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THE TRAUMA OF POVERTY AND INCARCERATION
EMER MARTIN’S 2018 NOVEL THE CRUELTY MEN TAKES READERS BACK TO A TIME WHEN THE IRISH CHURCH AND STATE HAD UNCONDITIONAL CONTROL OVER THE LIVES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE,
BY EAMON MAHER
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Aclose friend of mine had been singing the praises of the contemporary writer and artist Emer Martin (b. 1972) for a long time, which prompted me to read some of her Author Emer Martin fiction. I was not disappointed. Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, was published in 1995 and describes the experiences of a young Irish woman, Isolt, who escapes from the oppression and recession of 1980s Ireland and makes her way to Paris, where she lives as a down-andout with other immigrants, all of whom are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol.
In a revealing self-reflective essay, Martin explains why she is attracted to marginal figures: “Often my characters are hungry ghosts entangled in a great web of trauma, but soothing and devouring themselves with addiction, as they wait for the spider to come.” The first line of the novel itself is quite striking, as the main protagonist and narrator declares: “I am not Jesus Christ. I left home younger than he, walked further and stayed out in the wilderness longer.” Martin explained that this opening line was “a challenge to the once-immutable religious power as defined by my experience being raised in a rigidly Catholic society.” I think this explains where Martin stands in relation to organised religion: she is wary of any group of people, religious or otherwise, being given unconditional power over society. This aspect is wonderfully captured in Martin’s third novel, The Cruelty Men (2018).
SENT AWAY
The title comes from the name given to government representatives who went around the country trying to locate children who were born out of wedlock, or whose parents were deemed incapable of looking after them properly: single women who got pregnant, children who were found guilty of small misdemeanours or simply came from impoverished backgrounds. As a result of the close collusion between church and state, these people were sent to industrial schools, Magdalene Laundries or mother and child homes, where they were treated as though they were morally stained. Mary O’Conaill was the eldest child of a south-west Irishspeaking Kerry family, who were enticed with the gift of some land to relocate to the Meath Gaeltacht that was being established in an attempt to revive the national language. She and her siblings headed off with their father, leaving a heavily pregnant mother behind – the idea was that she would join them after giving birth to her baby – but they never saw her again. After a few months, not having heard any news of his wife, the father heads off to Kerry and he too disappears forever, leaving Mary with the task of raising her brothers and sisters on her own. She lives in daily fear of the cruelty men coming to take the children into care but, by dint of much resourcefulness and backbreaking work, she manages to keep the family together, initially at least.
When the eldest son, Seamus, takes control of the farm and the family, he arranges to have his brother Padraig sent to an industrial school where his strange mannerisms and inability to speak result in his ending up in a psychiatric unit. There he undergoes gruesome electro-therapy and eventually dies at a young age. The attractive Maeve, who goes to work in a shop in the nearby town of Trim, is pursued by many men, one of them the son of a wealthy farming family. Eventually she falls pregnant – it is not certain who the father is, as the son-in-law of the shopkeeper she works for regularly forces her to have sex with him also – and she ends up in a mother and baby home, a Magdalene Laundry and finally a mental home, where she suffers the same fate as her brother Padraig. Meanwhile Mary has to leave the family home because Seamus and his new bride, who is lazy to the core, make her life a living hell. She ends up as housekeeper and nanny to a lawyer and his wife, a teacher, also living in the area around Trim.
CONTROL
Mary is desperately saddened by her inability to keep the family together, as her mother had requested, but circumstances (and a strong bias against the poor) ensured that she could not do so. Her focus then becomes
ensuring that the youngest sibling, Seán, gets an education. He goes to the noviciate of the Christian Brothers and qualifies as a teacher. He is offered his choice of the best private schools, but in the end decides he wants to work in an industrial school: “I feel they need changing and sorting out. I feel my mission would be most fulfilled there, and not among the children of the wealthy and powerful.” Such laudable sentiments are not in keeping with the ethos of the school where he ends up. The principal, Br Peter, proudly declares that the Catholic Church in Ireland controls “all women, men, boys and girls of every class. The people of Ireland are here, in the palm of our hands.” He goes on to describe the inmates of his school as “the detritus of our new independent society”.
When his own nephew Ignatius, Seamus’ son, arrives in the school, Seán tries valiantly to give him a chance in life, providing private tuition in his room and protection from the proclivities of some of the more unsavoury Brothers. In the end, Ignatius figures out why his uncle always appears fearful: “Did they get you when you were in the training school?” he asks him. “Is that why you sleep with the light on. Is that why you are afraid of them still?” Shortly after giving Ignatius a fearful beating in full view of the school, and getting a standing ovation from the Brothers later that evening, he is found hanging in his room, unable to take any more of a life full of pain and suffering.
The Cruelty Men contains graphic descriptions of life in some of Ireland’s most notorious institutions, but at times the religious are rather one-dimensional. The nuns working in the Laundries seem uniformly evil. Elizabeth, housekeeper (and mistress) to the local parish priest, Fr Lavin, describes her experience of the laundry where she ended up: “They drummed it into us that we were the spawn of Satan. We were taken because someone ratted to the priest that my mother (who had 13 children) had a boyfriend.” She shares her anger with her friend: “What is my crime, Mary? I wasn’t a bloody orphan. My mother wanted us. They stole her off us. They were waiting outside in a car to take us. The priest and the guards.” Undoubtedly, there were numerous shocking and cruel incidents like these in the Ireland of a few decades ago, but there are times in the book when caricatures of evil nuns, Christian Brothers and priests seem a little lacking in objectivity.
Fr Lavin and Seán O Conaill are the only redeeming religious figures in the novel, and even they find it impossible to break the mould and criticise the abuses they see happening in front of their eyes. Maeve, who, because of her rebellious streak and various attempts at escape, is the victim of particularly harsh treatment, says she feels as though she is “going underground”: “Under the thud and hum of the laundries. Under the heaps of banned books from exiled scribblers. Under the shoeless bloody feet of slave children in the obscene care of church and state – uncounted lives melted like snow off a ditch.” Many of the ills of Irish society are captured in these lines.
HIDDEN IRELAND
The Cruelty Men lays bare the hidden Ireland that was exposed over the course of several decades, during which clerical sex abuse, the horror of life in institutions set up by the state and run by religious, the corruption of politicians and bankers, the various
revelations that showed how far we had strayed from the aspirations of the newlyestablished Free State, all came into the public domain.
When asked why he did not look for his aunt Mary and others when released from the industrial school, Ignatius replies: “When have the well fed ever understood the hungry?” In a sense, these words encapsulate the philosophy of Martin’s novel, which forces readers to think about what happened in Ireland’s recent past and to ponder the reasons behind it. The writer explains that her work is “a call to revolt against this despair, through examining the roots of the problem, facing it, protecting indigenous culture and rebelling against the authorities who have deemed it convenient to have problematic areas of the population consigned to haunt the fringes of humanity in a fog of poverty, addiction and inertia.” That is no small challenge, but Emer Martin shows herself to be more than capable of meeting it. She is a significant voice in contemporary Irish letters.
