Scapegoating the religious

The vilification of religious orders, such as the Christian Brothers and the Mercy Sisters, may have contributed to the scant media coverage the Nora Wall case received, writes Conor Brady

On 1 December, a 56 year old woman entered the Court of Criminal Appeal in Dublin to seek a judicial declaration that she was innocent of a terrible crime, allegedly committed many years before. Grey-haired and thin, she appeared older than her years. Accompanied by her lawyers and her family, she entered and left the Four Courts without uttering a word.

Six years previously, Nora Wall had been convicted in the Central Criminal Court, of the rape of a young girl at St Michael's child care institution at Cappoquin, Co Waterford. At the time of the alleged offence she was a nun, Sister Dominick of the Sisters of Mercy, who ran the centre. The State's case was that she had physically held down a young girl under her care while her fellow-accused, Pablo McCabe, raped her. Nora Wall and Pablo McCabe were duly convicted by a jury, largely on the evidence of a supposed eye-witness, herself a resident of the centre.

It was a sensational case at the time. Photographers crowded the precincts of the court. Reporters jotted every line of graphic evidence. Colour writers described the scene and the demeanour of the two defendants. Nora Wall was silent, her eyes cast down, her body seeming to shrink back into the nondescript anorak she wore to court. Pablo McCabe looked what he was – a man broken by alcoholism and a life lived rough, punctuated by petty crime.

At the end of the 1990s, Irish society was pretty well inured to tales of abuse against children by people within religious orders and others in positions of authority. But this case still had the necessary elements to shock. The idea that a nun could be engaged in such depravity went beyond the limits of comprehension – limits that had already been stretched by the vile acts of male clergymen and certain laymen. A woman – a nun – who could do such a thing was surely beyond compassion and mercy. The tabloids reached for their superlatives. She was evil, depraved. The very facts as reported – and the accompanying photographs – were sufficient to set the skin of ordinary, decent people, crawling.

But almost immediately after Nora Wall and Pablo McCabe had been convicted, counsel for the State went back to court, asking that the convictions be set aside. The crucial eye-witness evidence upon which they had been found guilty was false. The witness ought never to have been called.

Pablo McCabe and Nora Wall were freed. He died a few months later, victim to an illness from which he had already been suffering at the time of his trial. Nora Wall had left the Sisters of Mercy which she had joined as a teenager. John Byrne reported in Village last week that she then went to work with voluntary agencies in Ireland and Romania. On 1 December, the Court of Criminal Appeal granted her application and she is now in a position to sue the State for her wrongful conviction and incarceration.

But one will search the popular newspapers and one will surf the radio and TV archives of the past month in vain to find much about the case of Nora Wall. Her case, insofar as most of the news media are concerned, seems to be different from those of other people wrongly convicted. For example, Dean Lyons signed a confession for two murders that he did not commit. His case has received extensive publicity and is now being investigated by a senior counsel. The news media were more or less permanently encamped outside Nicky Kelly's door when the convictions in respect of the Sallins train robbery were overturned. Camera crews and investigative reporters have trawled endlessly through the circumstances in which the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were falsely convicted.

There was intensive coverage for a time after Wall and McCabe were freed. RTÉ's Mary Wilson did excellent work on the case and a lively correspondence took place in the Irish Times after a series of provocative diaries by Kevin Myers. Yet the story of Nora Wall no longer seems to make it on to the agenda of most editors or programme makers. It certainly did not do so in the immediate aftermath of her successful application to the Court of Criminal Appeal on 1 December. There were no colour pieces in the next day's newspapers, in Saturday's news-review sections or in any of the Sunday newspapers. I heard nothing more than bare court reports on radio. I did not see it figure in any Prime Time specials and I did not hear it raised on Questions and Answers.

Most of the news media do not appear to be greatly interested in this particular injustice any more. And it is not as if there are no questions to be asked, no lessons to be learned.

One wonders if Nora Wall were a different kind of victim would it be a different story. Were she a Sinn Féin activist or from a comfortable, middle-class family in south Dublin it might not be so. Indeed, had she been a Traveller it might not be so. But she is none of these. She is a former nun, a member of an order that has been the subject of a great deal of criticism. Her working life was spent doing a nasty job for which she and her sisters are now generally reviled.

Society often scapegoats a whole cohort of people. Right now, it is the religious and especially members of orders like the Mercy Sisters and the Christian Brothers who are the object of public obloquy. Is it because religious orders are now so categorised that most of the news media are not very interested in Nora Wall? It would be shameful were it to be so.

Conor Brady is Editor Emeritus of The Irish Times. He is a senior teaching fellow at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD, where he lectures in modern media.