It is so nice to see you posting here. Are you just back from Ireland yourself?
I am not an authority on Ireland in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, when I believe Frank Mc Court was living in Limerick. I do know that when President John Kennedy came to visit in the early 1960’s, he was astonished at the widespread poverty, and especially that most of the children did not even have shoes. The poverty Mc Court describes—long rows of tenement housing without inside plumbing—definitely existed when he lived there. In fact, in Northern Ireland even in recent decades this was the housing that poor Catholics in Belfast got, while poor Protestants got better digs. This caused an enormous amount of resentment because it was discriminatory.
But I digress. Back to Mc Court, I think several factors account for your friend’s different memories. First, Mc Court’s father was an alcoholic who did not work, for the most part. Children from extremely poor families with a working parent would have been more likely to get enough to eat and to have better clothing. The children in Mc Court’s family were really ill nourished, and several of them died, which could be a reflection of scarce, bad food and not enough heat or clothing to keep them warm. I do not really think Mc Court is lying about his background. Your friend is the first to come forth with such a charge that I could find doing an Internet search, and his books are wildly popular in Ireland. Children’s memories are somewhat subjective. If your friend’s family had enough food to eat usually, and one functional parent, his memories probably were substantially different. Irish children at that time spent most of their time in active play and sports, outside of their homes, and just came in for supper. It was possible for poor children to have reasonably happy memories of their childhoods overall.
Ireland is an extremely wealthy nation now. Because of the Celtic Tiger economy, average house prices have soared recently to over $250,000. The young are having trouble qualifying for mortgages. But that is very recent. In the 1970’s, my husband, his older siblings and his father lived in a cottage in the country in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland that did not have indoor plumbing. At Christmas the older children, who were working, managed to scrape together money to buy the younger ones presents. But there was fairly constant poverty in general. When there was no money for food, dinner was jam and bread, sometimes several nights a week. They had a horse, Nellie, that came and went from the cottage as she pleased. The countryside was achingly beautiful, of course, and even though there were hardships, some of the memories were very good ones.
I can tell you where some of the resentment of the priests began—the Potato Famine of 1847. If you talk to an Irishman for very long, you are likely to hear the story, and particularly the anger at the Catholic Church, which did nothing very helpful to help the starving. They kept their prosperous lives with housekeepers and plenty of food and lace curtains, even as the Irish died in the ditches outside of their houses after surviving by eating grass as long as they could. Not one Irish priest died in the Famine.
I don’t know much about De Valera. He was one of the IRA leaders of the 1916 uprising that finally led to the establishment of Eire, and so he is a legitimate national hero. At the same time he was a revolutionary politically, his devout Catholicism laid a heavy blanket of oppression over the entire country, particularly in the area of women’s rights. Abortion is still not legal in Ireland, and divorce was finally voted in until very recently. The lack of availability of birth control and the constraints of a rigid patriotic religious structure kept women pregnant or rearing huge families, and kept most people in poverty. The laws regulating what you could import into Ireland even in the 1980’s would have excluded most of my art—we were thinking of moving back there. And of course there were the book bannings. All of this led to a climate in which priests and nuns controlled the society, and vicious corporal punishment in schools was routine, and pedophile priests were in every parish. Then there were the old biddies in every village who spied on the populace and reported absolutely everything they saw to the Church. I have no idea what their motivation was, but even today you can see them watching everyone who goes by, making village life quite confining.
Anyway, it so nice talking with you! |
