This liars' charter has bled into secular life and covers everything from adultery to tax avoidance, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
AT LAST we have it. We’ve waited for years for an explanation as to why the Irish are so mysterious, creative and spiritual, as well as being such effective communicators. We have had endless discussions about this rather pleasing problem, and books have been written about it, and foreign professors have come over and told us how fabulous we are, without ever really explaining why. The Brits shook their colonial heads in wonder at the Taig capacity both to lie and to charm. We have always blamed imperialism. But now we have the real explanation – it is mental reservation.
You know how it is. We have produced the most wonderful literature in the world – Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, blah, blah, blah. Sure you can fill in the gaps yourselves at this stage, and David McSavage did a nice job on Irish artistic heritage on RTÉ television last Monday night. Yet we do have a couple of tiny blindspots, in areas such as banking, honest politics, running a health service, teaching our children to read, planning, paying taxes, and stuff like that.
How to reconcile these two opposing phenomena? Well, this is where mental reservation comes in. Mental reservation is a happy place that you can go to in your head when reality starts to disagree with you. Mental reservation is an elegant and fluid concept as explained in the Murphy report on child abuse in the Dublin diocese: “It permits a churchman knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying.”
This came as news to quite a lot of people, even some who have theology degrees such as my colleague Breda O’Brien, who wrote about mental reservation on Saturday.
But then the whole slippery genius of mental reservation just goes to show you the endless creativity of the Catholic Church. It is astounding that it can come up with this sort of thing pretty well ad infinitum. The more we learn about the church’s contortions around the issue of sexual assault of children, the more it seems to resemble something founded not so much by St Peter as by Lewis Carroll.
Mental reservation could be something that Carroll's Queen came up with in a world where words mean what you want them to mean, and the aristocracy sometimes believes six impossible things before breakfast. The writhing arguments of the church authorities are something to see. It is all quite Alice In Wonderland, and the bishops, up until very recently, had the clothes for it. Perhaps a mental reservation is actually a church property, standing in its own well-tended grounds, where the clergy can shelter from reality forever.
But let’s move away from Ireland’s Catholic clergy for a moment and look at the idea of mental reservation for a little while longer. Let’s stand back and admire it, because it has bled into secular life. Come on, mental reservation covers everything from adultery to tax avoidance. It is a liars’ charter. Bill Clinton, that nice Protestant boy, has obviously carved out whole prairies of mental reservation for himself over which he can gallop while pretending he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, and also that he had never cheated at golf.
As a nation we have given the glittering jewel of mental reservation to the world, yet it remains strongest at home, where politicians have lied to various tribunals quite shamelessly. But despite all the publicity and the revelations of the various tribunals – or perhaps because of them – we became a bit inured to their findings.
It is the Ryan and Murphy reports on crimes against children, and how that issue was dealt with by church and State, that have finally proved the poor Northern Loyalists right: Home Rule always was Rome Rule. You were right, lads. We couldn’t run the country on our own. We’re going to have to import civic virtue on a massive scale for the foreseeable future.
Not only are we unfamiliar with the truth, we also seem to have a problem when it comes to institutions. We are too loyal to them. We seem to like the tribal aspects of belonging to an institution – us against them – and this obsessive love is not confined to members of religious organisations. There is a certain Irish love for circling the wagons, no matter what rot lies inside the circle, or how many decent and distressed people are left outside it.
On Friday, the Religious Affairs Correspondent of this newspaper, Patsy McGarry, highlighted the Murphy commission report’s finding that in the face of sexual crimes against children, the church sought to protect itself, its reputation and its assets above everything else. “It was a case of the institution uber alles,” he wrote.
Without in any way minimising the connivance of church authorities in criminal matters, that sentence could be applied to a lot of our political parties – in fact all of them – and many other institutions of the Republic as well. It doesn’t matter who gets the job, as long as it is one of ours. That is how our mansion of mediocrity has been built. Let’s be honest about it: it’s only the phrase mental reservation that is new to us.