Omerta – the code of silence
On the subject of Emily O’Reilly’s comments about the Ryan report, one of the reasons why nobody said anything about institutional abuse even though everyone knew it was going on was for self-preservation. If you were a member of the Knights of St Columbanus or some other ultra Catholic lay group your passage to the higher pastures of employment was guaranteed. If you weren’t a member your outlook was less assured, but were you to offend the Knights in any way you could kiss goodbye to any effective advancement in vast areas of the Civil Service and Judiciary, and the Knights were (indeed honesty compels me to switch tenses here) are very vindictive, unforgetting and unforgiving. Their members conceal their intrinstic reactionary views on everything behind a cloak of religious clap-trap. I remember being in the company of a knight – one of the best of them now dead alas – when the television reported the demonstrations in Belgrade which brought down the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. He stated: “They’re getting’ as bad as us.” As to their attitude to those complaining of abuse, I remember one of them denouncing a victim as a “whinger” who “deserved everything he should have got”.
