Free Feckers by John Waters Page A

sense it fitted perfectly with the undertow of Casey’s character. In one way, it caused people a great deal of existential relief to realize that there had been a perfectly reasonable explanation for Casey’s apparent perpetual good humour. And it also offered people the prospect of relief from their own sins. The idea that a senior bishop had succumbed to the temptation of an American divorcée was something that, deep down, people wanted to celebrate rather than condemn. But this was not a culturally approved response, either in the old world of the Catholic Church or the ‘new’ one led by the Irish Times , so they had to keep it to themselves. Many people grinned inwardly when they thought of Casey and wondered how many other adventures he might have had, but outwardly had to join in the general clamour of cant and humbug in a society only too delighted at this opportunity to prosecute such a monumental example of a senior cleric being caught out doing one thing while preaching another. So, whether because of the woman, the baby, the money or all the above, Casey had to go.
    As the years unfolded and the floodgates opened up on revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up, Casey gradually came to look as if he’d been hard done by. What, after all, was Irish society trying to say? That it did not approve of bishops having sex? On the contrary, there began to be a growing demand for married priests, women priests, men and women priest who were married to each other, transvestite priests, transsexual priests and so forth.
    What was it? That Irish society could not tolerate bishops having sex while seeming to oppose such activity for others? That it was really, as the Irish Times tried to pretend, about the money? Or, as some of the more pious critics insisted: that the worst thing was Casey’s refusal to leave his position and marry Annie Murphy, or his failure subsequently to develop a relationship with his son. Perhaps, indeed, this latter was Casey’s only real offence, added to Murphy’s claims that he had initially tried to persuade her to give their child up for adoption.
    When you rinse it all down, it seems Casey had to go because he had behaved hypocritically. In truth, of course, there is not necessarily always something morally decisive about believing and stating one thing and, in certain circumstances, doing another. On the contrary, the Catholic Church insists that we are all sinners but that sins may be wiped away in the sacrament of confession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the heavily secularized mass culture of modern Ireland, which calls for more and greater sexual freedoms, is far less forgiving than the tyrant bishops, when it happens to be a bishop who is caught with his trousers down.
    Mercy and compassion towards Casey appears to have been the unspoken wish of the Irish people. Casey himself later claimed that he had received 1,500 letters and that only two were critical of him. Why could Eamonn Casey not simply have confessed his sins, conducted his penance in private and got on with his work? Would this not have been the best way of demonstrating how Christianity was supposed to work? In due course, he could have gone on The Late Late and confessed his sins to secular Ireland. God knows, in the years that followed, we could have done with a bishop who could come on television and sing ‘The Foggy Dew’ and tell a yarn or two about what the actress said to the bishop to cause him to fall out of bed.

15 Albert Reynolds
    A lbert Reynolds, who, when asked during the 1992 general election campaign about claims that he and the leader of Fianna Fáil’s coalition partners, Desmond O’Malley, never spoke outside the cabinet room, responded that this rumour was ‘crap, pure crap’. There followed a tsunami of sanctimony and high dudgeon, as opponents and journalists, supposedly offended by Albert’s language, spun into verbal tizzies at the offence and drama of it all.
    The then government