Irish Lit: Listening to Claire Keegan

As her novel, Small Things Like These, continues to win acclaim, its popularity bolstered by the recent film with Cillian Murphy, it pushes us to ask how the enormous atrocity it reveals can be depicted with such restraint. For a slim book, it is an incredible task, and it is one that Claire Keegan meets.

Because Keegan’s book upsets the national self-image, let alone the ecclesiastical one, Small Things Like These is very, very important. By interspersing  her character’s painful, half-known past with the willful blindness that his present-day family and friends need to preserve their happiness, Keegan’s novel enacts its harrowing judgment of complicity.

Yet even this judgment is sympathetically qualified: can these relatively powerless entrants to barely secure economic circumstances rectify what nearly unassailable institutions have done? Small Things Like These is a Christmas story. Not far from the convent where young women are malnourished and maltreated, a man simply wants to buy his wife the pair of shoes she admires.

But this is not the Gift of the Magi,  O’Henry’s tale of how a husband pawns his watch to buy his wife a comb for the beautiful hair she has cut and sold to buy him a watch chain. Nor is it A Christmas Carol, where one stone-hearted malefactor can reverse a lifetime of miserliness when he sees the difficulties of a crippled child. Rather, Small Things Like These belongs on the shelf next to Joyce’s The Dead as a rival achievement in picturing a world of insularity and banter, albeit one where the consequences of obtuseness are infinitely more devastating.

First, a digression. Most every cab driver in Ireland is expectedly loquacious, but none of my drivers talked stout and football. Instead, I heard about why Leo Varadkar really stepped down from the driver whose daughter knew his mother, and what the Northern Irish really think about Brexit, courtesy of a driver’s second cousin.  

Most interesting to me as a Galwegian descendent was a discussion of the controversy about what to do with the body of Bishop Eamon Casey, who is interred in a crypt in Saint Nicholas’s Cathedral in Galway. The story of Bishop Casey is infamous from the 1990s: he fathered a child with an American woman, never tried to meet his son, and when he was exposed, resigned his office.

He was permitted to serve as a missionary in Ecuador and at a parish in England. His story re-emerged in 2006 and 2019, when he was subsequently accused of other sexual abuse, notably by his niece. Sadly, for observant Irish Catholics who once supported Casey’s progressive social agenda, his case deepened despair about their allegiance.  

Now the point of my digression concerns our discussion about whether the Diocese of Galway should allow Bishop Casey’s body to remain buried in the Cathedral.  I made a simplistic response: “why don’t you just dig him up and put him elsewhere?”  “And where would he go?” said the driver, “who would take him?” and then, “Will we dig up every priest and nun who harmed a child?” 

That silenced me. Just two months before my visit, barrister Mary O’Toole revealed the results of a government inquiry that identified  over two thousand instances of historic abuse across some three hundred Catholic Schools.