Ireland in the 1980s was not the dark ages Western People 17.12.2024
It’s not news anymore that religion, particularly the Catholic religion, is now either no news or bad news. That’s obvious in both the general and the particular.
An example of the first is that, since the recent retirement of Patsy McGarry from the Irish Times no Irish paper any longer carries a designated religious affairs correspondent.
An example of the second is that one of the most popular programmes on RTÉ Radio, Liveline, today seems only interested in religion when it affords an opportunity to disparage and disembowel with apparent relish all things Catholic.
There are, I might add, good reasons for both attitudes.
There’s a declining interest in all things religious and the commercial imperative of sheer survival at a time when newspapers are struggling to cope with the burgeoning influence of a series of modern media makes it good business to give people what they want now. Hence, a gradual ‘dumbing down’ of the more traditional style and content of the Irish Times and the increasing tabloidization of the Irish Independent.
In the Irish Times, this decline in what were once exceptional standards is reflective of decisions like traditional updates on the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church no longer occupying a secure and prominent status and which now seem to be ‘wandering in the desert’ like the Old Testament Israelites of yore in search of a permanent home. The cute bet is against their survival at all.
The other obvious determining factor underpinning the growing marginalization of religion is the widespread perception (and acceptance) that the Catholic Church is a prevailing negative force in Irish life and a handy obvious target for journalistic shooting practice. If you can’t say something critical about Catholicism and all its works and practices, the prevailing wisdom seems to be, then best to ignore it altogether and hope that it goes away somewhere and sometime soon.
It often seems now that a veil of insidious and immersive darkness is being drawn over Catholic life which serves as a handy backdrop to advance any thesis that presumes that attitude not just to be true but to be irrefutable.
A recent example is the new film, Small Things Like These. A rough, very rough translation of a peach of a novel that despite its brevity is beautifully crafted – and attests to a forgotten truth that simplicity in a key element in readability – Claire Keegan’s classic has been mangled into a film that flaunts the past as a place of utter and irredeemable darkness. (And sad indeed to see Cillian Murphy’s popularity as a result of his 2024 Oscar Best Actor Award being used to give such bias such credibility.) But a silver lining to the universal acceptance of that prevailing sense of oppressive darkness in the past is that the past is taking exception to the critique and fighting back.
That film too has provoked a reaction as fair-minded people are simply asking whether the darkness of the recent past was quite as overwhelming as the film presents.
No less a figure than Ireland’s foremost historian, Diarmuid Ferriter, has added his authoritative voice to a growing chorus of protest at contriving to misrepresent New Ross in the 1980s as if the depiction of absolute darkness was the defining feature of a time most of us actually remember. Ferriter objects to the presumption in the film of presenting our history as ‘one giant black hole, occasionally interrupted by a lone, bright star’. Strange Things Like These, he writes in the Irish Times, frames the 1980s as ‘an era of unmitigated harshness and cruelty’. Or in Cillian Murphy’s indelicate comment (with the now prescribed expletive that modern sophisticates feel compelled to attach) – ‘like the f******g dark ages compared to now . . . it could be the 1950s in many ways’.
Murphy, of course, is an actor, and actors deal in hyperbole and an enhanced sense of their own importance. Ferriter is a professional historian and historians deal in facts (not fiction). Above all, historians are charged with the responsibility of giving context its due. Thus, Ferriter outlines multiple reasons why Murphy is not, in this instance, ‘at the pictures’ – including what Ferriter calls ‘individual acts of defiance . . . about previously taboo subjects’. He objects to what he calls ‘the embrace of an easier blanket narrative of hell and suffocation’.
In truth, the 1980s was not the dark ages. Most of us remember it and the film, Strange Things Like These, with its unwavering sense of darkness, does not represent it accurately.
(Ferriter’s words found earlier expression in the response of a friend to the depiction of the nun-tyrant: ‘Could they not have found even one nun in New Ross – apart from Sr Mary – who showed some sign of being human’.)
The truth is that, while not denying that individual members of religious orders perpetrated abuse, there is no explaining away or lessening the reality of what happened and its dreadful repercussions for its victims or that it is rightly demands the ongoing prominence that their stories deserve.
Yet, a further truth is that the vast majority of nuns have being tarred with the same brush even though they lived lives of admirable service: in teaching, in nursing, in care of the poor and in multiple hidden roles of support and kindness to generations of families.
I sometimes wonder how the hundreds of innocent elderly (and very elderly) nuns who now live in nursing homes see the work of long lifetimes being rubbished (as they themselves often are) by being so often and so casually bracketed with the worse that could be said about them.
Cillian Murphy’s false blanket narrative of the 1980s as the ‘dark ages’ is not just inaccurate but unacceptable.
