IRELAND
Irish Central
Cahir O’Doherty @randomirish January 19,2015
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Irish life is caution. We have learned to tread carefully everywhere. It’s probably a legacy of 800 years of colonialism, which have shown us that you can’t be too careful in a small country.
It’s caution about what might take its place that prevents much needed social and political reforms from happening in Ireland at the pace they do on the European continent. We seem to prefer being stuck with a host of familiar problems in preference to tackling a host of new ones.
All that abundance of caution has a price: paralysis.
Paralysis was the word James Joyce used to describe the state of turn of the century Ireland, and it is suddenly in vogue again. The social and political fault lines that Joyce discerned in “The Dead” have altered, but the tentative, halting Irish response to the challenges of the present is as familiar now as it was then.
Joyce ended his story with a strikingly beautiful image of the nation being carpeted by snow. It’s both a shroud and a spiritual awakening.
The question then was the question now – if we are to escape the prison of our colonial past, don’t we have to confront its challenges head on?
We are now halfway through the third decade of the abuse crisis that has stunned and transformed our society. In the 1990s, when allegations against abusive clerics began as a trickle that eventually became a damn burst, the initial response was so meek, so tempered that it was ineffectual.
It was still possible, as late as the 1990s, for senior church figures to transfer controversial clerics to other parishes or to stonewall their responses in the press. At the time it still seemed possible to brazen it out in the hope that it would all blow over.
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