"I just haven't come across all these "brainwashed" people you people talk about."
My family lived in awe, and often in fear of the clergy - my mother constantly admitted it, my father's fear was replaced by contempt when he witnessed their behaviour in one of Franco's prisons.
He described how, as a prisoner during the Spanish Civil war, he was taken out and placed before a firing squad one morning.
Last rites were administered by the pries, and the executioners lined up and aimed their rifles - they all then fell about laughing at the fact he'd pissed himself.
The procedure was repeated at irregular intervals during his 18 months as a POW.   
My aunt and uncle spent their lives working with those trying to bring peace and civil rights to Ireland, I always admired their work and dedication, and the suffering they had experienced when they were forced to flee their burning home in Derry in the 1950s.
I visited them in their home near Ballymun, in Dublin some years before they died and was appalled to see their obsequious and fearful attitude towards their priest neighbour, even though the church had been one of the great opponents of their beliefs throughout their lives
"Give me a child for its first seven years..." indeed
Thankfully, the effects of brainwashing are rapidly disappearing from Ireland today, but it has taken horrific revelation of generations of church implicated abuse to exorcise them.
Jim Carroll