Opinion

Nuala McCann: A well of silence surrounded us growing up in Catholic Ireland

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Getting pregnant outside marriage was a huge taboo in the Catholic Ireland of the past
Getting pregnant outside marriage was a huge taboo in the Catholic Ireland of the past Getting pregnant outside marriage was a huge taboo in the Catholic Ireland of the past

The Unquiet: Songs for My Mother – a radio documentary where traditional singer Pauline Scanlon pays tribute to her feisty, beautiful mother – has haunted me.

Pauline wove in words and song a tapestry of all our lives.

I never knew that a much-loved traditional song - The Well Below the Valley - is a tale of incest, murder and victim shaming.

Please listen. It is very beautiful and for those us who grew up in the 1960s and 70s in Ireland, it is so true.

Pauline’s mother, Eileen, got pregnant at 17 and travelled to Dublin to have her baby. Like thousands of others, she handed him over for adoption.

She went on to marry her baby’s father and to have a family and live a life in all its shades of light and dark and the half-light. She never saw her son again.

She was joyful and passionate. She was non-judgmental and always fought for the underdog – protesting on behalf of Joanne Hayes or to save the Dingle Hospital.

Still, as the older ones say, she didn’t have her troubles to seek.

It was that burden of secrecy - the well of silence that surrounded us growing up in Catholic Ireland that rang true.

The words whispered were of “unmarried mothers” – never “unmarried fathers” – and of “committing suicide”. Both were taboo.

In our parish, the bishop visited every three years for confirmation and the priest came in to test us on our religious knowledge before we could become soldiers of Christ.

We had our catechism off pat.

Who made you? God made me.

Why did he make you? To know, love and serve him here on earth so that I can be happy with him forever in heaven.

Fifty-four years on, and the day the priest tested us stands out.

Then, the big day. My friends and I were a little fearful about the slap on the cheek but it was just a tap.

Afterwards, the bishop in his long red robe stood outside the church as the crowd swarmed around him.

A friend’s mother urged us forward to kneel and kiss his ring.

I see him stretching out a hand; the sparkle off the big purple gem. I see my best friend bending to kiss it… and me, stalling like a stubborn pony.

Seven-year-old me refused.

Ours was a happy childhood but one that was bound by strict religious rules and whispered secrets.

Getting pregnant outside marriage was a huge taboo.

Years later, chatting with friends around restaurant tables, sipping wine; smoking Rothmans; we’d laugh at the irony of our lives - the years spent petrified of getting pregnant; the years spent desperate to get pregnant.

Many of us knew someone who had a concealed pregnancy, who was whisked off to “visit an aunt”, who returned thinner, paler, quieter.

Claire Keegan’s book Small Things Like These paints a precise picture of that other world of not so very long ago.

There were nuns like haughty ponies; there were priests who abused their power. But there were so many good, generous people too – priests and nuns and lay people who lived out their faith in kindness.

We brought my mother’s home-made apple tarts to the toothless old woman at the end of the street every Sunday.

“Tell your mother to put more sugar in the next time,” she’d say as we ran like hell.

My uncle had a van and picked up the old people from the local home on a Sunday, taking them down to the shore for a picnic.

Picture my grandmother leaving boxes of groceries under cover of darkness in the back alley for a struggling family.

My aunts loved us and loved the Church. Their big black rosary beads were draped around the waist-high ash tray in the living room; Gallaher's Greens and lace mantillas on a Sunday; piles of Christmas gifts for us.

Once, my mother overheard a neighbour say: “She’s a Catholic, but she’s a really good person.”

“I’d like to think I’d be really good because of my faith, not despite it,” she hit back.

Fast forward to this world, a million miles from the one we grew up in.

We carry the wounds of hidden secrets in our souls. Life is a cracked mirror; a Renaissance painting rich in light and shade.

But even in the depth of the shadows – in the lives of mothers like Eileen Scanlon – there was richness and joy and a deep well of love.