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TV Review
07 March 2010 By Emmanuel Kehoe
This one was young, and he didn’t use the school’s heavyweight Grundig tape recorder.
He had his own, a sleek portable that slid out of a battered black leather case.
He was probably the third recruiting sergeant for the priesthood we’d seen that year. He wanted men for the missions among the pagans of Africa, and we expected his machine would replay the voices of small black children singing out their tables under the tutelage of gnarled, bearded Irish missionaries.
But this time he was talking about a woman, Edel Quinn, a Legion of Mary envoy from Kanturk, who, despite tuberculosis, worked throughout east and central Africa from the late 1930s until her death in Nairobi in 1944.We lolled back in our desks, and half listened as the young priest warmed to his subject. The afternoon was fine, and the hands of the classroom clock moved lazily towards 4pm,the hour of daily manumission.
‘‘Edel Quinn," he said, ‘‘had an old Ford motor car and before she learned to drive herself, she had an African driver. Now there were no roads, boys, and the heat and the dust were terrible. Well, one evening boys, imagine this now, with the lions roaring and the hyenas laughing, didn’t the old Ford break down and Edel had to spend the night in the bush with a black man."
Boys choked, coughed, fell out of desks, elbowed each other, rolled their eyes. For if this was, as the voiceover of On God’s Mission (RTE One) put it, the era of the counter-culture, it was more accurately, in our case, that of the Carry On film, where double entendres hadn’t a chance of slipping by.
On God’s Mission was loaded with ironies, spoken and unspoken, chief among them being that England’s domination of Ireland, upon which so much was blamed and credited in the film, began with an English pope’s Papal Bull which gave Henry II carte blanche to win back the erring Irish to the faith.
And the language of Giraldus Cambrensis, the welsh Monk, writing about the time of the Norman invasion, is curiously similar to some of the observations by Irish missionaries about the pagan lands into which they’d venture.
According to Giraldus, the Irish ‘‘are a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts . . .This is a filthy people, wallowing in vice. Of all peoples, it is the least instructed in the rudiments of the Faith."
The pioneering Irish missionary in Nigeria, Holy Ghost father Joseph Shanahan (a truly heroic figure, according to Tom Arnold, Concern Worldwide’s director) said it was ‘‘no easy task to civilise, to teach to subdue and bring beneath the yoke of Christ the adult population sunk as they have been for centuries in superstition, ignorance and vice’’.
Dr Fiona Bateman of the Moore Institute in NUI Galway said Shanahan saw himself as the Ibo people’s St Patrick, and that he was very conscious of Satan whom he saw everywhere, in the landscape, in the people and in the soil. ‘‘It must have been a very scary place if that was what you believed," Bateman said.
And the Far East magazine, published by the Columban Fathers, whose mission was to China and beyond, spoke about missionary work as warfare, a campaign to push the standard of Christ’s cross ‘‘into the furthest outposts of heathendom, that vast restless mass, rotting in sin’’.
What the Irish missionaries were saying seems extreme today, but was little different to what missionaries of other faiths believed or said at that time. The world of governments and colonial administrators felt much the same too - indeed, not long before they had been saying it about the Irish themselves.
It all smells of Kipling and the white man’s burden (the task of developing ‘‘Your new caught, sullen peoples/Half-devil and half child’’).
Missionaries in Africa were, after all, plunging into a continent that had been carved up for exploitation by European powers and which was operating under the protection of those powers. Were the Irish missionaries to Africa unwittingly strengthening imperialism by what they did, or consciously working against it?
Did they ever conceive that one day they would have produced in their schools such leaders of African independence as Julius Nyerere, Tom Mboya, Hastings Banda and Robert Mugabe? Would they have been allowed to function by the imperial masters of Africa if the great powers had anticipated that this would be the outcome?
Concern, incidentally, was founded in 1968 as a response to appeals from Irish missionaries in the post-colonial Nigeria-Biafran war, when sentiment in Ireland was strongly on the side of the secessionist Biafran state.
Much was made in the film of Irish people’s empathy with colonised populations, because of our own legacy of exploitation, persecution and starvation. President Mary McAleese said it, as did Bob Geldof, so I guess it must be true. But should the president have taken part in the programme at all? She sees the missionaries as ‘‘our primary ambassadors . . .they have done Ireland no end of service. We were judged by them - what kind of people are we? What’s our nature?" But there is another side to it.
The Irish missionaries were not at first care workers (a role that developed over the years) but were proselytisers determined to spread Catholicism as the one true faith; clearly, this had a major affect on indigenous cultures.
Festus Ikeotuonye, a Nigerian sociologist who has been living in Ireland for ten years, said that although the Irish were sympathetic and were more tolerant of cultural differences than the British, ‘‘this was an invasion," he said.
‘‘Basically, anybody who comes in uninvited to a place with their own preconceived notion of the local culture, their own ideas of who they are, and who the other people are, are always colonialists," Ikeotuonye said.
It was something of a bubble-buster that came quite far on in a film that had been largely feel good in tone.
‘‘These people have survived thousands of years," he said. ‘‘They didn’t ask to be preached to or for schools to be built. Those things were not done consensually."
Irish missionaries of their time travelled with a portmanteau of contemporary western values, which surely they must have seen as superior, and the Catholic religion which they held to be supreme. The English language, in which they taught, was part of the package and, perhaps most disturbing for Irish sentimentalists, Ikeotuonye spoke of ‘‘brutal institutions’’ and claimed to have been flogged for speaking Ibo, his own language rather than English.
‘‘That was the same thing that happened here in the educational system in the Penal laws," he said. ‘‘We had it in Nigeria." Perhaps, collective memory is as selective as any other kind.
Contributors to Ruán Magan’s film made connections between the spirit of sacrifice of the 1916 Rising and the sacrifice of the thousands of young Irish men and women who became priests and nuns in the early years of independence and headed for Africa, or the even more inhospitable China, to win souls for Christ. Many of them, as McAleese pointed out, would die very young.
It was presented as part of establishing an Irish identity in the early years of the state, with Ireland simply taking unto itself the job of converting Africa.
There were many good and able men and women among the young Irish Catholics who went out to China and Africa. Some, like Marie Martin who founded the Medical Missionaries of Mary, helped to bring about a change in Canon Law in the 1930s that would allow women religious to practise obstetrics and gynaecology; it had been believed that this work would affect their vow of chastity. She was one of those who pioneered the needs-based, humanitarian nature of modern missionary work.
Yet all their energy and intelligence and zeal are never spoken as a loss to this country, in the way we speak of talented emigrants today as being a loss. It was a dangerous and daunting adventure. Many of them were young, country people from large families who stood to inherit nothing and who opted for a career with the high status religious life then offered.
Families were proud to see them go; towns and villages collected money and clothes to support their missions; people read the monthlies such as the Far East or the Missionary Annals; schoolchildren ‘bought’ black babies with their pocket money. The Imeldist magazine, which I believe was specifically aimed at children, had a taste for gruesome stories of martyrdom, which came to a number of priests in the east during the rise of communism in China.
The Columban priest, Fr John Heneghan, the first editor of the Far East, who had been inspired to risk his life by some young men who had come to him for confession just before the Easter Rising, was among those who met his death in the east. He was one of six Columbans who died during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.
And martyrdom was to be welcomed. The Far East seemed to thirst for it. When Fr Tim Leonard was murdered in China, its editor wrote: ‘‘It is with mingled feelings of sorrow and triumph we heard of Fr Leonard’s untimely end. I for one feel there is more reason for congratulations than sympathy."
Such religious zeal seems extraordinary, if not entirely mad to our eyes and shows just how tricky it is to judge the past from the perspective of the present.
* But is the Ireland of today any more comprehensible?
Headshops are wrecking people’s heads. They have been spawning mysteriously all over the country, multiplying as fast as wire coat hangers in a wardrobe.
They have ignited a moral panic, as well as direct violent action, for whatever motive and from whatever source.
Pat Kenny, in The Frontline (RTE 1) said there were 100 headshops around the country, but that was a week ago; there may be even more now.
It’s not often that a voice from Hot Press is heard on current affairs programmes, but there was Stuart Clark, the magazine’s deputy editor, talking about the shops’ stock of smokeables, snortables and party pills that mimic ecstasy. Drugs policy in this country is not set by a minister or by doctors, he said, but by public hysteria on Joe Duffy’s Liveline and other radio talkshows.
He believes there should be regulation of headshops (which they appear to want), because the stuff they sell will simply go underground if they’re closed down.
‘‘These shops are paying Vat and tax," Clark said. ‘‘A lot of money, tens of millions of euro, goes to the exchequer. That money can then be used for rehab places we don’t have, for drug counselling we can’t afford.
Anyone who turns around and says there’s no merit in legal highs, that we should just completely ban them straight away and who drinks or smokes is a hypocrite, because alcohol and nicotine are legal highs."
Dr Chris Luke, A&E consultant in Cork University Hospital, said the hospital had seen fewer than a dozen people suffering the effects of headshop drug abuse in the last six months, but that these effects can be spectacular.
‘‘Cocaine occasionally causes an explosive rage and violence . . . but it seems to me the headshops’ adverse affects involve a kind of temporary - hopefully a temporary - psychosis, which basically means people who are acutely, severely mad," Luke said. ‘‘They are thought-disordered, they’re paranoid, they’re hallucinating, and these effects can go on for two or three days. It’s very high maintenance for already overworked emergency department staff."
Luke wouldn’t shut the shops down in a hurry. ‘‘I would want to see what exactly they’re selling, to see if there’s a mismatch between what they’re advertising or purporting to sell and what they’re actually selling, and I would like to look at the casualty figures from all around the country to see how dangerous the various products are, and to take it from there. I’d like to take a rational, reasonable and scientific approach."
Luke, however, believes that the products being sold in headshops are ‘‘unequivocally poisonous, across the board’’.
It was sometimes emotional stuff, with political slagging from the audience about the government’s apparently slow reaction to the latest perceived menace in our midst. The government has since moved to outlaw some of the substances being sold. There were some lighter moments, like the man who talked about the banning of TCP when I think he meant BZP, which was banned here a year ago.
But what’s the world coming to? A Green councillor, Brian Meaney from Ennis (two headshops up to last Monday) wants them banned outright, and a member of the Fianna Fáil national executive, Paul O’Brennan from Mullingar (two headshops at last count), believes we should be cautious about closing them down immediately.
This could beat the ban on stag hunting as the next nightmare for the larger of the two political bedfellows.
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