The past is another country, whose landscapes we gaze at almost without recognition. So what was this Ireland we get an annual glimpse of when the State papers are released? For example, we learnt the other day that in 1956, the Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Joseph Rodgers, complained to the then Taoiseach, John A. Costello, about the prosecution of a Catholic priest for a violent assault on a Jehovah's Witness missionary in Conlara, in Clare, and the destruction of the man's papers and books.
Rodgers declared that he did not believe, had the Attorney General been "fully aware of the pernicious and blasphemous literature distributed and sold in my diocese. . . he would have proceeded against one of my priests for upholding and defending the fundamental truths of our treasured Catholic Church". So the bishop was saying that, far from the State prosecuting violent criminals, it should actually turn a blind eye if they were being violent in the name of the Catholic Church. One might have thought that Costello, as the man who declared the Republic, would have told the bishop where, with the aid of a crozier, to put his letter; but he did no such thing.
"Just indignation"
The Taoiseach replied that he fully appreciated "the just indignation aroused among the clergy and the people by the activities of the Jehovah's Witnesses". His only reservation was about the priest's methods. In fact, he proposed a legal alternative to the violent suppression of dissenting religious activity: the law provided means of dealing with persons "whose conduct was calculated to lead to a breach of the peace and who uttered blasphemy". In other words, stand back, lads, and leave the State to deal with the Jehovah's Witnesses.
But of course sometimes the urge to prove ecclesiastical power by the fist was irresistible. In 1960 two priests were involved in a violent assault on Jehovah's Witnesses in Wexford. One of their victims, according to the Attorney General's report, suffered "appreciable injuries".
Happily, both the Attorney General and the Taoiseach thought the priests should be prosecuted; but unhappily, they weren't. The State Solicitor for New Ross decided the issue himself. "My opinion is that it would be better to leave the matter rest in the hope that these people [the Jehovah's Witnesses\] leave town peacefully on the direction of their Principals. But should there by any further trouble. . .then I think proceedings should be brought for the purpose of having them bound to be of good behaviour."
Yes: the victims of a violent assault by Catholic priests were the people who were pursued by the State. It is a quite enchanting story: but there is an even more enchanting aspect to the earlier Limerick story of 1956 - because, anecdotally anyway, one of those involved in the attack on the Limerick Witnesses was the IRA man Sean South. He used regularly to put his military skills to good use in cinemas, where he would patrol with a blackthorn stick to inflict punishment beatings on courting couples.
Orgy of mourning
Forty-five years ago, Sean South, along with Fergal O'Hanlon, was fatally injured in the course of an IRA attack on a police barracks at Brookeborough. The Republic promptly embarked upon a hysterical orgy of mourning, with numerous town councils approving motions of sympathy, and the State came to an entire halt on the day of South's funeral.
This was a country which was on its knees through poverty: what investors would come to a place where exotic futility was a social norm? Yet large numbers of people clearly preferred pious poverty to prosperous realism: and as we have already seen earlier, not even the courts could be relied on to act impartially.
Forty-five years ago next Monday, a brave and conscientious garda, Detective Inspector Philip McMahon, arrested two IRA men, Anthony Magan and Thomas McCurtain. They went before Judge Michael Lennon, who openly sided with the IRA men, sneering with heavy irony that the Offences Against the State Act did not conclude with the words "God Save the King", as it clearly should. Lennon ordered D.I McMahon to return the property of the accused. The "property" was IRA ammunition. McMahon - who 20 years before had been demoted and transferred from Special Branch by de Valera as a sop to the IRA - refused.
Just to complete the picture of this land we left behind, at about the same time as McMahon was getting the boot from Dev, Lennon put the boot into James Joyce in the US publication Catholic World - so savagely that Joyce swore never to return to an Ireland which contained Lennon. And he didn't.
Impoverished lunacy
That, then, is the land we left behind us: the Ireland of the 1950s, in which an arrogant Catholic Church encouraged physical attacks on proselytising non-Catholics, where quasi-fascist IRA-RC bigots patrolled cinemas to cudgel lovers, and an utter philistine of a judge could openly side with accused terrorists. And somewhere in the midst of all this impoverished lunacy was the presumption that this was such a delightful society that the only thing preventing the Northern unionists from embracing a united Ireland with open arms was British intransigence.
The past is another country all right, through which we wander, gaping and marvelling at the mysteries there. Yet how much of its darkness endures into the present, in dank and poisoned streams underground, searching for a fissure through which they can emerge once again? For who in the summer of 1968 could have guessed that a magical mystery tour into the bloodiest corners of our history lay just around the corner?