Guest commentary: When silence allows injustice to survive

Some books entertain us. Others educate us. And occasionally, a book forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: What would I have done if I had witnessed injustice and everyone around me expected me to remain silent?

Claire Keegan’s "Small Things Like These" and Maureen Sullivan’s "Girl in the Tunnel: My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries" confront that question from two very different directions.

Keegan gives us fiction. Sullivan gives us lived experience.

Together, they illuminate one of the darker chapters of modern Irish history: the Magdalene Laundries, institutions in which women and girls were confined, stigmatized and subjected to harsh treatment and forced labor.

Small Things Like These is set in Ireland in 1985 and centers on Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, husband and father of five daughters. Bill is not a politician, activist or revolutionary. He is an ordinary working man trying to support his family.

That is precisely what makes his story so powerful.

During a delivery to a convent, Bill encounters evidence that young women are being terribly mistreated. He is then confronted with a choice that human beings have faced throughout history.

Does he look away?

Does he convince himself that it is none of his business?

Or does he listen to his conscience?

The genius of Keegan’s story is that evil is not presented only as something committed by obviously evil people. Injustice can also survive because ordinary, otherwise decent people remain silent.

That lesson becomes considerably more disturbing when read beside Maureen Sullivan’s Girl in the Tunnel.

Sullivan was only twelve years old when she was sent to a Magdalene Laundry in New Ross, County Wexford. Her memoir describes her journey from a violent childhood into an institution where she experienced cruelty, deprivation and loss of freedom.

Suddenly, what Keegan asks us to imagine through Bill Furlong becomes painfully real.

There really were girls behind those walls.

There really were children who were frightened, vulnerable and largely powerless.

And there really was a society outside those institutions that too often failed to protect them.

This is why these two books belong together.

One asks us to imagine the responsibility of the witness.

The other gives voice to the person who desperately needed someone to witness what was happening.

There is also an important distinction between faith and institutions.

Christianity teaches compassion, mercy, forgiveness and care for those who are suffering. Jesus repeatedly reached toward people whom society rejected or condemned. Therefore, when religious authority is used to humiliate, imprison or abuse vulnerable human beings, we should not confuse institutional wrongdoing with the teachings of Christ.

Indeed, the moral challenge presented by these books is profoundly compatible with Christianity: What do we owe the person suffering in front of us?

It is easy to condemn historical injustice after society has already recognized it.

The harder question is whether we recognize injustice while it is happening.

Every generation has people whom society finds convenient to ignore: the poor, the homeless, abused children, minorities, refugees, elderly people, people with disabilities and others without sufficient social or political power.

The names and circumstances change.

The moral question does not.

"Small Things Like These" reminds us that courage does not always arrive through enormous heroic acts. Sometimes courage begins with one ordinary person deciding, “I will not look away.”

"Girl in the Tunnel" reminds us why that decision matters.