Paul Malpas

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.

It has been a funny old week, nobody has been disrespectful towards me, nobody has kicked me up my arse or sent me a nasty letter or told me to do something I did not want to do.  In short it has been a boring few days especially to someone like me, who likes being treated with disrespect and whose arse yearns for a size 10 boot and who needs at least two threatening letters per week and loves to be told to do something that abhors.

I live off this kind of brutality, where would my blog be without it?  So I am living off titbits supplied by the newspapers.  For example, Mr. Eamonn Lillis, that nice chap from Howth, who driven to the brink of insanity by a sexually demanding wife, gave her a push, on his way out for a massage by a very friendly and accommodating local and could be locked up for life.  Is there a difference between a mental and a physical push.  One seems to deserve the other.  Give him a few weeks community service on Sean MacDermot Street and he will have learned his lesson.

Then there are the Irish bishops, who have been summoned to Rome by the Pope on the day after St. Valentine’s Day, a kind of post-coital beanfeast or will it be the night of the long knives for these three monkeys of holiness and virtue.  Somehow I doubt it.  Surely a better plan would be for the Pope to come here and sniff the air rather than a busload of recusants go there and of course it would be far cheaper.  In this financially denuded Church any saving is helpful while the 30,000 victims of sexual abuse confer with their fat cat lawyers to see how much they can skim off the top of the evangelistic churn.  Anyway it is doubtful whether  this murky mob will ever meet the Pope, I think protocol demands that they all sit in a room whilst the Pope watches them on CCTV and the first man to scratch his testes gets it.  Probably a turn on the rack or a few hours on the thumbscrew or some other Iberian based pleasure treatment.

One of the nicer aspects of the week came when it was learnt that women’s sex magazines the world over are vying with each other to persuade that mother’s joy of a lad, that broth of a boy, Kirk McCambley, to rag off and have his picture taken and hopefully tell his tales of derring-do.  For this they will give young Kirky plenty mazuma, which should go nicely to paying off his debt to good old Mrs. Robinson, who must have worked hard to secure it in the first place.  If he takes the lucre, it will be a real good case of him having his cake and eating it.  Praise the Lord.

An item that struck my eye and was very pleasing to see was this weeks publication of the ninth edition of the Lonely Planet Ireland, the very influential and best selling guidebook.  This edition says that modern Ireland is fast becoming like everywhere else, so to avoid that and go in search of the Traditional Ireland, the Ireland of welcome, craic and black porter, you have to cross the Shannon and then stay away from the “scenic super-stars” of Connemara and Kerry.  It urges everybody to head for the “quieter idylls” like the lakelands of Roscommon.  So all you Lonely Planet fans, I am here in lakeland Roscommon.  Come and see me and I will give you a tour of our archaeological treasures,  I will tell you a joke, give you a bite to eat and drink as many pints of Guiness as you can throw at me.  Seriously come and base yourself in Boyle and experience an experience.  You will not find it wanting.

The best headline of the week was TONNES OF MUSSELS SAVED BY MANY MUSCLES.  When a truck transporting mussels to France, ended up in a ditch outside of Kenmare in Kerry.  All the fishermen for miles around sailed to the scene and quickly tranferred the 20 tonnes of mussels on to another vehicle, to ensure the produce was live and fresh when it reached its destination.  That is why you visitors need to get to the west, it is only here that the community lives and breaths.  If that happened in Dublin those mussels would be beginning to whiff by now.

The last headline guaranteed to give us all cheer was when that devil-may-care Mullingar madman and Ryanair regisseur, Michael O’Leary, was voted the best man to take over the hot seat of the Health Service Executive’s, chief executive’s position, on the website IrishHealth.com.  By golly he would soon stir up some shit.  He might not cure any of that vast agencies ills but he would certainly give the media plenty of quotes.  Give it a go Mary.

The post has just arrived and with it a letter from our postman, Mr Eddie Heslin, thanking myself and Helen for our kind words recorded during the recent floods.  I mentioned this man’s attention to duty in an early blog, Still Cruising on 27 November 2009 and praised him for his determination to get the mail through.  It seems that Councillor Marie Egan Paul who was around during the floods, picked up on this and publicly praised Eddie at the last council meeting.  So three cheers to Eddie and Marie for putting in that extra step, we only watched and observed.  What have I just said about traditional Ireland, get here quick before the crowds come.

That’s all folks, let us hope tomorrow has got more meat in it than today, but I doubt it because tomorrow is Friday.