Conservative Dishonesty?

I know, 'dishonesty' may be too strong a word. Maybe 'stupidity' is the right one, though given how certain things work in their favour...

I'm talking about AV, of course. The Conservatives, in the main, don't want it. They are willing, under pressure, to seek the people's opinion on the matter, but they're not inclined to encourage them to vote for it. They must like systems where they might potentially get to govern despite not having received a majority of the popular vote since 1931.

The thing is, they know that First Past The Post is rubbish. How can we tell? Well, consider how they pick their leaders: sure, they give the members a straight choice between two candidates, but how do they pick those candidates when more than two people want the leadership? They ask the MPs, of course, and the MPs don't vote in a First Past The Post system. No, they use a slightly clunkier version of AV.

The candidates stand and the parliamentary party votes, and the least popular candidate is eliminated, and then the remaining candidates stand and the MPs vote again, and the weakest of these is eliminated, and so on, until they reach a point where there are only two candidates left. And only then, at the point where First Past The Post actually works, do they ask the ordinary party members to choose between the last two candidates.

Which, of course, is what happens in an AV system, except more quickly. It's an instant run-off, a streamlined version of the Conservative Party's own system for picking leaders. And this does matter.

Take 1997, for instance, where on the first count, Ken Clarke got 29.9% of the vote, making him the most popular candidate, but as we all know, this meant that the vast majority of members of the Parliamentary party voted for somebody else, so Michael Howard, the least popular candidate, was eliminated and Peter Lilley withdrew. On the second count, then, after transfers, Clarke was still the leading candidate, with 39% of the vote, but the fact was that more people had still voted for somebody else than voted for Clarke, and so a third count was needed. That headbanger Redwood was eliminated, then, and it wound up as a straight contest between Clarke and William Hague, and this time, although Clarke increased his share of the vote to 44.2%, Hague outstripped him and got 55.2%, so that he became leader.

Now. 

Leaving aside how that went, what we can say is that if this had been a straight First Past The Post count, then Clarke would have been leader, rather than Hague. I don't think there's any value in claiming that people would have voted differently had the system been First Past The Post: I think we have to assume that people's votes actually mean what they're meant to mean, which is that you give your vote to the person you think best fitted to the job, transferring to the person you regard as next best if your ideal candidate is ruled out, all the way down in order of preference.

The Tories changed their system in 1998, to allow ordinary members to choose at the final stage, once the MPs had used this runoff system to winnow the candidates down to two. In other words, it was still a runoff system, albeit with the final stage being based on a much larger pool of voters.

Along comes 2001, then, with the new system being deployed. Michael Portillo was leader in the first count, with 30.1% of the vote, though he was eliminated on the next count, in which Ken Clarke took the lead, with 35.5%. With the candidate pool winnowed down to two, again, it became a straight vote between Clarke and Iain Duncan Smith, which Duncan Smith won.

So, yet again we see that if the Conservatives used First Past The Post in their own internal elections, they'd have picked Michael Portillo as leader in 2001. But they don't. Because they know it's unrepresentative and results in people getting elected by a minority of voters.

Michael Howard, he of the least support in 1997, was anointed as leader in 2003, without any opposition, and then things get interesting again in 2005. With 31.3%, David Davis got more votes than any other candidate in the first round, though the elimination the least popular candidate, Ken Clarke, shook things up in the second round, as the MPs who had voted for Clarke in the main decided that if Clarke couldn't be leader, then they could accept David Cameron, so he became the frontrunner for the final face-off, with the whole party voting. He won in that round, of course, by a long way, but the fact remains that based on the initial vote, David Davis got more votes than him.

Ultimately, this is effectively the same system used in selecting individual candidates at constituency level. It's a run-off system, not a crude First Past The Post charade, where there isn't even a post to pass. Basically, the Conservatives obviously like run-off voting systems, as that's what they use for all their own elections, but when they have to compete for votes against people who have slightly different viewpoints, well, then things change, and unrepresentative crudeness becomes regarded as a virtue:

The fact is, FPTP is simple to understand and gives a clear result most of the time, which is true. As indeed does picking a name from a hat. Or throwing a dart at a dartboard. In fact, if you put names in a hat in direct proportion to the votes people got, picking the name from the hat would in all probability be fairer than FPTP.

It's sad, really. Look, I don't think AV is a great solution. I think AV+, as recommended by Parliamentary Commissions, would be far better. And I actually think the system we use in Ireland would work far better in the UK than it does at home, as every polity has its vices and our system nurtures ours. But still, I think AV would be a far fairer system than what the UK has currently got, where only a third of MPs are elected with the support of most of their voting constituents, where more people vote for defeated candidates than victorious ones, and where the Conservatives can get 47% of the seats with just 36% of the vote. 

And then complain that the system is set up against them.

Fifteen Movies

My friend Denise has done one of those Facebook meme things, where you list 'fifteen movies that have influenced you and that will always stick with you', challenging her mates to do likewise. It didn't take me long to hammer out a list of my own, resisting the urge merely to list my favourite films, but having done that I felt an urge to say why I picked these. I did a similar thing last year with books. So, here goes...

1. Seven Samurai

My favourite film, bar none. It's intelligent and beautiful and humane, and there's not a wasted frame in it. I couldn't come close to picking a favourite moment - that opening silhouette of the horses against the sky, the shot of the village from above, old Gisaku's grimacing face, Kambei's haircut, Gorobei's chuckling, Kyuzo's duel, the flower, Kikuchiyo at the waterwheel, the horse in the rain... It's surely no coincidence that my favourite film as a child was, for a while, The Magnificent Seven, or that even now I'm a big fan of A Bug's Life. This was also, as it happens, the first subtitled film that I ever watched from beginning to end.

2. Star Wars: A New Hope

Look, I'm a bloke, what do you expect? I'm not sure any film has ever brought me as much joy. Unlike 'Seven Samurai', this isn't a film that could ever be on a pedestal; it has faults galore, and I can see them all, and I still love it. Sure, it'd be a better film without them, but it'd be a different one. I love it as it is. Sometimes our cracks are part of who we are. And I still think its opening sequence is superb.

3. Casablanca

Like 'Star Wars', the cliches really do have a ball in this film, and Pauline Kael had a point when she said that this is the classic instance of how entertaining a bad film can be. Still, it's sparklingly witty, has perhaps the most exhilarating scene in the history of cinema, and for me stands out as the classic modern take on the Arthurian love triangle. And, of course, it underpins both When Harry Met Sally and Deep Space Nine. Of course.

4. The Maltese Falcon

I like quest stories, and I especially like futile quests. John Huston did them better than anyone, whether in Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Man Who Would Be King, or in this early masterpiece. I'm not convinced that the film's quite as deliciously dark as Hammett's novel, but it has the great Peter Lorre in it, which more than makes up for that, and there's something awe-inspiring about how Sidney Greenstreet fills the screen!

5. Scaramouche

Yeah, I can't defend this. Even hardcore swashbuckler lovers get embarrassed by this one. So what? My younger brother has said that my love for even ropey swashbucklers is my curse, but I don't care. Scaramouche may not be The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Mark of Zorro, but I've loved it since I was a small boy, and I love it now. The colours are gorgeous, the dialogue is hilarious, Janet Leigh is stunning, the long swordfight is breathtaking, and the final scene is wonderful if you don't think about it for too

6. The Birds

Sure, it's not Hitchcock's best film, or even my favourite of his films - that'd surely be either Rear Window or Vertigo - but it was the gateway drug for me, to a point where I now have almost two dozen Hitchcock gilms on my shelves! I saw it when I was about ten, and to this day find it one of the most weirdly unnerving films I've ever seen.

7. The Silence of the Lambs

This was the first film I ever saw in the cinema more than once, and the first time I saw it my knees hurt for hours afterwards, as they'd been tensed so tightly during the film. I've since read and loved the book, and think this well deserved its Oscar Royal Flush; as adaptations go, it rivals To Kill a Mockingbird, and though this film lacks an Atticus Finch, it does at least have a Clarice Starling. For all that Hopkins gets the plaudits for this one, and for all that I've ruined the film for others by reading Agony Aunt columns in his voice, I still think this is Jodie Foster's film.

8. Reservoir Dogs

I saw 'Silence of the Lambs' more than once in the cinema, but the following year I saw 'Reservoir Dogs' four times. I've not seen it in years, and it's a conspicuous gap in my dvd collection, and it's not even one I'm in a hurry to fill, but its impact on me at the time was undeniable. The dialogue astounded me, the claustrophobic staginess of it thrilled me, and above all I was fascinated by the fact that the film was almost - though not quite - in real time. Real-time films like High Noon and Before Sunset have delighted me ever since.

9. Beauty and the Beast

Yes, I know it might seem odd picking this ahead of the Cocteau masterpiece, but let's face it, for all the silvery magic of the 1946 classic (and wasn't that a great year for fantasy films, with A Matter of Life and Death and It's a Wonderful Life all appearing at the same time?), it doesn't have a sleazy candlestick with a comedy French accent, or that expression the Beast pulls when Belle unreasonably refuses to join him for dinner. I love redemption stories anyway, and I have always liked this story of how a thing must be loved before it is able to love. And, of course, it's about an intelligent, sensitive, beautiful girl who loves a clumsy, hairy, awkward man with a lot of books. One can always hope.

10. Stand by Me

It's probably not even Rob Reiner's best film, but Stephen King is a master of conveying small town American life - or so it has always seemed, anyway - and Reiner brought King's strengths to the screen perfectly here. It's funny and thrilling and gross and sad, and is deathly serious when it needs to be. What's more, as a study in boyhood friendship, it's pretty much perfect.

11. Dead Poets Society

For all that he can be too sentimental and twee, I like Robin Williams in this one, and I've come to like Ethan Hawke too. I still cherish watching it in Dave's living room, and at Nayra's going away night, and in Becky's room in halls. Its carpei diem motto still resounds with me, and I always picture the film's final scenes when I hear the story of Laura and Rose and the microphone. Thank you, girls.

12. The Searchers

Its iconic images of Monument Valley, of Wayne's Ethan Edwards silhouetted in the doorway, and of the burning homestead are part of cinema history, of course, but the film has layers and layers below and beyond its visual magnificence. Astonishingly beautiful and painfully bleak, The Searchers is, aside from being probably the finest western ever, a profoundly mythic study in how frighteningly lonely and psychologically insupportable it would be to be the type of man that John Wayne plays in so many of his films. Even the comic scenes, which can look like a frivolous distraction, serve, like the Olympus episodes in the Iliad, to heighten the darkness in Wayne's own character.

13. Dangerous Liaisons

If Beauty and the Beast and the Star Wars films are stories of how a man becomes a monster and then finds himself again, Dangerous Liaisons shows us a monster who realises he is becoming a man and who destroys the only person he loves in an attempt to remain otherwise. Devastatingly intelligent, there's nothing about this film that I don't like. The script, based on Christopher Hampton's play, is as brilliant and cold as the hardest of diamonds, as good an adaptation of Laclos' novel as one might hope for, and the cast is exactly right. Even young Keanu Reeves is good as the gormless Danceny, though he's nothing to Uma Thurman, let alone John Malkovich, Glenn Close, and the luminous Michelle Pfeiffer.

14. Magnolia

I like non-linear storytelling a lot. Citizen Kane is great, Pulp Fiction fascinated me for years, and Short Cuts, when I saw it back in the day, was a revelation. Of all these complex cinematic tapestries, though, Magnolia, for me,  is the one I'm most likely to think of. I know: it's messy, and it's often ugly, and not all of the characters are particularly likeable, but for all the horror it shows us, for all the loneliness, and inadequacy, and guilt, and shame, it's ultimate a deeply compassionate and hopeful film, as profound as it is profane, drinking from the same thematic wells as Krzysztof Kieślowski's tripartite study of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but doing so in an intoxicatingly different and utterly inspiring way. I'm a sucker for films about redemption, and they don't come much better than this.

15. Withnail and I

You know what Paul McGann does when faced with the bull? That works. A friend of mine did a few months back, when he and his wife were confronted with an angry one. You can talk about the poignancy and the quotability of this film all you like, but me, I have two friends who escaped being violently gored thanks to having watched this.

Stop Projecting Your Euro Neurosis, Revisited

Will Hutton, in today's Observer, utterly nails the Irish issue, rightly pointing out how the British narrative of Ireland's financial meltdown is a caricature, determined wholly by Britain's own issues, rather than the reality of what has happened in Ireland over the last decade:

But in Britain the vast inflation of Ireland's public sector wage bill, the fecklessness of its bankers who allowed lending to balloon to four times Irish GDP, largely on the expectation of never-ending property price increases, and the grubby corruption of its political elite are all pushed to one side. Voices on right and left insist that what is happening in Ireland is the fault of the EU and the euro. If Irish interest rates could have been a fraction higher, they argue, like those in Britain, Ireland would not have had a property and credit boom.

The British narrative ignores Ireland's insane public sector pay bill, the fact that the economy had become addictively dependent on the construction industry and rising property prices, reckless bankers, and corruption, cowardice, and a lack of imagination among the governing parties and the opposition which lacked the nerve to challenge them on economic grounds. It blames everything on Ireland's membership of the Euro and sees the events of the last week as a grand Franco-German plan to take over Ireland.

Nonsense, of course, not least because Ireland's no prize nowadays and because given her debt, Britain could quite easily wind up in as bad a situation:

A second financial crisis would confront Britain with Irish-style dilemmas despite the independence of the pound. We have proportionally more bank lending in relation to our GDP than even the Irish, some £7 trillion or five times GDP.

Yes, Britain has worse debt levels than Ireland does, and it managed this without being 'trapped' in a catch-all interest zone, which is how the Eurozone keeps being scorned as. The Euro, as Hutton points out, isn't the problem here. It might, however, be part of the solution.

I'm not sure the Pope has said anything new here...

Back in September, when the Pope came to Britain, one of the things I wore myself out telling people was how rubbish the media are when it comes to religion; at this point I pretty much only ever trust John Allen, of America's National Catholic Reporter, when it comes to any news about the Vatican, say. This shouldn't be surprising, of course. There's an enormous amount of shoddy journalism out there, and when it comes to, say, science journalism, Ben Goldacre has had a field day pointing out how misleading it is. So, given this, I was rather startled to read today headlines like 'Pope says Condoms can be used in Fight Against AIDS'.

The story relates to some extracts that have been leaked from Peter Seewald's forthcoming book-length interview with the Pope, his third such; I've read the other two, and their 1985 predecessor, The Ratzinger Report, where the then Cardinal Ratzinger was interviewed at length by Vittorio Messori.

In this interview the subject of AIDS in Africa inevitably comes up, with Seewald asking about the impact of Church policy on the crisis. The Pope's answer is being leapt on by an ignorant -- and it must be said, hopeful -- media as the Vatican having changed its official stance on condom use. Here's the relevant passage from the book:

PS: On the occasion of your trip to Africa in March 2009, the Vatican’s policy on AIDs once again became the target of media criticism.Twenty-five percent of all AIDs victims around the world today are treated in Catholic facilities. In some countries, such as Lesotho, for example, the statistic is 40 percent. In Africa you stated that the Church’s traditional teaching has proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics, including critics from the Church’s own ranks, object that it is madness to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.

B16: The media coverage completely ignored the rest of the trip to Africa on account of a single statement. Someone had asked me why the Catholic Church adopts an unrealistic and ineffective position on AIDs. At that point, I really felt that I was being provoked, because the Church does more than anyone else. And I stand by that claim. Because she is the only institution that assists people up close and concretely, with prevention, education, help, counsel, and accompaniment. And because she is second to none in treating so many AIDs victims, especially children with AIDs.

I had the chance to visit one of these wards and to speak with the patients. That was the real answer: The Church does more than anyone else, because she does not speak from the tribunal of the newspapers, but helps her brothers and sisters where they are actually suffering. In my remarks I was not making a general statement about the condom issue, but merely said, and this is what caused such great offense, that we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms. Much more needs to be done. We must stand close to the people, we must guide and help them; and we must do this both before and after they contract the disease.

As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

PS: Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?

B16: She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.

The first thing to note about this is that Benedict wasn't teaching here as 'The Pope'; this shouldn't be construed as an official stance of any sort. Rather it is a personal opinion, not to be understood as the Vatican's formal position, let alone an infallible doctrinal teaching. Elsewhere in the interview, Benedict is quite frank about the fact that popes can be wrong, and indeed he felt the need to preface his recent Jesus of Nazareth with the caveat that the book represents his personal thoughts, and shouldn't be misunderstood as something anyway binding on Catholics.

Secondly, what is he actually saying? He's saying that condoms aren't a practical solution to the problem, a position for which there certainly seems to be scientific support. He's also saying that condoms aren't a moral solution to the problem, in that they represent a banalization of sexuality; while you might disagree with that, it's certainly orthodox Church teaching. And finally he's saying that in cases where people are already ignoring of disobeying Church teaching, then use of condoms might represent a step in the right direction, a realisation that actions can have consequences and an attempt to limit harm.

This is commentary, not guidance. And it's not particularly earth-shaking guidance, either. Back in September I pointed out to friends that

'[...] the Pope has never said that condoms shouldn't be used when having sex outside of marriage. Not a word. All of his comments on the matter have concerned contraception within marriage. Why? Well, the Church regards sex as being exclusively for marriage - it is the act of marital communion, for want of a better way of putting it - and regards all extramarital sex as intrinsically wrong. Whether you agree with that is, in this context, neither here nor there. What matters is that the Church isn't in the business of advising people on how to mitigate things it regards as sins. It says, with God, "thou shalt not commit adultery" It doesn't say, "we'd rather you didn't commit adultery, but if you must cheat on your wife with some random skank, for whatever reason, well, it might be prudent to wear one of these things."'

Is he saying now that it would be prudent? As a theologian or an ordinary Catholic expressing his opinion, he is certainly saying that it might be better, that it might represent a step in the right direction. He's not saying that it would, just that it might. But as the Pope, the successor to Peter and custodian of the keys to the kingdom, charged with feeding and tending Jesus' flock, no, he's by no means teaching that condoms should be used. All he's saying is that for people who are inclined to ignore him anyway, a decision to use a condom could indicate a growing sense of moral responsibility.

Jimmy Akin sensibly analyses the interview fragment, and how it's been and is being presented, here.

One Crisis - Two Narratives

One of the most fascinating things about the terrible situation in Ireland nowadays is how there are very different narratives inside and outside Ireland to explain what's happened. To the largely europhobic British media, the story is simple: being in the Eurozone gave Ireland access to too much cheap credit, all offered at inappropriately low interest rates, which caused a credit bubble that has exploded. In short, it's all the fault of the Euro. Or, if you like, we told you so, and Maggie was right all along. Even the less characteristically europhobic elements of the British media seem to have bought into this story.

The Irish media, on the other hand, realises the Euro really isn't the problem, and the British crowing about it is far more reflective of Britain's issues than Ireland's. As Jason O'Mahony says in this superbly cutting post:

The Euro is not the source of our problems. Our exports continue to perform strongly. Please stop trying to project your Euro neurosis onto us. The Euro has flaws, but it is still where we need to be. We need to be competitive by cutting our costs, which we are doing, not by some Harold Wilson style three card trick.

It's true, after all, that our trade surplus is widening as our exports keep growing, and Goldman Sachs reckons that the situation is rather better than people seem to fear.

But if our estimates suggest anything, it is that the ultimate losses, and the ultimate burden on the Irish government, will be quite a bit lower than estimated by NAMA, which is likely to make money on its investments. Correspondingly, the government will significantly have over-capitalised the banks, perhaps by tens of billions of Euros.

Certainly, the situation is far more complex than us simply being trapped in the wrong currency. GS's analysis is summed up by saying that the fiscal crisis is a consequence rather than a cause of our collapse in output. This should make sense to anyone who's not been wearing ideological blinkers when watching how Ireland's economy has performed over the last twelve years or so; the fact that George Osborne was singing its praises at a time when the country was obviously an inflated bubble speaks volumes about his understanding of such matters, or at least it did four years ago; perhaps he's learned.

This isn't a matter of the wisdom that comes with hindsight; for years Garret Fitzgerald has been grumbling about how our national expenditure was too high while we simply weren't producing things and were dependent on construction to keep the wheels turning, Fintan O'Toole was pointing to the state's infatuation with a neo-liberal ideology that was pouring money into people's pockets and building nothing for when the good times ended, and David McWilliams memorably pointing out four years ago what the Ghost Estates around the country were destined to mean. I had huge arguments with friends before the 2002 and 2007 elections, with them happily voting for the status quo despite the writing being on the wall, or at least in the mainstream media, if they could be bothered to look.

Yes, it's true that easy access to cheap credit from German banks has played an enormous part in this whole farce, but this is hardly a matter of us being in the Eurozone. We have a young population that grew up with nothing and wanted to have everything; of course German banks, overloaded with pensioners' savings, wanted to lend to us. They'd lend to anyone! Look at Britain, with its national debt of more than £950 billion and its total personal debt of almost £1,500 billion! There's also the fact that not all of our debt has come from Eurozone countries -- our single largest creditor, to whom we owe a fifth of our debt, is the UK, with our third- and sixth-largest creditors being the United States and Japan. No, this problem wasn't caused by our using the same currency as our neighbours.

Inflation has been a huge problem in Ireland since the mid-1990s. I visited Berlin in 1996 and was struck by how expensive it was, and again five years later, before the physical adoption of the Euro as a real currency, and was amazed by how cheap it was. It hadn't changed; Ireland had. Inflation was rife, and property prices were rising, and rent was rising, and rather than bring in rent controls or otherwise try to cool the property market, the government instead decided to allow incomes to rise too, keeping taxes low and in 2002 raising all public servants' pay in accordance with a national benchmarking agreement.

More money was poured into the economy, driving labour costs up in the private sector and raising inflation in general, making us less competitive than we had been, all at a time when the hi-tech sector was feeling the aftershocks of the Dot.com Bubble bursting, and tourism was trying to cope with the double-whammy of the restrictions imposed by the Foot and Mouth Crisis and the of the collapse in American tourism following 9/11. Output declined, and the only thing keeping the economy going was the frenzy of construction, all funded by cheap credit, gambled on the new buildings being sold for a huge profit.

The buyers weren't there, though, as the credit began to dry up, and when the global banking system went into a tizz, the Irish banks, lightly regulated for far too long, turned out to be hugely overstretched. The government -- perhaps pressured by our partners in Britain and the Mainland who feared their own banks mightn't get their money back -- guaranteed to cover the banks, no matter what. This calmed things down, and we won plaudits internationally as teeth were gritted, belts were tightened, and costs were cut. It didn't work though, not least because it turned out that the banks had massively played down just how reckless they'd been and how overstretched they were.

This made it look increasingly likely that the bank guarantee would sink us, that it would, in hindsight, turn out to be an enormous mistake, though until a couple of months ago it was a mistake that could have been solved, in a sense, by the government changing the terms of the guarantee, pointing out that it had been misled about the scale of the banks' problems. The opportunity wasn't taken, though, and the government stuck to its guns, determined for whatever reason to keep to the letter of its word, thereby ensuring that people and institutions who had gambled with risky loans to Irish banks would get all their money back. And we all know what that's brought us to over the last fortnight.

It's difficult to tell, of course, whether the government is bluffing in saying it doesn't need a bail-out; there is a serious argument that it's more in the interests of the likes of Britain, Germany, and France than it is for us to accept their money -- and on their terms -- and that this is about preserving their banking systems and the European economic system as a whole. Of course, if that were destroyed, we'd be lost anyway...

So, are we doomed? The government and Goldman Sachs don't think so, and if it's just a matter of regaining confidence and keeping to our current austere path then we might be okay. Have we lost our sovereignty? I don't know. Did the UK lose its sovereignty when it called in the IMF back in 1976? If it did, did it get it back? Mightn't we do likewise?

Whatever way we look at it, those buffoons who babble about Ireland rejoining Sterling or even the United Kingdom, no matter how tongue-in-cheek their suggestions are, really need to calm down.

Notes on the Papal Visit 4: Playing the Man, Not the Ball

And continuing from yesterday...

I've friends who say of this that there's no smoke without fire, but so far it seems that all the smoke there's been has come from smoke bombs thrown by lazy or malicious journalists. I think the press has actually done the Church a favour with the abuse stuff -- though I'm sure this wasn't the intention -- by forcing it to confront the problems, but that doesn't change the fact unlike so much else that's been reported, these particular personal attacks on the Pope have indeed been 'petty gossip'. Abuse has been widespread in the Church, especially about thirty years ago, and even allowing for the shambolic organisation of the Church at national level, a tendency towards cover-up seems to have been endemic, but there's not a jot of proof that indicates that Benedict, in whatever capacity, was responsible for either committing or concealing abuse.

That's not to say that prior to about eight years ago Benedict was as good and thorough as he might have been in tackling these problems, or that he didn't make mistakes, but that's a far cry from saying that he was in any way responsible for their having been perpetuated, and as John Allen has pointed out, since 2001 he's done more than anyone to try to cleanse the Church's Augean stables.

Meanwhile, and I know it's generally bad form to play the man and not the ball but given their form in this area I think their credibility counts, look at the people who have been screeching loudest that he's a criminal who shouldn't be allowed here, two of the most prominent of whom have put their name to documents that pretty much condone sexual relations between adults and children.

Take Richard Dawkins, for instance. In The God Delusion he claims to have been molested as a child by one of his teachers, covering up the identity of the abuser and saying that it did him no harm at all.

'All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).'

So depending on who's doing the abusing, and the exact nature of the abuse, Professor Dawkins thinks that there are situations in which child molestation, even if embarrassing, is essentially harmless. This doubtless goes some way to explaining why just a page later in that same screed he records how he has wondered aloud whether it'd be better for a child to be raped by a priest than to be taught by one.

'Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by the child up Catholic in the first place.'

Is this really a credible person to make any sort of claims about the Pope's record in this area?

Or Peter Tatchell. Yes, Peter Tatchell, the very fellow who did that ludicrous 'documentary' about the Pope for Channel 4 the other week. By this point, you should be well aware of how in 1997 he wrote in the Guardian that:

'The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’

Yes, that's Peter Tatchell, whose main mission in life seems to be lowering the age of consent so that many cases of clerical sex abuse would actually cease to be intrinsically illegal.

I'm glad to see some more thoughtful and traditional atheists, such as Brendan O'Neill and the Guardian's Andrew Brown, realising the risible and hysterical nature of so many of the current attacks on the Pope.

And though he's no atheist*, and so I'm reluctant to cite him here, the libertarian political blogger 'Guido Fawkes' is utterly right to say that the current attacks on the Pope are nothing more than atheist bigotry dressed up in rationalist clothes. Yes, bigotry, which is not a belief that you're right, but an absolute unshakeable refusal to countenance the possibility that you might be wrong. This is about attacking somebody who is seen to embody not just the Catholic faith, but traditional Christianity in general.

Not, of course, that Catholics or Britain's wider Christian community should be too heartbroken about being attacked in this way. As Our Lord pointed out, if the world hates us, we should remember that it hated Him first.

_______________________________________________________

* Nor, to be fair, is he someone I like to cite in any situation.

Notes on the Papal Visit 3: Sex Abuse and Supposed Vatican Cover-Up

So, as I was saying...

What then of the whole abuse issue? Well, firstly, it was absolutely monstrous, it happened, and it presumably is still happening although nowhere near on the scale it was about thirty years ago. The jury is still out on whether it was more prevalent in the Catholic Church than among ministers of other religions or indeed among society in general, though all the statistical evidence that's been so far collected suggests that this was not the case.

(The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland Report, from 2002, which suggested that one in four Irish adults  - roughly 700 people from a sample of about 3000 - had been sexually abused in one way or another when they were children or teenagers, found that only one in sixty of those - 12 out of the more than 700 confirmed survivors, had been abused by religious ministers of any denomination.)

In connection with how the Pope is regularly attacked over this, complaints about abuse were indeed spectacularly mishandled by people who had the job of dealing with it. Why they did this is difficult to ascertain, but there seem to have been a range of reasons and I think it's foolish and simplistic to seek a holistic explanation, unifying all the factors. The 2009 Murphy Report, analysing how complaints were handled in the Dublin archdiocese between 1975 and 2004, singled such contributory factors as a determination to avoid scandal, an excessive degree of clericalism both within the Church hierarchy and in society at large, a tendency to downplay the significance of abuse, a belief that abusive priests were ill and in need of treatment more than punishment, and a post-Vatican II unwillingness to apply the Church's own internal disciplinary mechanisms.

The questions are, though, was Benedict in any way personally responsible for this and was there a centrally-mandated cover-up conspiracy in Rome? People who call him a criminal really ought to do some research into this before hurling around libels like that.

Andrew Brown, writing in the Guardian back in March, had this latter point spot on: there was no Vatican cover-up, but there were hundreds of little local ones that grew naturally out of clerical culture. Brown's article is particularly depressing, especially as he notes that the worst period by far for clerical sexual abuse in America - 1978 to 1983 - was a period during which not one complaint of abuse received by American bishops was referred to Rome. The significance of this, he rightly points out, lies in how bishops tended to hide the truth from Rome. The good news is that this means Rome is probably innocent of coordinating a grand global conspiracy to cover up sexual abuse around the world, but the bad news is that it didn't need to, as it happened anyway, which means that we can expect more horror stories in the years to come and it's going to be very hard to solve things.

But what about the then Cardinal Ratzinger's famous 2001 letter in which he demanded that all abuse allegations should be passed on to him, insisting on absolute secrecy and a refusal to cooperate with the civil authorities wherever the abuse took place. If you've heard this you've just heard typical media nonsense, possibly converted into an anti-Catholic diatribe.

And yes, 'media nonsense' is a fair way of describing this kind of stuff. John Allen, who seems to be by far the best Vatican journalist in the world, recently listed a few typical instances of how the mainstream media invariably gets this stuff wrong.

There was a 2001 letter, sure, directed to the bishops who Benedict feared had indeed made a complete mess of things, and taking these matters out of their incompetent - and in some cases arrogant and even corrupt - hands. It was designed to ensure that abuse allegations were dealt with properly, as they all too often had not been, and it helped abuse victims and justice in general by greatly extending the time limits for bringing complaints. The Church's internal handling of these matters indeed involved confidentiality, largely because of the basic principle that people should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, but the 2001 document  in no way precluded bishops or victims from going to the police. It didn't direct them to do so, but it most certainly didn't bar them from doing so.

And what of the specific instances where Benedict supposedly obstructed the course of justice and engaged in cover-ups himself, whether as Archbishop of Munich or as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? A few such stories hit the headlines earlier in the year, but none of them had legs once genuine investigation took place. Unfortunately, the papers which screamed about Benedict's guilt when the story's initially broke tended not to publish equally prominent articles retracting their claims. I'm not sure of the order the stories broke in, but just in order of how I learned of them...

Hullermann

The first concerns the then Archbishop of Munich's 1980 decision to allow a priest, one Peter Hullermann, who years later was convicted of molesting boys, to move to his archdiocese to undergo therapy for paedophilic tendencies. Weeks after his therapy began, one of the then archbishop's deputies approved Father Hullermann's return to pastoral duties. Was the then Archbishop Ratzinger at fault? The question concerns what he knew, of course, and there's no evidence that he knew of anything other than the initial decision to allow Hullermann to live in the archdiocese, without pastoral involvement, while undergoing therapy. Father Gerhard Gruber, the then Vicar General of the diocese, has repeatedly stated that the decision to allow Hullermann to return to duty was his and something the then archbishop had not been involved in; given how big the diocese was, and how priests in it at the time found Ratzinger to be rather remote and uninvolved with what went on, this seems likely to be true.

(The Murphy Report, for what it's worth, noted the widespread tendency back then to think of paedophilia and ephebophilia as conditions that could be treated, and the belief that therapy was the best solution; it specifically says, in a document that otherwise damns the Irish Church, that this was a reasonable approach, provided that the person undergoing therapy wasn't at liberty to reoffend. That the then Archbishop Ratzinger agreed to allow an abusive priest into his diocese for therapy seems something that can't reasonably be objected to, and there's no evidence that he was responsible for his subordinate's decision to allow said priest back into any sort of ministry.)

Murphy

A second story concerned a retired priest in Wisconsin, one Father Lawrence Murphy, who admitted to having abused nineteen boys but who it has been speculated may have abused as many two hundred deaf children, and who the then Cardinal Ratzinger supposedly protected and refused to laicise. As ever the story is more complicated than meets the eye, but the clear facts are as follows.

Murphy was guilty of numerous instances of sexual abuse between 1950 and 1974, though the figure of 200 is purely speculative. Complaints were made to the police and the diocese, but the police declined to prosecute or to do anything about the matter; feeling there were grounds for the complaints, the Church eventually removed Murphy from ministry anyway. He lived in seclusion at home for about twenty years, with no further complaints being made about him. In 1996, with some of Murphy's victims bravely continuing to pursue the matter, the affair was finally referred to Rome by Murphy's bishop. Three months later, under instructions from Cardinal Bertone in Rome, a canonical trial started to get underway, and numerous interviews were conducted with Murphy's victims. In 1998 Murphy was ordered to give a deposition himself, but his doctor wrote to say that he could not travel as he was ill. A week later he died.

There's no reason to believe that the then Cardinal Ratzinger was involved in the affair in any regard, and it was only sloppy journalism - marked by an apparent desire to smear the Pope - that generated the impression that he had been.

Teta and Trupio

The third related story two priests in Arizona,  Michael Teta and Robert Trupia, both of whom were removed from ministry as soon as allegations about them came to light.

The case against Teta solely concerned his abusing the confessional to solicit sex from adult males - the sole allegation concerning abuse of children went to court and was thrown out as clearly false. The subsequent canonical trials - because solicitation is regarded as a serious crime in the Church - continued for years, with a lengthy appeal following, so that more than a decade passed before Teta was dismissed from the clerical state. Rome was only involved in the Teta process in three respects: at the start, when its permission was sought for the trial to begin; during the trial, urging the diocese to expedite the process; and during the appeal, when the diocese asked from Rome's help in expediting the process.

As early as 1975, soon after his ordination, there were serious allegations made about Trupia molesting boys, but they were never passed on to Rome in any sense. In 1989 the police expressed concerns, but again, nothing came of this. It looks very likely that the diocese covered up for Trupia's actions, for whatever reason, but they certainly were never passed on to Rome. A fresh complaint in 1992 concerning abuse that had taken place in 1981 led to Trupia being confronted and admitting what he had done; he was suspended from ministry and  barred from presenting himself as a priest. Then began the lengthy process of canonical trials and appeals, which was clearly a bureaucratic mess, but during which children were not endangered, as the key step - according to the Murphy Report - of removal from ministry had already been taken. In 2001 responsibility for handling matters such as this in Rome was taken over by the then Cardinal Ratzinger's CDF, and work started on the thousands of cases that came in from around the world. In 2003, Trupia's bishop personally raised the matter with the CDF, and Trupia was dismissed from the clerical state the following year. Early in this process, the police were informed in Arizona, though criminal cases came to nothing; civil lawsuits brought some justice to Trupia's victims though I gather Trupia is at liberty nowadays.

In any case, what these stories clearly show, in connection with the Pope, is that he was in no way responsible for allowing either Teta or Trupia to have abused anyone, and indeed his involvement simply consists of his having pushed through the final decisions to laicise both men.

Kiesle

The last of these stories concerned how the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1985 supposedly refused to punish one Father Stephen Kiesle, a Californian priest who a Californian court convicted of child molestation in 1978. Kiesle's diocese responded to this by withdrawing permission for him to remain in ministry, and in 1981 he asked to be laicised, which meant that he asked to be allowed withdraw from the obligations of the clerical state, including celibacy and the duty to obey his bishop.

Dismissal from the clerical state can take place within the Church as a punishment, but it is only granted to priests who request it if they're in good standing with the Church. Kiesle, obviously, wasn't in good standing, and so Rome was in no hurry to grant his request. The then Cardinal Ratzinger signed a form letter in 1985, saying that the matter needed further consideration, and two years later Kiesle's wish was granted. The key thing here is that the abuse case was never sent to Rome, and there was never any question of Benedict refusing to punish an abusive priest; if anything, he was reluctant to reward one.

Just one more piece. Tomorrow, so.

Notes on the Papal Visit 2: Condoms, AIDS, and Africa

Continued from yesterday...

You know the story: supposedly millions upon millions of people in Africa are dying of HIV-AIDS because the Pope tells them they shouldn't use condoms, and they obey him on this because they're too thick to do otherwise. I've heard this too many times to count. There's only one problem with it: it's not true, as people would realise if they only stopped to think.

Brendan O'Neill utterly nails this nonsense in yesterday's Spiked, concisely making points I've been cumbersomely making for years. He glosses over the all-important fact that the Church is the single largest provider of healthcare -- notably for victims of HIV-AIDS --  in Africa, such that one could argue that the Church does more to fight HIV-AIDS than any other organisation in the world. Instead he points out that HIV-AIDS is most prevalent in African countries with tiny Catholic minorities rather than in countries with sizeable ones, and identifies the racism that's implicit in claims about the Church worsening the AIDS crisis, noting that such claims are wholly underpinned by the assumption that Africans are idiots, utterly in thrall to religious teachings, unlike sophisticated Europeans and Americans who cannily ignore the ones they find inconvenient. Have a read  and then think about the fact that while a few priests and bishops have said some false and dangerous things about condoms, their opinions don't necessarily represent Church teaching, anymore than my old blog from back in the day used to represent the official position of my old employer.*

And then take a look at these two maps, the top one showing the countries in Africa with the highest proportions of Catholics, and the bottom one showing the countries with the highest rates of HIV-AIDS, and then have a think about why there's not exactly a huge overlap between the most Catholic countries and the ones most blighted by HIV-AIDS. Does anyone seriously think that Church teaching carries in any meaningful way in countries where only small minorities of people are Catholic?

There is also the possibility that Pope may in any case have well been right when he opined that condoms may actually make the problem worse, by lulling people into a false sense of safety, thereby encouraging reckless behaviour, or so at least Harvard's Edward C Green, among others, has argued.

I know, intuitively this seems wrong, but according to that article, current empirical evidence supports the Pope on this. Ben Goldacre, for all his brilliance elsewhere, looks utterly guilty of bad science himself when he claims otherwise.

It's worth noting too, as pretty much everyone seems unaware of this, that the Pope has never said that condoms shouldn't be used when having sex outside of marriage. Not a word. All of his comments on the matter have concerned contraception within marriage. Why? Well, the Church regards sex as being exclusively for marriage - it is the act of marital communion, for want of a better way of putting it - and regards all extramarital sex as intrinsically wrong. Whether you agree with that is, in this context, neither here nor there. What matters is that the Church isn't in the business of advising people on how to mitigate things it regards as sins. It says, with God, 'thou shalt not commit adultery'. It doesn't say, 'we'd rather you didn't commit adultery, but if you must cheat on your wife with some random skank, for whatever reason, well, it might be prudent to wear one of these things.'

So everything the Church -- as opposed to the odd priest or bishop -- says about condoms pertains to marital sex only. Why does it do this in the case of HIV-AIDS, where they'd be used to prevent infection rather than conception? My thinking, ultimately, is that its about love. In cases where one partner in a married couple has HIV-AIDS, the Church takes the line that the most loving thing to do is to abstain from sex, not to engage in it with or without a condom.

Why? Well, look at the figures that Goldacre cites. Over a given period, any such couple engaging in regular sex without a condom can be sure that the disease will be passed from one partner to another, but for such a couple engaging in regular sex with a condom, the disease will only be a fifth as likely to be passed on. There's the crux of the issue: over a period that would cause faithful monogamous sex without a condom to lead to a 100% infection rate, faithful monogamous sex with a condom would have a 20% infection rate, and loving abstention would have a 0% infection rate.

If I had AIDS and loved my wife, I don't think I'd be inclined to play Russian Roulette with  her body. Would you?

More tomorrow...

Notes on the Papal Visit 1: Cost and Purpose

Sick in bed all today, I wrote a very long Facebook post about the Papal visit and the controversy some have tried to kick up about it. Thinking it mightn't be a bad idea to post it here too, here goes...

I've gotten rather tired of playing whack-a-mole with all the crazy myths being perpetuated about the Papal visit, so here's a pretty straightforward summary of where I stand on this.

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF STATE VISITS

Firstly, the Queen has made at least two formal state visits to the Holy See at the invitation of the Pope, and at the Holy See's expense. Given this, is it really so odd that the Pope, as head of state of the Holy See, should have been invited here or that he should have accepted? It is worth pointing out that the Holy See, to which the United Kingdom's ambassador is accredited, is not synonymous with the Vatican City, and predates most if not all other European states, dating back well into the medieval period.

There are straightforward political reasons why the British government should have wanted the Pope to visit. The British government and the Holy See work together in the fields of international justice, development, and debt, as well as other issues such as the environment. The government wants to develop these ties further to make use of what it perceives as the Holy See's massive 'soft power' in these areas. This is why the Pope has been invited here on a formal state visit, and is why more than half the cost of the visit is being paid for by the state.

THE COST OF THE VISIT

Why not all the cost, as would normally be the case? Well, the Pope is taking advantage of being here in order to perform his pastoral duties for British Catholics, and to oversee the beatification of Cardinal Newman, one of his heroes, and one of mine, for what it's worth. Benedict would hardly have come here if he could not have done such things, and such pastoral and ecclesiastical elements of the trip are being paid for by the Church, which is having to seek special donations from Britain's Catholics to fund these, as when John Paul II visited in 1982, the Church in Britain was left broke and in debt.

(For what it's worth the Queen shall be visiting Ireland in 2011, and shall be doing so at the Irish taxpayers' expense. I hope there shan't be Irish people upset at the prospect of paying for the Supreme Governor of the Church of England to visit their country.)

It looks as though £8 million of the costs shall be borne by Britain's Catholics, with the remaining £12 million or so - according to the government - being borne by the state that's invited Benedict to visit. This £12 million figure excludes security costs, but the government reckons they'll cost about £1.5 million. Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, on the other hand, is screeching that the visit will cost about £100 million, but given that the G20 Summit last year had a security budget of less than £8 million, I very much doubt that the Pope's visit shall cost eleven times that amount.

In short,  it looks like the taxpayer will be paying something in the region of £14 million for the visit. Presumably the government believes this will be money well spent if it means that it gain the support of the Holy See in achieving some of its foreign policy objectives. And £14 million, lest people feel that that's an outrageous amount to be spending on helping starving people in Africa, say, isn't that much; it's about 23p per head of population. And if that still bothers people, Halifax reckons everyone has, on average, seven tiimes that amount buried in their living room couch.

What then of the other reasons being wheeled out against Benedict being here? Two seem to be paramount, being the abuse scandals and the supposed effect of Church teaching on AIDS in Africa; there are other issues, but these pale into insignificance next to these. So...

Should Cardinal Brady Resign?

I know. It's been ages, yet again. I keep wanting to post, but I'm insanely busy, and most of the things I want to write about are things that I'd legally compromise if I discussed them here, or things that I'd probably get screamed at if I expressed my thoughts on.

Still, I'm going to use this today to get my thoughts in order on the whole furore about Cardinal Sean Brady, the Archbishop of Armagh, and thus the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The story, if you don't know it, and which broke in a rather muddy way over the weekend, is as follows.


The Story in Brief
Brendan Smyth was probably one of the two most notorious child molesters ever to have disgraced the Irish priesthood. Ordained a priest in the 1950s, he abused children almost from the offing, and the bungling of attempts to bring him to justice in the 1990s led to the collapse of a government. He eventually died in prison while serving a seven-year sentence for his crimes.

Over the weekend it turned out that the current Irish cardinal, Sean Brady, had learned of Smyth's actions back in 1975. An ordinary priest at the time, Brady was a schoolteacher who had been trained in canon law. In this capacity in March and April 1975 he interviewed two teenage boys who had reported Smythe's behaviour, taking notes on the interviews and administering oaths that required the boys to confirm the truthfulness of their statements and to guarantee that they would preserve the confidentiality of the interview process.

Father Brady, as he then was, passed on his findings to his bishop, who made his decision -- that Smyth's priestly faculties should be withdrawn and that he should receive psychiatric help -- which he passed on to the superior of Smyth's order, the Norbertines. The Norbetines, as we know, utterly failed to enforce the order restricting his priestly role, simply moving him from place to place, and we all know what horrors ensued.


Response to the Story
Now, this all came to light over the weekend, or thirteen years ago for people who were paying attention, and did so in a garbled form. Early reports suggested that the interviewees were children of 10 and 14, and that one was a girl, rather than, as per the Cardinal's statement and as everyone now seems to accept, that they two were boys of 14 and 15. Reporting hasn't been clear on the nature of the oath, either -- what exactly did it require, how was it phrased, and what obligations were there on the boys to sign it?

Despite this, and despite support for the Cardinal at mass in Armagh this Sunday, plenty of people have, understandably, been calling for the Cardinal's head.

Some, such as the Guardian's Andrew Brown have said it would be best if he stepped down as head of the Irish Church, as a public repudiation of the old ways. As someone who doesn't have a personal axe to grind against the Catholic Church in Ireland, I think his opinion is worth listening to on this, unlike, say, that of Vincent Browne at the Irish Times, given Browne's longstanding hatred of the Irish Church. Despite the vast amount of good work he's done over the years, Browne's comments on this issue look to me as him using abused children as a political football, and he's not been alone in doing this in the Irish Times over recent months. Others such as Colm O'Gorman have responding in a likewise predictable fashion, but it's hard not to raise an eyebrow when Martin McGuinness, of all people, holds anyone to account for their actions -- or inaction -- decades ago.


What is the Problem?
It's worth trying to isolate the problem here. The issues seem to come down to two key questions. In administering an oath of secrecy to the two victims, did Sean Brady somehow pervert the course of justice? Did Sean Brady, in knowing of Smyth's behaviour but in not reporting it to the Guards, effectively allow that behaviour to continue?

I don't think he did, on either count.


The Oath
It was only today that the Irish Independent bothered to ask what exactly the oath was that the teenagers were required to sign, and unsurprisingly the Independent pointed to Crimen Solicitationis, a 1960s Vatican document that basically restates a 1920s one.

The article doesn't quote the whole oath, by any means, or how it works in the context of the investigation that would have taken place, and indeed it looks as though the oath as quoted would have been taken by the investigators rather than the denouncers, but even so you can get a good idea at how it was to work by looking at sections 11, 12, and 13 of this ropey translation. The only oath I can see, for what it's worth, is to be found in formula A of the appendix, and the oath of secrecy for denouncers is mentioned but not detailed in formula E.

For what it's worth, though, even the oath for investigators doesn't seem to block the investigators from reporting crimes to the police -- it makes specific exceptions for those matters which can be legally made public.

So, was this oath an attempt to pervert the course of justice? I don't think we can be dogmatic on this without access to the wording, and the claims of the Independent aside, we don't have it. However, allowing for the fact that the Church says that the purpose of the oath was to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of the investigation process, that the oath for investigators -- even badly translated -- does not require them to maintain secrecy about things which could be legitimately made public, and that an accurate translation of Crimen Solicitationis reveals that oaths concern confidentiality about the trial itself rather than about the subject matter of the trial, I really don't see that it can be argued that the oath was designed to stop the two boys from going to the police if they saw fit.

Vincent Browne is wrong, I'm sure of this. Section 17 of the Offenses Against the State Act only comes into play when someone administers an oath to promote, assist, or conceal the commission of a crime. There's not a jot of evidence to suggest that the oath was intended to prevent the teenagers from reporting to the Guards what had happened, and, of course, it's significant that the boys' parents, who I presume were already familiar with the allegations, don't appear to have been required to sign any oaths at all.


Silence?
What then of Father Brady's silence in the years after he took these depositions?

Section 5.36 of the Murphy Report notes that misprison of felony is an offense in common law. It occurs when a person knows a felony has been committed but conceals it from the authorities. The Cardinal might, on the face of it, be guilty of this, although you'd have to concede that all he knew was that a felony had been alleged.

More broadly, I would say is this concerning his failure to report the allegations to the Guards. Abuse cases are nasty things that pollute people even loosely connected with them. Was the Cardinal guilty because he didn't go to the police? Maybe. But if he was, what of the victims' parents? Didn't they know too? And yet, did they go to the police? If they didn't, don't they too share in the guilt, possibly to a greater degree than the Cardinal? What of the victims themselves? In not reporting it to the state authorities, even years later, as adults, didn't they somehow allow Smyth to keep going in his vicious, wicked career?

Irish Brehon law used to have a thing called a 'crime of eye'. It meant that if you knew a crime had been committed, or believed a crime was being committed, and you didn't act to stop the crime or to punish the perpetrator, you shared in his guilt. In cases like this, a little knowledge is a poisonous and polluting thing.

The early victims of Brendan Smyth aren't responsible for what he did to children years later. They told their parents -- or some of them did -- and they told Smyth's superiors. The boys' parents likewise told Smyth's superiors. Maybe they should have told the Guards, but I've been assured by a friend in the Guards -- when discussing the pattern in the Murphy Report of Dublin parents going to the ecclesiastical authorities rather than the civil ones -- that complaining to the priest's bishop was a reasonable way of discharging of their responsibility.

So what of Father Brady, then? He took the evidence and passed it on to his superior, who made the decision. The abused children and their parents clearly regarded this as a matter for the bishop -- not the police -- to deal with, and he evidently took the same line. I don't see that you can fault him any more than you can fault them.

The bishop's decision, which was to bar Smyth from acting as a diocesan priest, to report the matter to Smyth's order, and to advise psychiatric involvement, may well strike us as hopelessly inadequate, but it doesn't seem unusual for the time. Indeed, section 1.81 of the Murphy Report is particularly enlightening on this point:

One of the aims of the Archdiocese and the religious orders was not to punish the priest but to help him towards recovery or rehabilitation. The Commission considers this to be reasonable provided he is not at liberty to commit other abuses.

Smyth's bishop, then, seems to have taken a decision that would have been seen as utterly reasonable and responsible at the time. Unfortunately, it was up to Smyth's order to enforce this decision, and it is pretty clear that the Norbertines were utterly culpable in this regard. As Breda O'Brien pointed out in the Irish Times recently, repeating a point made by the Presbyterian head of the Irish Church's child-protection agency, there are 184 parts to the Irish Church, and in reality nobody is in charge.

Should Father Brady, as he was then, have personally challenged the bishop's decision, reasonable though it would have been seen as being in the context of the time, and should he have made a point of ensuring that it was being properly enforced? Should he have spent the decades after he'd taken the evidence in trying to find out whether Brendan Smyth was indeed being kept locked away from children? Truth be told, we don't even know if he was told of the bishop's decision, or whether he simply collected the evidence, signed his own oath of secrecy, and then returned to the school where he trained the football teams and taught Latin, Commerce, French, and Religion, before heading off to Rome in 1980, only returning to Ireland in 1993, a few months before Smyth was finally arrested.

No, the Cardinal shouldn't have to resign, and he shouldn't be blamed for what happened. He's tainted, sure, but it's hard to find anyone who knows anything of an abuse case who isn't. Look at the SAVI report from 2002. Aside from finding that one out of every 250 Irish adults had been abused as a child by a clergyman, it found that almost one 1 in 4 Irish adults had been abused by somebody else. How many of us know somebody who was abused? How many of us know abusers? And how many of us do nothing about it?

The Church failed disgraceful in how it dealt with abuse among its clergy in the past, such that thousands of Irish children were abused by priests and next to nothing was done about it. At least, however, the Church is doing something about it now, such that it has child-protection measures better than any other organisation in the land, and monitoring systems of convicted and suspected abusers that, though still imperfect and difficult to enforce, are far superior than the non-existent measures the State is taking. Granted, policies are only as good as the people who have the job of implementing them, but all the Church's steps towards becoming the safest place in the land for children have been taken with Sean Brady as Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.
 

The problem of child abuse in Ireland is far bigger than the Catholic Church. Thousands of Irish people were abused by priests, but hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of other Irish children were abused too. Child abuse is a national scourge. We need to deal with it now, and to direct our resources above all to where the problems are now. If we don't do that, we'll fail yet another generation of Irish children.We've failed too many already.