Unsettled times

The favorite word for weather forecasters here is unsettled. It means that the day will look bright at 7am but by 8 a dull grey has set in. At 9 there is a shower, at 10 the sun is out, at 11 lashings of rain pound against the windows, but by 4 you could be having a picnic if the ground weren't soaked through. We've been having a great deal of unsettled weather over the past couple of weeks. It seems like a cosmic reflection of the general mood here. Even the sports triumphs in this sport-mad country--a young amateur from County Offaly, my county, came out of nowhere to win the Irish Open, and Saturday night Leinster (my province) beat their British rivals to win the ultimate rugby prize--have only marginally lifted the spirits. It was so quiet in Dublin on Saturday night I assumed that Ireland had lost the match.

What is causing this pall of sadness is not mysterious. The economic forecasts are beginning to use the word depression without putting quote marks around it. The government is fiddling while the jobs burn up at an alarming rate. The rains, uncharacteristic for this time of year, have devastated the farmlands and made everyone here fearful of yet another summer of merciless damp; it would be their third in a row. And this week, as if to say that a kick in the collective teeth is what you all deserve, the government released a report about the horrific levels of physical, emotional and sexual abuse carried out by priests and nuns in what were called Industrial Schools, where foster children were sent in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. 

 Many of the children  were sent to these schools to live merely because they were born to single mothers, or because their parents could no longer care for them, or because their mother had died, or for very minor offenses. The priests had such control over their parishes that they could make decisions about which children should be in the schools, then abuse them when they got there. 

A new novel, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, chronicles this godlike power of the priest earlier in the last century. The book is fictional, and wildly romantic. But back in real life, the children who were abused are still around, with their scars and their stories, now finally believed after all these years. Once the pure pathos of these children's stories, thousands of them, began to settle in, a far worse specter began to loom. Not only are the abused very much with us, so are the abusers. Now Ireland must look its collective shame in the face in order to seek atonement and forgiveness.

There is a lingering belief about the morose character of the Irish, as if the rain, fueled by Catholic guilt, has the power to wash off any optimism. You feel the poets and novelists fighting this depression, and you hear it sometimes in the idle conversations overheard at bus stops or in the shops. But when the rain stops and the sun comes out there is no place more glorious than the Irish countryside, nor can there be a people whose collective friendliness is more warmly felt by strangers. Living here as a guest, you just want things to start going right for this small island country, now.