I REGRET SO SHORT THIS ISSUE BUT I HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO USE MY

LAPTOP SUFFICIENTLY TO CREATE
A FULL ISSUE. HOWEVER , HERE GOES WITH TWO OF THE MOST IMPORTANT TEXTS OF MANY THAT HAVE
APPEARED IN RECENT MONTHS IN THE IRISH TIMES - A NEWSPAPER THAT CERTAINLY EXCELLS IN THE
FIRST RANK OF ENGLISH TEXT NEWSPAPERS INTERNATIONALLY AND A TRULY VALUABLE RESOURCE
FOR ALL OF US HERE IN IRELAND. J.BRADDELL, EDITOR

How we became an international disgrace

OPINION: Ireland was not unique in its industrial schools but the nature of Irish Catholicism set it apart, writes TOM INGLIS

IRELAND HAS become an international disgrace. It is now known that we incarcerated thousands of innocent little children into schools where they were abused, raped and tortured. How and why did it happen?

Ireland was not unique. French theorist Michel Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish that the idea of separating out deviants and misfits – whether they be mad, bad, poor or sick – was central to the creation of modern society. Mental asylums, jails, poor houses, reformatory schools and welfare homes sprang up all around Europe from the 16th century. Those deemed to be a threat to social order were herded into these institutions.

Those who ran the institutions specialised in producing forms of discipline and control that physically and mentally ensured that inmates were obedient and docile. Punishments for transgression were quick and harsh.

But there were added factors when it came to Ireland. As with many other social practices, the Irish did things to extreme. The British had left a legacy of treating the Irish as uncivilised savages. They instituted regimes of discipline and control that were taken over and developed by agencies of the Catholic Church.

The church played a central role in the discipline, civilisation and modernisation of Irish society. It was central to resisting and challenging the power of the British state. It was already enormously powerful before Independence. The devotion and loyalty of its members meant that the church became not only autonomous from the new Irish State but able to symbolically dominate it, particularly when it tried to interfere in areas over which it had obtained monopoly control.

However, for most of the 20th century it was a cosy relationship. There were differences over the decades but, generally, the State did not interfere with the church’s running of any of its schools, asylums, hospitals and homes.

The heyday of the Catholic Church was, then, akin to the years of the Celtic Tiger. The church was like a big bank. They had over a thousand vocations each year which produced the personnel necessary to manage and run the plethora of institutions, including reformatories and industrial schools. Indeed they had a surplus and were able to export not just missionaries but, with them, the particularly Catholic model of running these schools.

This is where Foucault again becomes useful. He argued that the most subtle way to discipline and control people was to sexualise them. From the 19th century, sex no longer remained under the jurisdiction of religion and medicine, it began to be studied and analysed by a new breed of human scientists including psychiatrists, demographers, educators, analysts, therapists, psychologists and sociologists.

GENERALLY, THROUGHOUT the 20th century there was a move from harsh physical forms of discipline and control to more subtle forms which involved forms of critical reflection and discussion about the self and the nature of sexual desire, pleasure and perversion.

However, again, things were different in Ireland. Sex remained wrapped up in Catholic teaching for longer. Such was the monopoly of the church over Irish society that, outside of a detached scientific medical language, it was almost impossible to mention the word sex.

Bourdieu, another French theorist, argued that there is a realm of thought called doxa: a realm of unquestioned orthodoxy in which things cannot be thought or let alone said. There was only ever one form of bad thought in Catholic Ireland.

It is when we put these two factors together, the huge numbers of reformatories and industrial schools in Ireland and the silence about sex, that we get the type of sadism and sexual perversion.

The absence of any thinking outside the box, let alone criticism and resistance, meant that very few people questioned the policy, particularly of religious Brothers, of taking young boys, barely teenagers, and sending them off to novitiate houses. Those who ran these novitiates operated within forms of repression, discipline and control that were copied in the schools.

The young men and women who ran these schools were servants of a system of power that was beyond question, they were Roman foot-soldiers. They were caught in a regime of Catholic thought and practice from which, effectively, there was little escape. There was no mechanism by which they could talk about themselves, their desires and frustrations. They took their anger out on the children. The children became their scapegoats.

There are three additional factors. The church propagated a form of sexuality which led to limited and often unsuccessful forms of fertility control and, thereby, the creation of large families. For most of the 20th century, Ireland had one of the highest levels of fertility in the West. The reformatory and industrial schools were, effectively, a system of dealing with excess children that, the State deemed, could not be cared for elsewhere.

Secondly, by giving the schools capitation grants for each inmate and by developing a policy (completely within the doxa of the time) of a hands-off form of regulation and control, the State ensured their persistence.

Finally, this was a system of absolute power. Many “good” Catholics knew for a long time what was happening in these schools, but they deliberately turned a blind eye. They could not mention the unmentionable.

There were no whistleblowers: there was no room for any questioning, let alone discussion or debate. The Catholic Church has always valued loyalty and obedience to the institution and it has always been willing to be loyal and to support those who had given their lives to the church, despite the enormity of their sins.

Tom Inglis is associate professor of sociology in UCD and the author of Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times

A way to free up money to banks - or too good to be true?

JOHN McMANUS

BUSINESS OPINION: There is a danger that the ECB will eventually have to start printing money

HOW ABOUT this for an investment proposition? Somebody comes along and says they will lend you money at 1 per cent interest so you can go and buy another investment that returns 4 per cent a year?

Sounds to good to be true? It is – unless you happen to be a eurozone bank, that is. If you are one you can now borrow pretty much limitless sums money from the ECB at about 1 per cent and use it to buy Irish and other eurozone government bonds paying up to 4 per cent.

The actual mechanism is a bit more complex – the banks have to buy the bonds first and then use them as collateral for loans from the ECB – but the net effect is the same. A 3 per cent annual return for doing little more than making a few phone calls – it sounds dangerously like the sort of madness that got us into this mess to begin with and the the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), the Government, the ECB and the banks themselves understandably are rather coy about it all.

The justification for offering what is essentially a free lunch for the banks is that firstly it allows them access to money at a time when they cannot get it anywhere else due to the freezing up of the credit markets. The second – and more problematic – argument is that by allowing them to make profit as well, you are helping them rebuild their shattered balance sheets, thus reducing the need for them to seek cash from their respective governments.

It is hard to argue against the first point as it is entirely in keeping with the role of the ECB as the lender of last resort to the eurozone banking system.

The ability of banks to use Government bonds as collateral for ECB loans is a very necessary part of the plan to fix the credit markets. Banks have always been able to do this, but until the credit crunch struck, the loans had to be repaid within a week or two and really only a last resort for banks facing temporary liquidity problems.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers though, the ECB has extended the length of time that it will lend money via these refinancing operations, lending more and more money for three months and then six months.

Early last month it announced it would conduct 12-month refinancing operations.

The second point is a little more contentious as the idea that banks should in effect be given money for nothing rather runs contrary to the public mood.

When you pair the ECB 12- month refinancing facility with some of the bonds currently being sold by Ireland and other states, you have a very attractive money- making opportunity. This, one suspects, is the main reason why nobody is very keen to highlight the refinancing arrangements and its consequences for debt issuance.

However, as with so much in the current climate, this has had some unforeseen consequences.

One has been to create concerns about why the Irish banks are such enthusiastic buyers of Government debt at the moment. The presumption is that they are being strong-armed into it by the Government as a quid pro quo for the taxpayer coming to their rescue.

If this really was the only reason the banks were buying Government bonds, it would be very worrying, as it would amount to little more than robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The NTMA chief executive went to some pains in a letter to this paper last week to address the issue by pointing out that the agency sells its bonds via intermediaries and has no control and no direct knowledge of who ends up owning them. The logic following on from this is that the NTMA is not in a position to oblige the Irish banks to buy Irish bonds.

It’s a plausible argument, but not really robust enough to withstand attack from conspiracy theorists and other cynics. However, once you understand the more venial commercial rationale for banks bailing into Government bonds, the whole thing starts to make a bit more sense. They are buying because – among other reasons – the ECB is in effect providing a subvention.

From the ECB point of view, the subvention presumably makes sense for several reasons; it provides liquidity, it bolsters the banks and it eases eurozone debt markets. Win, win win? Almost.

There does however remain an elephant in the room and it is the question of where exactly the ECB is getting the money to keep the whole thing going.

If it is coming out of existing bank reserves – and presumably it is, given that ECB has yet to embrace quantitative easing with the same enthusiasm as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England – then the inflationary dangers are limited. But if, as some postulate, the ECB is – or eventually will be – printing money, then the whole thing starts to look a bit more dangerous.

jmcmanus@irishtimes.ie