Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

Bishop’s Move

  “If Eamonn Casey came back and faced everything and raised a quarter of a million pounds for it, that would really be paying his dues”

  It’s no use talking about what he should or shouldn’t have done in the past. The past is over. What should he do today? I think he should get on a plane and come home from wherever he is. He won’t have to call a press conference because it will be known that he’s coming, and there will be plenty of people waiting. Then he should say very simply that he was sorry for running away and that he’s back now, he’d like a job somewhere in some parish but not for the next three weeks. He should explain that for the next three weeks he will be very busy indeed. Writing his own book. There are very many publishers who have desk-top publishing and could have the book out in no time. It would be announced from the word go that all the royalties would go to Trocaire.

  He should not listen to anyone who says that it’s more dignified to stay away. There is little dignity in being an exile from your own country when everyone is reading and tutting over your escapades. What extra dignity do you get by not being there to avoid their eyes?

  None.

  People are not going to forget him because he’s not here. On the contrary. They are going to be talking about him anyway when Annie Murphy’s book is published, even more than they talked about him last May, if that were possible. But if he’s not here, he’s even fairer game to tut-tut over than if he were seen to have the courage to come back and face it.

  Eamonn Casey would do well to remember two people at this time; they are John Profumo and Ben Dunne. You don’t hear many people attacking either of those lads today.

  When Profumo is mentioned, people remember that he stood his ground, did social work in the East End of London, craved no publicity, and behaved with extreme dignity. Ben Dunne behaved like a big innocent child who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He said he was desperately sorry, he had made an eejit out of himself and he wouldn’t do it again.

  Fair enough. Those were the words you heard every time Ben Dunne’s name was mentioned thereafter. Fair enough, or fair dues to him. The facing of it was bigger than the doing of it, and the second seemed to wipe out the first.

  Now both John Profumo and Ben Dunne had a wife each to help them. And things being as they are in the clerical celibacy business, Eamonn Casey does not, which makes him all alone. He must rely on people whom he trusts are out for his good.

  A lot of these people are those who believe that the less said the better, and that it will all be forgotten and become yesterday’s news, if no further fuel is added. This could be the well-meaning and sincere, cautious advice of those who truly think that it’s a nine day wonder and will blow away.

  But Eamonn Casey was always a showman, a larger-than-life person who was not known for treading the cautious path. When other bishops would wonder about the gravitas of singing a song on the Late Late Show, he was able to sing one, or tell a joke or laugh like a big jolly friar of old, and people loved him for it.

  He shouldn’t heed those who say that coming home would give scandal. To whom would it give scandal? There can hardly be anyone over three years of age who doesn’t know about it already.

  What started as a private affair has become a public one and it doesn’t do a bit of good for his friends to whinge about this and say it’s his own business and encourage him to be an ostrich. He has a couple of decades left: why spend them in hiding from people who would definitely forgive him if he played it straight, from people who would say fair enough, and, particularly, from his own son?

  The best thing, surely, for that boy would be to hear his father say publicly that it was an era of huge confusion and hypocrisy and that he hoped and prayed that the years to come will not be so small-minded. If he were to say to Peter Murphy that he was sorry for denying him all those years, then the boy might well have the big heart to think that his father had been punished enough, and to accept what he had to give now.

  And because of the way things turned out, he will not need to give Peter any money. Peter’s mother’s book has organised that for him. So he can give all the money to a charity that suffered very much and very unfairly because of him. Nobody ever said that Trocaire was to blame for what happened, nor that it wasn’t doing great work, but somehow people hadn’t the heart to support it, in the way they used to, for a few months after the story first broke. If Eamonn Casey came back and faced everything and raised a quarter of a million pounds for it, that would really be paying his dues.

  To do this he would have to write a really spectacular book that people would want to read.

  It couldn’t be a Holy Joe job, not a list of vague regrets about being unworthy, nor a smiting of his breast about being a sinner. There are no sales in that. It couldn’t be a self-justification book – that really would be undignified. Nor could it be full of denial or nit-picking – it wasn’t Thursday it was Friday, it wasn’t this number of times it was that number of times – no repeat of Adam’s poor script in the Garden of Eden about it being the Woman who made me do it.

  Nor should he run her down, say she was like a sack of potatoes in bed, that she was loopy. In her book, it is understood that she says all the time how much she loved him.

  Maybe he should say how much he loved her, if he did. He could write of the expectations people have of their clergy and whether these are realistic or not. Or about the whole celibacy argument: would priests be better, stronger men if they were allowed to share a life and love with a mate? He could tell of the effect Annie had on him, the wish to see his child grow up, which was almost stifled by the fear that anyone should know the child existed.

  Bishop Casey could always tell a good story and tell it well. The main thing he must do is tell this one quickly – while there is still money to be made from his side of things, money that can be spent doing good.

  And, if he wants to test the water, he could try it out in a newspaper interview, prove that there is no virtue in this so-called dignity of silence.

  This paper has treated him honourably. He knows the telephone number.

  (We’ll never know how things might stand now for Eamonn Casey had he followed my advice immediately, and to the letter. As it turned out, Annie Murphy’s book didn’t do him anything like the insurmountable damage some people feared, and lots of others began calling for his return, including the Archbishop of Tuam who said he’d dearly love to see Bishop Casey come home.

  But the Bishop delayed and then began making forays back, gave a couple of lengthy interviews, signed some autographs in Florida where he arrived for the World Cup, and his brothers in the hierarchy are taking a somewhat different line. They’re complaining about his excessively high profile and the wisdom of his wearing his Episcopal attire on the altar in Cork. The Archbishop of Dublin observed in August of 1994 that these sporadic appearances seemed simply to “tear open the wounds again”.

  Trocaire soldiers on through famines and wars. )

  On the Line

  “The land he wants to rule is a talkative land, where people value their conversations and do not like them cut short”

  If he were to analyse the poison in the chalice, Brian Cowen would probably find that the most dangerous section is the statistics. There is no way that anyone in this country believes that 72 per cent of local calls are of less than three minutes’ duration. When Brian had to respond to the rebalancing tariff proposals presented to him by Telecom, he knew he would have to wear a flak jacket. If you are in cabinet, presumably you can’t say that you don’t want to be associated with something that is going to draw the fire of every consumer group in the country, but Brian should have refused that particular figure. He must know that, unless you live in a world where people bark “Buy or Sell” down phones, conversations go on much longer.

  And it’s not too late. He could say that new information has come to his attention and that in the light of this . . . and that would be true. He would be quite truthful in
saying this because the man must be deafened with the sounds of disbelief. None of us will accept the assurances that it has all been measured scientifically. There are some things that will never be believed.

  I am in a fairly good position to report on this since I listen to a great many crossed lines. These people do not hang up in three minutes. They go on and on and on. They tell each other about the everyday business of living. They tell of housework and hangovers and heartbreak and harassment at work. And these are not just the famous teenagers who are meant to be the only ones who want to yak on for hours. They are friends relaxing after a day’s work, they are sisters talking about their families, they are colleagues talking about new schemes at work, they are golfers re-living every hole. They are people who are going to make a pudding who want advice on the recipe, they are tellers of interminable tales about traffic jams or trains that were late. It is to our everlasting credit as a nation that we are never short of a word.

  Who are these snappish people who get onto a phone and are off it again before they have time to say anything more than a greeting? They do not exist, and Brian Cowen, who is a man with the words “leadership material” written in the pupils of both eyes, should question these three-minute myths.

  And suppose there are some short conversations in your life, like ringing a bank or an organisation. By the time you have sung along with Alas my Love you do me wrong from the Greensleeves tape, or the singularly inappropriate Where the Deer and the Antelope Play that I get when I ring a place where the clouds are pretty threatening all day, then your three minutes are often up before you get connected.

  Brian Cowen has been told about the old and the lonely. He has been at pains to say that these were not his target and I’m sure he is truthful in this. After all even if you didn’t have “leadership material” tattooed on your chest, you wouldn’t be likely to say that you were setting out to penalise the old and the lonely. It would not be a good career move.

  But if he paused to think, he would realise that the old and the lonely are not a market segment who will want to hang up after three minutes. I am not very old and lonely yet, but when I am, if I get there, I would like to think that there was time to ramble on a bit without people thinking what a pathetic spendthrift lonely old fool I was. I don’t want to feel I have to return everyone’s calls saying that I would prefer to initiate them myself and be in charge of the duration in case I wasted anyone’s money. I don’t want to hear warning pings when I am coming to the end of my allotted time of chat.

  Did Brian ask for proof that 72 per cent of people hung up in under three minutes? If I were in his position I wouldn’t have opened my little beak until I had been shown the machinery that recorded it, and checked it out for myself. Perhaps, in his world, people bark staccato ministerial things at each other and hang up. I doubt it though. And anyway politicians are meant to have an understanding about the way we live. He must have noticed the way people talk, he must have seen enough of it to demand that the statistics be double-checked.

  The telephone used to be a luxury, people will tell you, wagging metaphorical fingers. I don’t like that line. It is so patronising to tell people that they should be grateful for a development in communications, and be prepared to get off the phone before they have got on, just because it’s far from telephones many of the previous generation were reared. The telephone is a comfort and a friend. A caring society should ensure that it remains so at some acceptable cost, without all this preaching and pontificating and telling us to be grateful that long-distance deals can now be done more cheaply from the Financial Services Centre.

  Brian hasn’t told us all to get up and get cracking before eight which is probably another sensible career move. The number of people who would like to be lifted from the bed for a pleasant aimless chat at seven is a limited one. Then at night people are often tired and busy or are with friends or watching television.

  I could tell him a heap of stories. An old man phones his daughter at lunch-time. She has the phone in the kitchen, she chops and peels and cleans as she talks. He is on for about half an hour. It’s great. It won’t be any more.

  A widow is worried about money. She drives her children mad by saying “this is costing a fortune”. About a year ago they got her off that, they told her proudly that local call charges were not related to time. Not any more. A kind woman keeps in touch with a proud neighbour by ringing her each day and discussing the bridge problem in The Irish Times. It’s only kindness really, an excuse to keep in touch. But from now on it would smack of charity.

  I am leaving out the life and death phone calls because it is assumed that the endless good and helpful Samaritans and other helplines will be looked after.

  I am really asking Brian Cowen to find who these short-callers are, the folks who are gone before you know they are there. If they exist, then it will be such an interesting piece of research. If they don’t, he can be magnanimous and say that he decided to look into it. After all there is a precedent in Fianna Fáil. De Valera was known to look into his heart about things and didn’t suffer for it. The leadership lights in Minister Cowen’s eyes could well turn out to be in brightest neon if he plays this one properly. If he remembers that the land he wants to rule is a talkative land where people value their conversations and do not like them cut short by any rebalancing tariff proposals whatsoever.

  (Mr Cowen did not talk much about figures or phones in his latter days as minister. This could be because business people who make a lot of long-distance phone calls do seem to be doing better on the bills, of course, and also because Telecom Eireann made a profit of £81 million last year).

  Screenstruck

  “Michael D Higgins always says that he prides himself on doing things quickly”

  It doesn’t matter if it goes off half cock; the main thing is that it gets started. People’s memories are short. Soon the great triumphant picture of Neil Jordan standing there holding the Oscar will fade or just be crowded out by pictures of other people holding their awards. The iron doesn’t stay hot forever.

  The main thing is to get everyone into a lather of excitement about it, to let there be a huge amount of hope where once there was a blank wall. There shouldn’t be months of deliberation about how it is to be composed and what voice it will speak with. There’s no point in getting the Row started and the Split organised before it’s appointed.

  The bad news has been that, since 1987, there has been nowhere that could act as a kind of focus, a channel for the dreams and plans of Irish film-makers. The good news is that there will be one again. It would be a great pity to waste endless hours wondering and speculating about its composition. It should meet next week.

  You see there’s no way it’s going to please everyone. It can’t possibly do that. The main thing is to make it wide-ranging and give it a lot of money. And then the legitimate long-running complaint, that our country doesn’t give a damn about one of the main art and entertainment forms of our day, can be stilled. For a while. It can be replaced, of course, with many equally legitimate complaints about the people who are running it. The lot they let in, the lot they excluded and whether it knows any part of itself from its elbow in terms of making films.

  At least it will be there, and all the talented Irish people who have had to fight to work in film industries outside this country will be able to fight with it and challenge it and picket it and denounce it. But there will be something there to acknowledge the huge impact of Irish people in the film industry all over the world.

  When I was roaming around the planet for four months I was not moving at all in film circles, but in every place I went they were talking about Irish films.

  Many people knew about Ireland only through their visits to the cinema or the video rental shop: they thought there must be a great dynamism about the place and said that the government was very enlightened to promote it so much. Loyalty to my own country and rage with the political party that had killed the Film Board warr
ed within me, and I used to say that it was all done very much against the odds. They had to find finance from the trees.

  This caused a lot of head-shaking. They thought it was like the palmy days of Gough Whitlam, when suddenly the world knew about Australia through a series of glorious Australian films. Now, not every Australian liked things like Sunday Too Far Away, full of grog-obsessed sheep shearers. It gave a down-market impression of the place, they said. But it also showed a world of enthusiasm, colour, light and love that made people begin to understand the many sides of their country.

  It wasn’t paid for by the Australian Tourist Board, any more than the marvellous Commitments was financed by Bórd Fáilte, but that’s not the point. A film industry is not a propaganda wing of the government. There were a lot of people who thought the Abbey Theatre shouldn’t produce plays set in Dublin slums, where drink and violence were accepted as the norm. And fortunately nobody took that kind of view seriously enough to bypass O’Casey.

  Of course, the Film Board will not have an easy road. We’ll all think our projects are being passed over because they’re too serious, too popular, too intellectual or too down-market.

  There will not be a person in the country who has written a book or even hatched an idea who will not believe that, if that shower were out and proper reasonable people in, then it would all be perfect.

  There will be those who will want to judge it by its commercial success, others by its artistic merit. Some by the box office, some by the film festival awards.

  We don’t get any wiser by speculating and coming up with one format after another. There is no Dream Team. It may be better to have real practitioners, people who know how to do it and have done it with success, on the Film Board. Then is there a fear that they would want to allot all the money to themselves and their friends?