‘The Catholic Hierarchy & Political Blackmail: The Curious Case of Fr. Brendan Smyth’ By Donal Lavery

I am of a generation which can still remember the last real involvement of priests and Christian Brothers in the day to day running of schools – growing up in the decade of the ’90s. Many of these people were among the greatest academic minds and talents on the island of Ireland, having devoted years to solitary study and educational endeavour. Much of this work was carried across the world, with Irish priests schooling the impoverished masses of every continent. Even some words and phrases in certain African languages are derived from Irish linguistics and vernacular, testimony to the efforts of our missionaries. That’s a beautiful legacy for Ireland to leave on the world against all else.

I have had the fortune to know some very fine clergy from all denominations on this island. Contrary to community tradition, I attend both a Catholic and a Protestant service regularly, with religion and faith playing a key fundamental ingredient in my life. I am both denominations and neither. Culturally Catholic but a Dutch-style Protestant philosophically – although upon much reflection, I’m not sure Christ wished to establish a Church, more so an alternative lifestyle on how to treat other people and exercise self-respect in the process.

But despite all the hard devotion of work put in by the lay personnel and those belonging to religious orders, only a fool would think the Catholic Church in Ireland to be infallible. Indeed, for too many years the men and women of Ireland believed themselves to be subservient to the clerical class which acted as both a government and a shadow government; telling Cabinet Ministers and parliamentarians what their mandates and standing orders included; and telling the population what their lives must involve.

Ireland was a “clean”, God-fearing nation which harboured little open resentment of the hierarchy, which administered it from the bounds of cathedrals and inside palatial chapel grounds. We were never far from theocracy mind you. The subject I want to bring to your attention, in light of present failings in the HIA Inquiry is such – Meddling with the business of governments is one thing, but disregarding those interfering with the sanctity of childhood is really quite another. Let’s be honest, the evidence we have all been exposed to shows beyond any reasonable doubt that paedophilia and child molestation are a sordid systemic problem in religious institutions, of all denominations. There exists a small but cunning group of sociopathic and psychotic  perverts who have operated within the cosy confines of Catholicism and Christianity, having managed to dodge both the law and any real accountability for the evil they have perpetrated against our youth.

When I first watched the numerous documentaries on Fr. Brendan Smyth I actually felt physically sick. Sick in my gut at a man of the cloth manipulating, raping and destroying, the fragility of little children, numbering thousands of victims across the globe. This monster began his ministry by abusing altar boys at Kilnacrot Abbey, moving from parish to parish across Ireland and afar, to fulfil his vulgar appetites. His superiors in the Church, having initially provided him with “psychiatric intervention”, decided upon the “geographical solution” of relocating him once rumours and allegations arose about his activities. Many accounts have now emerged of victims committing suicide over this man’s corruption, with families destroyed in the process. It’s hard to comprehend how this could go on happening without the authorities knowing anything in the slightest.

There’s no doubt about it that Cardinal Sean Brady resigned from his senior position due to his incompetence and being a conscious accessory to the sinister cover-up of Smyth’s dubious activities. Personally, I think he should be behind bars for undermining legitimate and official processes for objectively dealing with such illegalities, having hid behind the withering facade of Canon law, which as Mr. Kenny outlined, “has neither legitimacy nor place in the affairs of this country.”

However, what I would like to speculate on and there’s a fair amount of evidence to suggest this goes on, is that the authorities did know about Smyth and others, and as opposed to bringing them to justice before a court of the people, they maintained the secrecy of it to exercise political leverage and blackmail over the Church. From Maurice Oldfield to the Kincora Boy’s Home, the seditious tactics of J. Edgar Hoover have been deployed to hold powerful personnel to ransom over their sexual appetites. Notice how Cardinal Cahal Daly took a markedly different and much more critical stance against republicans after the death of Cardinal O’Fiach – the same Cahal Daly who couldn’t put his own house in order when the Smyth allegations arose.

As someone who grew up in a home with pictures of Jesus, Popes and Mary decorating the walls alongside the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, I often wrestled with the Church’s failure to adequately and objectively highlight the horrors being committed by the Orange State against Catholics/Nationalists. But as the pieces of this sordid puzzle start to emerge with time, we see continuously that “the men of cloth failed yet again.” The hierarchy wanted any challenge to their authority, be it republican or otherwise, exterminated. And were all too willing to cooperate with fellow right-wing extremists in the Orange and British authorities.

Unless we endeavour to take appropriate action in forging a new Ireland on this island, we will have to brace ourselves for more psychopaths like Brendan Smyth using their positions as a means of perverse “entitlement” over the powerless. No longer a colony of Britain nor prisoners of Vatican dogma, we need a real Republic which enshrines the rights of children in a Constitution – a legally binding order which will forever end any notion of unison between Church and State. Given the sensitivity of this subject, I will avoid being poetic in my choice of my language, but as John Lennon said in the song “Bloody Sunday”, ‘Keep Ireland for the Irish and not for London nor for Rome.”