The God Squad

By Brendan O’Connor

Sunday Independent May 24 2009

The moment when things crystallise can be the moment you least expect. But somehow it was Miriam O’Callaghan, in her piece to camera at the beginning of Thursday night’s Prime Time, who perfectly, albeit accidentally, expressed the nation’s shock and grief.

She didn’t cry as she cited one simple example from the heavy volumes she held in her arms, but it was clear she was working hard not to. Amidst all the horrors we had read about and listened to, there was something heartbreakingly simple about a four-year-old boy whose crime was that his mama had died.

And somehow, as this mother of eight mentioned this small boy, whose crime led to him being delivered into a life of hell perpetrated by adults, and as she held back the tears herself, it seemed to form a moment of catharsis for the nation.

Many people had cried their eyes out already reading about the systematic endemic breaking and torture of innocent little children by an unholy alliance of Church, State and society. But as the camera moved in on O’Callaghan’s trembling voice and her misting eyes it seemed to release us all to submit to the true horror for a minute and to admit that this was, as she so simply put it, “too sad”.

No other broadcaster or politician or public figure was so appropriate over recent days.

While millions of words of remorse and sympathy were spoken, sometimes the cracks between the words are what matters. And O’Callaghan cracked and maybe through that crack the light shone in.

Because there is no other response to this immense sadness but to falter and crack at the notion of that poor little boy, a little boy with no Mam whose only home was a hell on Earth, one of thousands of boys who had the only life they will ever have destroyed forever to somehow feed the inadequacies of others.

And in a way, it throws everything into perspective. Maybe, for a few weeks at least, we won’t moan about having a little less these days, or working a little bit harder, or facing a bit of uncertainty.

Rather a bit of economic uncertainty than the certainty that every day you will be made nothing of. Maybe we will remember for a while that while our houses are not worth what they were, at least we have a home, a home that is a place of love and sanctuary where we are loved and where we love our children and try to give them everything that we would wish for them, where their innocence can be kept intact for some few years.

Let’s hope that we will never have to face our demons the way we did this past week. Let’s hope that having been confronted so definitively with this collective stain on us we will learn something.

And let’s hope that Miriam O’Callaghan will never have to open Prime Time again with something that will make her cry, or with an image as heartbreaking as a little four-year-old boy who was punished so severely just because his mama died.