‘Many People Were Damaged By Carl Beech’

‘Many people were damaged by Carl Beech’

Carl Beech ruined lives with fake accusations of sex abuse. Why? Vanessa Engle, the director of a new film about him, explains

Ed Potton

Monday August 17 2020, 12.01am, The Times

Vanessa Engle, director of The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech

Vanessa Engle has built a reputation on asking straight questions about knotty subjects. Engle’s television documentaries on the art world, Jews, lefties, Harley Street and domestic violence have been marked out by humanity, curiosity and her disarming, direct interviewing style. The British journalist’s new film, though, is perhaps the most disturbing of her 30-year career. The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is one of those rare titles that’s not an exaggeration.

In 2012 Beech, a hospital inspector in his forties from Gloucester, claimed to police that he had been abused, raped and tortured as a boy in the late Seventies and early Eighties by a paedophile ring that included the politicians Edward Heath, Leon Brittan and Harvey Proctor and the senior army officer Lord Bramall. Beech, referred to by the police as “Nick” to protect his identity, also said that he witnessed members of that ring murder three boys and that he had been abused by his stepfather. “I had poppies pinned to my chest whilst they did whatever they wanted to do,” he says of the “VIP ring” in a police interview. That would normally begin with him being forced to perform oral sex, he adds, “but would always culminate in being raped”.

As Proctor said in an incendiary press conference at the time, Beech’s claims amounted to “just about the worst allegations anyone can make against another person”. Yet, after an 18-month investigation that cost £2.5 million and put huge stress on the accused men — Proctor lost his job and home — not a single arrest had been made. The allegations were completely fabricated. Last year Beech, who had been awarded more than £20,000 in compensation for non-existent injuries suffered in the alleged abuse, was tried and sentenced to 18 years in prison for offences including fraud and perverting the course of justice.

Carl Beech (left) in Court 2018

And yet his unbelievable story was at first widely believed in a country that was reeling from Jimmy Savile’s crimes. Victims of abuse were being listened to like never before. In the police interviews Beech looks plausibly nervous, vulnerable, damaged. 

“We were at a moment where people would believe literally anything on this subject,” Engle, 57, says by phone from her home in north London. “The press believed it, politicians believed it, police believed it, the public believed it. There are still people saying, ‘Oh, no smoke without fire. It must be true.’ ”

Except in this case it wasn’t. Beech, it is clear now, is a fantasist on a grand scale. If notes read out in the film are anything to go by, he is also a dreadful poet. “Electrocution and drowning were some of the tools/ They used when I broke the rules,” he wrote. “They used snakes and wasps/ Or left me out there to die in the frost.”

“Well he obviously didn’t die, did he, because he’s alive and still in prison, for f***’s sake,” says his ex-wife, Dawn Beech, in the film. She is a peach of an interviewee — candid, courageous and funny — which is extraordinary, given her travails. Her sex life with Beech, she tells Engle, “just wasn’t good at all”. 

Another interviewee is Mark Conrad, a journalist who was taken in by Beech. “Some people have probably assumed that Beech took you for a fool,” Engle says to Conrad. See what I mean about direct? “I’m a very direct person,” she says. “I did ten years of therapy and that gave me the tools to be very aware of what’s happening in the room when I ask questions and what it’s possible to ask. You know you’ve done a good interview if you know you’ve taken a risk in some of your questions.”

Nevertheless, she says she was nervous about making this documentary. “Why would I spend time on somebody who was not a real victim, as far as we know, and who had inflicted so much damage to the real victims? Normally, the more you familiarise yourself with stories, the less strange they become, but with this one Carl’s motivation just seemed stranger and more despicable to me.”

What was that motivation? Engle thinks there may have been a past trauma. “You just have to look at him. He does not look comfortable in his own skin, does he?” When police searched Beech’s home they found substantial amounts of child pornography, the possession of which contributed to his prison sentence. While there is no evidence that Beech was abused, Mike Pierce — an anti-abuse charity worker and survivor of child sexual abuse who appears in the film — met him and felt that he had been. “So, I can’t categorically say that he wasn’t,” Engle says. “I don’t know how bad a thing has to happen to someone to send them off the rails.”

The film ended up becoming an examination of the damage that Beech has done. “There was just wave upon wave,” she says. “We all understood that the falsely accused were very damaged, but I hadn’t really realised that Beech’s own family was damaged too. The family of his step-siblings has been really badly damaged. I hadn’t understood that the journalists [who covered the case] were damaged.”

Conrad talks about the long period of depression he went through when Beech was found to be a liar. “I know that some of the police who were fooled have had breakdowns as well,” Engle says.

She coaxes brilliant details out of people, punctuating the grimness with off-kilter interludes. Brittan’s widow and housekeeper talk about the police searching the house. “The thing that hurt the lady more than anything — they took his slippers,” the housekeeper says. “Were they nice slippers?” Engle asks. “They were pretty awful, to be honest,” Diana Brittan replies. “No monogram.” 

This is ultimately, Engle says, “a film about truth. Which, of course, is very relevant in the post-truth era.” In the age of Trump and Johnson, will fantasists like Beech become more common? “That’s a terrifying thought,” she says. There have always been fantasists, she points out. Her previous film, The $50m Art Swindle, was about Michel Cohen, a Frenchman who made a fortune by selling Picassos and Monets that he didn’t own. “He was a conman and a very deluded person too. We all have a tiny strain of deluded thinking. That’s not always a bad thing. It’s what makes people have dreams and grand ambitions.”

It’s hard to put a positive spin on Beech’s case, though. What’s most heartbreaking is how much damage it has done to the cause of genuine abuse victims. “We just were at a moment where the victims of historic child sexual abuse were coming forward and were being believed,” she says. “What kind of a person would want to get in the way of that?”

Engle asked Beech for an interview, but he refused. “We’d have loved to ask him why he did it. But when you see his extraordinary performance in those police videos, I don’t think you could whip off the mask and the real Carl Beech would step forward.”

Does she think he feels any remorse? “From everything I know and from everything I’ve heard from those closest to him, no, he doesn’t,” Engle says. “He’s never said, ‘I made it up.’ He really does seem to believe what he’s saying.”

The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is on BBC Two on August 24 at 9pm

The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns [1]

Nuns, Mothers and Babies in Bon Secours Home, Tuam

The final report from the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy) was due to be delivered to the Government in June but delivery was postponed until 30 October 2020 due to coronavirus. According to the Irish Times  "It was set up following claims that up to 800 babies may have been interred in an unmarked mass grave in the Bon Secours mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway." That's putting it very mildly. Brendan O'Neill editor of Spiked OnLine gives a flavour of the wordwide hysteria that preceded the establishment of the Commission (June 2004 article The Tuam Tank: Another Myth about Evil Ireland) 

Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, declared the Washington Post. ‘800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, said the New York Daily News. ‘Galway historian finds 800 babies in septic tank grave’, said the Boston Globe. ‘The bodies of 800 babies were found in the septic tank of a former home for unwed mothers in Ireland’, cried Buzzfeed. Commentators angrily demanded answers from the Catholic Church. ‘Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves’, said a writer for The Guardian, telling no-doubt outraged readers that ‘the bodies of 796 children… have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway’

I discuss the credibility of three preceding Reports including two chaired by the same Judge Yvonne Murphy.

This is the first in a projected series of three articles on "The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns". Part [2] is HERE and Part [3] HERE

(A) Credibility of Ryan Report (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse), May 2009

The Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy is due to be published shortly. I gave evidence myself to the Ryan Commission (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse) as part of a delegation from Let Our Voices Emerge. I emphasised the clearly bogus allegations of child murder made by leaders of "Victim" groups against the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy. The Ryan Report was published in May 2009 and  I outlined my experience in a letter published in the Irish Examiner on 7 November 2011 Ryan Report Did Not Deal With False Allegations  

The report of the Ryan Commission published in May 2009 makes no reference to these claims of unlawful killing. Originally I thought that the commission had ignored them completely. It now appears that the commission did investigate the allegations in private session, found no evidence to support them and took a deliberate decision to omit them from its published report. I find this reprehensible.

 I did not give evidence to the Commission of Investigation, Dublin Archdiocese or the Commission of Investigation, Cloyne Diocese - both of which were chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy - Reports published in November 2009 and July 2011 respectively. However the modus operandi of Judge Yvonne Murphy seems to be similar to that of Judge Sean Ryan - including ignoring evidence of false allegations and accepting as true any claim that Church authorities cannot prove false!

(B) Credibility of Murphy Report into Dublin Archdiocese, November 2009

I am not the only one to have such misgivings. This is a Statement by The Association of Catholic Priests in July 2014 on the appointment of Judge Yvonne Murphy to chair the current Commission. 

Statement from the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) responding to the  establishment of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and the appointment of Yvonne Murphy 

The ACP welcomes the establishment of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. It is important that it be carried out competently, justly and in strict accordance with guidelines to be laid down by the government, which should reflect natural and constitutional justice.

The ACP notes the appointment of Judge Yvonne Murphy who chaired the Murphy Commission into abuse in Dublin diocese. It is also important to note that, in view of a report commissioned by the ACP into procedural fairness in that investigation, Fergal Sweeney, an Irish barrister who worked for many years as a judge in Hong Kong, concluded that the Murphy Report contained significant deficiencies in terms of respecting the demands of natural and constitutional justice.

Last October [2013], the ACP published Fergal Sweeney’s findings. His conclusions are on pages 37-39 of his document, which is on this web-site. The final point is as follows:

4.14   However, from the legal perspective it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that insofar as the Catholic clerics who were called to testify were concerned, the practices and procedures of the Murphy Commission fell far short of meeting the concerns of the Law Reform Commission and, more importantly, of natural and Constitutional  justice. 

In the light of the serious failings of the Murphy Commission, the ACP suggests that Fergal Sweeney’s important and robustly argued conclusions should be considered before the terms of reference for the investigation are established and the necessity of following them is accepted.  

Our concerns should not be interpreted as an attack on Judge Murphy, still less an attempt to obstruct the investigation, but a concern that the new Commission of Investigation should have the best possible team to carry out the vital work. 

The ACP is aware that Judge Murphy and the Murphy Commission are legally debarred from any comment once they issued their Report but even though strangely Fergal Sweeney’s study was largely ignored in the media and by the legal profession, it is vital for the credibility of the enquiry that those entrusted with investigating the Mother and Baby Homes should accept and implement the guidelines laid down by the government. This is a matter not just of natural justice but of judicial competence. 

We would also hope that the Commission will avail of the expertise of social scientists, especially anthropologists, to make sure that the cultural prism through which we interpret present reality is not imposed on the past. Here too competent historians must be consulted so that the Commission has an accurate understanding of the historical reality at that period in Irish history and of the various actors who were involved in the wider context of the Mother and Child homes at the time. 

Making the same mistakes twice, when people’s characters and reputations are at stake, would be unconscionable.

A discussion regarding Fergal Sweeney’s report can be found on the ACP website at 

ACP Report on Yvonne Murphy Investigation Published (November 2013)

The text of Fergal Sweeney's 40 page Report is here

A Review from a legal perspective of the Commissions of Investigation Act 2004 and of the Report into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin (the “Murphy Report”)

Margaret Lee a retired Social Worker and former member of the Sisters of Mercy summarised it thus in the course of the afore-mentioned discussion 

I have read this review and I consider the following to be the salient Points

• 1. The enquiry that led to the Murphy Report was carried out under the 2004 [Commissions of Investigation] Act which was really guided by the Law Reform Commission Report of 2003. This report proposes a low key enquiry that would focus on the malfunction of the system not on the sins of the individual. It was viewed that such an enquiry would not attract the rules of constitutional justice precisely because the focus was to be on the system, not the individual. Two further recommendations of the LRC Report are pertinent: (a) the enquiry was to be held in private –again to protect the good name of the participants and (b) where a participant wished to comment on or disagree with the conclusions of the enquiry, such comments and/or disagreements would be included in the final report—in short both sides of the argument would be recorded. The Murphy Report does not meet the standards set out by the Law Reform because it names and blames individual clerics.

• 2. The legislation itself could be viewed as flawed and the Dail debates at the time foresaw the possibility of a legal challenge. The legislation does not make provision for an enquiry that might find a reason to go beyond the remit of focussing on a system and start adjudicating of individuals. If it had done so, it would surely have written into the legislation the 4 minimum rights which the Supreme Court set down in its Abbeylara judgement–right to know the content of the accusation, to cross examine the accuser, to address the adjudicator through counsel and make a rebuttal. Instead the legislation talks vaguely about “fair procedures” without stating how these fair provisions might be implemented.

• 3. The Murphy Report did not accord natural justice to the clerics who participated. Where there is a difference in the recollections of past events between clerics and professionals it resolves such differences in favour of the professionals and against the cleric and, most significantly, does not give any reason for doing so. The report does not give due consideration to any mitigating circumstances put forward by the clerics. This is particularly obvious in discussing the “learning curve”. The report dismisses out of hand that the clergy were on a learning curve when it came to child sexual abuse but freely acknowledges the existence of such a learning curve in the case of An Garda Siochana and Social workers—or indeed, psychiatrists.

• 4. The LRC places great emphasis on the limitations of any form of enquiry or tribunal when it comes to the administration of justice. It states that an enquiry is not able to carry out a function which belongs to the courts—that of punishment and it warns against the danger of attempting to do so in times of a public outcry.

This review of the Murphy report is not attempting to deny or minimize the wrong that was done to the victims of clerical child abuse. What the review is stating is that the clergy did not get natural justice. It is important to draw attention to this in a week when we have heard a lot of concern about targeting any particular group.

I find the silence of the named Bishops and of the members of the Law Reform Commission at the time of publication puzzling. I assume that the Bishops were terrified of savaging by the media. Why did not the members of the LRC not speak out?.....

Finally, there is no substitute for a formal statement of complaint to An Garda Siochana in the event of sexual assault or any other crime.

(C) Extracts from Discussion that followed ACP Statement on appointment of Yvonne Murphy (July 2014) 

Pádraig McCarthy July 18th, 2014 at 10:24 pm 
At the risk of increasing the task, it is important that the Commission of Investigation do not consider the religious run mother and baby homes in isolation: other such homes, including county homes, must be included. In relation to funding and staffing, the Commission must see how such homes which were funded by the state compare in funding to other kinds of homes, and to the regular maternity hospitals.

The matter of children being sent for adoption, and of children who died being sent to medical schools, must be looked at in all such institutions.

In looking at the matter of how society dealt with non-marital children and their mothers (what about the fathers?), the Commission must look at the context of how other jurisdictions at the time dealt with this. This would include the practice in some places of introducing legislation for the compulsory sterilisation of women in these situations.

In dealing with infant mortality, the Commission must look at how other institutions, including maternity hospitals, dealt with the burial arrangements; and how society at the time dealt with the deaths of small children – this includes the “Holy Angels” plots in many parts of the country as a normal practice. While today, we would see the burial of a child without a funeral rite as cruel and unfeeling, we need to ask how people saw it in the years before and following independence, including the question of whether it was seen as a kindness and help to the bereaved parents. The economic factors are relevant here. Also the fact that stillbirths were not registered here until 1995, so the child would not usually be given a name.

The level of infant mortality in society over those years is clearly important. Where there appears to be a much higher level of mortality of non-marital children, the Commission must look at the health and living conditions of the mothers; the question of poverty is relevant. The Commission must consider the experience in other jurisdictions also, where the level of infant mortality of non-marital children was frequently higher than the level in marital children, and what may be the reasons for this. The contemporary situation could be enlightening here. Also the kind of medical care available, and nutritional factors.

In the matter of adoptions, we must be aware of what was seen as good practice at the time. Often this involved minimising the bonding of the mother and child. Sending children abroad was not just a practice in Ireland: many children were sent from UK to Australia.

To look at international experience is not a way of justifying all that was done; but if we fail to look at the wider picture, we may be in danger of blaming ourselves because we are Irish, and largely Catholic.

I’m sure there are other relevant matters which do not come to mind at present. All in all, as the statement makes clear, it is important that the Commission take the matter in its historical context. This was a matter of serious failure in the Murphy Report.

The Commission must consider whether it can name and shame people they consider to blame: this was a very serious failure and injustice in a Commission of Investigation, as the Sweeney report makes clear.

It will be instructive to see whether this new Commission of Investigation learns from the errors of the past, and whether they pay attention to the study of the Murphy Report produced by Fergal Sweeney.

Rory Connor July 19th, 2014 at 4:03 pm 
One point that Fergal Sweeney did NOT mention is that the Murphy Report on Dublin includes criticism of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid even though he died in in 1973 and the inquiry was supposed to investigate the actions of the Catholic Church in the period 1975 to 2004. 

Also the Report failed to comment on the widely-publicized allegations of pedophilia against the late Archbishop even though these were made in 1999 i.e. WITHIN the period that Judge Murphy was supposed to report on. Could the fact that the allegations were universally rejected as false, have anything to do with this curious omission? The Dublin Archdiocese under Archbishop Desmond Connell, strongly repudiated the claims. Did they really have no effect on the attitudes of senior clergy who had to deal with similar sex claims against Dublin priests?

Judge Murphy’s report on Cloyne also failed to refer to scurrilous allegations against Bishop John Magee for which the UK Guardian was forced to apologise in 1994 and TV3 in 1999. Did Judge Murphy believe that these false allegations had NO effect on how the Bishop would have viewed similar claims against his priests?

The current investigation into Mother and Baby homes was sparked by a world-wide media storm based on claims that the Bon Secour nuns in Tuam had dumped the bodies of dead children into a septic tank. Most of the journalists who published this obscene libel have now quietly dropped it and only a few have had the grace to apologise. I hope that Judge Murphy will not fail to provide a detailed analysis of this fake atrocity story and name those responsible for creating it.

Dr Margaret Kennedy July 20th, 2014 at 9:34 am
 
It seems to me that the ACP despite its claim not to want to “attempt to obstruct the investigation” is in fact, conveying from day one that Judge Yvonne Murphy needs to brush up on her "practices and procedures" or even is "not suitable"  which from my perspective is disrespectful and does not fill me with admiration. Such enquiries are always limited by resources, information lost, not given (!) and in the end humanity and one’s human fallibility. I suspect some clergy did not equip themselves well in that enquiry! One could unpick most inquiries as ‘deficient’.


It further seems to me that the ACP wants to highlight the ‘unfairness’ of the Murphy Commission i.e. being allegedly ‘unfair’ towards clergy rather than hope that justice will be served to women and children incarcerated in ‘mother and baby homes’ and the subsequent (often) blighted lives of these women and children. That the ACP take this defensive clergy stance continues to present the Catholic Church as an institution largely only of benefit to clergy themselves! When Clergy begin to see the deficiencies of it’s OWN institution rather than point out the log in another’s eye, then will lay people subjected to the horrors of past Catholicism receive justice. I suspect that most of the Murphy Commission painted an accurate picture of victims abuse and the ACP statement above seeks to damn it whole and entire thus almost calling victims ‘liars’. Have we not endured enough of this clericalism? Now could the ACP speak/say something about the Women and Children who suffered in Mother and Baby Homes?

Pádraig McCarthy July 20th, 2014 at 1:19 pm 
Dr Margaret Kennedy 
Lessons need to be learned from the Murphy Commission – precisely because of deficiencies clearly identified by Fergal Sweeney, and also in my book Unheard Story. The ACP and Fergal Sweeney and I have been careful to recognise explicitly the valuable work done by the Commission. We are greatly concerned that justice be done for those who were abused, and for all concerned in the mother and baby homes.

The ACP itself is not a perfect association, and is very much aware of serious failings in the Church. The ACP certainly does not take a defensive stance in this regard.

It is not true to write, as you do, that “the ACP statement above seeks to damn [the Murphy Commission] whole and entire thus almost calling victims ‘liars’.” This cannot be found anywhere in any statement from the ACP; nor is it in Fergal Sweeney’s document; nor is it in my book.

This is not at all incompatible with bringing to attention deficiencies in the Murphy Report. One does not correct one injustice by inflicting another injustice. The points made by Fergal Sweeney in his document are the points to address: this is what is at issue here. The really strange thing is that the media and the political establishment have not so far addressed the matters raised by Fergal Sweeney.

Your work has been valuable in bringing public attention to abuse. It is understandable that any person who has experience of abuse, as you have, would be wary of anything that may seem to downgrade the appalling abuse which is well documented in the Murphy Report. It is vital that we hold on to that, and at the same time not fail to address failures in procedural fairness in the work of the Commission. This is not an attempt to exculpate anyone.

It is because the ACP wants the full story of the mother and baby homes to be made clear that the statement was issued. The media have backed away very much from initial sensational reports. As the ACP statement says: “It is important that it be carried out competently, justly and in strict accordance with guidelines to be laid down by the government, which should reflect natural and constitutional justice.” If there were deficiencies in the Murphy Report, as I believe Fergal Sweeney shows, then, indeed, “Making the same mistakes twice, when people’s characters and reputations are at stake, would be unconscionable.”

Joe O'Leary July 21st, 2014 at 11:50 am
 What one would like to see in a new Murphy report is a deeper sense of historical perspective, setting the work of the sisters who ran mother and child homes, Magdalene laundries, etc., in the context of the demands of society at the time. Even the shaming and shunning of unmarried mothers alleged to be a uniquely Catholic outlook could be put in perspective — unmarried mothers were not viewed benignly anywhere. As Fintan O’Toole points out, the vast amount of secret abortions that is our current solution to unwanted pregnancies bespeaks similar attitudes which have not gone away even though no longer connected with Catholic notions of guilt and sin. And it would also be nice if the next Murphy report recorded also the positive things people had to say about the sisters. If demonizing indignation is allowed to set the tone of the new report, as it in part set the tone of the Dublin and Cloyne reports, it will only undercut its reliability as work of historical reference.

Pádraig McCarthy July 29th, 2014 at 9:41 am 
Vincent Twomey has a good article in the Irish Times today (29 July) on the Opinion page, expressing similar reservations about how the Commission of Investigation may be influenced by its composition.
What’s Wrong with the Proposed Mother and Babies Home Commission
Opinion: Appointment of judge to chair body raises expectation of criminal findings

Eddie Finnegan July 29th, 2014 at 1:28 pm 
The interesting Opinion piece by Vincent Twomey in this morning’s Irish Times perhaps goes a step further than the ACP Statement and other substantial comments above. He asks, not just “Why Judge Yvonne Murphy?”, but why any judge as chairman of the mother-and-baby home inquiry? Like several of the contributors above, he asks why the narrow concentration “primarily on the mother-and-child homes run by Catholic religious congregations together with one Protestant-run home”. He also wonders whether the commission will enquire into the sensationalist media coverage of the original Tuam story.
What’s Wrong with the Proposed Mother and Babies Home Commission

Perhaps Vincent can hope for a fairer hearing from commenters on this forum than from the often rabid online commentariat the Irish Times now permits or even encourages. If they don’t permit such mindless anonymous or pseudonymous rubbish in their Letters Page, why leave serious contributors open to it online?


Rory Connor August 4th, 2014 at 12:34 am 
Fr. Vincent Twomey’s article in the Irish Times on 29 July raises a couple of very important issues
What’s Wrong with the Proposed Mother and Babies Home Commission

“Should the commission uncover grave misdeeds, even criminal actions, natural justice demands each instance be dealt with according to due procedures, all of which are predicated on the presumption of innocence. Malicious accusations against “the nuns” by some public commentators have been deeply offensive, not least to today’s aged Sisters, who, with depleted human resources, continue to provide unsung service to the marginalised in Ireland, which the State cannot provide. ……

“Finally, it would be a welcome development if the commission were to devote some attention to the media’s coverage of the initial Tuam story. How did such sensationalist coverage affect the women and children themselves – and those who provided service in the homes? What further hurt did it cause?”

The purveyors of ludicrous atrocity stories about the Bon Secour nuns have now largely gone silent – at least on the allegations that actually can be TESTED. So it may be helpful to remind ourselves of what they originally wrote: 

‘Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, declared the Washington Post. ‘800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, said the New York Daily News. ‘Galway historian finds 800 babies in septic tank grave’, said the Boston Globe. ‘The bodies of 800 babies were found in the septic tank of a former home for unwed mothers in Ireland’, cried Buzzfeed. Commentators angrily demanded answers from the Catholic Church. ‘Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves’, said a writer for the Guardian, telling no-doubt outraged readers that ‘the bodies of 796 children… have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway’. ……. 

The foregoing details are from Brendan O’Neill’s article on the SpikedOnLine website and he also comments that 

A hysterical piece in the Irish Independent compared the Tuam home to the Nazi Holocaust, Rwanda and Srebrenica, saying that in all these settings people were killed ‘because they were scum’ 

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-tuam-tank-another-myth-about-evil-ireland/15140#.U9muh9J4xjs

Brendan O’Neill is an atheist. Yet his article is entitled “The Tuam Tank: Another Myth about Evil Ireland” and the subtitle is “The obsession with Ireland’s dark past has officially become unhinged.” Compare this to Fr Brian D’Arcy’s article in the Sunday World on 10 June entitled “Fr Brian: Baby Graves are Our Greatest Crime” that includes the following
http://www.sundayworld.com/top-stories/columnists/fr-brian-d-arcy/fr-brian-baby-graves-are-our-greatest-crime

“When I first heard the news that more than 800 babies were buried in what was formerly a septic tank I was astonished – because initially I thought it happened in some famine-stricken country today. Then I thought I was hearing about Nazi Germany…..” etc etc

When the Commission of Investigation eventually issues its Report, will it even mention these fake atrocity stories that shamed us world-wide? Or will the Report ignore every allegation that is OBVIOUSLY false while accepting as true any claim that the nuns cannot PROVE is a lie? I strongly suspect the latter. After all, that is what happened in all previous investigations of this type!

Fr Brian D'Arcy [My comment dated 17 August 2020]

The above-mentioned Sunday World article by Father D'Arcy is no longer online but a shorter version is available  in the Irish Examiner dated 5 June 2014 entitled Disposal of babies' bodies in Tuam 'as bad as Nazi Germany': Fr Brian Darcy 

Well-known cleric Fr Brian Darcy has said the discovery of almost 800 babies bodies next to a Galway mother and baby home is as bad as anything that happened in Nazi Germany.

The Government has today confirmed that a "scoping exercise" is underway to determine whether other mass graves such as that found in Tuam exist in other parts of the country.

Fr Brian Darcy said he thought previous scandals involving the Church had left him "unshockable", but that this was a shocking as something that happened in Germany during World War II.

He added that people needed to be brought to justice for "sinful crimes". "I think if the facts are as bad as they seem to be, and I have no reason to doubt that, I think this will cause a massive revolution about the kind of country that we had and the kind of country that we're all children of."

(Helpful key words after the article include "Nazi Germany" and "World War II")

"Liberal" and Green Support for Paedophilia? [Part 4]

The Irish Church and the Sexual Revolution (plus "Conclusion")

Mary McAleese, former President of Ireland

Part [4] of "Liberal" and Green support for Paedophilia? is a continuation of Part [1], Part [2] and Part [3] and ends the article.

(6) The Irish Church and the Sexual Revolution

There were no equivalents in Ireland to the USA’s Father Paul Shanley or Belgium’s Bishop Roger Vangheluwe and Cardinal Danneels.(See Part [3]) Obviously there were cases where children were sexually abused by Irish priests or religious. However no clerical abuser gave public lectures to clergy and laity in which he defended sexual relationships between adults and adolescents (as Fr Paul Shanley did). And there was no Irish catechism like the Belgian “Roeach” containing drawings of naked children who were making statements like: “Stroking my pussy makes me feel groovy,” “I like to take my knickers off with friends” etc. In Belgium, after Alexandra Colen made futile attempts with other parents to get the catechism withdrawn, she decided to sever all ties with the Catholic education system and set up a homeschool together with other parents, so that their children would be educated in a Catholic environment.

In Ireland Catholic traditionalists often expressed frustration with the inadequacy – and inanity – of post-Vatican II religious teaching in schools, but they were not faced with THAT type of problem.  The saga of Bishop Brendan Comiskey and “child- abuser” (more correctly adolescent-abuser) priest Fr Sean Fortune is relevant here. Brendan Comiskey had to resign as Bishop of Ferns in 2002 following claims that he had not dealt adequately with allegations of abuse made against Fr Fortune. In his resignation statement he said that he had tried everything in his management of Fortune but found him “virtually impossible to deal with”.  When Fortune committed suicide shortly before facing trial, he left a note in which he claimed that hehad been raped by Bishop Comiskey! So we are NOT talking about the kind of cosy friendship that existed between Cardinal Godfried Danneels and the paedophile Bishop Roger Vangheluwe in Belgium. (Alexandra Colen writes:  Mgr Roger Vangheluwe, the pedophile child molesting Bishop of Bruges, was the supervising bishop of both institutions – the Catholic University of Leuven and the Seminary of Bruges – whence came the editors in chief of this perverted “catechism” textbook.)

However from the 1960s – and especially after the Vatican II – the Irish Church was buffeted by waves of change which it proved unable to cope with. Most of the problems related to sex. In July 1968, in his sensational encyclical Humanae Vitae (‘On Human Life’) Pope Paul VI went against the advice of his own commission and proclaimed that the act of love must always be open to the possibility of procreation. ‘Natural’ methods of fertility control could be used but in Mary Kenny’s words the Pope’s ruling could be summed up in the phrase, ‘Give God a sporting chance’ – the pill and other forms of artificial contraception were out. This created a great furore. Many Catholic couples had been the pill in anticipation of its approval and many priests were coming to the view that the case for contraception, responsibly used, was reasonable. However conservative members of the hierarchy notably Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin and Bishop Cornelius Lucey of Cork came out strongly in support of the encyclical. 

As in other countries, this controversy worsened the conflict between liberal and conservative parties in the Church that was to have momentous consequences. Subsequently there were two referendums in 1983 and 1995 to amend the Constitution in order to allow divorce, the second of which saw a narrow victory for the divorce lobby – and this is often cited as marking the end of Catholic Ireland. (Following the ‘yes’ vote, Conor Cruise O’Brien declared that Ireland was at last ‘a fit country for Protestants to live in’.) . The prominent feminist nun (and distinguished historian) Margaret McCurtain, spoke out for personal choice and for the division of Church and State on issues like divorce. There was an ongoing bitter controversy for decades concerning abortion. However where allegations of child abuse by clerics are concerned, the issue of homosexuality is the key one and this is what links developments in Ireland to those in Belgium, the USA and indeed worldwide.

Ireland may not have produced a cleric like Fr Paul Shanley who flaunted his homosexual lifestyle and gave lectures to clergy – and Bishops – on the joys of same. However in “Goodbye to Catholic Ireland” (pages 355-57), Mary Kenny details how some “liberal” Irish priests began to stretch the boundaries of  what was acceptable in the area of sexual relationships.  She quotes as a characteristic example of the new liberal tone among the clergy a strong article in the Furrow in 1979 about the pastoral care of homosexuals written by Redemptorist priest Father Ralph Gallagher.

“Father Gallagher questioned in this ground-breaking article, the traditional Christian view of homosexuality as being ‘contra naturam’: the theory he said was undergoing serious review. ‘Many debates on homosexuality reveal prejudice, fear and unsupported statements rather than the elements of reason and freedom which, theoretically are the basis of ethical analysis  … Homosexuals should not be judged to be immoral any more than a blind person if prenatally the visual tracts are not complete.’  …Some of the unhappiness of homosexuals was, in part, the fault of the Church. ‘The alienation and loneliness of many homosexuals have been contributed to in no small way by the attitude of society and of the Churches.’ We should be cautious in our use of scriptural texts about homosexuality ….Ralph Gallagher warns his fellow clergy; we must challenge the notion that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil or ‘imperfect’. Homosexuality must be seen as part of a proper understanding of sexuality ‘in its wider sense’. And this wider sense was arising because sex was no longer simply about procreation: birth control had altered perspectives. ‘We must take cognisance of the changed emphasis on procreation in a theological understanding of sex. It can no longer be regarded as the single dominant norm by which all sexual behaviour is judged. The reality of personal sexual encounters is too wide to be compressed into the univocal notion of procreation.’

Mary Kenny comments that Hugh Hefner had said that after the pill, sex was about recreation, not procreation – and now here was a Redemptorist using (perhaps unconsciously) the ideas of the founder of Playboy magazine as source text. Father Gallagher himself had been deeply impressed by a letter from a homosexual who had struggled with his orientation and who wrote, ‘The most important thing that happened to me was the realization that homosexuality was natural for me and from God.’

Kenny comments [ my emphasis]: “As the 1960s slogan had it – if it feels good, do it! What feels natural is natural. The crucial change that the 1960s had brought about was this shift from reasoning to feeling.”

The development of feminism within the Catholic Church also led in some very strange directions. The Furrow began to show the influence of feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether. ‘Patriarchy’ within the Church was the target and the idealised image of the Blessed Virgin as a role model was inextricably linked with the asceticism of the Church fathers. (As per Wikipedia:  “In 2005 Ruether presented to an audience at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles her view that "Christianity is riddled by hierarchy and patriarchy” and that this created a social order in which chaste women on their wedding night were "in effect, raped by young husbands whose previous sexual experience came from exploitative relationships with servant women and prostitutes."  ….. "modern societies have sought to change this situation, allowing women education, legal autonomy, paid employment and personal freedom. But the sexual morality of traditional puritanical patriarchal Christianity has never been adequately rethought." ⁾ 

 According to an article in The Furrow by Helen Sheehy in 1985 we needed a complete revolution in the male-dominated Church. ‘Todays sexual ethic promoted by a male celibate Church finds no answering chord in the hearts of many women . Feminist theology seeks to re-image God.’  This new image was not to replace Father with Mother: we really required freedom from God. ‘Ruether maintains that that the substitution of a female for a male image only serves to perpetuate a parent-child relationship to God, which she deems to be inimical to autonomy. Behind her thinking lies a valid desire to dismantle a patriarchal system of government in the Church.’  

According to Mary Kenny: “Behind Ms Ruether’s thinking, also was Freud, who considered the concept of God a form of infantilism, and Sartre, for whom ‘autonomy’ was the purpose of life. There were many other articles on these lines and they indicated how the cookie was crumbling.”

The fact that The Furrow “a monthly journal for the contemporary Church” would publish such ideas and such authors is an indication that something other than “tolerance” is at work here. In the “About Us” section of its website, “The Furrow” highlights some of its famous contributors over the years. Among them is Mary McAleese former President of Ireland and a much more mainstream figure than a radical feminist theologian like Ruether (who is not listed). However the views of Mary McAleese indicate just what is regarded as “mainstream” in modern Ireland. According to her Wikipedia article (treating the period after she was President): [12]

“In a radio interview discussing her book Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law on 28 September 2012, said she was concerned at the growing number of young men, and in particular young gay men, who take their own lives in Ireland. She said that when the research is broken down, it shows that young gay men are one of the most risk-prone groups in Ireland. McAleese said many of these young men will have gone to Catholic schools and they will have heard there their church's attitude to homosexuality. "They will have heard words like disorder, they may even have heard the word evil used in relation to homosexual practice," she said. She went on to say "And when they make the discovery, and it is a discovery and not a decision, when they make the discovery, that they are gay, when they are 14, 15 or 16, an internal conflict of absolutely appalling proportions opens up". She said many young gay men are driven into a place that is "dark and bleak". McAleese said she met the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Charles John Brown, shortly after Easter to raise with him her concern about the growing number of suicides among young men in Ireland.” [My emphasis]

The influence of the Catholic Church has been in steep decline for the past 30 years or so, yet Mary McAleese sees no contradiction in blaming the Church for the increase in the number of young gay men who are committing suicide! Is this female logic?  Not really – but it is definitely feminist logic!

The willingness of liberal theologians in the Catholic Church to pander to gay and feminist lifestyles and to their ideologies of victimisation has consequences in the real world also. In an interview with the Irish Times shortly after he retired as Bishop of Killaloe, the VERY liberal Bishop Willie Walsh made perhaps the only comment in his episcopal career that had the potential to displease his fellow liberals in the Church and the media: [13]

I’m very nervous about saying this – it’s an issue that hasn’t been faced – but practically all the abuse that I’ve come across has been abuse of boys, and boys of 14, 15 years old. [my emphasis] Now, that raises some serious questions, and if you really went into them you would be accused of mixing up homosexuality and paedophilia. If a priest abuses a 16- or 17-year old, is that homosexual? It’s certainly not paedophilia. Where does the division come? It is a very hazardous area – and there’s no question in my mind that I’m not equating homosexuality with sexual abuse by priests. No, I’m not. But I’m saying that at a certain point the distinction is not that clear.

The reason that “it’s an issue that hasn’t been faced” is that Bishop Willie’s media admirers have no wish to face it. It’s a great pity that the Bishop himself made no attempt to refer to the elephant in the drawing room it until he was safely retired, but better late than never!

 (7) CONCLUSION

Pope Benedict was absolutely correct when he said in December 2010 that:

“In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained - even within the realm of Catholic theology - that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a "better than" and a "worse than". Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today ………

Our modern day liberals and anti-clerics have either forgotten what they and their predecessors were saying in the 1970s – or they are being deliberately dishonest!

Among the details they have managed to forget are:

•     The fact that a pro-paedophile organisation The Paedophile Information Exchange was a member of the British “National Council for Civil Liberties” (now called “Liberty”) until 1983 and was closely association with the gay liberation movement in the UK.[Part 2]

•       The fact that two leading feminist politicians Harriet Harmann and Patricia Hewitt cut their teeth as leading lights in the NCCL at precisely the time that organisation was associated with the PIE. (Curiously enough the NCCL cut PIE loose shortly after Harmann and Hewitt left to pursue their political careers.) [Part 2]

•       The fact that it was only because of the intervention Mary Whitehouse in 1976 that the government-funded gay charity “Albany Trust” did not publish a booklet provided by PIE and the Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL) group. The reason the Trustees gave for declining to publish the booklet was that it wasn’t sufficiently “objective”. It is difficult to know what sort of “objectivity” they had expected from the two paedophile groups but presumably they did not want to credit Mary Whitehouse with their change of mind! [Part 2]

•      The fact that the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was a member of one of the biggest gay rights movements in the world – the International Lesbian and Gay Association – right up until 1993. [Part 2]

•  The fact that in 1977, a French petition against age of consent laws was addressed to the parliament calling for the abrogation of several articles of the age-of-consent law and the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen (the age of consent in France). This was signed by such luminaries as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and André Glucksmann, Roland Barthes, by the novelist/gay activist Guy Hocquenghem, the actor/play-writer/jurist Jean Danet, writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer Philippe Sollers, pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and also by people belonging to a wide range of political positions. [Part 1 - NOTES]

•  The fact that Fr Paul Shanley the priest at the centre of the USA’s  paedophile hysteria, was for decades a liberal and gay icon who was finally removed from his “gay outreach” ministry in 1979 because of protests by Catholic traditionalists. Because he remained a Catholic priest, his former liberal friends later used his lifestyle to demonise him as a paeophile and to demonise the Catholic traditionalists who had always loathed him! [Part 3]

 It is very strange that former IRA-man and hunger striker Anthony McIntyre’s choose to denounce Pope Benedict on this issue in his blog “The Pensive Quill” (article entitled “Papal Bull” dated 26 December 2010). You would expect him to have some familiarity with the views of Labour Party stalwarts Harman and Hewitt as both had been Secretaries of State in the British Government and the NCCL had been vocal on the human rights issue during the IRA’s 30 year terror campaign. Moreover when a poster on The Pensive Quill referred to the 1977 petition to parliament from several French intellectuals - including Sartre and Foucault -  Anthony McIntyre defended Foucault and minimised the significance of the petition. I tend to assume he would not have done this except in a context where the petition was being quoted to show that Pope Benedict was correct in his description of 1970s attitudes to paedophilia.  Has Anthony McIntyre broken with the IRA only to replace the British Government with the Catholic Church, as the supposed fountain-head of all evil?

During the several years of violence that preceded the foundation of the Irish State in 1922, the Catholic Church was the sole force that united constitutional reformers with revolutionaries of every persuasion. This was a major factor in ensuring the survival of democracy in Ireland. In contrast, during the 30 year IRA campaign in Northern Ireland from 1969, both the Provisional and the Official IRA were anti-clerics whose attitude to Catholic Bishops was not very different to that of Dr Ian Paisley. For operational reasons both IRAs made some effort to conceal their antipathy during the years of terror and violence. Hardly had Taoiseach Albert Reynolds got the peace process under way in 1994 but (former Workers party TD) PatRabbitte felt free to destroy his coalition government by peddling fantasies about a conspiracy between Church and State to protect Fr Brendan Smyth. And now Anthony McIntyre has courageously broken with his former terrorist colleagues but continues to subscribe to a similar type of fantasy!

NOTES:

[12] Wikipedia article on Mary McAleese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McAleese

The Wikipedia article also contains the following:

In 1998, she met the Archbishop of Boston Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, on an official visit to the US. In an interview in 2012 she said that Law told her he was "sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as President" and went on to insult a junior minister who was accompanying the then president. "His remarks were utterly inappropriate and unwelcome," she said. McAleese told the cardinal that she was the "President of Ireland and not just of Catholic Ireland". At this point, a heated argument ensued between the two, according to McAleese.

By any chance did Mary McAleese express to Cardinal Law the same kind of “compassionate” views that she articulated in 2012, and could it be that it was that kind of “compassion” that annoyed the Cardinal?

[13]  extract from “The Bishop Who Speaks His Mind” , by Kathy Sheridan, Irish Times, 6 November 2010. Article is behind Irish Times firewall but can be viewed at
http://www.irishsalem.com/individuals/Politicians%20and%20Others/bishop-willie-walsh/bishopwho-speakshismind-06nov10.php