Priest Read Free Page A

– men in their sixties with worn caps, worn eyes, nursing half-empty pints. They rarely talked to each other and began their vigil right after opening time. I’d never asked what they were waiting for, lest they told me. If the sentries ever depart, like the monkeys on Gibraltar, the pubs will fold. The radio was on and we heard of a massive Garda drug sting in Dublin. For months they’d been scoring from dealers, now it was round-up time. There had been a public outcry when a TV camera filmed dealers selling openly on the streets and it was like a kasbah in Temple Bar. A junkie shooting up in front of a uniformed Guard. Crack cocaine was being sold widely. I said,
    â€˜Jeez, when crack arrives, the country is gone.’
    Some irony for a nation that had given the word
crack
to the world – we now had crack of a whole more sinister hue.
    She seemed not to have heard, then,
    â€˜Galway is as bad.’
    â€˜As if I didn’t know.’
    She was fiddling with a silver ring on her right hand, appeared nervous, asked,
    â€˜Did you hear about the priest?’
    The question hung there, like an omen.
    Like a sign of the times.
    Ireland is a land of questions and very, very few answers. We’re notorious for replying to a direct question with a question. It’s like an inbred caution: never commit yourself. And it buys you time, lets you consider the implications of the query.
    We may have got rich, but we never got impulsive. Questions are always suspect. The years of British rule, the years of
yes,
questions usually posed by a soldier with a weapon in your face, led to a certain wariness. If the truth be told, and sometimes it is, we really want to hit back with two other questions.
    First,
Why d’you want to know?
    Second, and maybe more essential,
How is it any of your business?
    When I see a map of the island and they’re promoting the country, like, say, for the tourist trade, they’ll have a giant leprechaun or a harp, slap bang in the middle. I feel they should get honest and put a big question mark, let the folk know what they’re letting themselves in for.
    The classic Irish questions, of course, are the one to the returned emigrant,
When are you going back?
And the near daily one,
Do you know who’s dead?
    Naturally, I didn’t reply immediately to Ridge’s question. Especially in the current climate. You hear about priests now, it ain’t going to be good, it’s not going to be a heart-warming tale about some poor dedicated soul who spent fifty years among some remote tribe and then they ate him. No, it’s going to be bad, and scandalous. Every day, newrevelations about clerical abuse. I can’t say we’d become immune to that. The clergy will always hold a special place in our psyche, it’s pure history, but their unassailable position of trust, respect and yes, fear, was over. Man, they’d had their day, and as the Americans might put it,
That is so, like, over.
    Was it ever.

3
    â€˜Of true justice. We no longer have any. If we had, we should accept it as a rule of justice that one should follow the customs of one’s country.’
    Pascal,
Pensées,
297

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    We were on that stretch of road that leads into Galway. You could see the ocean on the left and, as always, it made me yearn – for what, I’ve never known. The silence in the car was oppressive and Ridge, in a very aggressive movement, flicked on the radio.
    Jimmy Norman, Ollie Jennings were doing their two-hander on
    Sport
    Politics
    Music
    Craic.
    I was homeward bound.
    Jimmy said,
    â€˜Here’s my favourite record.’
    And Shania Twain launched with ‘Forever And For Always’. I liked the line about never letting you go down. There wasn’t a single human being I could think of who felt that way about me.
    Years ago, watching Bruce Springsteen on video, Patti Scialfa had her eyes locked on him, a mix of adoration