Diarmuid Martin Remains a Maverick Among the Clergy

By Patsy McGarry
Irish Times
August 6, 2016

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Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin. Among survivors of clerical child sex abuse, no other Catholic Church leader comes close in their esteem. File photograph: Andrew Medichini/AP

A friend resorted to the Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel this week in response to all the talk of “strange goings-on” at the national seminary in Maynooth. “Si j’etais Dieu en les voyant prier/ Je crois que je perdrais la foi.” Or: “If I were God seeing them pray/I believe that I would lose my faith.” It was not an untypical reaction.

More typical was the perplexed guy at a train station on Thursday morning. “What’s he at?” he roared at me from a platform across the tracks, referring to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, “Is he mad? He sounds like a drunk in a pub: ‘I don’t like this place. . .the atmosphere. . .I’m outta here!’.”

He believed the Archbishop was just throwing a tantrum. From regular observation over the past 13 years, since his arrival back in Dublin in 2003, this reporter has yet to witness Archbishop Martin throw a tantrum despite some trying circumstances.

It wasn’t always so. In his highly entertaining 2008 memoir Good Times and Bad the Archbishop’s only sibling, older brother Seamus, recalls how the younger “Diarmuid had not been the ‘holy’ type of person one associated with those who had a vocation for the priesthood. As a child he might have been far more accurately described as a ‘holy terror’. He was noted throughout the extended family for throwing tantrums – in a family in which tantrum-throwing had been brought to a fine art.”