V is for Virgin and Victorina Press, a small independent publisher which supports bibliodiversity – it gives voice to the expression of diversity in its published authors. Victorina Press published my novel Michel–Michelle which tells the story of Axel whose birth father is transgender. V for the Virgin Mother takes me back to childhood and how Icons can inspire us or be used to instil fear and shame.

V for Virgin

The time spiral takes me to the 1950’s and 1960’s on a visit to a small Grotto to the Virgin Mary in Melmount graveyard in Strabane before transporting me to apparitions in the 1980’s and hurt from hypocrisy which lingers in our culture. The grotto in Melmount still exists but seems a long way from present day icons and idols It is even further from the concentration of economic power in global elites. Or is it? The word icon comes from the carved image of the figure of Christ used in religious ceremonies. Today it is used to describe people like the Kardashians, footballers, musicians, artists and other celebrities. Should we look beyond the masks of our icons?

On his night off, my father would take us to Melmount chapel to May devotions in honour of the Virgin Mother of God, where the whole community said the rosary followed by a litany of terms venerating Mary. The priest blessed us with a monstrance in the form of a gold Sun containing the body of the Son of God. The crucible pumped out incense from other worlds which spiral me back to May devotions when I visit a Russian Orthodox church in 1989 as the Soviet Union ant-capitalist experiment was crumbling. The Virgin Mother of God was a major icon in 1950’s Ireland and supervised virgins until they were protected by marriage to a man.. Statues or pictures of the Mother of God were second only to the Sacred Heart picture, which was a major icon in every Catholic living room. Images of the pope were in the same frame as an image of President Kennedy.

Grotto

As children the grotto in Melmount graveyard was a link to timeless myths transporting us from the mundane realities of sin, penalties and punishment into a better world where our imaginations could run riot. The grotto was a place of wonder where the cement studded with special stones sparkled in sunlight calling up the apparition and miracles at Lourdes. I remember it with ivy and trees around in the old graveyard. If the ivy ever existed outside of my imagination, it has been tidied away. The beads around the hands of the mythical purity of the Virgin were woven into decades of joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries. In the litany of attributes accompanying the rosary, Mary is also Queen of heaven. The echo of Queen of Heaven in the grotto-cave joins with the Ulster icon of the Queen of England. She appeared on a silverplated coronation teaspoon in 1952 which we used in the good sugar bowl for decades. Her icon appeared also on other shelves or walls in Ulster accompanied by King William on his white horse on cups and saucers, tea towels and 12^th July banners of the mystical rose. Rosaries with the image of flowers and thorns offer comfort in the commemorations of the dead from Roman times.  Is the Irish Catholic rosary a link to the times before the Judeo-Christian God when the rose represented the Greek Goddess Aphrodite with the thorns drawing the red blood of the gods to earth?

Death in the grotto

In the last century when the mother of God was celebrated in every small community in Ireland with such a grotto it was a place where miracles murmured the search for salvation. In 1984, the death of the fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett prostrate in front of such a grotto with the dead body of her child, inspired a spirit of resistance in Ireland. The response to the death of Ann Lovett broke the silences of many Irish women who had babies “outside wedlock”. In an article in the Irish Times in 2017, Roisin Ingle acknowledges Ann Lovett’s death marked turning point in Irish culture.  She quotes Gay Byrne, an Irish radio and Television Icon, who received letters, which tell true stories which no fiction or re-enactment can begin to express #roisiningle. The letter writers thank Ann Lovett for giving them the courage to express what they have kept secret. “Her sacrifice was not in vain, is their point.”

Later in Ireland in 1984 came the Kerry babies’ scandal where a young woman was browbeaten into confession of a murder she hadn’t committed. Did she feel guilty about a hidden miscarriage from her relationship with a married man? These young women were declarations of resistance to the hypocrisy endemic in Irish society from what Anne Enright describes as “the community of the hurt” where everyone lived secretly and silently. (Article on Nuala O’Faolain in Irish Times 13/08/2022. Can they give us the courage to face the secrets, silences and hypocrisies of to-day?

Parallel worlds

In the 1980’s I lived in a parallel world in England. Troubled by the continued sectarian conflict in Ulster after I left Belfast, I diverted my energies to children’s rights, feminism and gay liberation. I danced to Siouxsie and the Banshees to help me shed my Catholic guilt. Siouxsie sang to my  memories of the parish priest who rode the altar issuing forth hot spittle while railing against courting couples in the hedgerow. Siouxie’s version of Icon rattled him from memory into resistance to Thatcher’s homophobic laws.

Icons – feed the fires

Icons – falling from the spires

Those words hang like vicious spittle

Dribbling from that tongue

Close your eyes to your lies

Force feed more pious meat

Moving Statues

In 1985, the year following Anne Lovett’s martyrdom, mass hysteria about moving statues of the Virgin Mary erupted. In Manchester, I watched bemused English newsreaders on BBC as Grottos in rural Ireland spun onto our TV screens or I observed Gay Byrne’s careful tone on RTE on a visit home to Strabane, reinforcing my horror at the battle ahead for Irish feminists. Our Lady didn’t appear around the border or in the UK. Her nearest apparition to Ulster was in Sligo. Ireland has a small population and it is easy to meet someone who knows someone you know but I have yet to speak to one of the 20000 people who flocked down country roads to rural grottos which dot the countryside of Ireland to view these apparitions. Yet the sincerity of the teenagers on YouTube videos of that time is palpable. Rural grottos with stone and ivy and greenery, lit by the moon can still churn up those childhood emotions where miracles might happen to save us from ourselves. If kinetic energy can create the apparitions people saw and shared with thousands of others, could we make better use of such energy?

The Angel Guardian failed us

Was the mass hysteria of the moving statures in 1985 a reaction to the parallel worlds in the Irish Catholic Free State? It does seem a mighty coincidence that the apparitions of the Queen of heaven were in the year following Ann Lovett’s death in the grotto and the Kerry babies scandal. In rural Ireland after the formation of the Irish state, peasants dreamt of salvation while  Archbishop Mc Quaid silenced critics, bought shares in Irish companies and had tea with Dev Valera. The unemployed joined England’s working class. We had not yet faced the public scandals of child abuse or Magdalen laundries but the contradictions and connections lived with spirits in the grottos. Were these apparitions a reaction to the festering boils of abuse of women and children in Catholic Ireland?

In the Irish parallel world of the 1980’s, hypocrisy was still alive and well. In my childhood, the Angel Guardian, was “my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen’. He also guided the Irish government to replace bogs with cash crop pine and businessmen to lay the foundations for the Angels lap-dancing club which later emerged in Dublin. When blood-sucking vampires were facing a decline in virgins, the icon of Dracula could hover between Sligo and Clontarf ready to make it with a hundred thousand welcomes into the tourist business and The stories of the many Ann Lovetts and their peers are now part of the silent history of grandmothers and great-aunts.

21^st century Icons

In this century there has been a dramatic shift in the quantity of Icons and Idols which flash onto our screens. When I was a child the few available were saints, actors on a small TV screen or cinema, characters in books from the library, political leaders like James Connolly or John F Kennedy. Now the constant barrage of media images shout wealth and celebrity as a potential goal for everyone if you can get the clicks. The stereotypical Idol of to-day is more likely to be a member of the Kardashian family than the Virgin mother in the Grotto, Nelson Mandela or Che Guevarra. The Kardashian reality reflects how exposure of the vulnerability in sex and gender, including Trans identity, can be incorporated into the badge of power-celebrity while discrimination continues in the parallel everyday reality of LBGTQ+.

Does the silent history of gender inequality hold any lessons for the present and future? Was the human sacrifice of Ann Lovett in a grotto in Longford in vain? When Candy Warhol explores what makes a queer icon, she describes how gays are inspired by icons like Judy Garland who died at 47 in 1969 because “their story, their struggle, their journey” has a “bittersweet mix of glamour and tragedy.”  (Article on Dublin Fringe Festival 2022 @gcn @candywarholqueen). “Think The Wizard of Oz meets Thelma and Louise” she says.

Do we need icons and idols to help us tell our story and recreate our human nature on the planet? Can icons play a positive role in resistance?