Bedtime stories

At my lunchtime read of the newspaper, I tend to avoid the awful stories and last week there were plenty of them: the mistreatment of elderly people in care facilities; the Morris Tribunal report; and the matter of the ex-cleric charged and found guilty of the sexual abuse of the two national school pupils in Sligo in the 1970s. I read as far as the bit where we learned it was his practice to hang them up on hooks on the back of the classroom doors and I thought immediately, well, maybe I should go back to work a bit early, I'll leave that for tonight when I'll be better able to handle it.

And then the time came to choose what to take into bed – the Morris Tribunal that would make any mother tell her child, "And if you see a policeman, my love, run to the nearest house and scream for help" or the Guardian's understandably indulgent coverage of the The Guardian Hay Festival in the market town of Hay-on-Wye in the Brecon Beacons.

Do I want to read how Andrew Marr and Jon Snow fared with the 50 quid they were each given to spend on books or do I want to read what happened to Richie Barron's face? And when one strives to deal with the reality of things, what makes it easier to read about the hurt inflicted on the five-year-old boy who was allegedly abducted and harmed by a 12-year-old girl in England but difficult to read of the little boys in Sligo who had to pee in the schoolyard rather than face the horrors of what their teacher would do to them in the toilets.

I remember going to the film The Prince of Tides with two other mothers when I was in Israel. It was a long-planned escape from the mothering of small children for each of us and we were half-hysterical with the excitement. Fans of the author who wrote the story, Pat Conroy, will know that it involves the rapes of a mother and her children. The rape of the young boy did my head in and I reeled from it as the two women with me chattered on through the film.

I mentioned it to visiting Irish friends, sharing my horror, and was met with a "Jesus, that's nothing. Sure that was going on wholesale in orphanages and industrial schools in Ireland. You don't know the half of what has been going on at home." Did they put something in the water to help you all adapt to the worst of it at the time? I feel I missed the immunisation against it and was awake staring at the wall for hours after RTÉ's Cardinals Sins. Or did you just acclimatise to it, helped on by how each act of horror oh so quickly became just grist for the mill of downmarket tabloids and rants of the day on Liveline?

A woman visiting from New Zealand recounted for me in my living room this evening how her boyfriend's uncle told them of his memory of being six years old and mixing up his 7's and 9's when asked to write them on the board for the school inspector and of the beating he took when the inspector left. And, in secondary school, of the tales of the array of rods from which the priestly headmaster had to choose from.

It will be a long time I imagine before we will as easily hear tales of sexual abuse and be able to listen and respond. And as I read on through the feast of Hay on Wye in the Guardian last week, I nudged the Irish newspapers off the end of the bed with my toe. I don't want to think too much of the cunning tormentors in Co Donegal, the elderly woman being tormented by her caregiver in the nursing home, or the small boys who will eternally hang in our memory now, suspended and helpless, a great floating toy of a thing for the gratification of a gown and sick man.

In the Irish Museum of Modern Art the other weekend, walking through the exhibition of the works of Mark Manders, we came upon his 'Cupboard with Newspapers', an alcove packed floor to ceiling with folded-in-half copies of the Irish Times. They were packed tight, too tight to take out and read. I think it's a proper place for them and certainly much more appropriate than spread out and varnished over on a bathroom floor where we would risk treading on stories of the pain, from our past and our present, the likes of which appeared in our newspapers last week.