Are we in a situation now where speakers are being vilified for simply stating facts, asks Eilis O’Hanlon
Sunday June 21 2009
PAYOUTS to victims of the recent earthquake in Italy had to be delayed last month after the number of people claiming for money turned out to be greater than the official population of the affected area.
The mayor of the worst hit town insisted indignantly that “the people of L’Aquila are not cheats”, but he needn’t have been so touchy. The prospect of money for nothing is bound to attract a few chancers. It’s human nature.
It’s become impossible, however, to suggest that any of those who claimed to have been the victims of abuse in Church-run institutions in Ireland might have been economical with the truth in the hope of financial gain, without being accused of siding with paedophiles. Even deviating by the slightest degree from the set of approved responses has become a risky undertaking. Fr Tom Coonan found that out last week when, during mass at St Joseph’s church in Ballingar, Co Offaly, he observed that the boys sent to the nearby St Conleth’s reformatory school in Daingean were… well, the next part is disputed.
One parishioner who hurried to the media to express her disgust was adamant that Fr Coonan called them “ruffians”. He denies using the word, insisting that he merely said “not all the boys in Daingean were angels” and that they were “dumped” there by society. The anonymous complainer stands by her original claim. Stalemate. Suffice to say that some mass-goers were offended, and the national media reported on the obligatory “outrage”.
Fr Tom subsequently apologised, though why he felt the need to say anything about the nature of the boys in Daingean is a conundrum. Their characters were and are irrelevant. Perhaps he was simply irritated, as many Catholics are, by the perception that the reputation of the Church as an entity is being indiscriminately tarred by the Ryan report into physical and sexual abuse by certain clerical orders. If so, he could probably have found a better way of expressing it.
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