Paul Malpas

Last night I witnessed the most inept, senile and out of touch display of accountability by the bishops of Ireland that has ever been known, when they set up the three stooges, McAreavey of Dromore, Brennan of Ferns and the holier and more stupid than thou, our own Jones of Elphin.

Although this press conference was expected and in fact Brady of Armagh said he would attend and it was expected Archbishop Martin would also be present, two hours notice of time and location was given to the media and the conference was limited to 25 minutes duration while these three bishops gave their much vaunted master class in obscurity, idiocy and sheer lunacy.

You would think that the bishops knowing the seriousness of the situation and that a public relations class was necessary, would have brought out their big guns to fend off the barbs of the media, but obviously Brady does not want to become involved and Archbishop Martin has been told to back-pedal.  The difference in that man pre-Rome and Post-Rome is a subject in itself.  It is as though they are two different men, the go-getting Martin knowing God was on his side pre-Rome, has been replaced by this stultified, nervous and certainly very uncomfortable post-Rome Martin, who finds it difficult to put more than two words together in answer to questions on the subject of abuse.  On Newsnight on BBC2 on Tuesday, he was at his lowest and no match at all for the strident Jeremy Paxman when talking about the serial abusing yet unpunished Bill Carney.  My advice, for what it is worth in matters as important as this is to stand up and be counted,  do not hide behind authority and at the end of the day give authority as the excuse for wrongdoing, like Hitler’s minions did after the war was lost.  Be totally accountable at all times to everybody.  Feck the rules because the rules are wrong and evil.  I feel really sorry for him having to take the path he has and being reined in and letting the likes of Drennan of Galway and the retired O’Mahoney have their evil way and say.

Which reminds me that Drennan of Galway who was classed as the complete scholar and holy man by Jones of Elphin at the press conference yesterday, has told his priests to send a couple of representatives from each parish in the diocese to a service of reparation in the Cathedral on Palm Sunday where these elected ones would place a sprig of palm on the altar to express penitence for the cover up by the bishops of these paedophilic priests.  The poor people of Galway, what has it to do with them?  Why should they express penitance?  Why are the bishops not standing on their heads and shouting “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”.  Jones’s statement about Drennan reminds me of something a mate of mine said this morning whilst we were talking on this subject,  Michael Cryan, citizen of Boyle and always good for a quote said “If you are there  at the bottom of the shit heap even a hump on your back is a thing of beauty”

So there we were with these three monkeys from Dromore, Ferns and I am ashamed to say Elphin, with Dromore spluttering and farting like a demented pig, Ferns doing a good impression of a man sucking a lemon and Elphin asking why is everybody singling out the Church when it is a well known fact that most child abuse takes place in the home and has done for hundreds of years and nobody condemns that, but just because the Church has transgressed and covered up, the world is on its back.  What a load of bunkum, if this is what they say publicly what must their private thoughts and conversations be like.  Why should we accept lunacy of this nature from a shepherd of Christ.

It was Jones of Elphin who said in his pastoral letter after the Murphy Report that the Diocese of Elphin abides by best practice when dealing with possible child abuse and the laity have nothing to fear.  Well I fear him.  Where is best practice in that statement of his yesterday.

Watching this simian trio at the press conference made me think that the Church is missing a trick, professional PR men or women would do a far better job at wooing the people back, but perhaps the Church realises it has put its finger too far into the fire and that self immolation is the only way out.  It is  well known  among all the dead religions as the Phoenix Theory.  It never works.  All we can do is sit back as Sinead O’Connor said to me last Saturday “Good will win in the end.  We just relax and enjoy watching it all unfold”.

On this lovely sunny Sunday afternoon I was having difficulty putting pen to paper thinking no matter how lovely the day, the outside world is not so lovely.  With Boyle really feeling the effects of the economic downturn with 1300 people signing on the live register for job seekers allowance, businesses closing down and the HSE shutting down the Day Care centre and reducing the number of beds in the Plunkett Home.  The Plunkett Home,  for those outside Boyle, is a multi-purpose HSE establishment built on the site of the old Poor House which serves as an old folks home, respite care centre, day care centre, medical centre for the town, a meals on wheels centre,  the home of the community welfare officer and it has a hospice built about seven years ago and sadly never put on line.

The Plunkett Home is Boyle’s little jewel.  A centre of excellence for old folk in particular, who went there and received any attention they might need, both medical and social needs being met, but no longer.  The HSE  cut back funding for this wonderfully necessary operation about six months ago to just two days per week where they were catering for 25 people per day, many of whom saw no-one from one visit to the next.  Just in that respect they were performing a magnificent social duty on top of the medical benefits the 50 patients received, but it has now been stopped altogether.  The only people to suffer being our most vulnerable.

Someone please contradict me if I am wrong but it has been explained tp me that the savings are negligible.  The only savings being the transport costs of bringing some of these folk in from the country.  The nurses running the scheme were just co-opted off the wards, they were and still are getting paid. the rooms were and still are being heated.  It all seems a nonsense and a complete act of brutality when one looks at the waste and roguery that pervades the Dublin government.

Let us hope that the meeting being arranged for Wednesday night at 9.15pm comes up with some decent proposals and here are three questions I would like answering:-

1 ) What jobs have had to go with the closure?

2 )How much savings have been made?

3 )If necessary why cannot the town cover this saving?

It does strike me that the basic thinking of those who make decisions of this nature is so wrong, they should not be in this type of job at all.  When the shit hits the fan financially as it has done in this country the care of the old and the young should be ring-fenced and not interfered with, any savings coming from the middle ground from those more able to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

So to get back to this lovely Sunday afternoon and thinking positively, I soon realized that things were not that bad.  One of my daughters, a frequent visitor to Boyle, tells me that she is expecting twins in July.  The Child Benefit for this mighty event would probably cover the savings made at the Plunkett Home day care centre.  Another positive was an email I received from the singer, Sinead O’Connor, thanking me for thanking her for the stance she has taken on the bishops of Ireland’s woeful management of the abuse scandal.  It has been an awful pity that more people like her have not stood up and been counted on this issue.  The artistic and literary muscle of this country have unbelievable power when it comes to leading public opinion in the right direction and with the right amount of impact, but there seems to be so very few of them willing.  Perhaps they were disenchanted many years ago by these prancing, preening men of black and purple.  To put it into rugby parlance, this has become a forward struggle and we need as many heavyweights as we can to pack in tightly against these religious bullies to ensure the surge of public opinion and thought is not lost and that the roles and thinking of the Church is irredeemably altered and that good prevails.

There was a great quote in the letters page of the Independent this morning from Gordon Cunningham of Donaghmede in Dublin regarding Ghandi, the great Indian statesman, when asked why, with his policy of none violence, he had never become a Christian, he replied ” Only for the Christians I would have become a Christian”

Congratulations to Sinead O’Connor for coming on TV3 this morning and reading her well researched statement on the state of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the idiocy of the bishops and their woebegone thinking.  The thing that stood out for me was this chap Monsignor Alex Stenson, parish priest of Killester in North Dublin who wrote recently in the Irish Catholic newspaper that under canon law paedophilia was not a sin although it was  thought that it was not right or good.  for more information on this monsignor read The Alliance Victim Support Group‘s report The Church Must Bow Down To The Law Of The Land dated 25 October 2009.

I have spent a lifetime being told that shagging your neighbour is a sin and needs a bout in the confessional,  now,  I know it would have been alright for me to go shagging my neighbour’s nine year old son and not have to bother with confession.  This course of action would certainly have saved a lot of time on a Saturday evening and certainly did for these buggers in black.

Before the Church gets any older it needs to sort out its dichotomy between canon law and civil law.  Every man, woman, child and priest has to abide by civil law and leave canon law to be pursued by consenting adults at weekends and bank holidays.

As Sinead says and I have been saying for some time that this is the start of the long road to finality for the church.  The bishops and priests are no longer putting God first, but the continuance of the institution is paramount in their minds.

I look forward to more details of the proposed demonstration at the end of the month at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin.  The only way this religious elite will understand what common decent folk think is by  people gathering en masse and venting their spleen.  As Sinead said this morning and as I said in my blog on 3  March 2010 We Are Not Stupid.

For more on the dirty deeds of Monsignor Alex Stenson type his name into Google and be appalled. He is definately on my hit list.  For details of the mass demonstration on 25 March in Dublin keep tuning in to www.paddydoyle.com or if you have nothing better to do keep reading this blog.