Paul Malpas

Just a quick trawl through the papers, in this week prior to Christmas, shows us that everything is not right with this Island of Ireland.

1.  The favourite topic of conversation at the moment is the discussion on when will we all go on strike and who will be the first.  Each Union is vying for this privilege.  The selfishness is unbelievable.  My guess is that everyone is that skint that nobody will strike.

2.  Property developer, Bernard McNamara has been ordered by the courts to personally pay back €62.5million on the foot of a personal guarantee that was injudicious even in 2006 and his company, Donatex, has to pay back €98million to investors in the purchase of The Irish Glass Bottle Plant site at Ringsend,which was bought in that year for€412million and is now worth €60million.  It is time that these irresponsible eejits were made to pay, but I would suggest that it will be a long road before this €160.5million sees the light of day.  First Carroll, now McNamara, who will be roasted in the New Year.  The bishops, the bankers, the government, the developers, we will be spoiled for choice as we wallow in our penury.

3.  A 35 year old man from Listowel, shown up on video cameras, is found guilty of sexual abuse of a young woman. Whilst waiting for the judge to deliver sentence, about 50 mature men rushed forward in court and tried to shake the guilty man’s hand and show their allegiance and the local parish priest, Fr Sheehy, told the court what a fine young man he was and lauded his virtue.  It all smacked of an orchestrated attempt to pervert the course of justice.  The young woman underwent a series of abuse from the townfolk.  Shame on small town Ireland and Listowel in particular. Praise on the Bishop of Kerry for immediately seeking the resignation of the priest.  No doubt they will give him a few bob and find a new place for him,  Let us hope not.

4.  At the same time a man was found guilty in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin for raping and orally raping his daughter who was 7 years old when this abuse started.  His ex-employer stood up and said he was “a first class man” and his recent partner said he was “honest, salt of the earth, very reliable and my best friend”.  Why do the Courts of Ireland continue with this crass character reference type of injustice.  Politicians and priests galore have been shot down in flames over the years for this old fashioned rubbish.

5.  The St Vicent de Paul Society, Ireland’s premier charity of last resort cannot cope with the demands on its resources this Christmas.

6.  Cardinal Connell, the last supremo in the Dublin Archdiocese and the main culprit in the abuse cover up campaign by the hierarchy, is in hiding in his palace in Glasnevin and remains mute whilst his Church is falling apart around him. Archbishop Martin, his sucessor, whilst verbally hardening his stance with the Auxilliary Bishops who refuse to budge, and are being threatened with the might of Rome, will not have a word said of Connell, who is soaking up the spare cash of the Archdiocese with his entourage in the Dead Centre.  Read John Conney’s article on Cardinal Connell of 16 December 2009 for a great bit of fighting journalism.  Meanwhile the said bishops are fighting all the way.  How can so called learned men not realize the horror of their ways.  It would be the subject of next years Christmas pantomime if it were not so bloody sad and disgusting.

7.  Liam Adams, Gerry Adams’s brother, is wanted by the Police Force of Northern Ireland for the alleged systematic rape of his daughter for a period of five years from 1978-1983.  Gerry Adams has known all about this for the last 20 years and his now telling his brother to give himself up, Gerry has also revealed that his father also sexually abused some of his sisters.

8.  A 30 year old man in Enniskillen has been arrested for the sexual abuse and murder of the 15 month old daughter of his partner.

9.  A man in Limerick, driving whilst intoxicated, went through a roadblock at the scene of an accident at speed and killed a guarda and a fireman who were marshalling traffic.  The only offence the Department of Public Prosecution could come up with was drinking and driving.

God help us.  Let us hope these last few days before Christmas gives us a reason for living.

A very, very tentative happy Christmas to you all.

In  Blogging On submitted on 9 December 2009,  I explained that I initially persuaded myself I was doing this blogging to better my ability on the computer  and improve my writing skills, in as much as the discipline of churning out 1000 words plus almost daily would help me with construction and quality and also help  form a personalised style of writing.  My computer skills have not improved, I cannot fight my way out of a paper bag when it comes to using the tools provided on the screen,  because it relies on memory and has you go down the hill on the other side of life that particular gift of immediate memory becomes lost.  However I have now relaxed into a particular style; I suppose one could say it was light, emotional, cynical and humerous.  I have also conquered,  for the time being,  the discipline of writing 1000 words every day on whatever topic comes to mind.  At the moment, after 21 or 22 of these blogs,  I am not stuck for a subject, in that regard my religion has helped me considerably.  The quality of my writing is to subjective for me to consider, however practice must improve it, practice and reading.  The more you read the better to analyse the skills of the writer.  So I do both and hopefully will improve.  I do not, of course, aspire to be as good as my favourite wordsmith, the late John McGahern, who could paint a wonderful scene in a 100 words, which would take me 400 to write badly and never of course within a million miles of the quality of the Leitrim master.  As regards construction some blogs just fly off the pen and at the end make reasonable sense, whilst others have to have an amount of planning and prethinking.  I suppose it depends on the emotion and knowledge required as to how well the piece is fabricated.

All this daydreaming came about because yesterday evening I met a friend for a pint and a gossip and immediately he started buttering me up and telling me how much he enjoyed reading my journal and how he wished he could write because his head was bursting with ideas and thoughts he needed to relay.  Thoughts  I have noticed that have raised people’s ire sometimes, ill-considered and possibly immature, the truth perhaps, but often enough the truth is too direct for some.  Writing it all down gives you a buffer zone in which to consider the ill-considered.

I told him he was the ideal candidate, start blogging, spit it out, get people on their toes, make ‘em think.  He is in an occupation where something differs every five minutes, he would never be stuck for a subject.  He said no.  The thoughts in his head easily come to his tongue but not his pen.  I told him to relax, consider and slowly write it down, re-read and edit if he needed to, as it will have more power in the end.  But he still said no, he was worried about his spelling, his punctuation, his words, his only basic education.  In truth he lacked confidence.  So I think high up on the scale of things a writer needs confidence, besides the technical skills discussed.  Confidence to sit down alone, understand what you are thinking and put it down in a way that makes sense and you just hope somebody picks it up.

So all you people out there who care and get exasperated with the happenings of the world, get writing, the skills might or might not come but at least it is ordering your mind.

By the way, why is it that when you are your own editor you can read your own stuff 100 times and see that an improving change is needed every time.  It reminds me of trying to sharpen a knife that has lost its edge, it will always be blunt.  Whereas McGahern used to re-read, edit and rewrite 50 or 60 times before he was satisfied.  The difference being that every time he re-wrote, he improved the text until he eventually turned out a jewel.

I was born in a suburb of Manchester called Longsight.  Three miles from the city centre, a halfway house, neither inner city deprivation or outer suburban splendour.  A place one came to, to escape the former and aspire to the latter.  Immediately after the 2nd world war it was nearly 100% English in its population, but that changed very quickly.

The war’s aftermath wrought many changes.  Lots of houses with no man, only women and children, the man either dead or strayed. Which resulted in a rise of lodging houses to cater for the single and not so single men travelling around looking for work, men who had been either soldiers or fully employed during the war.  The Irish families started moving in to the area, men who had immigrated during the thirties and had been in good employment as Bevan Boys or on government construction sites during the war and were now raising families.  Slowly also a few Italians, Maltese, Germans and West Indians started to drift in, who because of the war had been washed upon England’s shores.  Once the first wave of Irish settled, they attracted more of their own from the inner suburbs and soon they were rivalling the English in terms of population.

They were obvious for their vigour and zest for life.  the English had been flattened by the war, the Irish had been earning a reasonably good living and had not been ground down.  They had also escaped De Valera and his insular policies and the cloying grasp the Catholic Church had on its congregation.  They liked the freedoms, they flourished and so did the Church.  New churches were being built in all the suburbs financed by the impecunious English and the vim and determination of the Irish.

Into this burgeoning atmosphere I was born and reared, the eldest of three sons, of an English farmer’s son and an Irishman’s daughter.  For us also Longsight was a half-way house although my parents lived in the area all their married lives, moving from modest Duncan Road to the opulence of Birchfields Road in the space of 20 years.

For me , my life and thoughts were formed in Duncan Road, a long wide road split by the three main roads of the district.  Slade Lane to the east, Hamilton Road in the centre and Beresford Road to the west.  The east end of the road was a mixture of early, mid and late Victorian terraced houses, one of which was ours, to the west the houses were Edwardian terraces.  Looking at them now, you wonder how families managed in them, they were that small.  The Irish with their larger broods were taking the bigger houses on the three main roads, the English with their smaller families and wage packets were contented with the smaller houses.

I do not think it can be stressed enough the burden that was put on the English population during the war.  It had worn them out, family values had been eroded and I think they wondered whether it had all been worth it.  In a lot of ways the Irish were fresher and certainly fitter to take on the rejuvenation of the country.

My mother’s family had escaped death when a landmine dropped from an Heinkel bomber had killed 45 of their neighbours and destroyed their home on Christmas Eve 1940 and this was their chance and they escaped to Longsight and a better life.  My father used to  large farmhouse living and having spent the war in a reserved occupation, working long hours on the development of the newly invented radar system, was totally deflated.  This then was my inheritance, my mother’s enthusiasm for life and my father thinking at 27 that his best years were behind him.

My mother worked occasionally, when there was work about and her father a retired stoker from Ballinamore Bridge in East Galway did more than his share of looking after us kids during the school dinner break and after school.  This man helped greatly in forming my character,  he deserves a blog to himself.  Let it just be said for now that I thought the world of him.  He had been born in 1874 and sometime in the 1890s had left Galway and settled in Manchester, eventually gaining regular and full time employment with the Manchester Gas Company for whom he worked until retirement 38 years later in 1939.  He married a Manchester girl of Laois and Kildare parents at the fashionably late age of 44 in 1919 and they had their first children, twins, in July 1922.

In Manchester, in this period after the First World War, there was a great deal of civil unrest brought on by Michael Collins and his mates in Dublin.  To the north of the city along Oldham and Rochdale Roads and along Stretford Road to the west, the police could hardly control the political foment.  Manchester was a channel, formed by friends of Eamonn Boland, Collins’s compadre, through which arms and ammunition were smuggled into IRA hands in Dublin.  One of the blackguards who supplied this channel was the son of a cousin of my grandmother’s Eddie Lenihan.  Eddie was receiving these weapons from his many contacts and while he waited to pass them into the chain, he stored them temporarily at his mother’s house.  His mother naturally was worried sick and called on my grandmother, who was in the throes of marriage to help her somehow.  Mrs Lenihan’s husband, serving in the Irish Guards, had been killed at Loos in 1915 and she had nobody to turn to in trying to save her errant son. Into the lining of their long coats, which women wore in those days, they stitched as many guns as they could and set off walking from Ardwick to Northenden, then a rustic village to the south of Manchester, about five miles away on the south bank of the River  Mersey.  At the bridge over the river,  ran Palatine Road and it was here the two ladies stopped and unstitched the guns and threw them into the muddy waters  and then mightily relieved, made their way home.  I do not think for one minute did this stop Eddie’s gallop, but his feelings are not on the family record.  My mother must have been told this story many times as she grew up for it made a big impression on her young and enthusiastic soul.

During the school holidays and if she was not working, she used to take us on bus trips all over Manchester and mainly the Manchester she knew as a child.  Miles Platting, Newton Heath, Collyhurst,  Ancoats,  Ardwick and completely in the other direction. Styal Woods!  I knew Manchester intimately before I was ten years old.  We did the Styal Woods trip five or six times, I cannot remember now it being nearly 60 years ago but the trips are indelibly etched into my memory.

To get the bus to Styal, we had to walk one and a half miles , to the Birch Villa, a pub in  Rusholme, on Wilmslow Road and wait for its hourly arrival.  Off the bus went, down Wilmslow Road, through Fallowfield, Withington and Didsbury. along Palatine Road into Northenden and points south.  We always used to get off the bus outside Northenden Golf Club and cross the road onto the bridge and look into the muddy waters, whilst my mother related the happenings of thirty years previously.  We never moaned or groaned but after a while of looking into these murky depths,  we crossed the road and waited for the next bus an hour later.  Of this dutiful sons are made.

The follow up to this story is that after another interval of 30 years, I was involved in the demolition industry in Manchester, when it was decided to demolish the old bridge at Northenden and replace with new.  I priced this tender in full knowledge of my family’s past and chequered, I was going to get the job and find the guns.  I priced to do it for next to nothing, we came second or third, the opportunity was lost.  Obviously more than two women in Manchester had a gun up their sleeve all those years ago.

I hope you do not mind two blogs in a day but I might be busy tomorrow.

Sorry to appear like a dog with a bone but that Naughton case yesterday has me amazed.  One of the terrible things that came out of this case of a Catholic priest returning for sentencing for his second conviction for paedophilia is  the length of time it takes to squeeze the facts out of the reluctant Church.  This time we are talking of 26 years ago and every ping of a button and rasp of a zip recorded and annotated.  The other mind benders are and I list them in no particular order:-

1.  Naughton could not remember the then six year old boy he had sexually assaulted at least 70 times in 19 months.  There must have been that many, to him it was no different than breakfast.

2.  The victim has attempted suicide twice and he is now a sex addict suffering from post traumatic stress and depression and believes he can never have a normal lasting relationship with a woman.

3.  The victim’s father told the parish priest that Naughton had to leave town (Blessington that is).  He was moved one week later to Dublin where he continued his roaming. This seems to be a case of nimbyism at its most extreme.

4.  The judge noted that Naughton was of the “highest standing in society, had the respect of society and had the confidence of society” before giving him two years for his heinous crimes and also ordered him to enter into a bond of €200 to keep the peace after his release.  So he does not expect him to die inside. The judge must have been left behind by Armstrong and Co after their moonwalk in the sixties.

5.  Naughton, when asked if he had anything to say to his victims said “No, nothing”.  He obviously suffers no remorse, which makes his case  and the church’s case untenable.

6.  Diarmuid Martin, the mumbling Archbishop said “I hope those involved in the proceedings will find some solace and justice in his having to serve a jail sentence for his crimes”  What justice!  Does two years in nick equate to hanging for a Catholic priest.

7.  Naughton has had more than 20 complaints of child abuse levelled against him.  Four alter boys in Donneycarney and one in Blessington.  15 more to go.  We could be entertained for years to come if only the poor blighter can keep his pecker up.  There are probably 100s more that have not yet surfaced.

8.  He spent ten years plus in Africa and the West Indies where he is suspected of doing similar.

9.  The first recorded complaint was in 1983.

10.  Bishop Murray, who thankfully is on his way out, failed to tell the psychiatrist treating Naughton of any previous accusations and that indeed Naughton was a “reluctant participant” in the therapy.

11.  The number of parishes he worked in from 1976-1999 are still being examined but it seems he was one of these ping pong balls being continually batted across the net in front of various complaints.  This was not one moment of  aberrant behaviour by the bishops.  It was designed Church policy from the top.

12.  A number of people have settled civil claims against him rather than bring him to a criminal court, presumably with the connivance of the Church, one man from Ringsend, a particularly cruelly named district given the circumstances, being awarded over €400,000.

13.  Naughton however is still a priest of the Archdiocese.  The moral is obvious:-

A MASS A DAY AND ROGER AWAY.

However there is some light in the distance.  Bishop Murray of Limerick has gone.  It was he who allowed Naughton to circumnavigate the archdiocese.  Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field look as though they are on their way.  All presumably with their pockets full of gold and given a comfortable place to live which is denied to a lot of us god fearing folk.  Moriarty and Drennan hopefully will be next.  Which leaves us with six more that I mentioned in my Once a Catholic piece on 7 December 2009 Archbishop Desmond Connell and Bshops William Walsh, Dermot O’Mahoney, Brendan Comiskey, Fiachre O’Ceallaigh and Lawrence Foristal.   They all said in a statement on December 10 2009 that they were shamed by the statement that child abuse was covered up but that individually they claim to have done no wrong.  Let not one of them escape.

How can we not accept the fact that the Catholic Church is rotten to its very core.

Can I thank Edil Kennedy of the Indo for the dutiful and full account of the sentencing procedure yesterday.