How to Heal: Contemporary Irish Writers and the Sex Abuse Scandals

The contemporary moment in Ireland has been characterized by the exposure of widespread abuse of children, a crisis represented, in one example, by the non-profit organization “One in Four,” which is named for the fact that one in four Irish citizens has suffered from childhood sexual abuse, or through the series of state-sponsored investigations into clerical sex abuse in Ireland, such as the 2009 Ryan Report. Recently, The New York Times Magazine published a lyrical essay considering the discovery that the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, had over decades concealed the deaths of hundreds of infants by burying their corpses in an unmarked sewer. Irish artists have responded to these abuses with an astonishing range of thoughtful work. For example, novels from Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992) to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) have endeavored to represent the costs and consequences of the epidemic of childhood abuse in Ireland. In this session, we will discuss poems by contemporary Irish poets including Paul Muldoon and Paula Meehan that address the scandals, as well as Colm Toibin’s short story “A Priest in the Family,” to consider how artists grapple with the failures of the church and society and attempt to point a way forward for healing