Irish film-maker and journalist Sinéad O’Shea has a gripping and inspirational story to tell about her home town of Navan in Co Meath, and she tells it terrifically well, talking to the people involved, engaging with the history, delivering the drama and teasing out the poignancies and complexities.
O’Shea is speaking to the people who stood up to church abuse in the 60s and 70s, at a time when challenging the Catholic authorities seemed unthinkable. There can hardly be anyone left now who doesn’t know something about Ireland’s coming to terms with the historical abuse sanctioned by the church and its treatment of young pregnant women in the brutal mother-and-baby houses and Magdalene Laundries, the subject of movies such as Stephen Frears’s Philomena and Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters. These were the workhouses of shame, or perhaps the refineries in which guilt and fear were extracted as fuel for the theocracy. Schools were the same, with their incessant beatings, carried out by unmarried men who had of course been beaten and humiliated themselves in their formative years: a theatre of cruelty where the punishment was the point. (England has nothing to be smug about: we had teachers routinely assaulting children in front of other children for reasons they perhaps couldn’t explain to themselves.)
O’Shea returns to the nightmare of the dead infants buried in secret in the mother-and-baby house grounds; she shows that it was the result of callousness and incompetence but also something even more sinister; not all the babies could be adopted, the authorities had no great enthusiasm for maintaining embarrassing hordes of growing infants and they were frankly content for the horror and grief of infant mortality to be part of the young women’s punishment.
But in Navan, some stood up against it all. O’Shea talks to Dr Mary Randles, who with her (now late) husband Dr Paddy Randles established in Navan the first family planning clinic in Ireland outside Dublin, and complained directly to the school when a young boy, Norman Murray, was viciously beaten simply for using his left hand to write, after his right arm was broken in a fall. Murray is interviewed here, and his dignity, courage and humility are moving, like all the other interviewees – particularly the women who were forced into these institutions, but whose babies were amazingly returned to them due to the Randles’ fearless intervention.
When the authorities contemptuously rejected Randles’ complaint about corporal punishment, she tried taking the story to the Irish newspapers who refused to touch it. Finally the British News of the World ran the story in two parts, followed by America’s NBC News. But no one in Navan saw the TV item and as for the News of the World, the legend is that priests made sure that no copies carrying the second half were carried in Navan newsagents.
This was all almost certainly done with the connivance of, or even under instruction from, Navan’s dynamic and much-admired priest, Father Andy Farrell, a man with the charisma of a young John F Kennedy. Farrell was in some ways a progressive figure who talked passionately about Christianity as socialism in action. But he was also a reactionary in sexual politics, colluding with the mother-and-baby racket, although very possibly with a heavy heart. O’Shea’s film concludes with a thoughtful, nuanced assessment of this important figure.
Corporal punishment was finally outlawed in 1982, though the laundries continued in dwindling forms for many years afterwards. The nation of Ireland is vastly different now, but O’Shea shows this change was not inevitable, but the effect of courageous dissidents.
• Pray for Our Sinners is released on 21 April in Irish cinemas, and on Curzon Home Cinema.
