Paul Malpas

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.

Now that I am rid of delightful grandchildren, wife’s bad backs and volcanic dust clouds, I can get back into the groove again,  ie, the never ending quest for words to put into my blog.  Some days I sit looking at a blank page for hours then something clicks and I am off, other days I wake up with an idea in my head and then struggle for hours to put it into acceptable form.

This idea came to me at 6.00am this morning as I sat reading an article by Ali Bracken, the Sunday Tribune’s crime correspondent, about sexual abuse by five staff members of young boys in St. John’s National School in Sligo over a 30 year period.  Three were Marist brothers and two were lay teachers.  The Garda say there was no evidence of a paedophile ring but it is a remarkable coincidence that most of these men taught at the school at the same time.  To make matters worse after a very thorough 11 year garda investigation, one of the Marist brothers, eventually convicted of 35 counts of sexual abuse against four boys  between 1968 to 1977 wriggled that much it took four trials to eventually nail him.

What was surprising was the leniency of the sentencing in the five separate trials.  The victims felt themselves let down by the courts.

Peter White (Brother Agnellus) In 2005 he received three years on eight sample charges of indecent assault  for “unfathomable torture” on two boys after pleading guilty

Patrick Curran In 2005 he was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years reduced to nine years on appeal for assaulting nine boys between 1966 and 1984.  He originally denied 237 counts of indecent assault on ten boys in the same periopd.  He was still teaching at the school when these allegations came to light.

Michael Cunnane In 1999 he received a three year suspended sentence for 11 counts of indecent assault on three boys after pleading guilty

Martin Meaney (Brother Gregory) In 2008 he received a two year sentence for five sample counts of indecent assault against one seven year old boy after pleading guilty.

Christopher Cosgrave (BrotherChristopher) Convicted after four trials of 35 charges against four boys over a nine year period.  He walked free from court this month because of time already served.  He has never admitted his guilt.

Now I would suggest these specimen charges must have just been the tip of the iceberg in this Sligo school.  God knows how many occasions have gone unpunished, but even so the punishment is, just on these specimen charges, lenient.

Whilst Cosgrave was wriggling, I have been conducting my own inquiry into a priest who has remained unpunished.  Perhaps his premature death at 62 years old in 1968 saved him from his punishment on earth, but let us hope he has received it in the place he espoused.

Most of you supporters of my blog will already know of my search for truth in relation to Monsignor Thomas Duggan, late Rector of St. Bede’s College, Manchester and I will not bore you with a repeat of his sins.  Suffice it to say that I am gathering a portfolio of testimonies on the sexual conduct of this priest and things are moving apace, as the Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese now want to interview me and discuss the evidence collected.

Today I am not about to reveal the statements made by these ex-pupils (now professional men, some retired, in their 60s and 70s) but I have become fascinated by the language used by the middle-aged men of Sligo and the diaspora of former pupils of St. Bede’s.

Phrases like “he picked out the weak boys” and “reign of complete terror”, “physically violent beyond belief”,  “I put it out of my mind and did not think of those days” and “how could you tell your parents” repeat themselves so often in both inquiries.  Those men were all working to a pattern  as though taught it at some third level campus.  If the Garda say there is no evidence of a paedophile ring, there seems to me to be evidence of a learnt paedophile mentality as though the position and learning attracts.

These Safeguarding Commissions set up on both sides of the Irish Sea by the various dioceses are riddled with lawyers who do not know how to show empathy and understanding, but are selected to form defensive bastions willing to shrug off all allegations.  I understand the argument about wheat and chaff but I do think empathy comes first.  a psychotherapist or some such person would be a better first port of call than a hardbitten legal man,  It does show you though that the Church is thinking more of pounds, shillings and pence, rather than the healing of tortured minds and bodies.

This corruption went on years ago, it went on last year, it is still going on today, these paedophiles have just reorganized their strategies and the future is bright for them.  The Church and the Government need to understand this and get the right pegs in the correct holes and forget the retribution from sins passed.  Get positive.

Today I am struck dumb, my mind is not working because my wife has just done something that I am very proud of but for legal reasons I cannot tell you about it, so you will all have to celebrate with me in this anonymous brilliance and I will try and experiment to see if we can get some empathy here.

One of the beautiful things about blog writing is the facility that WordPress give you to analyse where your readers are, how long they spend reading you and when.  This is  magnificent if you are blogging for business reasons, it helps you to know your customer, but when your purpose is not commercial it becomes useless, but interesting.  So today I am going to try and winkle out some of my readers from exotic corners of this planet and try to get them to tell me what turns them on.

I know who is reading the misguided waffle that pours from these keys on a good day.  I know where you are from, how long I keep you interested and how many pages you read before you get bored to tears. Therefore I am today going to analyse the less trafficked areas of the world.  I will list the locations of these readers, no names because I do not have them, but I know what you read and how many minutes of most days you waste, reading this guff that I spew onto the page.

Introduce yourself in the comments facility so I know who you are.  It might help me write something more pertaining to your situation.

Who for example is the person in San Francisco who spent ages reading me on 7th April or for that matter the person in Sacramento.  I think I might know the person in Tallahassee in Florida, who is a regular visitor and has little to do if she reads me regularly, but at least she has introduced herself and congratulated me.  I also think that I might know the person in Oxford, Mississippi who is a frequent reader and as also written nice things in the past.

I can only guess at the person in Rochester, Minnesota, who had a spate in late March but who has run aground since and I can understand why the person in Manchester, New Hampshire spent ages reading me this Monday gone, obviously wishing they were in Manchester in England enjoying the lovely Spring sunshine as opposed to the horrible rainy weather that early April always brings to New England.

The person in Etobicoke, Canada intrigues me, who spent ages reading me on 6th April.  Where is it?  We also have a regular reader in Bolton, Ontario, near Toronto.  I can have an educated guess at the person in San Miguel de Allende, in Central Mexico.  Good morning Eileen, by the way if your name is not Eileen and your a bloke, my apologies but the name definitely suits you.

Whose fancy have I tickled in I’viv, in the Ukraine, who spent three hours reading last week.  I know the people in Falkenberg in Swedan, because they rang me and said how much they have enjoyed the blog and that they had read the lot.  I have news for them, they have only read seven pages, there are 96 of these posts altogether, so keep reading.  The recent visitor from Melbourne worries me, he should be in the nets training hard for the forthcoming tour not sitting on his backside.  You do not realize how good we are.

There is too much traffic in England and Ireland to isolate individuals but the popularity of the blog lies in London, Manchester, Stockport, Huyton, Sale, Atherton, Henfield, wherever that is, Huddersfield, Basingstoke, Boothstown, Wembley, Reading and Sheffield.  As you would expect Dublin and Limerick feature highly in Ireland.

So please get in touch on the comments facility and tell me what you think, what makes you tick and why I should stop making a fool of myself.  Otherwise it is like talking to a brick wall and I was doing that all my life in Manchester.

Get in touch.

I started this blogging vehicle on 24 November 2009 and since then I have written 59 blogs almost on a daily basis with the exception of an alcohol refuelling stop over the Christmas.  Blog writing is a little like walking across the Sahara Desert.  You set off nice and fresh with plenty of water but after two months and no oasis the water is rationed and after another while almost non-existant and the end of the journey is nearer than the start, so you have to keep going with not at all the same style and vigour as you did at the begining.  I am running out of water or should I say ideas and my daily offerings are becoming more banal but I have to press on until this searched for oasis or inspiration appears and I can refresh and march on determinedly.

So while I stumble and fall and drag myself forward I will return to that old chestnut which I must have squeezed completely dry over the last few weeks.  The Irish bishops and their complete lack of grip on reality.  But wait I think I can see water.  Is it a mirage or is it really an oasis?  They were there on the News on Monday night prancing and posturing in front of the papal procession in their long white dresses waspishly tied at the waist with their scarlet fascias and rakishly set off with a white ferraiolo slung across their shoulders, for all the world like girls at a country dance ladies excuse me, waiting expectantly while the Pope walked amongst them preening and clucking like a little red rooster hoping for one of these white beauties to entice him.  What do they think they were doing, what message did they think they were giving out to the world.  They were there to discuss child abuse by priests and not to take part in a mannequin parade.  As a good friend of mine, Michael Cryan, said yesterday morning “Nero fiddling while Rome burns comes to mind”.  These fancy dressed clerics with their medieval affectations pawing their Teflon leader while the Church is ripping itself apart (there is teutonic rumblings of even worse abuse in the cockerel’s own farmyard)  If politicians tried to do the same and not act in a responsible manner they would be voted out of office before they returned home.

Do they not understand there is work to be done and serious work at that.  We do not want pomp, ceremony and vacuousness.  We want accountability, admittance of guilt, empathy with the abused and firm, firm plans on how to go forward.  To be leaders and shepards you have to be part of your flock, you have to belong.  These boy scouts in Rome could have come from Mars for all I can see, so remote are they from public thinking.  I just hope the seriousness of the situation somehow sinks into these jesters because the abused have now got the bone between their teeth and they will not let go and the Church will suffer unthought of harm in the years to come as the majority of practising Catholics get hauled from their comfort zones and made to confront these bishops, these men of riddles and forked tongues who do not deserve a comfortable old age.

So once one strata of power is removed let us turn our attention to the priests.  In order that we get every one of these abusers, some could still be hidden, all of them should be punished by making sure they all marry a woman of their choice and that should be sufficient punishment for most, any that survive the ordeal should be canonized.

We are nearer the water, we can smell it, but alas, it is a mirage, a sham, an illusion. What the Pope and his acolytes are giving us is not what we wanted , expected or deserved.  The verdict of this two day garden party is that child abuse is a sin and these bishops have to go back home and hope and pray it never happens again.  Anyway the Pope claimed that a weakening of the Catholic faith in Ireland has been ” a significant contributing factor in the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors”.  So it is not their fault at all, it is our fault and our childrens fault.  It is we who unzipped those clerical trousers, it was our children who deftly pulled the clerical member from its cosy nest and put it carefully where the sun don’t shine.  We are to blame, what a relief it is to know the truth.

Well whether it is a sin or it is not is feck all to do with anything, because without doubt it is a crime and these abusers and the men who tried to hide this crime from the authorities and systematically covered up these heinous transgressions need punishing and I just hope the Gardai and the Government plough their own furrow and bring these people to justice.

As for Drennan and his ilk it seems to me that they have been exonerated by this Roman beanfeast and our only hope, Archbishop Martin, has been told to back off.  His position it seems is now untenable and for me he should walk away and let the scum float on the surface like they have probably always done.  Never in all my life have I heard such drivel in what is coming out of Rome.  Never in all my life have I seen evil being allowed to take sway over good to such a degree.

What about the poor abused.  What about us who have lived our whole life in the Church.  I am 64 on Friday and I think that I have wasted all those 64 years accepting what these wastrels have told me, it fills me with despair and anger.