Remembering Eileen Flynn

It’s a pity there’s no afterlife, because if there was, Eileen Flynn could chuckle at the Catholic Church.

Seemingly serious calls are now being made for an end to Church control of Irish schools. How seriously serious we will find out soon enough. Experience suggests cynical scepticism might be appropriate. It’s too late anyway for Eileen.
She was sacked in 1982 for failing to “reflect the ethos” of Holy Cross school in New Ross, Wexford, where she taught English and history. She was a single mother living with a separated man who was the father of their child. Nobody denied she was an exemplary teacher. But the Ferns diocese reckoned her “a source of scandal”. So she had to go.
Meanwhile, across the road at St. Peter’s boarding school, priests were buggering small boys. Donal Collins and James Doyle were eventually charged. Doyle admitted indecency and assault, received a suspended sentence and hightailed it to England. Collins was given four years. Michael Ledwith later became a monsignor and president of Maynooth, a position from which he resigned after he’d settled out of court with one of his victims, and fled to America.
The hypocrisy is hardly worth comment, given the deluge of double-talk, double-think and double-standards which has swamped the land. What’s distinctive is that Eileen’s case led to an Irish government slithering even lower in obeisance to the bishops.
Most media commentators lamented Eileen’s treatment at the time. But, politicians pointed out, the Church had been within its legal rights. And enacting new legislation would be damnably difficult. So nothing happened.
Then, in October 2000, an EU Equality Directive confronted the exact circumstances of Eileen’s case. It laid down that schools could insist only that teachers of religion conform to the school’s religious ethos. What mattered when it came to, say, English or history, was competence in teaching the subjects.
Far from welcoming this mechanism for rectifying the anomaly, the Ahern Government, at the behest of the bishops, sent Justice Minister John O’Donoghue to Luxembourg to stymie the new proposal.
O’Donoghue’s success in the mission earned an Irish Catholic front-page headline: “Minister wins victory for religious liberty.” O’Donoghue later boasted he’d prolonged debate until well after midnight and had threatened to veto the directive as a whole if ministers of other member-States didn’t accede to the wishes of the Irish bishops.
Irish Catholic editor David Quinn spelt out what had alarmed the hierarchy: the directive would have “forced (schools) to employ openly declared atheists, gay activists and others whose views or lifestyles were obviously contrary to the ethos of their employer.”
The editorial continued: “A grave cause for concern is that (O’Donoghue) had little or no active support from any of his EU counterparts. This indicates that the concept of religious liberty is now under severe threat across Europe.”
In other words, religious freedom means empowering religions to discriminate against citizens of whose beliefs, or ways of living, they disapprove.
Note that it’s “openly declared” atheists, gays etc. who forfeit entitlement to equal treatment. Lie about your beliefs or skulk in the closet and you’ll be accorded full citizenship. Not one TD spoke out against this perversity.
Sean Brady has been derided for suggesting that he couldn’t have been expected to behave back in 1975 according to the standards of 2012. But the behaviour of the Church in sacking Eileen Flynn came seven years after 1975. And the action of the State in ensuring that the bishops could continue on this course came 18 years later again.
So let’s stop loading all blame on the clergy. The Republic’s politicians have been complicit in the scandal at every stage.
Eileen collapsed and died in 2008, at the age of 53, just a day after celebrating the 11th anniversary of her wedding to Richie Roche. They’d married in 1997, having had to wait for legalisation of divorce. She was survived by Richie, their children Regina, Rebecca, Pat, Richie and Diarmuid and their grandchildren Shauna, Kai and Rachel. Hundreds marched in her funeral procession.
She’d been 27 when sacked on the order of the Church. She could have slunk away quietly. Instead, she came out fighting, took them on. Her role in winning religious freedom for the people of Ireland was huge, in comparison with the performance of any politician of the time. She deserves remembrance.
The best way of marking her memory would be a State boycott of the Eucharistic Congress. Catholics who believe are entitled to assemble at this jamboree to listen to Eurovisionary John Waters and aforementioned Sean Brady sharing their wisdom with the wider world. But there can be no excuse for the involvement of the State.
The opening ceremony, on June 10 in the main arena at the RDS, will be conducted by papal legate Cardinal Marc Ouellet, head of the Congregation of Bishops, Benedict XVI’s main man in the selection of candidates for bishops across the world. Ouellet attributes the incidence of clerical child sex abuse to a deterioration in discipline exemplified by challenges to clerical celibacy and advocacy of women’s ordination. He has been especially strong in condemning suggestions that “we should dialogue with other faiths and not attempt to bring them the Gospels, to convert.”
In all the circumstances, there should be no question of President Higgins meeting or greeting Ouellet, or of any involvement of any representative of government in the week-long series of events.
But who will stand up in the Dáil and say it out loud: Boycott the Eucharistic Congress!