Paul Malpas

Life in Ireland is no different to life in England except really in two different ways.  The casual immigrant, as I class myself as being, one who never did his homework before coming here, one who classed Ireland as his or her’s spiritual home and had to get here come what may, all of a sudden runs up against matters that do not seem to make sense.  Take for example the Health Service here.  If you step outside your door intent on a visit to the doctors, the euros start to clock up.  If the doctor is at his surgery and you nod in his direction he charges you €40 if you are lucky, then there is another €20 for a blood test and when you go to the chemists with a prescription you can be charged anything.  I remember being asked for €193 for some pills for my wife.  There is also 50 cent government  levy on each type of medication you walk away with.  I did not of course pay the €193 but handed same back to the pharmacist explaining how my wife has decided to take the old fashioned remedy and chosen to ignore her complaint because in most cases complaints fade away unless they are very serious and then the doctor or pharmacist cannot really help.  All pharmaceutical products and doctors work on the fear factor to cower you in to partaking.  Why cannot they set up a National Health Service here.  A think tank of doctors and health professional spent a year recently looking into this ideal and came to the conclusion that the transition could be done smoothly and at no real cost if the motivation was there but it isn’t and the consultants and medical practitoners continue to make hay without any real discipline as they have always done so.

So with these kind of costs clicking up like a till register in a superstore, the potential patient has to be quick on his feet to avoid bankruptcy and like most problems Irish there is of course a way round the problem but you need to take a combined 3rd level course in computers and psychology to prevail.  Either that or take a lesson off the simple man in the street who at all times and in every country has found out a way round every barrier known to man.  So within weeks after taking some very intense lessons on life and how to live it, stood at the various bars around town, I passed my examination with flying colours and now the mazuma stays in my pocket and does not grace the doctors.  This medium is not the place to relate the secrets in which I matriculated but if you, like me, will stand at the bar or better still sit on a high stool at your favourite watering hole and invest in copious quantities of Arthur’s finest cordials, your investment will be well rewarded.

Another happening yesterday made me stop and ponder on the conundrums of Irish life as opposed to the puritan English.  Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Fein TD and Deputy Leader of her party, and champion of all that is foolish about her party, stood up in the Dail and roundly criticized the Coalition’s minister for Social Services, Joan Burton, for once again attacking the very poor in this country.  The reason for this broadside was the fact that under the present rigourous belt tightening that the Fine Gael/Labour Coalition Government is imposing on the inhabitants of this fair isle, Joan was looking seriously at the social service payments paid to thousands of parents throughout the country for Communion and Confirmation dresses hopefully intended for their little cherubic daughters to go lightly tripping up the aisle of their parish church on those two annual sacramental days ordained by Holy Mother the Church.

Now I do not know how the lads fare out in this fashion parade and I hope they are not left with their arse hanging out of a scraggy pair of trousers they have worn every day for the last two years, but yesterday in the Dail only Communion dresses were mentioned.  It might be a case of the Government giving early lessons in cross-dressing which would ease their financial problems no end with the thought of the word gender being thrown out of the window and the lack of need for distinguishing the sexes.

However the thought that these little Catholic children of Christ are getting free party dresses while the poor Church of Ireland, Methodist, Presbyterian and all the other myriad of religious and non-religious parents do not get even a sock fills me with distaste.  Is it a fact and so I was told since being knee high to a grasshopper, that the Catholic religion is God’s chosen course and that all the rest of them and now me included, are damned or is the Catholic Church in Ireland after years and years of abusing these little children getting more than its fair share of the financial cake?

Now it is obvious to the casual observer that because of this clerical abuse of the little children of Christ and their abuse of so many things, in so many walks of life, that the attendances at mass are dwindling and that the congregations at Catholic churches now seem to be limited to people over 70 years old who stopped thinking about their redemption 40 years ago.  So why should it be that the thrusting and vital young parents of today, who only see the inside of a church at Baptisms, Communions, weddings and funerals find the need to equip their loved ones in the finest couture the government can buy.  The answer is obvious, because it is there.  Once you see an apple on a tree it is nature’s course to want to pluck it.  The communion dress serves a variety of purposes and if the mother is wise she will design the dress that it fits the child for every social occasion for the next seven years and after puberty is passed, can be cut down by the able and made into very decent curtains for the back bedroom.

Last year the average payout per child was €242 and Joan said yesterday, whilst under constant attack from that party who value family life above everthing else, she might have to limit the payment to €120.  Tell me why in this day of total financial insecurity, where handicapped children are being denied their basic rights, where every government penny is counted, is it even thinking of giving parents, who never dream of going to church, unless there is a party afterwards, €120 towards a new frock.  I am not annoyed, I am slightly shocked but I am also completely dumfounded.

What are the qualities of a good priest?  Humility, generosity, intelligence, commitment, goodness, patience, responsibility, stability, openness, motivation, simplicity; in other words the qualities needed in an all round decent person.  What you do not want is pride, meanness, instability, irresponsibility, deviousness, irritability, ignorance, neglectfulness and all the other faults a lot of people have.

One’s gender should not come into it, all the good things mentioned above are shared between the sexes, just as much as all the bad things are.  On reflection and this is more than just a personal view, women tend to have slightly more of the good qualities than men, only because their mental and emotional needs and gifts have been nurtured since the beginning of time.  Women tend away from violence, confrontation, anger and competitiveness, while men tend towards them.  So on the whole women are better placed than men to play the priestly role in life.  Obviously there are good and bad in both sexes but when it comes to priestly qualities women tend to shade it better than men.

I have come across a lot of men in my life and few women.  Unfortunately women are not drawn to the rugged, dirty, competitive world that construction is whilst men are and I can count on a couple of hands the good men I have actually met.  Whilst in my limited experience of women, this percentage of good priestly qualities seem to be amply scattered about.

In my dotage I now deal with more women than men which I suppose in one way is a little unfortunate but the majority of women that now surround me, I would honestly say, are humble, generous, intelligent, committed, good, patient, responsible, stable, open, motivated, simplistic human beings.

Celibacy is not one of the qualities I look for in a priest and neither do most folk but if you have to throw this ridiculous burden into the mix then women again are better able to withstand its pressures.

So why if women have a vocation, why can they not become priests?  They would surely make a better fist of it than some of the men priests I have come across.  Well the why is important, the why is because the misogynistic, old boys club that is the Catholic Church will not let them.  They are scared that the rare priestly qualities they expect from their priests will soon be exposed when the people realise that women have them in spades.  They are scared that they will be exposed for the strutting peacocks they are.  They realise where their scrap heap is.

I have been told that in Jesus’ legacy women were of equal standing but just because in that Iron Age era men could chuck a spear farther than women it was decided that men should fulfill the role of priest.  Now things are different you get rid of your enemies by pressing a button and women can do that with the same if not better dexterity than men.  Women can reach out and capture the hearts and minds of people and are far better placed in this modern environment.  So let us have it, three cheers for HABEMUS PAPESS.

At least with a woman as Pope and with women as bishops we would not have the horrible monstrosities of priests I have met in my time like Monsignor Thomas Duggan, Father Joseph Coulthard, Father Richard Hynes and the ignominious, misplaced horror that was Fr Barry O’Sullivan,  Coordinator of the Salford Diocese Safeguarding Commission, until his recent sacking and his daft dogs.

It is now a month since I wrote to 40 odd priests of the Salford Diocese who I knew were educated or taught at St. Bede’s College in Manchester during the reign of Monsignor Thomas  Duggan, I might not have them all but certainly the majority.  I asked them to speak up on the mental, physical and sexual abuse suffered by some of them and certainly by a lot of their fellow pupils.  I wrote:-

Dear Fr…….,

My name is Paul Malpas and I attended St. Bede’s College 1957-1963.  For 18 months now I have been working to bring to light serious issues of mental, physical and sexual abuse suffered by former pupils of St. Bede’s during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s by former members of the staff of the College, in the hope of bringing some peace and justice to these men.

Some of these former pupils were so severely traumatised it has affected their whole lives and the number of known suicides of former pupils are far and away above the national average.

My main reason for this action is to help these people acheive peace and justice in their troubled lives, to help others who have not yet come forward and to protect those that are not yet born from experiencing the same horror that my generation suffered.

I know that you were associated with the school as pupil or teacher in this period and I wonder whether you can add anything to this story.  You have to see and talk to these survivors to understand their grief and I have been doing this for some considerable time; so perhaps you might reply as soon as possible.

If you find that you cannot speak on the subject, reply anyway and, if you wish, you could reply anonymously.  Somewhere, someone in the Catholic Church in the Salford Diocese must care enough to want justice and goodness available to these men who are all in their 60s and 70s.

Yours sincerely

Paul Malpas

I wasn’t asking much, all they had to do was accept what we all knew to be the truth and offer help both spiritual or physical, anonymously if they wanted to, but offer something of their priestly selves.  I sort of knew the quality of some of the priests I wrote to and really did not expect much, but I thought that a leopard might change its spots one day and it is always worth a stamp.

In fact as it turned out and with the cost of air mail postage stamps between Ireland and England and France, it cost me more than the cost of an airline ticket from Knock to Manchester.  The results were good, some of these priests replied and I found this to be very courageous. Some even agreed with me.  They too recognised the Bede’s of my blog. I will not mention names as their outpourings could well affect their own interests.   The Bishop might well consider knocking down their pensions a notch or two, it has been known,  certainly their own standing amongst their peers, tied tightly with this seeming vow of omerta, might be damaged.

So I have received endorsement and corroboration and offers of help if I can decide where this help is best channelled.   At least some priests stand shoulder to shoulder with me and are prepared to show compassion for their fellow pupils even as the Bishop seems to hide behind lawyers and insurance-speak.

The others, those that did not reply, I hold in contempt.  They could at the very least have shown good manners by replying.  They could have replied and said there was no such thing.  However in the long run, this act of immaturity, this inability to feel for their fellow man, or embrace the truth, will at some stage disconnect themselves from their pastoral responsibilities, they will then be no more than empty cans.

These men were there at the school on a daily basis.  They experienced this abuse, if not by action, by word of mouth.  They can no longer behave like the three monkeys, they have a duty to God.  They are nearing the end of their time on this earth and still cannot admit, 50 years after the event, that abuse, which tainted the very air of the school, took place at St. Bede’s College.  By denial they gain nothing.  This muted behaviour  cannot possibly help them on their way to the heavenly peace they so desire.

When a decent chap becomes a priest (and in this bunch of priests who did not reply there were some decent chaps once, I knew some of them) they start to believe what Bishop Thomas Holland used to say at ordination, “You are no longer a man, but a man of God”.  But that does not mean they should lose their sense of individuality.  The most of them seem to be bound in a god-forsaken union that says that if they spill the beans all is lost.  As that maddest of mad-hatters said in his memoir that the staff of his school (Upholland) “provided us young boys and men with a harmonious pattern of the priesthood.  Easier for them to do that than for today’s priests.  It was a point of honour, in the tradition of the nineteenth and the early decades of this century, to stay within a highly disciplined code of external behaviour.”  These “men of God” have to make themselves a cut above the rest and not expose their flaws and immaturity when it would be far better for everyone especially themselves to show humility

These days every action of the majority of  priests seems driven by the insurer’s  need for obscurity and obfuscation.  But we need better men than these and it is because of them that the Church is in such a delapidated state.  Three cheers for the  men who at least believed in themselves a little bit and have endorsed this difficult task of mine.

It  is now two weeks since that appalling article concerning the expose of Monsignor Thomas Duggan and written by their ace cub reporter, Mike Keegan, appeared in the Manchester Evening News.  “That moribund rag”, as one of my daughters has christened this newspaper, did not follow up on the story and the two Old Bedians, behind its publication, have slunk back into their holes.

However the Press Association got hold of it and spread it around most of the local papers in England, Scotland and Wales, it made the papers here in Ireland and was also broadcast on American radio.  So without criticizing the MEN too much, at least the story got out to a lot of the chattering classes.  However you would have thought because of its local appeal and with so many victims still living in and around Manchester, that they would have used some of that crusading spirit that is common to most good journalists and really put the boot in where it hurts.  They had their chance and failed.

That is all water under the bridge now and what the real results of the article were, is that it has emboldened a lot more victims to look closer at the subject and by so doing  they contacted me through the internet.  I note that the MEN only gave Fr. Barry O’Sullivan as a point of contact and did not include my details as promised, another source of rancour I have with them.  For the victims to contact O’Sullivan would be like pissing in the wind and I have told everyone I know to be very careful of saying too much to this priest or depending on him at all.  For example, one particular victim of abuse at St. Bede’s contacted O’Sullivan in 2002 hoping for some solace from the Church.  Now nine years later a;though he achieved attention at the time, his particular complaint has not been processed or progressed, it has just been covered up.  I wonder how many more of these individual complainants have been closed down.

So the bright spot is that I have gathered a whole new list of victims, who are grateful for our campaign and have poured their hearts out to me, after 50 years of holding their anguish in.  Some have not even told their wives about their inner torments.  Some of them have not been able to sustain relationships because of it and some have had their mental and physical health wrecked.

At times I have felt so out of my depth, because I am just an ordinary chap on the street, who a year ago wrote about the abuse of his friend at Bede’s in about 1960, that I wondered whether I was doing the right thing in heading up this campaign.  When interviewing some of the boys, I could not write for tears and I found whole swathes of testimony missing when I came to write it up.  This had to be returned to and alas a return to tears.

I do fear I need help, but I trust nobody in the professional classes, but thankfully I have had that much praise and thanks from the lads. They have sustained and fortified me and helped me through my weaker moments.

The article inadvertently pin-pointed all that is wrong with the Catholic Church, by reporting that weak excuse for an apology that the bishop gave to the victims of Duggan.  After promising so much, the Church came up with that trite nonsense and opened up more wounds and made a lot of Old Bedians, laid low by the scurge that was Duggan, very angry.  Very angry after 50 years,that the Church’s attitude is still the same. After learning all there was to know about clerical abuse and the affect it has on victims, for them to come out with this stupid, half-hearted weak apology was a disgrace.

A journalist in London, Emma Hartley, picked up on this Duggan abuse story, read my blogs on the subject and put the story out on her blog, which I understand is read by many and for that I will be eternally grateful.  This posting was picked up by an internationally successful law firm, who then also read my blog postings and felt we needed help.  They were appalled at the Church’s atitude and thought that they could make a difference.  From the very beginning we had eschewed the idea of law courts and compensation, all we wanted was Acceptance, Acknowledgement and Apology and the apology had to be personal and sincere and we certainly did not get that and it would have cost the Diocese nothing.

I turned this lawfirm down at least twice but they were very persistent and my final decision was helped by that growing feeling inside of me, that if the Salford Diocese cannot give an apology from the heart, we should take one from its pockets.  I was also empowered by the fact that my list of victims were getting more bellicose by the day.

So here we are at this moment.  The law firm have offered help, I have accepted that offer.  All we need is a group of individuals who wish to add their name to the law suit and join us against the Salford Diocese.  I ask every Old Bedian who reads this, to seriously consider that if they feel that they were abused by Duggan, to step forward and make contact by e-mailing me at malpas46@eircom.net.  Or if you know of an Old Bedian, ask him the question and if he is willing to contact me and join our growing band.  I have calculated there were approximately 2500 boys who came under his aegis as Rector and I am in contact with about 8% there are still a lot out there who are ignorant of our campaign,

As a last thought I think I should tell you that I thought this abuse was limited to Duggan.  I know of no one else, although I knew plenty of sadists and evil men on the staff, but the more I delve into this subject, the more fingers of shame are pointed at other individuals in authority at the school and over the coming months these allegations will be investigated.  We will wipe the slate clean in the process.