Connect: Peter Tyrrell's recently published memoir, Founded on Fear, is extraordinary. As a detailed, first-hand account of life in Letterfrack Industrial School in the 1920s and 1930s, it is not pleasant reading. However, it engenders, at least in most readers, gratitude that they avoided the systematic brutality perpetrated on children confined in such places.
Like Holocaust survivors' accounts, it evokes horrors people are happy to have avoided. Tyrrell's memoir says to readers that whatever difficulties they faced in childhood are almost certainly less than the illnesses, beatings and savagery experienced by and inflicted on industrial school inmates. Thus it evokes gratitude with an arguably guilty if exhilarating dash of deliverance.
It could, after all, have been you who wound up in Letterfrack. You could have been orphaned as a child, have had parents too poor to care for you or been born to unmarried parents. If this wasn't your experience, the vicarious element - the sense of life lived at a remove - evoked by the book must be uplifting. But for fate or the grace of God or whatever you believe . . .
Yet perhaps some readers will feel only outrage. How could it be that, for instance, Tyrrell portrayed a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp as being "like a tea party" compared with Letterfrack? Remember that Letterfrack and the rest of the industrial school system existed until a generation ago or less. Its heyday coincided with the generations of most readers' parents and grandparents.
Does it mean that they too, as is said of ordinary Germans in relation to the Holocaust, must bear a portion of guilt for not speaking out? Perhaps it does. But it is easy to blame the generations of traditional Ireland (from, say, 26-county independence to the visit of Pope John Paul II) and thereby exonerate ourselves. It's easy but is it right to do so? It's true that the horrors described by Tyrrell and others happened overwhelmingly on their watch. It's equally true that, with independence, Rome colonised this State as the British had done for centuries. It wasn't only the State's industrial school system that was founded on fear. The deference accorded to clerics was neither good for them nor for lay people. It was cringing.
It's one thing to be God-fearing; it's another altogether to be clergy-petrified. Sure, the Catholic Church had awesome power in this State and its hierarchy swatted all opposition mercilessly. Traditional Ireland was a place of sin, indulgences and religious rules. Isolationism and a desire to forge an identity as different as possible from Britain's guaranteed its existence.
It may be too neat to suggest that earlier generations in independent Ireland were like front-line troops. Nasty things happen on the front lines but the aim is to gain ground, or at least not be pushed back. In that sense, though such an argument can be viewed as reductive, earlier generations may be seen to have clung to a version of Irish identity imposed by Rome.
There were many casualties, of course, and Tyrrell was among them. They must not be dismissed. Yet it has to be at least disconcerting for current generations of Irish people to consider that rampant tyranny of children was an integral part of that identity. It means the "New Ireland" of tracker mortgages, property portfolios and the rest of the guff is built on human suffering.
So, it's not our fault that this State handed itself over to Rome. Is it the fault of the generations of our parents and grandparents? They were hardly that callous. If they were, we must have inherited at least some of that coldness. Fewer children are tyrannised by adults nowadays but school and workplace bullying continues to rise. The strain hasn't gone away, you know.
I visited Letterfrack a few months ago. There is a blue book in the little church above the former industrial school. Visitors leave messages in this book. There are dozens, perhaps scores of such messages in different handwriting. Many urge people to pray for all the boys who died there. On July 10th of this year somebody wrote: "This was Ireland's Holocaust of the young children [ boys] in the hands of the Christian Brothers. May the children rest in peace. Where was God? The church has so much to answer for."
Without question, Letterfrack industrial school was a brutal and shaming indictment of the Catholic Church in Ireland. In scale and severity however - even though children in the industrial school system almost certainly died from beatings and/or lack of care - it is not comparable to the Holocaust. Such language, while sometimes defensible, allows church apologists to claim disproportion.
Tyrrell has written that had a gas chamber been offered to him when he was at Letterfrack, he would gladly have chosen it. Maybe he would. A decade and a half ago, events in Bosnia partly explained why so little was done to stop the Nazi Holocaust. Tyrrell's memoir does not exonerate the early generations of this State but it does put our parents and grandparents in perspective.