Free Trespassers by Julia O'Faolain Page A

celebrated – though the word didn’t really apply – at unconvivial hours in a hole-and-corner way, and all children born of it must, the Church insisted, be brought up as Catholics. When a Protestant parent refused to go along with this, there could be social repercussions, and once, notoriously, as late as 1957, in a place called Fethard-on-Sea, there would be a priest-led, full-scale boycott of Protestants and their businesses. So it seemed that the only tyranny in the country now was that of our own Church, which from 1940 on would be incarnate in our archbishop and primate, John Charles McQuaid, a man obsessed by petty concerns, who allegedly greeted the arrival of Tampax on the Irish market in 1944 by advising the Minister of Health against permitting it, lest it sexually arouse young girls. McQuaid was said to be so opposed to mixed marriages that he did not want Catholic and Protestant schools to play hockey with each other. Such encounters, he feared, could lead to Catholic girls meeting and possibly eventually marrying Protestant opponents’ male relatives.
    Were these fantasies his or ours? His lean fanatic’s face and tight, drawstring mouth discouraged negotiation, and when mygeneration began to think of leaving school we learned that he had forbidden us to attend Trinity, the older and more aesthetically pleasing of our two universities, on pain of excommunication. ‘A reserved sin!’ Why? Because Trinity was Protestant and he didn’t approve of Catholics fraternising with Protestants. By all reports, McQuaid was an odd fish.
    In 1945 he bought a property at the foot of Killiney Hill, where he got an astronomer to rig up a telescope overlooking the beach. So, for all his inquisitorial ways, he had a soft spot for natural beauty. Human beauty? Perhaps. A biography by John Cooney,
John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland,
published first in Ireland, then in the US by Syracuse University Press, reports a rumour that he had been known to disguise himself and go cruising for boys. Another fantasy? Or another reserved sin? Gossip flourished. Nobody knew. The biography quotes Dubliners who, as boys, had been embarrassed by the prelate’s notorious interest in explicitly discussing sex and masturbation so as to encourage them to avoid both. And it records one lurid episode with a small boy which Irish reviewers tend to dismiss on grounds that its source was an enemy of McQuaid’s, and that there was no witness to it. But then attempted rape is rarely witnessed.
    Interestingly, the outspoken biographer’s Irish critics argue that his ‘life’ of McQuaid judges the ‘Ruler of Catholic Ireland’ – his subtitle – between 1940 and 1973 by today’s standards. This, they imply, makes his assessments faulty and so does his ignorance of how Ireland was in those years. But, in the wake of the paedophile scandals now shaking the Irish Church, we must wonder whether these defenders themselves knew what, we now learn, was going on all over the country in those decades. If they did, they were guilty of connivance. If they did not, their criticisms are worthless. The Murphy report, whose findings are being discussed in the newspapers as I write, says that paedophilia was covered up for forty years in the Dublin diocese. In those years, covering upscandals would have been easy – especially in the light of another item which appeared in the press not so very long ago to the effect that Pius XII apparently made it a reserved sin – yet another one! – for anyone to accuse a priest of paedophilia. True or untrue? How to know after so much duplicity?
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    I lived in Killiney myself until the early Fifties and thereafter regularly visited my parents there until twenty years later, when they left it for the urban comforts of nearby Dún Laoghaire.
    Partly perched on its hilltop, partly tumbling down it, the town seemed so sedate, sexless and sleepy that my great anxiety was, when the war ended, travel revived