BREAKING THE STRANGLEHOLD (PRAY FOR OUR SINNERS)

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What a difference 60 years makes.

The Ireland that greeted US President Joe Biden last week was a radically different country from the one that hosted President John F Kennedy in 1963.

Ireland has long since moved away from the country that was in the grip of oppressive Catholic conservatism.

It'a a world away from the Ireland of Archbishop John Charles McQuade who exerted a huge influence over successive governments.

The republic is no longer a monocultural, male dominated, homophobic, economically stunted society.

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Today's Ireland is a multicultural nation, a socially progressive nation, a prosperous member state of the European Union that voted in huge numbers for same sex marriage eight years ago.

It's not perfect by any means - ask anyone who has been struggling for an affordable home in Dublin - but it's still a much more inclusive and less oppressive society than the one I or my sisters experienced as a kid in the 1980s when we used to visit relatives in Dublin and Cork or go on holiday to Kerry or Mayo.

If you want a stark reminder of just how far the republic has travelled, then check out Sinead O'Shea's documentary feature 'Pray For Our Sinners'.

A very Irish story of defiance and resistance, O'Shea's film celebrates a couple in Navan, Co Meath who bravely challenged the wrongs of a Church that really ought to have treated its people better.

Mary and Paddy Randles resisted the Church's domination of their community on two fronts.

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Paddy, a GP, exposed the brutality meted out to children in Church run schools.

This was a very public stand.

However away from the spotlight, he and his wife Mary, also a doctor, played a key role in helping pregnant girls recover children taken away from them by the clergy.

O'Shea, who narrates her film, boldly sets out her agenda at the start, insisting: "I want to tell a story about my town, a small town in the middle of Ireland.

"It is a story about power and resistance."

However rather than exposing the audience to 81 minutes of angry polemic, she gently tells the story of the Randles and the people they helped in Navan.

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After setting the tone with archive footage of Eamon de Valera, Archbishop McQuade, Gay Byrne and a clip of his fellow broadcaster Pat Kenny asking a studio audience how many people believe in the Devil, the director unearths a telling observation by the anti corporal punishment campaigner Dr Cyril Daly in the 1960s that pigs are treated better than schoolchildren in the country.

O'Shea goes on to tell the story of Norman, the victim of savage beatings with a rubber hose in his local Catholic school.

Norman, who was ambidextrous, was beaten as a nine year old for writing with his left hand.

Paddy Randles became involved in his case when Norman asked him to provide him with a GP's letter asking the school to beat him on his good hand.

The picture Norman paints of the Catholic school he attended is of a system that discriminated against the most disadvantaged.

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Each child, he says, had their father's occupation registered beside their name and only those whose parents supplied coal got to sit beside the radiator on cold days.

Angered by the beatings meted out to the children, Paddy Randles brought the plight of Norman and other pupils to the attention of the British News of the World newspaper and to NBC in the United States but faced blowback from the Church and from neighbours.

O'Shea reveals the extraordinary lengths the priests went to limit the damage to Navan's reputation.

But she also tells the stories of two women, Betty who was driven by the local parish priest Fr Andrew Farrell to a mother and baby home in Roscrea and Ethna whose baby was born in Dublin's Rotunda Hospital only for her to be taken off her and given up for adoption.

Providing a refuge for unmarried mothers and also supplying contraception when it was illegal, the Randles and their children withstood intimidation from the Church and its supporters.

What is most impressive about 'Pray For Our Sinners' is the way O'Shea handles the narrative.

As an interviewer, she gently allows Mary Randles, Norman, Betty and Ethna to tell their stories of the injustices they encountered and the PTSD suffered.

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As a commentator, she's honest about the unease she feels about events that were still unfolding in her lifetime.

As a storyteller, she also builds a compelling subplot about Father Sullivan that may surprise viewers and is far more complex than some may anticipate. 

Watching 'Pray For Our Sinners' you are struck, though, by the fact that there are thousands of Normans, Bettys and Ethnas in cities, towns and villages all over the island.

You're also struck while watching it in Northern Ireland that the full scale of the injustice in schools and communities has not been as openly discussed north of the border in the way that it has in the republic.

O'Shea has done her hometown of Navan a hell of a service telling this tale.

Someone needs to do the same north of the border.

('Pray for Our Sinners' was released in the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast and other UK and Irish cinemas on April 21, 2023)