The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship with Derek Scally

What influence the Catholic Church has on the Irish national identity? What was growing up in Catholic Ireland like? And how has the self-image of the Irish transformed over the years?

Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Derek Scally, the “Irish Times Berlin” correspondent. He reports on both German and European politics and current affairs but also on business, arts, and European affairs. He is the author of the book “The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship” (2021). Tune in for their talk!

Derek Scally will be a guest of the forthcoming edition of Freedom Games, a festival of ideas held annually in Łódź, Poland. This year’s edition will be held on October 18-20 in EC1 Łódź. The European Liberal Forum is the Co-Organizer of the festival.

This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.

Play on SoundCloud or on Apple Podcast. See the transcript below.

Transcript – The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship with Derek Scally

Welcome to the Liberal Europe Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me on.

Today we’re going to talk about Ireland and the Catholic church, and my guest is Derek Scally, who is the Irish Times correspondent in Berlin, the author of the book “The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship”. And most importantly for us, he is also a guest at the Freedom Games. Derek, welcome to the liberal Europe Podcast.

You said in one of your recent interviews that what prompted you to write this book is the inspiration of Germany’s reconciliation with the past. Do you think after the elections in Saxony that this is still the case?

That is a very good question. I think a lot of people in Germany are really grappling with still very much two different Germanys. What we consider Germans coming to terms with the past, of course, came from the West German tradition. Like all of Germany, West Germany spent decades in denial about the past. And it was only really in the seventies and eighties that they finally realised, okay, Hitler wasn’t just a small group of people committing crimes, but an entire society looking on either actively or passively condoning it.

East Germany never had that. And I think what you have with these election results, you have a lot of West Germans who never agreed with this idea of historical responsibility for the crimes of Hitler, meeting an older group of people in Eastern Germany who were basically told, oh, no, there’s no Nazis here.

The official line in East Germany for 40 years was, well, the Nazis have gone west. They’re not here. We’re an anti-fascist state. It’s a very clever little mind trick. And many younger people have heard this from their parents and from their grandparents. I think what you’ve got is West German deniers meeting East German never admitted errors.

And I think that’s really at the back of it. Obviously, these days in the political skirmish, they’re still talking about parties, they’re still talking about power and majorities and so on. But behind it, you really do have a clash. And I’ve spoken to historians about this, and they’ve said, 35 years after the German unification, we are going to have to have a new discussion about what we agree on our past was and who was responsible for it because there doesn’t seem to be a consensus anymore. So I wanted to ask you about the special relationship of Ireland and Catholic Church and the influence the Catholic Church has or had, perhaps on the Irish national identity.

Yes, the relationship was. And it’s very much in the past tense at this stage because even since I’ve written the book – I wrote the book, I finished the book during the pandemic. And just since then, the decline in the Catholic Church in Ireland has been exponential. It was already declining, a bit like in Poland, but many people never returned to the pews, to the church benches after. So, it’s really staggering to watch it. It collapsed slowly, and suddenly, it just went off a cliff.

But the special relationship was so strong because it needed to be strong. Irish people needed something to fill the gap while the English were there during colonial times, which is something I think Polish people will associate with. The Catholic Church was a source of comfort.

Are people standing by us during this terrible time when these people from outside are occupying our land, are calling our culture into question or perhaps even forbidding the culture, which is what was happening for a time in Ireland, the language and the culture. So the special relationship was born out of a time of hardship.

I think Polish listeners will associate with that. And then once the hardship passed and the oppressors disappeared, the catholic church moved in to fill the gap. The big house in town was no longer the British landlord, but it was the bishop or the archbishop. And people had a huge sense of pride. Finally, our people are telling us what to do. It’s no longer the outsiders telling us what to do.

And that special relationship was so big that if you were a politician and you had the bishops looking down on you, telling you, you can’t do that, and they were going into their churches on a Sunday saying, you can’t have your politicians do that, you’d have politicians being squeezed between their voters and the church hierarchy.

So many people in Ireland today forget that the special relationship was one where we had the church hierarchy and the believers squeezing politicians to do what the bishops wanted them to do. So, it was very special, it was very strong connection.

But it’s amazing. As soon as the cracks appeared, an old woman in my parish said, oh, I think people had their coats on, they couldn’t wait to leave. So, it seemed strong until it wasn’t strong. And then we realised just how it was like a Potemkin village. A strong breeze comes and just blows it over.

Well, you describe a lot of myths built around the catholic past. I think this is something that definitely I can associate with my Polish background, but I wanted to ask you about it because your book is very much also a personal journey as much as an Irish journey through its history and its relationship with the catholic church. Can you describe your own experience of growing up in the catholic islands and what you found missing after you came back to write a book?

Yes, I mean, I wrote the approach. As somebody who’s actually a believer, I think a lot of people will pick up this book thinking, oh, it’s another journalist taking a stick and beating poor old granny church in Germany. There’s an expression when granny is lying on the ground, you give her a kick in the shins. You know, the church is still powerful, just not in Western Europe the way it used to be. I very much approached it from a position of sadness because I’m an immigrant, I’ve lived in Germany for 25 years, and I wanted to understand what happened to the beauty, the beautiful side of it, the societal, the positives I saw, because we seem to be drowning in negatives, and then it all seems to be going down the drain.

And I think many people in Ireland are actually reaching this stage now. We’ve had about 20-25 years, 35 years, actually, of revelation, so most people were exhausted for a time. They said, I just don’t have anything to do with it. Now, what we’re starting to see is people realising what’s been lost, including community, including sort of, what are our rules of engagement with each other? At the end of the day, the Catholic Church provided a framework and a moral code, and now it’s kind of in a more secular Ireland, a bit more anything goes, and in a way, Ireland has rejected Catholicism or Christianity. When people have these tattoos now saying, be kind, I’m just thinking, are we really? Is this the banality level we have reached?

I’m not nostalgic for the iron that’s passed.

I think we can all be a little bit nostalgic about the past, but I don’t. The reason I wanted to write the book is, what have we replaced it with? And are we aware, as Irish people, of our part in our past? Because I think what happened was we went from this huge, special relationship, sense of pride in our clerics to an othering process. As soon as the abuse revelations, child sexual abuse, locking women up who had had babies out of wedlock in residential homes, as soon as those abuses came out, people very much distanced themselves and said, those terrible priests, those terrible nuns. And I went back to just uncomfortably point out, do you realise these people are Irish passport holders? Do you realise you used to be proud of these people. Do you realise they are us? And I think I was just trying to excavate it. And just before it got too covered up with other stuff, I wanted to be like an archaeologist, just take the brush and brush back a little bit and look at some uncomfortable truths about how much we were a part of our own past and how much agency many of us had to. To do or not do anything.

And we have a double standard. We hold these priests and nuns to a higher standard. They expected to be held to a higher standard, but we weren’t really. We didn’t cover ourselves in glory in that past either. So trying to accept the dark and the shade as well as the bright parts of Irish catholic past.

I think it’s very hard for people without a sort of religious background or living in non-religious communities, which I think most of contemporary Western Europe basically looks like, to sort of understand the state in which people both knew and didn’t know about things that happened. I mean, these communities in which you didn’t discuss certain issues where priests were sort of beyond the, well, accusations or suspicion even.

I think I very much relate it to my own youth, in the 1980s, when you had this catholic church very much in opposition to the communist regime and then sort of triumphant after Poland gained independence. So I wanted to sort of get back to the time which you remember personally from your youth. Can you describe a society in which you lived and grew up in one of the neighbourhoods of Dublin? Because I think it’s very important for our listeners to understand society which you are describing without having this sort of presentism and criticising it from today’s perspective.

Yeah, I think everyone just goes through life living their life, because you only get one. And I think that applies in particular for childhood. 1980s Ireland wasn’t very wealthy, the school was run by the Catholic Church. They owned the land on which the school was built. Every day, once, I think, a month or once every two months at 10:00 I would leave my classes, walk through the back gate and go into the church and serve the weekly mass. I was missing out on my education to serve mass for a dozen or two dozen pensioners and the church.

I looked back at old documents, old parish newsletters, and the church really was doing everything, even like the horticultural, the flower group, the sports groups, the Cub Scouts were Catholic, so the Catholic Church really was offering far more than just Sunday mornings, where everyone is expected to be present. We had Mass at 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, 11:30, 12:30, Saturday evening and Sunday evening. And now we have, I think, one mass, which is like three-quarters full. Plus they’ve halved the size of the church. So it was everywhere. It was inescapable.

But most people figured this was good. I mean, Ireland, you must remember, came from tremendous poverty. The British withdrew from Ireland 100 years ago. They gave us the keys and said, have fun. They withdrew all their welfare, and the catholic church moved right in, providing hospitals and schools, often at a very high level. So many people are ambivalent about completely attacking the church because, unlike in Poland or elsewhere, there was no welfare state. The church was the welfare state. But of course they said, well, we have the hospitals, we have the schools, we have a few conditions, which is you don’t come in, you don’t inspect. We have control, which, of course, opens the door to abuse. But life was very ordered.

If I’m very honest, when I talk to East German friends here, my life sounds very similar to what they would have gone through in East Germany. They, the party, wanted you part of their youth group, part of their women’s groups, part of their work excursion groups. They didn’t want you at home on your own. The collectivization, which I read about from communist times, sounds very similar to the collectivization in the catholic church in Ireland. It wasn’t perhaps as ordered, with books and stamps and so on, but there was very much social pressure. If you aren’t there, you really have to explain yourself. And that’s what I find so funny now that we have a collectivization which is secular, and if you are not secular, you have to explain yourself. At the pope’s when the pope, John Paul, visited Ireland in 1979, when he was on his way to Poland as well, you had to justify not being there. And when Pope Francis visited Ireland in 2018, I met many people at the mass who said, oh, I’ve told no one I’m here to, because it would just create too much. I think people are group animals, and the Catholic Church provided the ultimate collective comfort and, in many senses, a good collective.

It just could be used for bad things. One thing I would say, though, is that it’s very hard for people these days to imagine how abuse could happen in these environments. Without wanting to be too controversial, the most common institution where child sexual abuse happens is the family. We all have families. And anyone who has experienced concern over a child and not knowing what do I do. What do I say? Will I be turned out of the family if I point this out? Every expert will tell you this, but this is the ultimate taboo.

So we’ve got over our taboo of thinking that priests may be sexual beings, may be preying on underage children, but we still have certain taboos about other untouchable institutions, and one of them, and the biggest one, is the family, and we all have families, and that’s still lingering there. So if people struggle to understand what Catholic Ireland or the Catholic Church in Poland was like, why they were so untouchable, just think how untouchable the family is as an institution.