clothes to the laundry anymore.
Therefore, we must acknowledge that these laundries did not close down because people broke down the walls and said, ‘You are now free!’. They broke down because of the washing machine, which was cheaper. The reason the last laundry stayed open as long as it did, is because – according to the nuns who were interviewed in our newspaper, The Irish Times, nobody has come to collect these women, so they were basically institutionalized.
In many cases, they were very damaged by their time there, which is why the nuns did not want to let them walk out the door, as they would not have anywhere to go, even though they had families. Therefore, by bringing them into this institutional environment and collecting them, or failing to collect them at the end, the Irish society very much carries a co-responsibility. And this is not something that the Irish people were comfortable admitting or accepting.
LJ: How do you deal with this difficult past as an Irishman? Are there any universal lessons we can learn from it?
DS: First of all, do not trust anyone who calls you a victim. When I looked at Polish politics in the last few years from the outside, I saw a lot of people who were playing using the victim card to make people feel like they are partly a victim. Once you play that card on the people, you can do anything with them. It can be nationalism, Catholicism, or used against certain minorities.
Irish people were told by the Catholic Church that they are the best Catholics in the world, that they are the holiest. Once you compliment somebody, you can victimize them in an extreme way. Suddenly, they become very malleable. In Ireland, we were sold the victim narrative, according to which we are the most oppressed people in the world. At the same time, because of our oppression we were suffering the most. Therefore, our reward in the next life would be even greater. We are the best Catholics in the world, therefore, we must stick to the set rules particularly strictly.
When I look at Poland, I see similar dynamics at play – with the Catholic Church in the past, as well as in the political sphere right now. The feeling of moral outrage, of being victimized, when you actually belong to a privileged group – when these dynamics leak into present-day politics, it can be quite dangerous.
If you start pointing your finger at other people, it is usually best to start by looking at yourself in the mirror. My therapist once asked me, ‘Derek, so what is Christianity if it was boiled down into one sentence?’ and I realized that it all comes to a verse in the Bible, where Jesus says, ‘You must love your god with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself’. And my therapist replied, ‘What if your Catholic Church in Ireland did not teach you to love yourself?’. In fact, it really did not! It was a Catholicism of rules, the fear of exclusion, and finger pointing, where there was very little love. And if the Christian Church fails the love test, it fails as a Church.
If politicians or priests are not speaking from a position of love, if they are using hate, exclusion, and fear, it does not really matter what political or religious group they represent. It means it is not a healthy place to be in. And if you have gone through a more hate-filled rather than love-filled Christian background, you are uniquely susceptible to such manipulations right now – particularly, in terms of politics.
Derek Scally will be a guest of the forthcoming edition of Freedom Games, a festival of ideas held annually in Łódź, Poland. This year’s edition will be held on October 18-20 in EC1 Łódź. The European Liberal Forum is the Co-Organizer of the festival.
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
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