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	Apologies Are Delayed So Often That They Are Tarnished By Ann Marie Hourihane Irish Times February 22, 2010 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0222/1224264936311.html IRELAND -- Surely it is Irish Catholicism that made us both so fixated on the apology and so reluctant to apologise, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE FOR A country in which people say "sorry" when they bump into each other on the street – a habit as contagious as it is infuriating – it is strange that the real apology seems to be in trouble here. In fact the saying sorry problem is worse than that. It is now quite common for people to say "Sorry now . . ." before launching into something aggressive or insulting. "Sorry now" has become the modern equivalent of that odious phrase "No offence", which is really a carte blanche to be horrible. The comedienne Arabella Weir once built a character around the phrase "no offence", a loathsome make-up assistant who used to demolish her unfortunate customers behind the shelter of the phrase. But let's look at being offended for a moment. On the one hand very few adults will have been offended by Tiger Woods having sex with cocktail waitresses. Amused, yes. Surprised, maybe. Sick to death of hearing about it, definitely. But offended, no. Yet the more optimistic among us might say Tiger Woods's toe-curling performance last Friday must surely mark the beginning of the end for the public apology. It was really offensive. Even golf fans were embarrassed by his appearance. Tiger apologised to his children, for goodness sake, who hopefully are too young to know what he'd been up to, or to watch their father making a show of them on television around the world. Having sex with cocktail waitresses is not against the law, but Tiger brought to his case a self-importance and a gravity that made it seem like a war-crime. Then he wheeled on his mum. As we watched we knew that the main thing about this public apology was that it did not matter at all what we, the increasingly cynical public, actually thought of it. It was aimed at Tiger's corporate sponsors and about Tiger regaining control of his financial empire and – most damagingly of all for Tiger Woods Inc – strongly reminiscent of Bill Clinton at his most shameless. It was perhaps the longest commercial in history. On the other hand, in Ireland in the early part of last week, former minister Willie O'Dea seemed – how to put this – not entirely contrite about the controversy which led to his resignation on Thursday. If anything O'Dea was too robust in the face of the storm clouds which had settled about him. Then, as the ground started to give way under his feet, he shifted to victim status. "I'm a victim too," he told Seán O'Rourke, in one of the more remarkable sentences ever uttered on News At One . But it was too late. If he had seemed sorrier earlier he might not have had to walk the political plank. As it was, O'Dea, like the rest of us in modern society, ricocheted between not taking his alleged misdeeds seriously enough and wallowing in the self-pity of victimhood. And the rest of us don't even have the Greens to blame. Meanwhile, over in Rome, the pope and the Irish bishops were playing to the Vatican home crowd who, presumably, could be termed their sponsors. All that dressing up in the long robes and kissing the pope's ring – the optics of the occasion, as it was rather horribly termed – was designed to reassure not the victims, but the accused. It is extraordinary to realise that the institution which invented confession – surely the most brilliantly conceived of the church's seven sacraments – and impregnated the national DNA with enough sexual guilt to ruin dozens of generations – is incapable of demonstrating contrition. How mad is that? Last week the Vatican started trying to make us feel better by reassuring us that clerical child abuse was not an Irish problem, but an international problem – a nice appeal to isolationist nationalism. You can be sure that that made the Irish victims of child abuse feel a whole lot better. And that was it, really. The bishops had to fly home to put ashes on the foreheads of the faithful to demonstrate how very sorry the faithful were for their sins. Surely it is Irish Catholicism that made us both so fixated on the apology and so reluctant to apologise. We used to wonder why our politicians, our bank executives and our customer service managers refused to take personal responsibility for anything, and now we have our answer. It is hard to credit, but the Catholic Church doesn't understand collective responsibility when that concept is applied to itself and also, presumably, when its own lawyers are hovering in the wings. We have bishops refusing to resign on the basis that no one has asked them to. But, much, much worse, we had decent believing Catholics in despair and disgust about how the church behaved towards them. To hear the clerical abuse survivor Michael O'Brien on the radio during the week was to realise what a sincere apology could still have accomplished. But perhaps we have relied and waited for the apology, and for Rome, too long. It is not that public apologies are worthless, but that they have been degraded and delayed so often that they are tarnished now. Sorry, but we are going to have to find other ways to recover.
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