I love to drive around our part of Donegal along the Wild Atlantic Way through Falcarragh, Gortahork, Gweedore, and around a headland called "The Rosses" through Bunbeg, Derrybeg, Brinlack, Meenacladdy, and Meenlaragh.
A while ago, I got out of the car and stopped at the fishing village of Bunbeg. I found a working pier, not as busy as it used to be, but still shipping to Belfast and Dublin daily.
Pippin and I walked down the pier, and as we passed a shipping container, a man inside it called out to me.
"Thank goodness help has arrived!"
"You're in trouble if you think I will can help you," I replied, and then we talked for an hour.
Pippin and I walked down the pier, and as we passed a shipping container, a man inside it called out to me.
"Thank goodness help has arrived!"
"You're in trouble if you think I will can help you," I replied, and then we talked for an hour.
Inside the shipping container a man about my age stood next to a table in a long apron, surrounded by thousands of shellfish in bags, in buckets, in heaps on the floor.
"What are you doing here?"
"Grading oysters." One by one he set an oyster on a scale and tossed it into one of two buckets. I saw perhaps I could have helped him with this task, but he wanted company more than labor.
"Where do you sell them?"
"Mostly to Germans. Irish people don't eat oysters, but they used to."
"Is it because they're seen as a poor people's food?"
He said that might be it, and maybe he was just agreeing with me to be agreeable. I don't always know how to interpret people's acceptance of my semi-informed speculations.
We chatted about sea food for a while, and how things were different in the past, but just the same, and then he asked, "Would you like some oysters right now?"
"Yes, yes, I would."
"How many would you like?"
Expecting them to be like normal oysters, I said "Five."
"Sure."
He selected five oysters from a bucket and we walked to the end of the pier. He used a hose and a brush hanging there to scrub them clean, and he described what he was doing as if he were teaching me. Back in the container, and he expertly pried one open, poured out excess liquor, and handed it to me. I slurped the oyster out and closed my eyes, overwhelmed at the sensation of pure concentrated ocean essence. It was the best oyster I've ever had, and twice the size. Delicious and satisfying.
"Yes, yes, I would."
"How many would you like?"
Expecting them to be like normal oysters, I said "Five."
"Sure."
He selected five oysters from a bucket and we walked to the end of the pier. He used a hose and a brush hanging there to scrub them clean, and he described what he was doing as if he were teaching me. Back in the container, and he expertly pried one open, poured out excess liquor, and handed it to me. I slurped the oyster out and closed my eyes, overwhelmed at the sensation of pure concentrated ocean essence. It was the best oyster I've ever had, and twice the size. Delicious and satisfying.
I did that four more times.
Then I thanked him and said, "I probably couldn't afford five of your oysters. They are usually €3 or €4 in a restaurant."
He looked surprised and winced. "I sell them €6 a dozen. That's what they're worth to me."
He returned to grading oysters and asked me about my family. I asked him about his, and we talked about being raised Catholic, and how supporting the church is different from believing in God. Then conversation turned to priests and pederasty and the article I read in the NY Times about the people of Gortahork who suffered for so long and still can point out the house where the priest raped them.
"That priest died last December," he said.
"Did anyone go to his funeral?"
"No, he was cremated and gone before the news was out."
I didn't say anything.
"I would have known some of the people he abused," he said softly, and I could not tell if this was a secret he was confiding to a stranger.
"That priest died last December," he said.
"Did anyone go to his funeral?"
"No, he was cremated and gone before the news was out."
I didn't say anything.
"I would have known some of the people he abused," he said softly, and I could not tell if this was a secret he was confiding to a stranger.
We agreed that the church had too much control over people and was an international criminal organization. I didn't want to ask insensitive questions or offer ill-informed comments, so we turned to gentler subjects, and a few minutes later a friend of his turned up. The two men admired Pippin, and Pippen was so excited by the new person he danced up on two legs. We soon said "all the best," and I promised to come back again. The Oyster Man handed me two dozen more.
I drove home through Gortahork with new eyes.
*********
Here is the story I mentioned to the Oyster Man. [link to this story in NYT ]
Pope to Visit Ireland, Where Scars of Sex Abuse Are ‘Worse Than the I.R.A.’
GORTAHORK, Ireland — If any place illustrates the depth and depravity of child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — and why the Irish are so angry about it — it is this unlikely corner of the country, where among rolling hills of wild heather, castles and bucolic fishing villages, predatory priests terrorized children with impunity for decades.County Donegal, which overlooks the Atlantic in northwestern Ireland, has fewer than 160,000 residents, but it may have the worst record of clerical abuse in the country. According to a watchdog group that monitors the Catholic Church in Ireland, 14 priests have been accused in recent years, four of whom were convicted. They include the Rev. Eugene Greene, one of the nation’s most notorious pedophile priests, who served nine years in prison for raping and molesting 26 boys between 1965 and 1982, though the real figure may be far higher.
Yet this year, when Pope Francis needed someone to head a neighboring diocese, he chose Bishop Philip Boyce, who had been heavily criticized for refusing to defrock Father Greene when the priest was under his management in the late 1990s.
Bishop Philip Boyce was heavily criticized for refusing to defrock one of Ireland’s most notorious pedophile priests in the late 1990s. But Francis appointed him head of a neighboring diocese this year.CreditNiall Carson/Press Association, via Associated Press
As Francis prepares for a visit to Ireland this weekend — the first by a pope since John Paul II in 1979 — the painful specter of such abuses hangs over his trip, as well as the church’s long history of protecting pedophile priests. It is cases like this one that many faithful say make it incumbent on Francis to give them not just words, but action.
That is true not only in Ireland, but also in the United States, where last week a grand jury in Pennsylvania released a sweeping reportthat the church had covered up the abuse of more than 1,000 minors by some 300 priests over 70 years. Francis himself acknowledged the global scale of the problem this week, when he issued a rare letter to Catholics worldwide condemning such “atrocities.”
But the pope offered no specific remedies. Many Irish say they are now waiting not only for recognition of their suffering, but also for Francis to announce concrete measures to combat and punish such abuses. His record on the issue so far has left them skeptical and angry, even in conservative, ardently Catholic Donegal — the only Irish county where a majority of voters rejected a measure in May to repeal an abortion ban.
Residents said Francis’ appointment of Bishop Boyce demonstrated that the church’s record of shuffling along abusers and those who protected them remained unbroken.
Bishop Boyce “was keen to protect the family of the convicted priest from further trauma by not initiating laicization,” the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church found in a 2011 review.
For those in Donegal, Bishop Boyce’s appointment was salt in the wounds. Francis chose him to replace John McAreavey, who resigned as bishop of Dromore after coming under fire for officiating at the funeral of a priest he knew to be a pedophile. It is unclear whether Bishop McAreavey was disciplined by the church.
Bishop Boyce did not respond to requests for comment.
Father Greene, now in his 90s, is thought to be living in a protected home run by an ecclesiastical order in Cork and enjoying a “happy retirement,” said John McAteer, the editor of the weekly Tirconaill Tribune. “I find it shocking,” he said.
“Even in Donegal, it did a lot of damage,” Jackie Hughes, a retired truck driver, said of the abuses and the church’s handling of them. “They have destroyed homes. They have destroyed young men.”
In his letter this week, Francis offered a forceful condemnation of the church’s handling of the abuse crisis, but his words nonetheless disappointed many Catholics, including those in Donegal.
“Nothing has changed, sadly,” said Colm O’Gorman, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, who is himself a survivor of clerical sexual abuse. “The reason why the church can’t get a grip on the problem is because its primary concern is not to protect vulnerable adults and children but to protect the authority and reputation and the wealth of the institution.”
The church’s grip in Donegal was so strong that abuse was uncovered almost by accident, when Father Greene told the police that a young man was trying to blackmail him. That man had been abused by Father Greene.
One of the detectives, Martin Ridge, had arrived in Donegal hoping to wind down after decades chasing Irish Republican Army militants, dealing with bombings and bank robberies.
“I opened up a can of worms,” he said in an interview. Fighting the I.R.A. was a “conflict you could see with your eyes,” he said. “This one, you couldn’t. It’s worse than the I.R.A., because it’s like putting a bomb into a child’s mind.”
His superiors were so reluctant to take on sexual abuse cases that Mr. Ridge turned a room in his home into an office and bought himself a computer. “They washed their hands of it,” he said. The victims, he added, “were dismissed as if they didn’t matter. The power of the clergy was so strong.”
By the time Father Greene was arrested, Mr. Ridge said, at least 45 men had come forward with abuse accusations, including against a teacher who worked in a Catholic school. That teacher, Denis McGinley, served a two-year prison sentence in 2002 for abusing dozens of pupils over three decades.
According to “Breaking the Silence,” a detailed account of the investigations co-written by Mr. Ridge, victims described how they were forced to masturbate their rapists. They were forcibly stripped, held down and repeatedly raped so violently that they bled for days afterward.
Many victims, groomed to such an extent that they believed sexual abuse was part of growing up, developed drinking problems and other addictions.
In a cemetery in Gortahork, a small village near the coast, eight men are buried, all victims of clerical abuse who killed themselves. A few miles away, a 15-year-old abuse victim hanged himself in a shed.
Abuse took place in a school, at a secluded beach, in a grove of trees and behind the altar of a church on Inishboffin, an island that according to the most recent census has only 11 residents.
“It looks like the most innocent, idyllic scene,” Mr. Ridge said as he drove his car down a winding road that cut through craggy hills splashed with purple heather. A soft mist started to descend as the evening closed in, slowly swallowing gray cottages and barns.
“It’s hard to fathom that all these crimes were committed and covered up,” he said. “The audacity!” As he drove by the shed where the 15-year-old had killed himself, Mr. Ridge gripped the steering wheel before making a sign of the cross.
Martin Gallagher was 12 when he was first raped and molested by Father Greene, and the abuse continued for more than a year. He left school at 14 and started drinking at 16. He got sober only six years ago, at the age of 46.
“There’s something there that’s never going to go away,” Mr. Gallagher said in an interview. “You try to forget, but you can’t. It’s a thing you just need to have to live with, work around.”
He was 33 when he told Mr. Ridge about the abuse, the first time he had confided in anyone. He later discovered that two cousins had also been abused by Father Greene.
“At my age you didn’t have the sense to go to the police,” Mr. Gallagher said. “And going to your parents — who are they going to tell? How are they going to help? They can’t. Everything was blocked.”
Mr. Gallagher said that the pope’s visit and letter “mean nothing to me.”
“They know what they have to change, but they haven’t changed,” he said, referring to the way the church moved around predatory priests instead of removing them completely from the institution.
“They spread like measles,” he said later, driving past a large white house with three chimneys.
It was Father Greene’s home, where he had been abused.
“Instead of clamping down, they moved them around, and the same thing happened,” Mr. Gallagher said. “They were like a virus.”
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