IRELAND
The Guardian

Helen Dunmore
Friday 3 October 2014

“Ireland is rotten. Rotten to the core. I’m sorry, but you priests destroyed it.” These words are spoken by a young man who was sexually attacked in his childhood by an Irish priest, a friend of the family. They go to the heart of this novel’s passionate denunciation of the role played by the Catholic church in the scandal over child abuse by the clergy. It is a study of the corrupting effects of power in an Ireland that came close to being a theocracy. Sexuality was strictly governed; contraception, abortion and divorce were forbidden; and yet the abuse of children went unpunished and was deliberately concealed by the church hierarchy for fear of damage to the institution. It is this cover-up, this shifting from parish to parish of offending priests, this determination to put the good name…