The recurrent theme of victim and critic is graphically portrayed in Paddy Doyle's autobiographical account of his childhood in rural Ireland in the nineteen fifties and sixties, in The God Squad. This is a moving and terrifying testament of the institutionalised Ireland of forty years ago. Following the death of his mother from cancer in 1955, and the subsequent suicide of his father, which he witnessed, Paddy Doyle was charged with "not being in possession of a proper guardian". At the age of four years and three months he was sentenced in a District Court to be detained in an industrial school for eleven years. Any attempt he made to talk about the manner of his father's death was met with either disbelief, stony silence or punishment. The psychological burden of this unshared knowledge, and the abuse and deprivation he suffered while in the industrial school, has had a profound effect on his life.
Although not a work of fiction, Paddy Doyle's account of institutional life in Ireland - as seen through the bewildered eyes of a child in The God Squad - deals with many of the issues raised in Butcher Boy. It is a factual and oddly pragmatic account of the years he spent in an industrial school in rural Ireland during the nineteen fifties, following the deaths of both his parents. During his detention he was viciously assaulted and sexually abused by his religious custodians, and when within three years his experiences began to result in physical manifestations of trauma, he was taken to hospital in Cork, and left there, never to see his custodians again. So began his long round of hospitals, mainly in the company of old and dying men, while doctors tried to diagnose his condition. During this period of his life he was a constant witness to death, and years of exploratory treatment for his illness culminated in brain surgery at the age of ten, by which time he had become permanently disabled. (Doyle 2001:3) In recent years, following the birth of his third child, Doyle's condition has been diagnosed as Idiopathic Torsion Dystonia. He has also discovered that this rare medical condition is hereditary, genetic and familial, and although not disclosed to him at the time it was mentioned as a possible reason for his disability on his medical file when he was a child.
The narrative style of The God Squad is journalistic, low-key and convincing. First published in 1988, it held a mirror to the established mores of Irish society, and particularly the Catholic Church, at a moment of traumatic cultural change, a point where the certainties of the past were rapidly dissolving. (Herron 2000:168) Although concerned with the horrors of child abuse, the issue is dealt with in a detached and open manner, and with an extraordinary lack of bitterness. He treats the text sociologically; there is no depth, no hidden meaning. As Doyle says: "It is about a society's abdication of responsibility to a child. The fact that I was that child, and that the book is about my life, is largely irrelevant." (Doyle 1989:11) It is nonetheless, an indictment of a society which entrusted small children into the care of religious orders in institutions where neglect and abuse were commonplace. Just as Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy is a contemporary response to the crises of post-modern Irish society, the dominant concern of Paddy Doyle's story is an exploration of the moral corruption at the heart of traditional Irish Catholicism, and the collusion of the state in hiding away the poor, the unwanted, the neglected. For McCabe's fictional characters there is no exit from the state of madness, or the madness of the state. (Herron 2000:169) For Paddy Doyle, the pervasive presence of madness erupts as a form of contamination which slowly and inexorably results in the disintegration of a healthy child into one with severe physical handicap. The horror of both texts is that the past, particularly the state's official past, is prone to revision and contamination.
Whereas
McCabe's Francie is an unreliable narrator, the stability of Doyle's anchoring
voice masks the horror of his text. Paddy Doyle always remains detached from
his story, but his pain transcends the prosaic narrative. The God Squad is an
eloquent testimony to the power of the human psyche to rescue wholeness from
chaos, and this makes it, for all its horrors, a profoundly hopeful book. (Doyle
2001: 4)
Both The Butcher Boy and The God Squad are written from the perspective of a
child, and depend upon the successful and early investiture of credibility on
a child's unironic perceptions. McCabe's narrator is a child, albeit a psychopath,
and the narrative is successful in portraying the vivid immediacy of a child's
perception; Francie blurts out something only to have to requalify it later.
Paddy Doyle's voice clearly recounts the events of a painful childhood, the
emotions and the suffering are chronicled in great detail, his artistry lies
in his ability to speak with the innocent non-judgmental voice of a
child.
In writing The God Squad, Doyle exposed the horror of children's lives in these institutions, run by religious orders and funded to a large extent by the state. Although Doyle's story is one of the many cases of child abuse which have become public during the last two decades, when The God Squad was first published in December 1988 it caused public outcry. Doyle was accused of bringing about the "collapse of the Church in Ireland". (Doyle 2001:1) The terse comment from the Conference for Major Religious Superiors was "we have no comment to make at this time". It was, Doyle says, never his intention to "wreck" the church, but to make public the truth about the abuse of children who were placed in the care of nuns, priests or christian brothers by the courts of the land. (Doyle 2001:1) Despite the public reaction of horror to The God Squad, and the very negative response of the church, the book did not raise the issue of child abuse in institutional care to the level of public consciousness as did the television programmes, Dear Daughter and States of Fear, which also dealt with this subject and were broadcast in the latter half of the nineties. This somewhat muted response was perhaps both a question of medium and timing. Television of its nature reaches a wider audience and has a more immediate impact than a book, however favourably received. Since the mid-nineties the power and authority of the Catholic Church has been undermined by a series of scandals, most notably the case of the paedophile priest Brendan Smyth, and the emerging stories of widespread child-abuse. While religion remains an important factor in Irish life, its rapidly changing role and the move away from traditional religious practices, church membership and participation by a large section of society has made it easier for the public to accept the truth of what happened to children who were in institutional care run by religious orders.
Indeed it
seems that it is only in the final decade of the twentieth century that Ireland
was
ready to accept its hidden history, evidenced by an editorial headline in The
Irish Times in March 1996, which read "stark days of revelation". (O'Toole 1999:313)
This was prompted by the release of files from the national Archives, showing
that over 2,100 "illegitimate" babies had been secretly exported from Ireland
to America between 1949 and 1970, in a trade organised by nuns, sanctioned by
the then Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, administered by civil servants,
and endorsed by government ministers. That the story itself was covered in such
detail in 1996 was itself a profound mark of change, because in fact the policy
of exporting babies had not been entirely secret. The Irish Times had revealed
in October 1951 that "almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption
last year", and in fact the figure for 1951 was already higher than that. The
report referred to eighteen parties of children leaving Shannon in the first
week of October alone, but the story had no impact at the time. When the files
were released in 1996 they showed that the only comment within the Department
of External Affairs at the time had been that "it would be interesting to know
how The Irish Times obtained the figure." This clearly indicates that a subject
that was the source of national outrage in 1996 was not, in the early fifties,
a subject fit for discussion. (O'Toole 1999:314) The editorial continued: "When
the social history of our times is written, the early months of 1996 will figure
as a period of stark revelation, a final drawing away of the veils from a darker,
hidden Ireland. These days and weeks have marked a convergence of suppressed
grief, of buried secrets and of enduring pain". (O'Toole 1999:315)
This enduring pain is evident in both The God Squad and The Butcher Boy. Both texts are set in the same era, the late fifties and early sixties, both are narrated by young males and the shared themes include child-abuse, institutional life, and the difficulties, both physical and mental of a child set adrift in the repressed and hypocritical Ireland of that time without a secure family structure. Both books graphically expose the deficencies in the social system of a country which promised in its constitution to:
"make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their proper education and training as Citizens of a Free and Gaelic Ireland". (O'Toole 2000:5)
Clearly, the reality of what happened in Ireland in the '50s and '60s is far removed from this ideal. In an article in the Irish Times in October of last year, the journalist Fintan O'Toole expressed the opinion that during that time children in trouble were treated as objects of charitable concern who could be handed over to church institutions to do with, quite literally, what they pleased. He continued, "then when the cruelty and violence of those institutions became inconvenient, a hopelessly inadequate patchwork of public and voluntary services were supposed to take their place". (O'Toole 2000: 5)
Almost four decades after the scandal of "exporting children" was first revealed, in response to the emerging stories of the mistreatment of children in care, a former Government minister, Justin Keating apologised to the children who had suffered abuse. Although undoubtedly sincere, this apology is also within the context of the times - would it have been issued in the '60s or '70s? In an interview with Patsy McGarry, the Religious Affairs Correspondent in the Irish Times, dated July 15th 1999, he said:
I am quite satisfied that the people in the (religious) communities knew about the abuse. What about the priests at large? Can they, in truth, offer the Nazi alibi "It wasn't me. I was somewhere else, I didn't know". They could not have escaped knowing. We are sure that the hierarchy knew, because of complaints made to them which were ignored. Similarly, civil servants must have developed a very shrewd insight about what was happening, but the State sheltered its complicity by duplicity, and all the organs of the church and state betrayed the victims. Judging from their efforts so far, consisting mainly of denial, evasion and non-co-operation, we cannot expect self-reform from the church (apart from the almost hilariously offensive offer of helpline counselling from the organisations which perpetrated the offences). Without sustained anger and sustained pressure, these organisations show no sign of being able to reform themselves. The corruption seeping into the body politic from these events has spread very widely. In our world, people who have practised all their lives at believing what is impossible have become, simultaneously, expert at disbelieving what is possible. In other words, they lose their judgment. (Doyle 2001:2.2)
Such overt criticism of both Church and State would undoubtedly have had a very negative effect on the career of a politician had he made known his views some decades earlier. The findings of The Kennedy Report in 1970 may have caused alarm and concern in many circles, but it is evident that the repressive nature of Irish society at that time did not allow for publicly voiced criticism. As Paddy Doyle pointed out, it is reasonable to assume that there was widespread knowledge of child abuse, even in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Many people, including medical staff who came in contact with the children and civil servants who received reports both official and non-official, could not but realise the extent of ill-treatment of many in institutional care. The poet, Austin Clarke, who wrote Corporal Punishment in 1955, the year Paddy Doyle was incarcerated in the Industrial School in Cappaquin, spoke graphically of the horrendous abuse of children. The hidden nature of this abuse is a clear indication of contradictions in Irish society, and the abdication of responsibility towards the most vulnerable members of that society, the children "in care".
Paddy Doyle maintains a website that is lengthy and comprehensive, and includes excerpts from The God Squad, a number of reviews, information on his medical condition and his search for the truth relating to his background and family. Newspaper coverage of the response of church and state to the issue of the institutional child abuse is regularly updated. He offers advice and support to people who were similarly mistreated, and who seek information on their background and parentage. (Doyle 2001:1)
As well as being the first winner of the Christy Brown Literary Award for Literature for a play called "Why do I bother" Paddy Doyle won the Sundy Tribune Arts Award for Literature with The God Squad. Doyle's account of his childhood is told without embellishment, he relies on his memory and a small amount of written evidence, for example the Court Detention order sentencing him to eleven years in an industrial school, to corroborate his story. His quest for answers is ongoing, he is actively involved in research into his family background, his early childhood and the possible origin of his disability.