The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus (review)

Abstract

I the 1960s and 1970s, Ireland experienced a more open economy, greater access to education, and European Economic Community membership, which all suggested that the strength of Catholic dogma in the state since independence in the 1920s might begin to lessen. In Ireland, moreover, that dogma had particularly centered upon sexual morality. However, Pope John Paul II’s Mass for Youth in Galway in 1979, where he was introduced by the local Catholic bishop, Eamonn Casey, was enthusiastically attended by hundreds of thousands of people, and into the 1980s the Church’s grip remained such that referenda on abortion and divorce were unsuccessful. Casey, popular and high profile throughout this whole period, resigned his bishopric suddenly in May 1992 after it was revealed that in the 1970s he had fathered a son with his Irish-American lover, Annie Murphy, an exposé that shook the foundations of the Catholic Church in Ireland; Irish pop star Sinéad O’Connor’s destruction of a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live five months later may have perplexed America, but the gesture made sense in Ireland. Despite the implications of hypocrisy on the bishop’s part, the affair that initiated the Church’s fall from grace involved two consenting adults, in contrast to the kinds of sex scandals soon to emerge. Something “unspeakable” had clearly shaped the Irish laity’s stunted view of sexuality, and this dark history started to emerge in Murphy’s 1993 memoir, which revealed that Casey had sought to involuntarily confine her in an Irish convent and force her to give up their child for adoption.1 Murphy’s disclosure garnered little immediate attention amid salacious discussion of her 1970s trysts with Casey. The implication of Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus’s deeply informative introductory survey of child abuse in Ireland in The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, however, is that Casey’s attempted confinement of both mother and “illegitimate” child was the real scandal (23). Murphy’s 1993 revelation heralded the subsequent onslaught of disclosures regarding the incarceration, sexual and physical abuse, and neglect of vulnerable children and their mothers at the hands of the priests, brothers, or nuns in charge of post-independence Ireland’s borstals, Magdalene Laundries, and Mother and Baby Homes. Further sources of outrage from the 1990s onward were revelations that the hierarchy repeatedly placed the rep-