Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

A view of the world from an Irish hole

Category: abuse of authority

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Arson around again

According to RTE news Gardai are investigating a suspected arson attack at an industrial estate in Dublin.

 The arsonist(s) are probably on the run now, fearing apprehension, but I want to give them some words of consolation for the future. You should really get out of the grime of the big city and move to a border county. There your involvement with arson will be initially forgotten, especially if you join Fianna Fail and the Knights of St Columbanus. You will then be able to look back upon your past with pride and speak candidly and unashamedly about it. And what’s more you will even get a job with the local authority.

 Instead of having to keep a low profile to escape the Bill, you will be able to have your mugs emblazoned on a weekly basis in the local paper. When you attend social events camera bulbs will flash as if you were Brittney Spears. If you still have criminal tendencies you will be able to steal with impunity, and because of your newfound friends you will be able to slander decent people, and what’s more be believed.

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Child abuse in Ireland

Historically the greatest institutional child abusers were the Catholic Church.  This was carried out with the connivance of the Irish police and the various local health boards. This had thankfully sharply declined.

 Sadly child abuse, of a physical, sexual and emotional nature still continues and shows no signs of diminishing. Nowadays it happens with the knowledge and even participation of government bodies, probably the greatest of which is the Health Service Executive (HSE), who sometimes return children who have escaped from abuse in the UK to the very locations and environments where the abuse initially took place. \In this they are assisted by the Irish courts and legal system.

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Lea’s Cross report gagging order

It is very hard to listen to news reports on RTE without a feeling of deep disgust. I have just heard about the understandable anger of the brother and sister of a man with Alzheimer’s Disease and Down’s Syndrome who died less than a fortnight after being transferred to the Leas Cross Nursing Home. It has taken until now for the Health Service Executive to finalise a report, but before it is handed over to the man’s family the HSE want them to sign a confidentiality clause – a gagging order – that would prevent them publicising its contents.

 This is 2010. What though is the difference between this outrageous demand and the similar gagging order that the former bishop of Kilmore wished to impose on the victims of clerical sexual abuse in 1975 – thirty five years’ ago? The calls on Cardinal Sean Brady to resign because he was associated with that shameful episode have been loud. Surely the demands for the resignation of the Minister for Health Matry Harney, who presides at the pinnacle of the HSE, must be louder. m (It is an open secret though that the HSE has long been out of the minister’s control. In fact it has never been under any effective control but operates as a state within a state.

 The substandard care at Leas Cross came to light not through the health service’s own investigations, which were at most perfunctory. The clamour of the relatives of those who had suffered in that dreadful institution were brushed aside. They were only acted upon when the scandal of Leas Cross was exposed by RTE’s Prime Time program.

 As my mother died suffering from Alzheimer’s I am affected by this. Honestly it makes me feel sick that in this great country of ours someone can die due and those responsible seek to hide their culpability. That doesn’t happen in free countries; it’s the stuff of dictatorship worthy of Argentina after the Dirty War.

 We may very well live in a post-Christian society in Ireland, but let’s remember one thing. The vast majority of senior management in government institutions were educated in Catholic secondary schools, which so jealously guarded their Catholic ethos. It didn’t seem to produce more Christian or caring citizens – maybe that was because so many of the clerical teachers were busy abusing their pupils.

 To be honest, I think that the senior management of the HSE, or anyone who supports this gagging order, should be taken out and shot. In fact, I think a bullet would be too good for such miserable scum.

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Tell the guards!?

A very persistent urban myth in American politics relates that the one-time governor of Texas, John B. Conally, once objected to any diminution of the use of the English language in his state on the basis that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it should be good enough for the rest of us. It has been claims that this howler was uttered instead by governor Miriam Ferguson, but once again this seems unlikely.

 I’ve always been a bit uneasy with ethical relativism. For me the foundations of ethics are unchanging. What is more as a Christian I have never felt that the sermon preached by Jesus Christ on the Mount had a time embargo on it. It was good to go then and will be valid until the end of time. In other words, if it was good enough for Jesus Christ, it is certainly good enough for the rest of us, especially those who hold offices of ministry in any Christian church, To hell with the casuistry: if any action causes gratuitous pain or suffering, surely that is wrong. For that reason I find some of the excuses being put forward by leading figures in the Irish Catholic church for their non-actions when confronted with paedophilia to be intellectually feeble.

 I do feel that there is an element of shadow-boxing, maybe even dishonesty, about this issue. Some church figures are condemned for not informing the civil authorities, which they should have done. But let’s just ask what might have happened had they done so. I very much doubt that An Gardai Siochana would have known how to deal with the issue. Back in 1975 they were far busier looking for Dr Herrema or chasing after Dr Rose Dugdale to worry about paedophiles. The Murphy inquiry uncovered numerous instances of active collusion between the police and the church authorities in covering up child abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin. Many senior policemen viewed the Catholic Church as a type of religious police force, enforcing law and order, and generally keeping everyone in their place while some may have owed their promotion to membership of certain Catholic lay groups. Even younger police officers just out of Templemore tended to come from rural backgrounds, traditionally deferential to the more authoritarian aspects of religion. You never gave cheek to a priest, and if you did he could put a pig’s head on you or make you stick to the chair. Such police officers were reluctant to prosecute priests for minor traffic infringements, so how would they have approached the idea of a priest potentially committing something far more serious?

I suppose what I am trying to say here is: let’s not get fixated with attaching blame to a mere handful of individuals in the Catholic church’s past. These were not the only demons in Ireland’s society.

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Stand in the corridor Gogarty

Who of us has not told a lie now and again? These are usually “white” lie3s, of no importance. But there are other lies that are bigger, because they involve besmirching someone’s reputation or covering up criminal activity, either by yourself or by others. The actions of Minister Willie O’Dea definitely fall into this latter category. I believe that any public servant caught doing this shows complete lack of morality. They cannot be allowed to retain their position without drawing discredit on the whole system within which they work.

 Willie O’Dea seems to be immune because the present government operates a policy of “honour amongst thieves”. This may also be expressed in the phrase of Our Lord in the Gospels: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

 Amongst those who don’t believe this is a “resigning issue” is Green Party parliamentarian Paul Gogarty. Now Gogarty is a teacher by training, but I am full of pity for any of his students. I’m sure, as a teacher, he was often faced by pupils failing to deliver homework because they had fallen ill or left their textbooks in school or any number of excuses. These might be considered lies that were a whiter shade of pale. While they would not draw down punishments the first time, a teacher would be anxious to ensure that the excuse / lie was not used again, or if it was, with discretion. This would ensure that lying was viewed as a reprehensible activity. It is the handmaiden of dishonesty, and as a teacher he would surely have been worried if he discovered that one or more of his pupils was passing off work as their own, when it had actually been completed by someone else. As a teacher in the Irish education system he was imprisoned by the examinations system, but if someone was caught cheating in any exam, that was a major black mark against their character.

 So how can Mr Gogarty then say that the actions of Minister O’Dea ought to be ignored? This was far bigger than saying he couldn’t come to school because his grandfather had died, or his pet rothweiler had eaten his essay.

 But then Paul Gogarty’s actions must be considered in a broader context. He knows that he has paid that many hostages to fortune that his days as a member of the Dail are numbered, and that his constituents will be only waiting to have their vengeance upon him at the next general election. Maybe he could go back to teaching, but I wouldn’t let him near a school. With his morals he might look for a job in a special criminals’ academy. Alternatively he could look for a post in PR.

 But Willie will not resign, at least not before St Patrick’s Day. Otherwise he would have to forego the all-expenses-paid trip to visit Irish peacekeepers in Chad, but as that country is landlocked and hasn’t much of a tourism infrastructure, I’m sure there will be a stop-off in somewhere more comfortable.

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Home sweet home

Let them eat slush

Yesterday (Sunday January 10th) we were given a further example of the contempt felt by this present regime for the Irish people when the Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey, came back from his holiday with a smugness and alacrity that was insulting.

 The inclement weather has created real hardships for tens of thousands of people, of all age groups, and it behoves those who rule us – and who get paid to rule us – to remain in the country where they can at least experience the difficulties faced by the Irish people. Minister Dempsey’s attitude was, however, “I’m a government minister, a big shot, and I can do what I like. In fact I can head off to the sun and leave all you scummy little people up to your arses in slush. Yez don’t deserve any better. Why d’ya think I’m a minister and you crowd of whingin’ hoors are nobodies?”

 The minister claimed that he was so well-informed that it was as if he was back home. So, as he was being kept abreast of developments did he sit ibnside his refrigerator? Did he turn on the air-conditioning to full blast? When he went out for food did he worry whether he’d be able to get back to his pied-a-terre?

Dempsey seemed to imply that there was no need for him to be here at all. Many would agree there, but does he also agree then that there is no need to pay him a salary? What’s more, he came out with the accursed guff of “Oaying tribute” to those who had been trying to keep the country moving, but it sounded so insincere, like a back-handed jeer. Anyway, what he really meant was to send a message to the various managers that they’d be in line for a nice bonus later on in the year, especially if they had earned it by staying in their overheated offices and as far away as possible from snow and ice. or better stioll, had not bothered coming ibnto work at all but had directed operations from home.

 Noel Dempsey, you’re nothing but a disgrace. Thank your lucky stars that I’m disabled and in a wheel-chair, because if I wasn’t and I met you I would give me the greatest pleasure to break your rotten neck. How many tears would then be shed amongst the very extensive extended Dempsey clan where possession of the surname or some other agnatic link guarantees a job and impunity from the law. I better make sure I n ever come up before your brother the judge.

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Darkness visible revisited

Readers will recall how I exposed the shameful practice of solicitor Helen Magovern who last September chose to deliver a high court summons or some other document on two people staying with a friend at 1.30 AM – a time and a manner which surprisingly did not strike other members of the legal profession as bizarre. Alas the people upon whom this was served have earned my disappointment and contempt by associating themselves with a street-walker in Belturbet who has represented herself falsely as a trainee solicitor. The friendship which they have rediscovered with her is all the stranger as not long ago they denounced her for letting them down when she did not appear on their behalf at a previous court hearing, preferring to spend her time with a male acquaintance whom I believe has been jailed for fire-arms offences in the United Kingdom. Even more recently they had hinted that she was involved in child trafficking. What is worse, probably at this shameful scrubber’s instigation, they have begun a campaign of hostile and potentially threatening text messages to a person whom, in their benighted paranoia, they believe to be working against them.  They have been seriously damaged by their ordeal, and I believe their psychological vulnerability was deliberately targeted by the Health Service Executive and others, as a lion or cheetah is attracted by the sense of fear exuded by a gazelle on the African savannah. Nevertheless, one would have thought they could see that they are going to be used by the person in question, in the same way she has used everyone else. She believes that she enjoys the protection of the not-so-Civic guards who may have been lured by the possibility of enjoying unspecified favours.

 It was evident that this couple have suffered greatly from the illegality and injustices of public bodies, but instead of turning their justified anger against those who have never meant them well, they have decided instead to conduct a campaign against an innocent individual who was lucky enough to extricate her son from the clutches of the aforementioned would-be solicitor. Such behaviour is both cowardly and wicked.

 Having said this, I still believe the behaviour of Ms Magovern on the morning in question was loathsome and morally reprehensible – I am entitled to express a belief I hope.

  It goes without saying that she was accompanied in her nocturnal frolic by members of the Gardai Siochana who obviously found the prospect of waking people up at Half one in the morning far less dangerous than dealing with drug pushers in the Navan area.

 Just in case any bright-eyed legal eagle (and I’m not talking here about the Ally McBeal of Erne Court who should seriously revise basic Contract) might think that I have violated the in camera rule regarding these people’s case, I must point out that I have commented upon matters incidental to it. I think that case law may support me in my contention that the serving of papers are always incidental to a case and not a part of it.

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