It's so easy to be manipulated

This week's Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers' column.

Michael Commane

There has been much media coverage surrounding the victims of the Magdalene Laundries in recent weeks.

President Michael D Higgins met them at Áras an Uachtaráin and there was also a function at Dublin’s Mansion House to acknowledge their suffering.

It was a small token of apology for what the State, we the Irish people had done to them when they were of child-bearing age.

It was unspeakable behaviour.

The State, the church, the entire nation played a part in causing such pain and suffering to these people.

We have all heard horrendous stories: religious sisters slapping young girls, placing them in solitary confinement. There is no end to the savagery.

It set me thinking. My mind wandered and I began to think of the ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’. Oskar Gröning was 18-years-old when war broke out and joined the army at 19.

He was sent to Auschwitz. His job was to itemise money and valuables taken from new arrivals.

He asked to be sent to the front but his request was only accepted in 1944.

Forty or so years after the war when Gröning heard people denying the Holocaust, he stood up and said that he had seen it, that he had worked in Auschwitz.

Eventually the German State arrested him. In 2015 he was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews, was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He died this year on March 8 before beginning his prison sentence.

I am no bookkeeper, nor, thank God did I work at Auschwitz. But I have been thinking of Oskar Gröning while reading about the Magdalene Laundries.

I was a novice in the Dominican Priory in Pope’s Quay in Cork in 1967. I was 18/19, the same age as Oskar Gröning. There was a church attached to the priory and it was held in high esteem in the city.

The two Christmases I was in Pope’s Quay the novices and students staged a play at Peacock Lane and the Good Shepherd Convent. Both those establishments were Magdalene Laundries. 

I have vague memories of those plays. There was something eerie about the two places but I asked no questions. Either one or both establishments did the laundry for the community at the Dominican Priory in Pope’s Quay. Did anyone higher up the chain of command know that something untoward was going on in these places?

Is it that most people go with the flow, accept the status quo, never question the popular opinion?

I’m wondering what’s the definition of a wise person or prophet. Is it someone, who can think for themselves, sum up a situation and then act accordingly. It’s easy to look back and see what we did wrong. What are we doing wrong today?

EU Commissioner of Competition Margrethe Vestager, criticising social media, has pointed out how it lures us into listening to and seeing the things we want to hear.

Sacked FBI director James Comey in his book A Higher Loyalty writes: ‘The danger in every organisation, especially one built around hierarchy, is that you create an environment that cuts off dissenting views and discourages feedback. That can quickly lead to a culture of delusion and deception.’

But it happens not just in organisations. Is it not part of the human condition to go with the prevailing wind?

It’s so easy to be manipulated. 

It requires courage and wisdom to think for ourselves, to speak our minds and never cow-tow to the establishment, whoever they are.