The great national lie: us and them

The great national lie: us and them

I’m always interested in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and the kind of country we live in. The English, bless them, still think that the world should give them thanks for civilising so much of it. The Americans are convinced that no country has ever been as special as they are. The French believe that no nation has ever been as cultured, or artistic. The Irish? Well, we’re the nicest people on earth. You’ll never get a better welcome than you will here. Some country, lovely people.

RTÉ has produced, over the summer, two investigative documentaries that, it is fair to say, have appalled and disgusted those who watched them. The first, some weeks ago, was an investigation into practices in the greyhound racing industry, exposing a situation where up to 2,000 dogs a year are disposed of in the most horrendous fashion. Many are sent off to China to be cooked alive in that country’s barbaric dog-meat festival. Others, the lucky ones, are put down by vets.

And some are dragged to an unlicensed knackers yard by their owners, who in one case were shown waiting to have the dog’s collar handed back as the poor, trusting animal writhed, in agony, on the ground, bleeding to death from an incompetent attempt at a gunshot. For dog lovers like me, it was completely sickening stuff.

Then, this week, we saw that our national predilection for cruelty is not confined to the dogs.  A second RTÉ Investigation programme, this time into Childcare, discovered scenes inside a creche that would not have been out of place in those regular RTÉ dramatisations of the mother and baby homes of our past. Children shouted at, shaken, held down by force, their cries met with mockery and scorn, their supposed carers displaying horrifying cruelty and ignorance while taking extortionate sums from the unsuspecting parents.

This is not, we are told, a cruel country anymore. Our politicians fall over themselves to claim for Ireland the mantle of the earth’s most kind and compassionate and understanding country, a land of milk and honey, where the people and those who lead them are the most understanding, accepting, and sympathetic beings ever to have graced the cosmos.

Our laws have changed, we are told, to reflect this. The old powers are gone, the cruel Princes of the Church deposed; the wicked nuns banished from our land to hide behind increasingly rare convent walls; a new enlightenment has replaced the religion and dogma of old with a church of kindness and decency and cupcakes and avocado sandwiches in the park.

It is all nonsense.

These days, those people no longer have an avenue to power by becoming a man or a woman of the cloth”

It is easy to blame institutions for human failures. In an overcrowded hospital, where the sick and the elderly are left on trollies for days, we are told that we should not blame the staff, for they are under-resourced, and under pressure. The system is to blame, not the people. When we see the mistreatment of residents in a nursing home, we are told poor training is to blame. The system, not the people.

People in Ireland are never cruel, these days. Only institutions, and companies, and Government departments are cruel, have you noticed?

Real problem

Perhaps we have never understood the real problem. There is no doubt, after all, and it is widely agreed, that in the days when the Church was the pre-eminent cultural power in the land, it attracted to the priesthood and to the religious life many of those who sought power and influence for themselves. The Church in those days was a good career move if you were somebody who fancied a bit of status and influence in Ireland, and as always, those who most fancy status and influence include the most cruel and capricious amongst us.

These days, those people no longer have an avenue to power by becoming a man or a woman of the cloth. That does not mean that those people no longer exist. Liberal Ireland may congratulate itself for banishing the alleged cruelty of the Church, but the cruel and the monstrous are amongst us still – they’re just wearing different hats.

Perhaps it is time, as a country, that we confronted this fact head on. For as long as we have been writing and talking about our country, we Irish have had a unique talent for pretending that every misfortune done to us was inflicted by someone else, some foreign or institutional cruelty.

We see an old person moaning on a trolley, and it’s the HSE, the devils, who are doing this…”

Vast numbers of us died in a famine, and it was all England’s fault, and we had no choice – none – but to walk past the sick and the dying or condemn them to workhouses, did we?

We left mothers and children to perish and suffer abuse in Church-run institutions, and it was the Church that did it to us – we had no choice but to walk past those walls and ask no questions about what happened inside, or why these girls were disappearing, quietly, from our communities, did we?

We see an old person moaning on a trolley, and it’s the HSE, the devils, who are doing this, and there’s nothing we can do about it, is there?

We’re just a country of kind and compassionate and nice and decent and lovely people who just happen to have all these horrible things done to us by monsters, British monsters, Catholic monsters, Government monsters, and monsters yet to be discovered. No Irish person would watch their own dog being shot, or shake a crying child, or leave a sick person moaning on a trolley all by themselves, would they?

No, that’s not us. That’s them. They’re not us, are they? After all, it’s some country.

Lovely people.