Truth is stranger than fiction, so they say. It is also, sadly, often far darker, more disturbing. The Abbey Theatre is embarking on something interesting, with the best of motives: to explore the doleful landscape of our nation in the middle of the last century, the damp and cold sod on which the malignant growths of clerical/industrial abuse of children flourished, like a toxic mold. A sort of archaeological dig of the grimmest corners of the Irish psyche, as documented in the Murphy and Ryan reports.

However much I am passionate about the arts, and theatre in particular, I am, however, far more interested in the truth of people’s lives now, and, in a very political sense, ensuring that such abuse and deprivation can never take place again. That means, primarily, education, education, education. And yet, of course, it is a false polarity to think in terms of political change versus the arts - they go hand in hand. It was, after all, a documentary, States of Fear, that presented the evidence of abuse in such a compelling way that it could no longer be ignored. It motivated people to get exercised, fill the airwaves and newspapers with similar stories, calls for action, and it shifted politicians out of their inertia. Even then, it took a further ten years before the report was published, and the full horror to be inescapable.
However, it has to be said – people in Ireland did know what was happening in those institutions, and did know that children were terrified of certain priests. They chose to ignore them, for all sorts of complex reasons.
It is extraordinarily difficult to come out and speak about something private and distressing that has happened to you as a child such as abuse, whether it is sexual or not. It is even more difficult when it is not about you, it is about someone else, a friend or relative. Which is why - and I never thought I would write these words - I had sympathy for Gerry Adams, when I heard him explain the fraught circumstances in which he found himself, as the carrier of a family secret that he was not given permission to divulge. Such secrets are, generally, toxic to all who know of them. But if the victim of abuse does not wish to have their secret revealed to anyone, then it results in a terrible split, a charade, whereby those in the know behave and act in a way that is contrived and inauthentic. But they do it out of love.
A victim of abuse is highly sensitized to feeling powerless, and one of the main ways a survivor keeps in control is to insist on a confidential lock-down of their story to all who know about it, to avoid the shame of having fingers pointed at them, and the suffering of having to recount the tale. An entire family can feel doomed to conceal the identity of a monster in their midst, at the behest of a victim. It is terribly corrosive and depressing. It should be seen for what it is - one of the awful effects of abuse itself, because it is never the child who is affected, it is his or her entire family system. The blame for this lies, firmly and squarely, with the abuser, and no one else.
In some ways I think that this “abused” family dynamic, this culture of knowing-but-not-knowing, is endemic in Irish society. Family secrets become local secrets, then open secrets. Knowing, but not knowing: double standards that can drive people to drink or the boat or the grave.
If I’m looking for emotional catharsis through art, how can any work of art top the reading of the reports, the testimonies of the survivors, and hearing their heartrending stories on radio and television? The Abbey are indeed going to offer us that experience on stage, in a forthcoming documentary theatre production No Escape, by Mary Raftery, the pioneering journalist who first began to rattle the bones of the skeletons in our cupboard.
However, when it comes to turning horrendous collective experiences into art, in a fictional sense, it can be a thankless and, perhaps, exploitative task to attempt it too soon, if the pain is too close. The holocaust, for example, was simply impossible to treat as a topic for serious writers and film-makers until much later. Even the landmark Oscar-winning documentary about the holocaust, Genocide, was made nearly 30 years later. The film version of the Diary of Anne Frank came out a full 14 years after the end of the war, and it wasn’t until 1982 that, for example, Sophie’s Choice came out. Schindler’s List, The Pianist, La Vita è Bella, all speak to the issue with integrity - but perhaps the crucial mark of an artist’s integrity is to wait. Even if that means decades.
In time, perhaps, the “Irish holocaust” will be the inspiration for some great works of art, in decades to come. However, Christ Deliver Us! by Tom Kilroy, is not one of those. It is an interesting re-working of a century old expressionistic German play about the brutalising of children, and its effects. Beautifully acted and sometimes moving and funny, it does not, however, come anywhere near the mark in terms of our understanding of the way the “Murphy and Ryan” children were treated on this island, which is an expectation raised by the Abbey’s publicity. As a vehicle for helping modern teenagers to understand what it was like in the fifties in Ireland, it has its merits, in a historical-educational sense, and I hope the play is seen by many coachloads of schoolchildren, to get them thinking and asking questions.
I suspect, in time, it will be, like any of the above-named powerful holocaust films, one individual’s story that will be the basis of something truly transformative and enlightening, down the line. We tend to understand horror best when it is seen through the eyes of one articulate and sensitive person, describing one individual’s journey. As much as we may be dismayed by the seemingly endless catalogue of misery as told in Murphy and Ryan, I think documentaries, testaments and memoirs are all that can be tolerated now. It’s too soon for fiction. Far too soon.