Secrets. This is a country full of secrets. And because we haven’t faced up to them, they’re always there, ready to trip us up, like a minefield that hasn’t been cleared.
There’s a saying psychologists use: "Secrets are the rocks on which we perish". The truth of that struck me this weekend reading Rosita Boland’s extraordinary interview in The Irish Times with a man who had not spoken for 34 years. He was Ann Lovett’s boyfriend, Ricky McDonnell. Ann Lovett was the 15-year-old schoolgirl who 34 years ago, gave birth to her baby alone, lying in the rain, at a grotto to Our Lady in Granard, Co Longford. Both mother and baby died.
It was a massive scandal at the time. Did nobody know she was pregnant or offer to help her? Did she feel so alone that somehow this place, dedicated to the mother of God, symbolised shelter and protection? At the time, almost nobody in Granard admitted to knowing about Anne’s pregnancy but the work that Rosita did for The Irish Times this year shows that a number of people did know about it.
McDonnell claims that they did have a sexual relationship but that that cooled after Ann arrived at his house distraught one night, bruised and scuffed on the thighs. She wouldn’t confirm whether she’d been raped, she just told him not to tell anybody.
After she had died, McDonnell related how the local priest told him to burn a letter that Ann had left for him because it would cause so much trouble and would destroy the town, though the priest denies saying this. The priest took him away for a few days to keep him away from the press.
There was no inquiry. The inquest simply confirmed that the pathologist’s report said the baby was probably stillborn, and that Ann had died due to irreversible shock from exposure and bleeding. The Garda file sent to the Coroner has never been seen. The emphasis from the Church seemed to be to keep things quiet - and to criticise whoever had tipped off the newspapers and RTÉ about the story.
But the problem with burying secrets is that they’ll trip you up when you least expect it. You may be able to control the present but you can’t control the future. The Roman Catholic Church discovered that. As its power waned and people were less afraid of confronting it, tales of clerical sexual abuse and the systematic cover-up of clerical sexual abuse trickled and then flooded out to damage its reputation and its authority irreparably.
"If authorities thought that silence might protect trust in the system, they now know it did the exact opposite"
All over the country, those big institutional buildings in that clerical architecture style – industrial schools and Mother and Baby homes and Magdalene laundries – now stand as empty monuments to all the secrets we locked up coldly, so that we could present ourselves to the world as ‘Holy Ireland’.
And the State keeps secrets too. Take the cervical smear tests scandal. If an inquiry shows that this is primarily a communications failure, then look at the damage that has been done by not telling women that a review of their earlier test showed it shouldn’t have given them the all-clear.
If authorities thought that silence might protect trust in the system, they now know it did the exact opposite. And why did the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health advise against including mandatory disclosure in the legislation, which went through last November, only to have the whole scandal of women being kept in the dark about their own medical history blow up in the department’s face?
It brings me back to the Thalidomide scandal in the early 60s and an interview I did 10 years later with the then Minister for Health, Erskine Childers. I asked him why, when the Department had been warned that Thalidomide caused deformities in babies in 1961, they hadn’t issued a public warning and insisted on immediate withdrawal of Thalidomide from pharmacy shelves. Because, he told me uncomfortably, the then Minister and Department decided that it might frighten pregnant women who had already taken the drug and do more harm than good.
As a result, Thalidomide was still to be found on pharmacy shelves three years after it should have been withdrawn. And there was at least one Irish mother who took the drug and had an affected baby well after the Department had been warned it was dangerous.
It took us a long time to winkle all of this out because the Department was afraid of any admission that it might have been negligent. And that’s the pattern with secrets. Secrets are usually there to protect the institution, the department, the HSE, the hospital, the church, the town. Maybe even the family.
So, it’s usually the individual, like Ann Lovett, who suffers when it comes to secrets. But the place she chose to have her baby and die alone was no secret. It was a place of public devotion to Our Lady. And that was her protest, says her boyfriend. 34 years later, her protest lives on.
This column was broadcast on Drivetime on Tuesday, May 8th, 2018. Listen back to the full programme here.
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