Freud never said that the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis as suggested in The Departed. He would surely have never surrendered such fertile ground.

Derek Scally’s book The Best Catholics in the World is a stunning study into what Kant called the crooked timber of humanity, from which no straight thing was ever made.

Ireland’s humanity – or lack of it – is something that Ireland has often considered in an unreflective way. Ireland moved from being the best Catholics in the world to the best non-Catholics but both may have been dutifully done without much self-examination.

Scally brings an emigrant’s eye to the study. He has been The Irish Times‘s correspondent in Berlin for more than 20 years and the country where he lives has examined its past – and continues to examine its past both from World War Two and the Cold War – in a manner which Ireland arguably has never done.

“My friends in East Germany have spent decades reflecting on why did socialism last so long? They didn’t believe in it. They don’t know anyone who believed in it and yet everyone who pretended to believe in it had to go along because there was an implicit threat in the background that if you didn’t, there was a social cost. Socialism in East Germany was imposed after the Second World War, a time of great trauma. Instead of dealing with the trauma of the Second World War, this was just thrown in on top. This new hope for a better future – socialism as the untried option would bring a better future.

“And I think a century previously in Ireland, there was a very similar situation after the devastation of the famine was piled on top of the penal laws and the British occupation and colonialism. You had a new Irish Catholicism that was literally just built on top of this trauma and there were no tools at the time, Freud had yet to come along. So there was probably no option but to try and build on top and make the best of it, but I’m suggesting in the book that there was a huge cost to cementing over our historical trauma and creating a new type of religion, a new reformulated Catholicism. And I think that the cost is only visible now. I don’t try to judge anyone in the book. People often talk about the harshness of Irish Catholicism and the need to judge and label and punish and lock people away. I really think this just comes from a deep psychological need for order and control. After the famine, the notion of control and salvation was very strong. The Catholic Church, in its reformulated version of the 19th century, promised this, but the price it demanded was obedience.”

Ireland produced obedient Catholics. Scally talks to Sean Brady, the former Primate of All Ireland who says, among other things, that the Church in Ireland produced good labourers but not good thinkers. “Some would say we were saying prayers rather than praying,” Brady tells him. Why was Ireland so obedient?

“It’s a history of humiliation, it’s a history of colonialism,” Scally says.

“It’s a history of hierarchy. I don’t really know if the Enlightenment came to Ireland, because I know when Paul Cullen brought in his reforms in the 1850s, he was introducing teachings into the Catholic Church in Ireland that had been agreed 300, 400 or 500 years previously in Rome and at various church synods, and so on. So Ireland has always been very cut off. It’s easy to forget that these days because we’re so connected, but Ireland missed out on an awful lot. And we sort of jumped several stages. I mean, back in the famine days, Irish Catholicism was sort of doling out a medieval suffering salvation narrative, and that sort of flipped into a nationalist narrative. And then we jumped forward, I think, to the EU and being a part of Europe, but Irish Catholicism was never very sophisticated. It’s very strong, pastorally. You know, you see it at an Irish funeral. But it’s very weak on self-responsibility, on thinking, the philosophical end of spiritual thought. I mean, the Reformation never came to Ireland, the notion of self-responsibility, the notion of doing something for your own well-being… It’s still sort of pay and pray. I call it Car Wash Catholicism, you know, people put the coin in the slot, and they expect the full service.”

“The Irish state has failed and continues to fail survivors so often that it really isn’t in a position to start spreading the shit around.”

Why this matters now is because the past has been discarded or viewed simplistically. Scally understands why people feel angered when politicians state, after the publication of the Mother and Baby Home report, that society played a huge part.

“I think once you get into a blame situation, you’ll always have somebody’s back up. And I think the Irish state has failed and continues to fail survivors so often that it really isn’t in a position to start spreading the shit around.”

But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be an examination. Catholicism in Ireland has always been as much Irish as it has been Catholic. While the Church has been rejected in many ways, Scally’s book details how people have been less robust in rejecting it when it is interlinked with nationalism.

“Many academics I spoke to, they all say the same thing, they have a generation now – the second generation of students coming through who don’t really remember the Catholic Ireland that I would have grown up within the 70s and 80s. So they’re completely post-Catholic, as it were, and yet they’re clinging to narratives of Irish nationhood and Irish identity which emerged in the mid-19th century in the struggle for independence, where the bishop and the Irish freedom fighters were standing shoulder to shoulder. They’re actually repeating a narrative that came about in the 19th century without realising that they are. Whenever anyone questions that this is just a narrative based on circumstances and needs of a time, and maybe that time has passed and we can create a new narrative based on the needs of today, there’s a huge push back. So the sophisticated young Irish student who has absolutely no time for the Catholic Church is actually unconsciously parroting narratives from the Catholic Church from the 19th century.”

Equally, Scally points out that we can’t exaggerate how others have dealt with their own histories. Germany has created the infrastructure if people want to interrogate the past, but many are not interested. Scally doesn’t compare histories, he compares the readiness to process historical memory. For 30 years after the war, there was no appetite in Germany to examine their past except as something done by others. Among the things that changed that was the historical series Holocaust but it is ongoing. “The Germans have not perfected it,” Scally says.

Ireland may still be at the point where the country feels history was always done to us but the truth is more complex.

“It’s always been about us,” Scally says. “It’s always been about our social, cultural, economic and needs. And so what I’m gently trying to suggest in the book is the history of Catholicism and Ireland isn’t simply about perpetrators and victims. It’s a history of us. It’s a history of bystanders, millions and millions of bystanders, silent bystanders who were silent then and who are silent today, who may think they’ve taken a moral stand by no longer going to Mass on Sunday because they’re so disgusted by the revelations of the last 30 years. But I would say just as always in Irish history, this is just the done thing. What is the social cost of avoiding mass now? There is nothing.”

Scally wonders why people can visit a Leprechaun museum in Dublin but not a Museum of Catholic Ireland. There may be something too when he suggests that learning “to live with ambivalence” is part of the process.

“My book is trying to do it in a set of anecdotal, personal, not academic, and not a preachy way. But there’s a lot to be done. And I think, 30 years on from the first of these revelations, I think the time has come.”

The most mature approach to the past, he says, is not to disown it.

Derek Scally: “The sophisticated young Irish student who has absolutely no time for the Catholic Church is actually unconsciously parroting narratives from the Catholic Church from the 19th century.”

“I was fascinated by the rush to get away from that past and the silence towards that whenever is brought up. Or, even more particular, the othering that I sensed was going on. The narrative seemed to be being rewritten in front of our eyes, that it was no longer about us as a country, a Catholic country, and this happening in our midst, but it was something that they, the religious, did to us. All of these things were things I recognised from the German debates. And while Ireland and Germany have very different histories, I was just fascinated. Could you take some of the tools that the Germans apply to their past and apply them to our own very different past, with the hope of maybe having a slightly more progressive and interesting present?”

Scally talks about the peace and reconciliation centre at Glencree, which brings people from around the world, and wonders why nobody has utilised this resource for ourselves.

“Nobody can force the Germans to engage with the Nazi past or a former East German to engage with the Berlin Wall. But there are options there for schools, for younger people. And as survivors disappear, it’s all the more necessary. I sometimes wonder in Ireland if people are just hoping that this will all just disappear, whether it’s abusing priests or people who survived institutions – they certainly feel that many people in Ireland would just wish they would just go away. That’s where the dangers begin, because the dynamics, the situations, the mentalities, the politics that allowed certain things to happen, if you haven’t institutionalised it and got archives together, as the Germans have done, that’s when the problems begin for the future.”

Maybe there is another lesson too that could sit with nurturing ambivalence.

Scally recalls a conversation with an Irish religious he met in Rome who points out that Ireland has veered wildly in his lifetime from being the best Catholics in class to being at the vanguard of secularism. “Maybe,” he says to Scally, “we just need to get over ourselves.”