Paul Malpas

After the trauma of the recent week ie. the birth of those twin boys, I have found it hard getting back to the mundane. The pen has become heavy in my hand and my brain is struggling to return to its livewire best. Perhaps it was the cocktail of champagne, cider, stout and good old Chilean Carmenere wine that has dulled the mental performance, but today, come what may, I have decided to rid myself of the dilatory rut that I have found myself stuck in.

The news from Manchester this morning is that the twins, although not thriving as well as might be expected, are alert and well and their mother, although exhausted because of the new routine, is confident that they will get the hang of the tap that controls the flow from those mammary reservoirs. My daughter says that one of the delights with feeding twins is that when you have finished with one and turn over to the other, the first scratches your back. On top of that there is a lady coming round this morning who calls herself a Breast Feeding Coordinator from the hospital and she has papers to prove it. She will no doubt add her bosomal delights to the feast that is already at the table, but formula milk is definitely off the menu.

It seems these days that wet nursing is no longer a thing of the past and we know of one 72 year old woman in Hollywood who is still at it and has been plying this honourable trade for the last 42 years with the offspring of filmstars and in the process has made herself millions. She lives in a mansion up in the hills outside Tinseltown and must have paps down to her knees by now. Fair play to the rich and famous for ensuring this profession still exists today in this fast food world we live in.

I went to Manchester last week on hearing the news. I went the old fashioned way, by train and boat and train and was amazed by the ease which everything seamlessly slotted into place. I caught the train from Boyle, walked across the platform at Connolly Station in Dublin and caught the Dart out to Dun Laoghaire, walked across the road to the Stena Line Terminal and walked onto the boat. The same at Holyhead, where we caught the train to Chester, and changed for Manchester in minutes. What amazed me also was the number of passengers who choose this form of travel. Going by car you are cocooned and are not aware of this traditional mode. Although the throng was slightly diluted at Chester, some going north and some south, those of us who made it to the end, struck up a friendship that will take a long time breaking.

I heard one amourous young English lady who seemed attracted to this langourous, tall, thin, cigarette smoking West of Ireland youth, who looked to be coolness personified, “how many pints do you drink when you are out on the tear at weekends”. “I don’t know” was the reply “the same amount as I drink during the week. I’m always pissed when I get home and I can’t remember”. This for chat up lines takes the biscuit and I hope they have a long and loving relationship.

It is a trip worth taking for anyone with the time and it took me on a happy memorial tour of all the chemical and petro-chemical plants of North Wales and East Merseyside where I spent many a pleasurable day in the past. I was recognizing the plants but getting their names mixed up. A sign of old age, I am glad I am where I am.

My first meeting with the twins was memorable, emotional and private but I will at least show you this photograph, which was taken within seconds of me arriving at my daughter’s house. The smile I think is more in anticipation of the cold glass of Weston’s Old Rosie cider that my son-in-law was holding tantalizingly out of reach, while I cuddled the delightful twosome.

Two days later, repleat with joy, I came back to Ireland in Helen’s car and stopped off in Dublin to watch the premiere of my daughter, Paddy Jo’s, performance in Brian Friel’s play “The Yalta Game”. She played the female lead, Anna Sergeyevna, in this adaption of a theme from Anton Chekov’s 1899 short story “The Lady with a Lapdog”. Although I say it myself and I am of course as biased as hell, she was magnificent and I was really proud of her in this her first professional performance after years of making a name for herself at UCD’s Dramsoc. Mark my words, look out for Paddy Jo Malpas in the future, she indeed might need that wetnurse in Hollywood in the years to come.

Please excuse me if I am inaccurate but I am speaking about an unusual subject for me at least, but I do understand logic and after nearly 40 years of marriage I am beginning to understand the courage and emotion that make up the female psyche and I know one thing for certain, women know their own bodies and as vacant as some of them might well be, they understand what is right and wrong for them.  There is another thing that I am certain of, men have not got a clue about the inner workings of a woman’s mind and body.  After years of study and examinations, the murky males who populate the maternity departments of hospitals and call themselves doctors and even worse, gynaecologists and look at women from a different perspective than most of us, have no idea about their patients’ innards and minds than we who admire them on a Saturday night out.

To them a maternity department is a well oiled conveyor belt with all operatives ticking along in unison like those in a car production plant, producing fully formed units every 20 minutes or so.  But this in reality is not the case and drugs and other additives are added to fine tune the system.  But this should not be the case.  Each woman is a unique machine, a Rolls Royce and is hand built to perfection depending on their environmental circumstances.  Each woman is different in a million little nuances; each woman needs empathy, not sympathy and certainly does not need to be patronised.

Most women nowadays understand drugs and their misuse and overuse and consultation and agreement is required, not dismissal and overbearance.  A psychotherapist with no maternity training would make a better maternity doctor than those who have trained for years in obstetrics.  Without a doubt when it comes to producing babies, mind is more important than matter.  Pumping them full of antibiotics and birth inducing drugs, like a cow in the field, is not what the normal woman wants.  Environment and nature is the thing to instil into these maternity mechanics.

On conveyor belts hundreds of things can go wrong.  Take the case of the North Dublin woman, Melissa Redmond, who went for an initial scan on her expectant third child, after a few miscarriages and was told the foetus was dead and the hospital set in motion the machinery to remove the embryo by D&C procedure two days later and gave her an abortion tool and some drugs that would help the operation.  The lady agreed to all this but knew in her own mind that something was wrong.  Her body was telling her different, she knew her own body and everything felt good.  Wisely she went for a second opinion to her G.P. who confirmed to her that her baby was live and well and in fact the bouncing boy was born in March this year.  If she had used the abortion tool or taken the drugs given, prior to presenting herself at hospital that new life would not be..

You might recogniSe the hospital, that conveyor belt to hell, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, famed for Dr Michael Neary’s antics of removing the wombs and ovaries of women as they got out of their cars in the carpark.  To him, no woman was a vital unit until these parasitic organs were cut out.  To read more of this lady’s experiences which was well reported in depth by Fiach Kelly and Breda Heffernan in today’s Independent click here.

I, as a father of six, am well experienced in natural births, long labours (four hours) and short labours (ten minutes), hospital births and home births and I know the most important thing for my wife was environment, nature and absence,  My absence that is, whilst she underwent the joyous and personal effort of birth.  I was obviously welcomed back into the family as soon as the messy bits were cleaned up.

So my daughter, who became pregnant last autumn and was later told she had twins, swore she was going to have her multiple birth at home, like her last child, in peace and harmony and without drugs and insistence and clockwork routine.  She had suffered trauma with her first two births in that den of filth and grime, they called Wythenshawe Hospital, a few years ago.  Let us hope that they have now got their act together.

This time she had independent midwives on call and every thing was progressing well until time stepped in.  Even independent midwives have to send their charges to hospital if they are more than three weeks premature and Katy was 35 weeks gone when she started to have regular contractions yesterday and she reluctantly had to go to Stepping Hill Hospital, where if she had let them, she would have been hooked up to the conveyor belt and pumped with antibiotics.  An institutionalised midwife explained the system and a foreign doctor, who did not have a proper grasp of the language, never mind the mind of the mother, told her she would be endangering the lives of the unborn if she did not enter into the spirit of his system and have steroids administered to the foetuses.

Her husband could see the trauma his wife was in and with the obstinacy only those born in Northampton have, told the doctor to fuck off, which released the tension momentarily.  Katy suffered an adrenalin rush which halted her labour and they came home, exhausted and annoyed.  Her contractions started again this morning and she waited until they were coming thick and fast before submitting herself to an understandable husband’s six mile hair-raising drive to hospital.  An hour later, Tom, her first child was born at 10.05am and as I write between tears, he has already settled on her right breast and we are waiting for the second.  It is important to know that in this case the hospital staff did not have chance to start up the conveyor belt, at least nature if not environment took its course.  My wife telephones me from the ringside and tells me that a doctor in a book she is reading tells that the safest place to have a baby is in the back of a taxi on the way to hospital, to sever the umbilical and tell the driver “home James”.  The phone rings once more with the news that George was born at 10.30am and is settling down well on the left one.   Alleluia! Alleluia!

Mother, father and fourth and fifth born swear to be out of hospital this afternoon.  I wish I was there instead of tapping the keys of this ever devouring machine of mine.  I can hardly see the keys for these last few lines so emotional as this morning become.  Alleluia!

As a post scriptum to this happy occasion the first pictures, as if by miracle have come onto my computer screen.  The two young bucks look like their father and mark my words, they look obstinate buggers.

First of all I would like to apologize to anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis.  I have been very busy and have only managed to squeeze in one blog in the last week.  A cousin of mine died  a week ago, trgically young at 54 years of age and I went over to England last Thursday to a very emotional but lovely funeral.  A funeral is a very necessary and cathartic experience for all that have been  touched by the deceased’s life.  The tentacles of humanity, stretching out and gathering in all those people, who have at some stage  had their spirit lifted by the finished life-force, for one final celebration.  It is happy and sad and necessary and this particular celebration was made all the greater by the beautiful panegyric of the priest, Father Bernard Sparks, a great and longtime friend of the family.

I left the gathering after a couple of hours and went back to my daughter’s house in a very contemplative mood.  For reasons I will not bother you with, I had not seen the lady, my first cousin, for a number of years.  As you all grow up and move around and settle into a path of life, touch can easily be lost and this is what made this death all the harder for me.  At one time I was so close to her and her family and now I would not have recognized her in the street.  She died before I knew her and yet at one time I knew her well.  Somehow I had missed out on a good life and that is a big miss.

Away I came and the following morning was more than pleasantly surprised from a comment I received on a blog I wrote  on 12 January 2010 called The Importance of Blogs. I had just heard that Catherine, who has just died, was terminally ill and I dedicated this blog to her and her family.  It traced her mother’s  family tree back to the Famine in Ireland, it was a piece of their history they were unsure of because of their mother’s premature death, nearly 50 years ago.

This comment was from a lady who had just read this blog and realized that she was a second cousin of mine and Catherine’s, her grandfather and my grandmother were siblings.  She was from a branch of the family that had gone their separate ways in the 1930s and for whatever reason  touch had been lost.

That is why the blog is such an amazing and powerful tool if used properly.  You often think that once a piece has been posted, that is it, gone and forgotten, but the internet and blog field leaves it there like a bright shiny cherry on a tree waiting to be picked and eaten by passing strangers.  It is there for evermore, hopefully to be appreciated by everyone and that is what happened.  So now as one cousin goes another comes to light and hopefully will not disappear as quickly.

As I was writing these words this morning, there came news that  will only double my efforts in this field.  My daughter, Katy, has entered the final stages of pregnancy with the anticipation of twins.  She is slightly premature but the experts say that this is normal with multiple births and that mother and foeutuses are fine, with estimated weights of 5lb with still four weeks of cooking  to go.  However she will now have to go into hospital for their delivery,  a thing she dreads.  She was looking forward to a home birth and had an army of midwives lined up to take care of any eventuality.  She will have to be forthright and clear minded and not let these tinkerers of mortality, the doctors, try to bully her into treatment she does not want, just to suit the timetable of the maternity suite.

My wife has flown the coop and is now in Dublin boarding the Holyhead boat with a rolling pin in hand.  God help the doctors at Stepping Hill Hospital.   I am left with the young fellah, a mop and bucket and various dusters and told to make sure the house is perfect on her return.  That might not be until these twins are weaned so I have plenty of time.  The male’s station in life as with all things historic is a lonely one, but I suppose I have the pub and my blog and all the interesting things that both these channels deliver, but I must get on, the mop is doing a lonely dance in the bucket of hot water I prepared earlier.

With the boring news that an Irish Catholic Archbishop has resigned from the priesthood and that the Pope with surprising alacrity accepted this resignation because the Archbishop says he cannot keep to his vows of celibacy, comes the thought that, that was hard luck on him and another nail in this stupid medieval rule that priests have to be celibates.

But then the news came through that he has been shagging young Nigerian girls for the last 30 years according to Dolores Atwood, a 41 year old Nigerian who had been under his physical and sexual spell for 27 years.  Dick Burke, has he is known to his friends, has been under investigation by his order, the St. Patrick’s Missionary Society or the Kiltegan Fathers, since 2007 or so they tell us and although they could find no evidence of abuse against young girls, they have accepted Dick’s confession that he cannot leave women alone.  They also say that they accept Dolores Atwood’s sworn statement that he had been molesting her since she was 14.  It seems though, that they only accept bits of her statement because molesting a 14 year old girl in a hospital bed seems to me to be sexual abuse of young girls.  These Kiltegan Fathers also claim to have given Dolores counselling after her ordeal.  Dolores says she does not trust the Kiltegan Fathers one bit.

Richard Burke, from Fethard in Tipperary, was made bishop of Warri diocese in Nigeria in 1997 by Pope John Paul II and then promoted to Archbishop of Benin City in 2008 by Benedict XVI.  This excuse that he failed to observe his oath of celibacy puts a new slant on child abuse and makes it seem not to much of a sin.  But what kind of a sin is it if the Church knew of his abuse of juveniles before he was made a bishop and I will come onto that later.

So now we have the boring bit over with, what made me start to look into this, is what Dolores also said in her statement, that Old Dick had visited St. Luke’s in Manchester in 2009.  That started me thinking that the only St. Lukes I knew in Manchester was the clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, founded in 1818 as the Lock Hospital in Ancoats, it became St. Luke’s in 1918, serving the returning soldiers who had picked up all sorts of nasties in France and the Middle East.

However after a little research I found the name of St. Luke’s, an unfortunate misnomer.  The St. Lukes Centre in Manchester is a private clinic which deals with a slicker form of sexual subversion that of supporting the psychological and physical needs of priests, and that is what Old Dick needed in 2009 when he stayed there.

This St. Luke’s Centre opened in a blaze of silence in December 2005 to try to straighten out those bent clerics who had previously been treated by the Paraclete Fathers at Stroud in Gloucestershire.  To get sent to Stroud as a priest meant you were well bent, you needed lots of straightening out.  Brendan Smyth, the most infamous serial abuser of children in Ireland, was a past pupil.  The Paraclete Fathers said they neither had the resources or the manpower to run this establishment and were going to have to close down and the Bishop’s Conference of England and Wales, with an eye on the Indians coming over the hill, decided they definitely needed such a place but run on more modern, sleeker lines.  They looked around and realized that the Church in America was in the deepest mire and decided to learn from them.  The American Church had opened up such a place some years before, called the St. Luke’s Institute in Silver Springs, Maryland and using their experience and model, the Bishop’s Conference opened up St. Luke’s in Manchester.

Now Dick Burke, in his travels, before bishopric tapped him on his shoulder, was sent by his order to New Jersey in 1995 according to Dolores Atwood’s statement.  A strange place to go for a man steeped in the missionary ethos of the Kiltegan Fathers, but on perusing a map of America, I realized that Silver Springs and the St. Lukes Institute, just north of Washington D.C. are only 65 miles from the border of New Jersey. In American terms, only a hop step and a jump away.  I just hope he was not treated at St. Luke’s Institute in 1995 because to suggest he was is to cynical to consider.

The Rev. Dr. Gerard Fieldhouse-Byrne BA(Hons), STB, MA, MSW, D.Min., MBAPC (Accred), a very highly qualified psychotherapist is the head of St. Luke’s in Manchester.  His education reads like a Who’s Who in the mindbending game.

1989-1992  Lancaster University BA (Hons)

1992-1996  Venerable English College and the Gregorian University in Rome

1996-1997  Angelicum University in Rome.

1997     Boston University School of Theology.

1998-2000  Boston University School of Social Work

2000-2002  St. Luke’s in Maryland.  Special treatment for priests’ addictive, sexual and psychological disorders

And then after these 13 years of intensive study and on his return to the Salford Diocese, he was sent as parish priest to St. Teresa’s, Little Lever, in Bolton.  It was like sending a rocket scientist to mind the corner shop.  He was only there for a year and he was then sent to St. Joseph’s parish in Todmorden for two years until July 2005 whilst retaining his status as Ex-Officio member of the Salford Diocese Child Protection  Commission.  He is top dog when it comes to priestly abuse of minors and it was to St. Joseph’s Todmorden he was sent, the parish where the homosexual abusing priest Fr Thomas Doherty left his slimy trail when he was imprisoned on 5 counts of buggery of children.  It was seven years after Doherty was sentenced and Featherstone-Byrne’s move coincided with his release from prison.  Was this to tidy up or to cover up, but again we can all get too cynical by far.

To return to Dick, who St. Luke’s could not straighten out and to Stroud where the Paraclete Fathers could not straighten out Brendan Smyth and to all the other serial abusers who could not straighten up.  Is there any point. Commendable as all this psychotherapy is, do you not think that Featherstone-Byrne and his cohort are just pissing in the wind.  Paedophiles are born with that preference and nothing will make them divert from their path.  All that can be done is to keep them under proper surveillance and do not give them opportunity.

Read Dolores Atwood’s statement here

And read Richard Burke’s statement here