fifty-two such places and interned some
fifty thousand children. O’Toole writes
that he can’t recall a time when he didn’t
know the names of the biggest “schools,”
which “formed a hinterland of dread.”
When he was eight, a boy named
George, who lived across the street, dis-
appeared into one of these places. He
had apparently stolen a bike.
O’Toole was lucky enough to attend
a relatively normal school run by the
Christian Brothers, if normality can be
stretched to accommodate unrestrained
physical violence meted out with leather
straps or bamboo canes, and much en-
forced propaganda; the Brothers pub-
lished such texts as “Courtesy for Boys
and Girls” and a “Catechism of the
History of Ireland,” which asserted that
“in the martyrology of history, among
crucified nations, Ireland occupies the
foremost place. The duration of her
torture, and the ferocity of her execu-
tioner, are as revolting as the power of
the victim is astonishing.” A crucified
nation must imagine itself a holy na-
tion, allied in defeat and in victory with
Christ’s necessary suffering. But once
suffering is somehow necessary all con-
trol is lost, and violence can be theo-
logically justified, because punishment
is really a kind of shared self-punish-
ment. (That’s the kind of thing I used
to hear in my Church of England school
in the North of England, as the head-
master, the Reverend Canon John
Grove, bent down to beat my bottom
with the back of a wooden hairbrush:
“Believe me, Wood, this hurts me more
than it will hurt you.”) It is the logic
of original sin: all have sinned, all must
suffer, and only through suffering is
glory achieved.
Irish society was premised on what
O’Toole calls “the unknown known,”
Ireland’s “genius for knowing and not
knowing at the same time.” This gap,
this useful fiction, could be maintained
in the postwar decades as long as ordi-
nary people, many with modest educa-
tions and modest aspirations, under-
stood their lowly place in the hierarchy.
Parents trusted predatory or violent
schoolteachers and priests, and were
happy to outsource a fair amount of the
parenting: a dog’s obeyed in office, as
mad King Lear has it. The secret can
survive as long as the monarch stays
sane and does not reveal himself in all
his doglike animalism, because then
someone in the street might yell out,
“But he’s just a dog!”
For instance, until the divorce ref-
erendum of 1995, a couple who neededto get divorced in Ireland had to con-
vince a body called the diocesan Mar-
riage Tribunal that their marriage should
be annulled on the ground that, owing
to some “defect” at the time of the nup-
tials, they were never properly married
anyway. In Dublin, O’Toole writes, the
moral arbiter before whom you had to
lay these sophistical contortions was a
priest named, appropriately enough,
Ivan Payne. In 1968, Payne had become
the chaplain of the Crumlin children’s
hospital, not far from where the young
O’Toole lived. He replaced Father Paul
McGennis, who had been discovered
photographing little girls’ genitalia and
had been secretly pardoned and pro-
tected by our man with the magnify-
ing glass, Archbishop McQuaid. At
the children’s hospital, Payne started
abusing little boys: O’Toole tells us that
there were sixteen known victims at
the hospital, and fifteen more identi-
fied victims after Payne joined the Mar-
riage Tribunal. The Church knew about
Payne’s activities as early as 1981, when
one of his young victims alerted Church
authorities. Payne admitted his offense,
and was quietly moved from one par-
ish to another. As O’Toole puts it, with
measured fury, from 1985 to 1995 the
body charged with making discrimi-
nations about the moral fineness of
marriages “included a man who had
admitted the sexual abuse of a child
and two other priests who knew about
that abuse.”H
ypocrisy shrivels when it is named
in sunlight. In the nineteen-nine-
ties, that sunlit naming happened fast,
and the two sides of the unknown
known—the knowing and the not
knowing—started openly talking to
each other, like a mistress and a wife fi-
nally comparing notes on the same atro-
cious man. Four events were propulsive.
In 1992, Eamonn Casey, the popular
and telegenic Bishop of Galway, fled
Ireland for New York on an Aer Lin-
gus plane. His American lover, Annie
Murphy, had told the Irish Times about
her long affair with Casey, and about
their son, Peter, born in 1974, who was
being financially supported by the
Bishop—or, more precisely, by funds
from the Galway diocese, without its
knowledge. Not that Peter was being
supported with much grace. Bishop“Will you spend eighteen months and tens of thousands
of dollars planning a party with me?”