Peggy McFadden was about ten when she was sent to Australia as a child migrant in the late 1940’s. Strictly speaking it should only have been orphans who could legally be sent on the Migrant Scheme but Peggy’s father was still alive and she had an older brother. Whatever sleight of hand was used by the nuns in the Nazareth House in Derry to get around the rules Peggy was sent to an orphanage in Perth where she was so badly treated she wouldn’t talk about what happened to her there – even 50 years later.
I was editor of the Derry Journal when Peggy came to see me in the early 1990s. She told a long, sad tale of literally spending years looking for her brother. He was, as she explained to me, the only person who kept her sane in her darkest days of depression, in that she lived in hope of seeing him again; he gave her something to live for.
When she eventually found out (around 1990) where her brother Patrick had gone it was too late – he had died a couple of years earlier.
But there was even a bit of cruel irony here too. Somewhere in the 1980s Peggy, who had come to Ireland on several occasions to try and find some information from the church authorities about him, was travelling by CIE Express bus from Derry to Dublin. It broke down a couple of hours into the journey and the passengers were taken to Ballybay in Co. Monaghan to await a substitute vehicle. Here’s the twist: her brother had been living all along in Ballybay. When she eventually learned this it tormented her. Really did. She wondered as she sat in a wee cafe having a cup of tea did her brother walk past her in the street or even was he sitting somewhere in the same building. Eventually she had a sort of a nervous breakdown.
I don’t think it would be putting it too strongly to say Peggy despised the Catholic Church. They had broken the rules to send her to Australia, they had withheld information on her brother’s whereabouts – they had the information all along – and they condoned, as far as she was concerned, the abuse of children. She held them responsible for all of it.
Not too long after meeting Peggy I met Bishop Edward Daly and we got into a fairly heated discussion about her story and what had happened to her. The bishop, a thoroughly decent man, while accepting that Peggy’s story was tragic, tried to defend the Church’s role, stating that I was trying to impose modern-day standards on a different time and in a very different place.
It’s an argument I have heard many, many times.
Thanks to the lockdown I finally got around to reading Tim Pat Coogan’s 1916- The Mornings After which one of my sons bought me as a Christmas present in, I think, 2015. A chapter on how the Church and State colluded in ‘looking after’ – that is an euphemistic term – children in its care borders on a tale of the satanic.
One account of a young fella being stripped naked in one institution while a ‘Christian’ Brother stood on his hands and another held his feet and a third flogged him with a leather strap is horrific. When asked why a boy had to be stripped naked for punishment the manager of the Daingean Industrial school, Fr. William McGonagle, told a visiting committee he ‘considered punishment to be more humiliating when administered this way.’ The very fact that this comment was recorded indicates the State knew what was going on.
But it wasn’t just the physical abuse, there was also sexual abuse on a wholesale level, starvation, mental cruelty so much so that that many of the children lived lives of desperation suffering from isolation, suicidal thoughts and alcoholism. The statistics are there to prove it.
It is true that the Catholic Church in Ireland
is a bit of a Janus figure in that it can be looked at from two directions –
good and evil. It would be unfair to only look at one side without
acknowledging the other. I went to a diocesan college for my secondary
education and there were those who did try to do their best, who really looked
out for those in their care. And we all know clergy who never took a step out
of line, led blameless lives and hopefully are now reaping their rewards in the
next world, if one exists.
But you do have to ask yourself how did the message of love and peace that Jesus preached get so mangled in our country that cruelty and sadism were acceptable as being part of that message. How did that happen? And why did none of those in clerical garb who were there to preach, allegedly, the gospel of love and tolerance, not speak out? Where were their consciences?
There will be those who will disagree but in the great run of Irish history I don’t think the Catholic Church has, overall, come out well.
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