In its 2022 report on human rights in Afghanistan, Amnesty International summarises the situation which would not be unfamiliar to most people on the street:
The Taliban conducted extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests, torture and unlawful detention of perceived opponents with impunity, creating an atmosphere of fear… Public executions and floggings were used as punishment for crimes such as murder, theft, “illegitimate” relationships or violating social norms. Women’s rights continued to be attacked, and women’s participation in public life was severely limited. Afghanistan was the only country in the world where girls were banned from attending secondary school.
The details of the report provide for even more grim reading:
Between 18 November and 16 December, more than 100 people were publicly flogged in stadiums in several provinces, according to UN human rights experts. In December, the Taliban authorities carried out their first public execution in Farah province in the presence of senior Taliban officials including the deputy prime minister, ministers and the chief justice.
The brutality of the Taliban is no secret.
Stalin famously, but perhaps apocryphally, rhetorically once asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”. The answer, contrary to the political and military strength enjoyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, is, of course, none.
Yet some commentators in Ireland remember things quite differently, and the sad and untimely passing of Sinéad O’Connor last week has afforded them another opportunity to pick at their old wounds.
Perhaps, most egregiously, writing in the Irish Examiner, Rosita Sweetman claims, “Sinéad O’Connor was a child of an Ireland where Irish women had, for decades, been stripped of their power, their rage, by our Taliban — the Catholic Church”. The Church had no divisions, and it had no monopoly on coercive power. All that sat with the State throughout the lifetime of Sinéad O’Connor. Born in 1966, she arrived into the world one month after Sean Lemass completed his time as Taoiseach, ushering in an era of optimism, progress and openness to the world.
Such a comparison between the Church in Ireland and the Taliban is insulting on many levels. It is insulting to the people and the women of Afghanistan. I worked there in 2003 and can attest to the stories told by people of the horrors endured prior to the post-9/11 defeat of the Taliban. The type of flippancy towards the situation in Afghanistan must not go unnoticed.
It is insulting to Catholics of Ireland and to the many, many female leaders of the Church in Ireland (many of whom should be rightly described as feminist but because their allegiances mean they are the wrong type of female leader) who stepped up and stepped in when the Irish State (and society) was unable and unwilling to provide any form of social services to women in desperate situations in Ireland.
Sinéad O’Connor’s own early life story is intertwined with the provision of services by the Church, as at 15 she was sent to a Magdalene Asylum – An Grianán (‘sun’) Training Centre in Drumcondra, run by the Order of Our Lady of Charity. She didn’t like the imposed conformity, but the worst she could report from her time there was how “if you were bad, they sent you upstairs to sleep in the old folks’ home. You’re in there in the pitch black, you can smell the s*** and the puke and everything, and these old women are moaning in their sleep […] I have never—and probably will never—experience such panic and terror and agony over anything.” It was far from the experience of girls under the Taliban.
Such comparisons are also insulting to O’Connor’s memory. Yes, she famously railed against the Church and struggled with but sought her faith, ironically finding Islam, calling it “the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey”. No doubt the Taliban might feel the same.
Importantly, O’Connor acknowledges that it was a nun who first noticed her musical talent, encouraged it and pushed her to make something of it. In Afghanistan, that is not what happens. Music is outlawed. Singing girls may not be killed but their fathers or husbands could be.
Defenders of Sweetman and others who continue to peddle the myth that Ireland was some form of theocracy may claim that it is a mere literary device for effect and should not be taken as a literal comparison (some may actually believe this – younger commentators with no first hand experience of Ireland in the 80s or 90s may believe that the “theocracy” survived even then). They may claim they want to emphasise how bad a place Ireland was under the crozier of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and President Eamon deValera (another irony: O’Connor was named after Sinéad deValera).
Such an approach is designed to keep a particular “memory” of the Church alive in the minds of the young, modern Irish lest the bogeyman of the faith start to re-establish himself. Yet, the memory is trashed by such hyperbole and historical, social and political illiteracy. It is only a small step away from Catholic Ireland being described as “our Holocaust” and polite society politely demurring to such comparisons.
The comparisons, whether a literary tool or not, are dishonest. In 20 years time, having also lived in North Korea, I may be equally able to refer to “our Kim Jong Un” when talking about the current Irish self-described socialist president, Michael D. Higgins. Nonsense of course, but this is how the work is done now. The precedent is set.
It is common in modern Ireland to co-opt figures, events, tragedies, to further a political or ideological aim. Frequently the ghost of Ireland’s Catholic past is resurfaced and reimagined with ever increasing amnesia. The memories of the social services provided by the Church are erased simultaneously with the fabrication of a dishonest historical narrative.
Whether it is done in order to win the “abortion” argument, to divest patronage of schools or healthcare facilities that were set-up and run by the religious, or to paper over the failings of the modern Irish nation state, both in the past or as a distraction from the present, each occasion sees the erasure of the memories of real, Irish, religious female figures such as Nano Nagle, who devoted her life to the service of the poor, and even St Brigid, whose identity has been co-opted into some form of Celtic goddess.
Whether many, or any, of these commentators knew O’Connor well enough to do justice to her life, her thoughts and ideas, I do not know, but they omit to note that she died in modern Ireland. It was not the Ireland of the past, Catholic Ireland, that let her down in recent years, but the Ireland of their own creation.
O’Connor was a supremely talented musician – one of Ireland’s finest, whose personality and vulnerability endeared her to the people. She was seeking, and her search led her further away from modern Ireland than it did from the Catholic past. She may have ended up looking in the wrong places, but she found no comfort in the lives of the Irish establishment.
It was the Ireland of today that was unable to offer her what she needed – modern, liberal, progressive Ireland – one of the wealthiest countries in the world where teenage girls in State care are being coerced into prostitution in a manner similar to Rochdale and Rotherham; where Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, is at a “crisis point” to such an extent that district Judge had to write to the government Ministers to inform them of this; and where the Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services find that they “cannot currently provide an assurance to all parents or guardians in all parts of Ireland that their children have access to a safe, effective, and evidence based mental health service”. This is the reality of modern Ireland, yet more apoplexy is visible in commentary about the past that can’t be changed than the present that can.
It is easier to continue to rail at the past that you cannot change, to harangue those that tried and sometimes failed than those that never stepped up at all, than it is to do something about the society of today that is equally, if not more, susceptible to human and institutional failings despite the abundance of resources and technological modernity at its disposal.
It is a disservice to the memory of Sinéad O’Connor to use her early life story to further an ideological end, and doubly so while ignoring the lived reality of her later years.
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