Nestled among the elegant Georgian townhouses of Dublin’s North Great George’s Street, the creeper-clad No 15, with a faded red front door, doesn’t have the designer color schemes of some of its neighbours.
And the unpolished brass plaque that reads ‘Unity House’ gives no real indication of the owners’ identities.
But if you look at the somewhat gaudy nameplate, you’ll see ‘FFWPU: Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, UPF Ireland, Universal Peace Foundation, WFWP Ireland: Women’s Federation for World Peace and Heavenly Parent’s Holy Community’.
You look at the Irish headquarters of what used to be called ‘The Moonies’.
For some it is a dangerous religious sect, for others a harmless organization.
Regardless, it appears to have migrated from the secular streets of Dublin to the more fertile fields of Armagh and Derry, where it promises to hold ‘peace marches’ later in the year – though it’s questionable whether either city has more marches needs point.
The polite young man who opens the door a few minutes after I ring the bell seems surprised at my presence, and I don’t really blame him.
I tell him that the murder of ex-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by a disgruntled man—whose mother abandoned him as a child to join The Moonies—has sparked a renewed interest in the cult.
Killer of ex-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe throws away gun as police confiscate him
He seems somewhat baffled by the connection to the Japanese murder and explains that he was just having lunch when the doorbell rang and he can’t help me.
He took my details and said he would pass my message on to ‘the director’ – whoever that may be.
In the last decades of the 20th century, Ireland was outwardly a good God-fearing Catholic country, where the people were given moral guidance by the bishops and priests who wanted “a Catholic land for a Catholic people.”
Today “cults” don’t mean as much as they did, if they mean anything at all.
Before birth control, divorce, same-sex marriage, and the liberal agenda, Catholic matrons feared that their sons and daughters could be plucked off the streets at any moment — and wound up in strange clothes, their heads filled with misguided Eastern mysticism, or the teachings of the Korean-born Sun Myung Moon.
The Family Federation for World Peace, also known as the Unification Church, also known as The Moonies, was just one of the “cults” that upset the balance of the country’s well-ordered Catholic ethos.
The Atlantis Commune in Burtonport, Co Donegal
One of the lesser known, but equally feared, was the Church of Scientology, whose long-suffering but persistent followers stood for years on Middle Abbey Street, trying to recruit members; the Hare Krishna, in their saffron robes and bells, dancing down O’Connell Street; and the respectable Mormons of the Church of Latter-day Saints (men) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (women), who passed their days door-to-door in the suburbs, earnestly trying to explain their creed before the doors were unceremoniously opened. in their shining faces.
Then there was the really fascinating crew of The Atlantis Commune in Burtonport, Co Donegal; and on a boat off the coast of Baltimore in West Cork, the Blue Marys—who got their name from their long blue garments; and then there were sad little communities, like the Plymouth Brethren and Mennonites, who carved out a living in remote, untraveled boreens.
This is, of course, to ignore the various ‘cults’ within the established churches – such as Opus Dei, the Palmarians, the House of Prayer, the Knights of St Columbanus (who supposedly had tentacles to the heart of Leinster House and RTE), and its Protestant counterpart, the Freemasons.
It all seems strange and rather remote. In Ireland, where religion is an obsession rather than a practice, no one can come up with much to harm cults.
While there is a website called Dialogue Ireland that remains intrigued that Albert Reynolds ever attended a Moonie conference.
As someone who knew that former Taoiseach, I can say that Mr Reynolds and his wife Kathleen were both good Irish Catholics who attended Mass – and when Albert attended such a conference, a few bobs were involved and an expense allowance was made to some exotic location where he could enjoy a bit of sun.
In Ireland, religion is an obsession rather than a practice
In the 1980s, The Moonies were a source of headlines.
“This church is anti-intellectual, anti-women, anti-child and anti-family,” schoolmaster Casey McCann wrote to the Sunday Independentafter Mary Kenny interviewed a member of The Moonies to “get the other side of the story”.
There was “riot” in UCD in 1982, when Bob Duffy, described as “head” of the Unification Church, addressed the Literary & Historical Society, where he was hissed and booed after telling students that “love is central” in her teaching and so is “beauty, truth and fulfillment.”
Since then, the Unification Church has gone largely unnoticed, and it’s hard to find out much about it on its website — other than that it plans to take part in peace marches.
Whether it has financial strength, or owns the property on North Great George’s Street, is hard to say, though it’s been there since the 1990s.
But what cults lacked in power or prestige, they made up for with lurid headlines, and they came no more exciting than The Atlantis Commune – known as ‘The Screamers’, for their practice of the power of primordial scream therapy, which echoed disturbingly around the gaunt house that they lived near Burtonport.
Led by Jenny James, this group arrived in Donegal in 1974 to escape the outside world – only to become part of the folklore of rural Ireland.
“The commune dwellers are, in the popular expression, dropouts from society – partly because they have found society pathetically short and more than a little hypocritical and unreal,” wrote Michael Finlan in the Irish Times in 1977.
They eventually moved to Inishfree, a small island off the coast of Donegal in 1980, before encamping in Columbia in South America.
There, in the year 2000, Jenny James’ grandson Tristan (18) and his friend Javier Nova (19) were captured and brutally murdered in front of local villagers by drunken FARC guerrillas.
Fortunately, the Servants of Love, known as the Blue Marys, are still around and have been seen regularly in Wicklow since 1990.
They lead a full-time monastic life of discipline and chastity while remaining in the Catholic Church, and run their own business center near Wicklow Harbour.
Whatever it is with cults, you don’t miss them until they’re gone.