Paul Malpas

For my secondary education in Manchester I went to St. Bede’s College, the Premier League for all Catholic boys, having first of all passed my 11+ examination and attended an interview with Monsignor Thomas Duggan, the Rector of the College.  It was a school run by priests with a good % of lay teachers.  Its old boys were famed throughout the colonial world, mainly clerics but scores of lawyers, architects and engineers.  The Qui Ante Nos column of the Baeda, the school magazine, oozed class and distinction.  However we Baby Boomers as we were called, those that had sprung from exuberant couplings after Hitler’s downfall, we Baby Boomers were a different kettle of fish, claimed mainly from the backstreets of Manchester.  We were cynics first and scholars last.

However the College counteracted this subversiveness by appointing Father John Rigby – Jack to us – as Prefect of Discipline.  A man who excelled at sport, particularly rugby and boxing, stood about 6′ 1” in his stocking feet and had a nose to prove his extramural activity.  His main purpose was to collect the dinner money and thrash us pupils as diligently as the law would allow.  A nice man but with too much energy and vigour.  He used to have one day a week off, I presume for weight training, skipping and a little bag work.  On that day off, Fr. Groarke – Tojo to us – would assume the task of punishment.  Now Tojo, called that because of his nipponic feature, was not a strong man, rumour had it that he had grown to resemble an oriental having been incarcerated for four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp after the fall of Singapore.  He was that weakened by that experience, that even a dozen years later, he could barely lift his right arm when the weight of the strap was added.  The strap, to the uninitiated, was a piece of leather about 450mm long and 50mm wide and about 6mm thick, attractively embroidered at one end to stop it sliding out of the floggers hand.

So Jack was to be feared and we malefactors used to queue up outside Tojo’s door on his day on duty with our disciplinary notes in hand, these had to be signed by Tojo once punishment had been given and taken back to the teacher who had been put out by our unruly behaviour.  Tojo would strap away all afternoon or as long as his strength lasted but with little effect, he had a kind of swedish massage of a stroke.  After a while this subterfuge was noted and the rules altered and we had to return these notes within 24 hours of issue.  We then had to line up outside Jack’s study to await his return from lunch.  Steak and a butcher’s dog come to mind.  The trick was to be at the head of the queue because after the first five or six boys had been punished Jack was only just getting into his stride.  After a few minutes of this violent exercise, his timing and strap action was second to none, he could have strapped for England.

All we old stagers carried a bottle of methylated spirits in our bags.  The coolness of this spirit helped to sooth the fire emanating from our palms.  Unfortunately the hand and fingers were in no state to unscrew the cap from the bottle, so an attendant friend used to open it and pour the liquid out.  The stairs leading down from Jack’s study on the first floor smelt like an oil refinery.

It has to be said, we were an uncouth lot, tempered by the spirituality of the boarders, those boys who were training for the priesthood.  The College was a conveyor belt for this activity but even in my time so very few lasted the course, driven out by a change in their vocation or possibly by a thrust from the wrong direction.  Why lock these boys up at 11 years of age and try to make them rounded individuals by 23 years old, after 12 years of captivity you must be a mess.

A close friend of mine throughout school was a lad from a neighbouring parish and of Kerry extraction.  His name is not necessary, we will call him M.  He was brilliant, every subject came to him so easily, without any study he would be at the top of most subjects.  His drawing was excellent and he was always producing cartoons of the staff and pupils.  However discipline was not his forte.  He was always in trouble and he would have been weeded out except that his brilliance outweighed his misdemeanour and the authorities thought they could change his troublesome ways.  Even my father tried to steer me away from his influence but to no avail.  His knowledge of American blues singers like Billy Leadbetter or Leadbelly as he was known, was overpowering and we used to sit listening to his scratchy records and planning ferment.

The teachers at the school in the main were blase about their subjects, faced with such quality their job was easy, they just churned it out.  The difference was that we boys born after the war were imbued with a different spirit to those born before.  They knuckled down and accepted disciplinary procedures, we for some reason could not, we questioned everything, therefore 80% to 90% of the teaching staff failed us.  Only the young teachers succeeded and there was not many of those.  The one outstanding teacher, who matched us wit for wit, was a fellow called Anthony Martin – Spike to us – he had spotted the post war rebelliousness and moulded his English classes to suit, getting us to read Waugh, Orwell, Huxley, Steinbeck, Amis, Dunleavy et al from a young age using them as an add on to our boring set books.  He remains one of my greatest influences.

The antithesis to Spike was the College Rector, Monsignor Thomas Duggan,.  Here was a man to despise.  dressed in his black and scarlet robes, he stalked the College, dispossessed of humour, amity, or christianity.  His eyebrows did most of the talking.  He was the last resort as regards school discipline.  If teachers thought that a particular boy had transgressed to such a degree, where even Jack Rigby’s physicality would not prevail, he was sent with a note to the Rector.  M was such a boy, aged 14.

The meeting had to be booked in advance and I give here M’s account of what happened, it is virtually verbatim and ties in with the boys who suffered similar fates, so it is not the made up ramblings of some miserable woebegone. He told me these details early one evening about ten years later.  At the time he gave only bare details and we all laughed it off as just one of those things.  As he told it he stumbled over words and you could see the pain and anguish that was within.

“I knocked on his door and waited his bidding.  I entered and there was Duggan sitting in an armchair at the end of the room. I was told to stand in front of him and drop my trousers and underpants.  He looked at me as I stood naked for some time and told me how naughty I had been and that I had to take my punishment like a man.  He told me to lie across his knees and he gently caressed my raised arse.  He took a leather strap from a side table he hit me across the buttocks about six times.  After each stroke he again caressed my arse sticking his fingers deep into the rear of my crotch.  There was minutes between each stroke, I was terrified.  The whole affair took about 20 minutes and then he told me to stand up, put on my trousers and go.  He never got up from his chair and I stumbled out in tears, not from pain but it did hurt but I cried from embarrassment.”

Nothing was mentioned, nothing was said.  The staff must have known and condoned.  How did this punishment fit the crime.  I suppose everyone who metes out punishment needs gratification in different ways.  M certainly did not go back for more, but as brilliant as he was at his various subjects he was eventually pushed out of school like a used rag, never rose above labouring jobs, a tenuous marriage and drug misuse.  He died aged about 57 in a drug den in Gorton.  You just wonder how much his ignominious treatment at Duggan’s hands had to do with his decline and eventual fall.

It is obvious that the Church in Ireland as an Institution is in turmoil, with bishop turning on bishop, like wild cats in the jungle.  Yesterday the retired O’Mahoney retaliated against Archbishop Martin by having their personal correspondence printed out in the Irish Catholic  newspaper.  The thrust of his argument is that the Murphy Report is flawed and that the priests in the Dublin Archdiocese should start to question its findings and that he is dismayed that Martin did not support his priests.  This was after O’Mahoney was  asked to step down from various duties by the Archbishop whilst he considered his position after being severely criticized by the Report.

Two things stood out in this defence of his own actions.  Firstly he said that Archbishop Martin’s letter was the harshest communication he had ever received during his 50 year priesthood.  All I can say is that harsh deeds demand harsh words.  I think everyone in the known world has now accepted the cold fact that there was wholesale abuse of young children by catholic priests in this archdiocese.  O’Mahoney a;lso said that Archbishop Martin had been 31 years out of the diocese and he had no idea how traumatic it was for the priests that were there dealing with the abuse allegations without protocols to work to.  This piece of nonsense can be easily refuted by the fact that child sexual abuse was a crime 30 years ago and is still a crime today.  What protocols are necessary?

These denials and O’Mahony’s need to give his totally fragile defence to the press shows how bad a state the hierarchy’s thinking is in and how necessary it is for them all to go immediately.  Let the Church start again under Archbishop Martin’s leadership and let’s cut the crap.  O’Mahoney and Drennan today, Murray, Walsh, Field and Moriarty already back in the pavilion.  Only Willie Walsh who is going, Comiskey, O’Ceallaigh and Foristal to come, plus the last man Connell who should be promoted up the order and be dismissed as quickly as possible.  His record is attrocious.  That will do for a start in Dublin, but then there are another 25 dioceses to go, with Raphoe being a good place to start.  There was a lot of table tennis played in Donegal.

As Dublin tears itself apart, England looks as though it is going the same way, with the startling evidence coming out of the Iraq Enquiry, with the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, lying about or at least omitting the positions he held at the time.  Every lawyer in the Foreign Office was against the war and thought it illegal yet Jack ignored this advice and agreed with the Prime Minister Bliar who was hell bent on sucking President Bush’s lollipop.  Jack is now saying he was against the path to war.  The then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who happened to be a flatmate of Bliar’s in their youth was dead against the war and said that it certainly needed a second UN resolution to make it legal, changed his mind at the last minute when faced with Bliar’s obvious enthusiasm for blood.  Bliar must have agreed to pay his next month’s rent.  At the time this decision flew in the face of the advice that all the top international lawyers were giving and in fact caused two of them to resign their positions but it did allow Bliar to join Bush in the desert.  It reminds me of Hitler and his puny excuses for invading bits of Europe in 1938-9.

On top of this the details of Dr. David Kelly’s death and post-mortem have been put on hold for 70 years by Lord Hutton, who led the first and hopelessly inefficient first Iraq enquiry.  You remember Dr. Kelly, the expert on weapons of mass destruction who said that Bliar was sexing up the reports on Sadam Hussein’s weaponry.  He was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood in July 2003, a year or so before the Bliar was baptised into the Catholic Church.  Why if this so called mad scientist committed suicide as the enquiry said, why should the details of his death be kept secret for 70 years?

We have the Bliar in the box today, I wonder how he will live up to his name, because I suggest the Iraqui invasion in 2003 and subsequent death toll lies at the door of this recently baptized catholic and ranks as one of the great international crimes of the modern world, up there with the Holocaust and the Stalinist pogroms of the 1930s.

Cancel your diaries, fix your seats and log onto iraqinquiry.org.uk this morning for a live performance of the Bliar, but do not expect the truth.

I apologise for the non-appearance of this blog yesterday but halfway through its production the gremlins attacked and a score of viruses devoured my computer and caused it to cease.  However help was immediately on hand in the form of Tomas, tel no 0851344431 who came round, discovered the cause, saved what I thought was necessary and took the computer away and returned it four hours later in better than mint condition.  I am seriously happy with his immediate diagnosis, his service and his advice for the future.  He is here at your service in Boyle.  Any problems with your PCs or laptops get in touch and all your worries will disappear.  Thank you Tomas.

When I was writing my blogs Dereliction of Duty on17 January and Small Town Ireland on 7 January 2010 I thought I was the only wronged person in Ireland, now after the article on page 16 of the Independent 23 January 2010 and the Pat Kenny show, The Frontline, on 25 January 2010, both regarding modern estates being left with poor infrastructure by indolent and grasping builders, I now realize I am one of many thousands.  Probably anyone who has bought a new house in the last 15 years qualifies for my status.  We all paid over the top prices for sub-standard goods that we understood the Government, the Local Authorities, the professions and the manufacturer, who because of his need to ensure his abidance by the rules and laws  set out by the first three institutions, would produce reasonably perfect specimens of their type.  All fit for purpose, all ready to last well into the years to come.  Alas and alack.

These sub-standard goods or modern houses, as we tend to call them are littering Ireland and will cause grief to owner and a financial burden for the taxpayers of Ireland for generations to come.  Surely if you buy say a refrigerator from a showroom and it does not work properly, under the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act 1980 you can ask the manufacturer to repair the faults immediately or make the retailer replace it with a similar or a different model of choice to the same financial level.  Why cannot we do this with builders?  Why?, because if we did this there would be no builders left.  So before we waste time and money on builders, let the Banks quickly call in the loans that most of them seem to have, thus ridding this country of  “this vile pestilence”  and then we can attack the Local Authorities and their financial stewards, the Government, who will at the end of the day have to pick up the tab for this shoddy workmanship.  Another catastrophe for Ireland, another 5 cents in the euro rise in income tax, which as the taxpayer is at this moment bailing out the Banks, he will not shirk at putting the builder’s work to rights.  What a superbly fit, flexible and workmanlike person is the taxpayer.  On top of all this there should be a national award given to any builder, engineer and local authority who can prove that they have either built, managed or overseen a modern housing estate to the regulations laid down and with no faults in its infrastructure.  Hens teeth come to mind.

The Pat Kenny show picked up this really massive problem and gathered together a very angry but eloquent audience who were too much for Mr. Finneran, the Fianna Fail, centre half, who it seems, although he was Minister for Housing, had not, in true Fianna Fail style,  prepared himself fully for a subject which must be on the lips of 50% of the country.  In fact he did not seem to think there was a problem and did not really help the discussion.  While I am on about Pat Kenny’s show can I ask why is it when given such a pertinent subject and have assembled for him such an able audience,  does he not let each contributor make their point properly?  He is forever cutting people off in mid sentence or sniggering down the microphone to drown them out, presumably it is because he likes the sound of his own voice better.  To the viewer it is infuriating and it turns the show into a farce.

Hold on a minute! A change of tack.  The postman has just arrived delivering one type written letter, the solitary prize for my endeavours.  It is not addressed or signed, my fan remains anonymous.  I will give it you verbatim:-

Dear Mr. Malpas,

Reading your writings daily leads one to believe you are not happy in yourself and certainly not happy in the town you now live in.

Were you made to live in Boyle?  If not, go back to where you come from and stop slagging off the local builders, solicitors, newspapers, church and the way the Irish live their lifes (sic).  You are not Irish – you’re what we referred to years ago as a “Plastic Paddy”.

Also if you are so upset by the catholic church why are you such a hypocrite and parade to 11.30 mass each Sunday?

People like you are no addition to Boyle or indeed any town in Ireland.

Do us and yourself a favour – Go Home.

The anonymity is a shame because I would like whoever to know that my mass of choice was 9.30am and that I have not attended since driven to write the piece Once a Catholic on 7 December 2009 in the wake of the Murphy Report where the Institution of the Church was held up for what it is, a protectionist of perverted morals and I would never ever demote the Catholic Church to lower case like the writer has done.

Is it not obvious that with a mentality and intelligence that this writer undoubtedly lacks that there are troubles brewing in Ireland, troubles that possibly cannot be controlled.

I would have had a far more rounded view of this fan mail if they had just quoted S. G. Tallentyre’s words which were wrongly attributed to Voltaire.  “I do not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.  Then we would know that this writer had metal.

Keep up the love and support you have for us afflicted ones, and while we are on the subject of Voltaire, this is what he says in Candide,

Si nous ne trouvens pas des choses agreable, nous trouverons du moins des choses nouvelles. Which admirably and hopefully translates as  “If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new”.

And on the subject of nationality, let us all remind ourselves less we forget of that old Irish saying:-

If a cat had kittens in a pigsty they would not be called bonhams

It was about three months ago when I decided to go one step higher on the writing ladder.  For years I had always fancied myself as a writer, but one of poor quality.  I wanted to improve this quality and the only way I knew besides reading quality 24/7 was writing in a disciplined manner on a regular and determined basis. Putting together pieces of writing on various subjects but doing them  almost as a  daily routine and then re-reading and editing to try to ensure an increase in quality.  I was thinking for some time of a diary but that did not really get me to where I wanted to be.  Then I started to read of this comparatively new idea of blogging, which seemed to fulfill all the necessary parameters I had set myself but which I had no idea on how to float.

I heard about this seminar that Mark Attwood, my son-in-law and an internet marketing expert, was holding in Cheshire in mid November 2009.  It was called The Art Of Blogging For Business. As I did not have a clue what blogging entailed I thought that this might be a good start and went along hoping to learn something.  What I got was something else, far above my expectations.  Mark spoke for six hours only broken up by an hour from another really interesting guy and whereas a lot of it was above my head in terms of computer know-how, I grasped enough to make myself decide that this genre was for me.  I listened afterwards to the delegates talking amongst themselves and realized how much these professionals had got out of the day and I decided to take another step forward.  I approached Mark, informed him of my predicament, told him I was computer illiterate almost and surely I would need to go on a course.

“”Nonsense” was the brave words he used, “just do it” he said and he called over one of his associates, Steve Wild, explained my case and within two days I was set up with a blog vehicle on which all I had to do was press a few buttons in a predetermined sequence and hey presto!  A blog.

Initially I was rather scared as I stared at the screen wondering what to write about and 19 words dribbled out of my brain and down my arm onto the blog.  I read, re-read and edited this mighty piece, pressed a button and there it was on the printed page.  How proud was I?  The following day 545 words splattered themselves onto the page and from there it just flowed.  What was a trickle very quickly became a torrent and I saw an increase in quality but I suppose a lot of that could be down to conceit.

However as I wrote I could hear Mark’s words ringing in my ears “do not underestimate the power of the blog, it is a serious tool” but little did I realize that only two weeks into my venture and quickly getting into my stride, I wrote a piece, an innocent piece I thought, and I was inundated with e-mails and comments on my blog page.  A lot of people thought I was libellous, the editor of the local paper, who had the grace to ring me and let me know said she would sue me the next time it happened.  People I had known for years stopped talking to me all because I had written the truth.

This onslaught knocked me back considerably, I had never known anything so immediate and so powerful.  My style suffered as a result and the following days blog output was anodyne to say the least.  However buoyed up by encouragement from various quarters I continued my merry way but in a more watchful and circumspect manner and slowly cranked myself up to my present “tell it as it is” state.  I can honestly say I have never come across a more potent tool of communication than a blog.  I was not prepared for the onslaught although Mark had told me of the weirdos out there.  He had been attacked for months by certain individuals whose only motive was jealousy and whose only aim was disruption and now, don’t I know it, but let us soldier on and f… the begrudgers!

If any reader wants to follow my trail of self immolation, just refer back to my previous blogs on the subject, namely  Blogging On written on 9 December 2009, Keep Writing of the 18 December 2009 and The Importance Of Blogs of the 12 January 2010.  Happy writing, make it good, but do not be vindictive for the sake of it.