Paul Malpas

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

After reading my blog yesterday, David Laws, once Chief Secretary to the Treasury, resigned immediately.  But like a hen with its head cut off running round the farmyard, David Laws is still sheep-shagging, he is still shagging us, the people, the flock, with unbelievable spin coming out of every coalition members voice box.

I have just been listening to Vince Cable, a politician I admired up until this morning, talking in the aftermath of the only thing that David Laws ever did right in his life.  Sky News asked him if he thought David Laws had to resign.  Our Vince, with a sideways look at someone off camera, presumably holding a Kaleshnikov said “No he didn’t, he did not do this for personal gain, he did it to retain his privacy.  It was a mistake and David knows it but he has done nothing wrong”.

Now if fiddling many thousands of pounds out of the public purse, a purse David was there to protect, is not wrong, let us all go and rob a bank or a post office.  I do not get this argument at all.  I have looked at his problem from all angles and I suppose he did have a problem packing good solid muck up his partner, James Lundie’s anal passage, which was always prone to leakage because his sphincter had been severely damaged by years of unnecessary activity, but how do the politicians expect us to believe that he did it to retain his privacy.  He did not have to claim the money in the first place, but as he did claim it, he could have given it back, saying he was well enough off not to need it.  To give it back when he was caught bang to rights means he was doing it for personal gain.  Greed had taken over.

The politicians still think we are sheep and they are still shagging us with lies and hypocrisy.  Cable went on to say “the people out there will understand the decency of the man and know that he did not do it for personal gain”.  Well if Vince Cable can come out with this clap-trap, just like Nick Clegg did last night, then I realize that this brave new world that Cameron promised us last week, is indeed the same old, same old.

Will someone out there please tell these political pricks, that we are not mindless morons who unbelievably use our phalli for what god made them for and not for shagging young boys and Downs Syndrome kids, but we are intelligent people who will hopefully at some stage bite back.   We can tell right from wrong.

Lastly I would like to apologise to my readers for the strong language used in this posting but I have found that politicians only respond, like the poor colonials of years ago, with something stiff and glistening up their khybers.

Paddy Ashdown, ex-leader of the Liberal Party and the only person  in the House of Commons who has ever been trained to kill, so he jokingly says of his pre-political days as a Captain in the Royal Marines; as Margaret Thatcher trained herself.  Paddy prised the parliamentary seat of Yeovil from Tory hands in 1983, a seat they had held since the constituency was formed in 1918.  In 1992 he was proud enough to regale us with the details of an affair he had with his secretary, Tricia Howard,  in1986.

So he would have been more than pleased with the news that his successor in the seat, Mr. David Laws, started an affair in 2001 that is still thriving to-day.  Parliamentary lobbyist Mr. James Lundie is the happy recipient of Mr. Laws’s amours and he also happens to be Mr. Laws’s landlord and Mr. Laws has been claiming up to £12,000 per year expenses for sharing the joys of Mr. Lundie’s sheets.  Now, it is alright giving your landlord one on a Friday night after a few pints, but to claim he is not your partner or spouse after nine years of jiggery pokery is rimming it a little, even if they say they have different bank accounts and social circles.  You see when you have a spouse or partner you cannot claim the payment of rent to that person as a parliamentary expense.  If you are lucky, you might get away with the odd bunch of red roses but not £12,000 per year.

Mr. Laws, for those who do not know, was highly thought of in the Liberal Party, despite his proclivities which seem highly prized in political circles, so come coalition with the Tories after the recent General Election, David (Laws) that is, was made the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and was given the task of immediately finding £6 billion in cuts in public spending.  He has already drawn up a list of new rules limiting the pay and expenses of hundreds and thousands of civil servants.  He has been a very busy man.  So busy that straight away after being found out by the Daily Telegraph’s intreprid reporters, he offered to set the ball rolling towards the £6 billion target by giving back £40,000 of his hard and pleasurably earned expenses.

Mr. Laws does not think he has broken any rules.  He does not think, by forgetting to tell the parliamentary stewards that Mr. Shagnasty Lundie was his lover and partner and spouse as well as his landlord,  he has done anything wrong.  Well what is he doing as Chief Secretary to the Treasury then.

A friend, in mitigation, has said that Mr. Laws is a man of great integrity, it has not been about profit but privacy.  Tell that to the poor buggers who every week get thrown into the slammer for stealing a loaf of bread.  What a great defence for any thief  “Sorry me lud, but this bird I was shagging wanted a few quid to buy some chips, I did not have it, so I stole a fiver out of the till, I did it first of all for privacy because I had no cash and secondly so I could have another go at her tonight”  “That is okay my private friend and man of great integrity.  Run along and do not do it again, this week at least” says the judge.

What is it about this British establishment that appears to allow them to do what they like when they like and lets them think that it does not matter.  Just keep the people down and treat them like sheep, for it could be said that sheep-shagging is not a crime, especially if done in private and that is what Mr Laws has been doing for years.  He has shagged us to the tune of £12,000 per year for the last  eight years.

Surely Mr. David Cameron you will have to use your muscle and get shut, we cannot have these Mandelson types clogging up the avenues along which you are giving power to the people.

As part of my retired life, I spend a lot of my time on research which turns into a wild goose chase, I run into a brick wall and cannot get any further, but I hope this particular recent subject will not.  I am already fond of this family and I do not properly know them yet.

This line of research concerns the Dignan family of Ballinagard House, which is or was situated two kilometres south of Roscommon town on the Athleague or Galway road.  It was a large house of 12 rooms and was owned at the time ie the turn of the 20th Century by Charles Coleman Dignan, the Under Sheriff of Roscommon.  The Under Sheriff as far as I know is or was a court official, normally a solicitor, who carried out the wishes of the courts.  For example he might organize bailiffs to enter a property to seize goods etc, or he might be responsible for the serving of summonses.

Charles Coleman Dignan had lived in Roscommon all his life, born in 1858 and marrying his wife, a local woman, Angelina Victoria in 1886.  He was 28, she was 21.  During their marriage Angelina had 10 pregnancies, one a still birth, another infant dying very young and the other eight surviving well into adulthood.  They were:-

Joseph Patrick born in 1888.

Eveleen Victoria born in1891.

Alfred Charles born in 1892.

Albert Guy born in 1894.

Mabel B. born in1897.

Cecil Joseph born in 1899.

Hilda Angelina born in 1902.

Ethel W. born in 1906.

Ballinagard House was a fine stone built house with a slated roof, it had six outhouses consisting of a stable, a harness room. a coach house, a cowshed, a dairy and a hen house.  They had one live-in sevant, but there must have been others who lived in a cluster of dwellings round the big house like the King’s and the Igoe’s who classed themselves as agricultural labourers and Edward Flanagan who classed himself as a groom/domestic servant in the 1911 census.

The Dignan family were doing well for themselves and were stalwarts of polite Roscommon society and it can be seen that like the majority of people in Ireland at this time, although born and bred in the country, in this case Roscommon, they would have considered themselves happy to be part of Queen Victoria’s Empire.  Look at the names they gave their children, except for Joseph Patrick, the rest of the names could be from anywhere in England.  Ireland to them was as much part of England as Lancashire or Warwickshire.

All the children as far as I know did their basic education at Roscommon National School before being finished off at a convent or Grammer School and this is where I come in.  Joseph Patrick, when he was 14 years and 10 months old, was sent to St. Bede’s College in Manchester for two further years of education, 1903-1905.  St. Bede’s was the school I went to 1957-1963.  We have something in common, we have both kneeled in the same little chapel, built in 1895, at the school, doing penance for our sins, and it is this man, Joseph Patrick Dignan, I am most interested in and I intend over the next few weeks, to find out more about him.

He left St. Bede’s in the summer of 1905 after presumably boarding at the school for two years, he became a clerk in the Bank of Ireland, where he was probably posted to some far flung branch.  He certainly was not working in Roscommon at the time of the Census in 1911.  At the moment I do not know where he spent the years 1905-1914, but in September 1914 he enlisted as a Private soldier in the 19th (Service) Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, which suggests to me that he was back working in Manchester at that time.  He put down his occupation as clerk, not bank clerk, which would have given him extra Kudos, but just plain clerk.  He might have had relations in the town whom he lived and worked with and who he might have lived with while at St. Bede’s.  All these questions I hope to answer shortly; I do seem to remember my mother speaking of a business family in North Manchester called Dignan.

Anyway after seven months training as a private soldier, without going overseas, he applied for and received his commission, as a 2nd Lieutenant in his local regiment, the Connaught Rangers, on 22 May 1915, in fact in the 4th battalion, which normally had a home at King House, the barracks in Boyle, Co Roscommon, where I was yesterday.  Myself and Joseph Patrick Dignan have a lot in common.

The sad part of this story is that from the 4th Battalion, which was a reserve Battalion suppling troops to the 1st, 5th and 6th Battalions of the Connaught Rangers in the field. he was attached to the 8th Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers where he had his first taste of action in 1915.  For a 2nd lieutenant he had a long length of active service before being killed in action on16 October 1916 at Wyschaete, a few miles south of Ypres.  He is buried in Kemmel Chateau Military Cemetery.

His two younger brothers, Alfred Charles and Albert Guy, both served with the South Irish Horse, a cavalry regiment.  Lt. Albert Guy Dignan was 23 when he was killed on the 21 March 1918 on the first day of that spring offensive that saw the German Army throw everything it had left at the British and French armies on the Somme in one final effort to break the four year stalemate that was the Western Front.  Albert Guy’s name appears on the Poziere Memorial in the Poziere British Cemetery.

Charles Coleman Dignan, the Lieutenant recruiting Officer for the town and district of Roscommon paid a heavy price for his duties to King and Country with the loss of his two sons.

If anybody reads this blog and can add to this story in any way please contact me through the comments section of the blog or e-mail me on malpas46@eircom.net.  In the months to come I hope to have a fuller version of this family’s story.

Thank you for reading this post and to Joseph Patrick and Albert Guy Rest in Peace.  They will never be forgotten.

Finally I would like to thank Oliver Fallon, Chairman and Chief Researcher of the Connaught Rangers for some of the military facts in this blog.