360,000 New Irish Criminals?

I couldn't help but think yesterday that it's a very weird week when you find yourself agreeing with both Daniel Hannan and Kevin Myers. I don't think I've ever agreed with Hannan before, and I'm never happy about standing on the same side of any issue with Myers, but I think they've both been, broadly, right in the last week or so. 

Hannan tries to slap down those who have been trying to maintain that the phone-hacking scandal is a Guardian plot, which, of course, it isn't; it's a real story, and if it came to the fore at a curiously fortuitous time for those who oppose the vitiating influence Rupert Murdoch has had on British public life since at least the early 1980s, well, that's purely down to the fact of the trial of Milly Dowler's murderer having ended only a few weeks ago.

As for the odious Mr Myers, well, he reckons the official reaction to the Cloyne Report in Ireland is such that:

'The Government is now effectively handing a legal charter to every hysteric, every troublemaker, every malcontent and every evil-doer, with its insane proposals effectively to make it a criminal offence for anyone not to disclose "information" that a child is being sexually or physically abused.'

I'm afraid he's not wrong on this. We have problems in Ireland, as should be very clear to anybody who's read the SAVI, Ferns, Ryan, Murphy, and Cloyne reports, but the Government's solutions aren't going to do any good, will probably come to nothing, and may well do an enormous amount of harm.

Enda Kenny in the Dáil

Look at Enda's speech today, with all its portentous ellipses, hanging heavily as though he's saying something profound. He opens as follows:

'The revelations of the Cloyne report have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic…as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.'

And onward he ploughs in a full-blown attack on what the Vatican did three years ago, despite the fact that you can trawl through the Cloyne Report until the Papal bulls come home, and nowhere will you find any evidence to support any argument of Rome having sought to frustrate an Inquiry in Ireland in the last three years. Seriously, don't trust me on this. Look at the document and do some electronic searches. It's easy to do. You don't have to read it all first, like I did. Just do a few searches. Look up 'Vatican', 'Rome', 'Nuncio', and 'Congregation for', and you'll quickly see that there's not one reference there to Rome having frustrated any kind of inquiry.

Now, granted, there is a reference to the Nuncio in, I presume, 2009 having been asked to pass on any information it might have about matters under investigation (C2.11), to which the Nuncio replied saying that the Nunciature:

'[...] does not determine the handling of cases of sexual abuse in Ireland and therefore is unable to assist you in this matter. In fact, such cases are managed according to the responsibility of local ecclesiastical authorities, in this instance the Diocese of Cloyne. Like all ecclesiastical entities in Ireland, the Diocese of Cloyne is bound to act in accordance with canon law and with all civil laws and regulations of Ireland as may be applicable.'

Could this be what Enda's talking about? Surely not. After all, it's true that the Nuncio doesn't determine how sexual abuse cases are handled. And yes, Rome would have been in possession of documents, but it wouldn't have held any documents that weren't also held by Cloyne itself, and the Nuncio was quite clear that Cloyne had a legal obligation to comply, not merely with canon law, but with the law of the land. And, and this should settle this, the Report explicitly recognises that Cloyne passed on all the relevant documentation (C2.12), whether it was privileged or not! In no way does this suggest that Rome sought to frustrate the Inquiry.

So much for the Taoiseach -- the Tánaiste's no better

But of course, there's been lots of similar nonsense talked in the last few days. Listen to Eamon Gilmore, blustering last week:

'I want to know why this State, with which we have diplomatic relations, issued a communication, the effect of which was that very serious matters of the abuse of children in this country were not reported to the authorities. [...] What happened here should not have happened. What happened here was a totally inappropriate, unjustified and unacceptable intervention by the Vatican in the reporting arrangements, even within the context of the arrangements of the church itself. They conveyed a message to priests which may have led them to believe that they could in conscience not report matters to the authorities.'

He was talking about the Congregation for Clergy's 1997 response to the Irish bishops' 1996 document Child Sexual Abuse: Framework for a Church Response, which he wholly mischaracterises, going further even than the Cloyne Report itself in that regard. As I said the other day, the Report describes how the Irish bishops' 1996 Framework Document was sent to Rome in the hope of it getting Rome's approval, such that it should be regarded as canonically binding, and how a year later the Papal Nuncio passed on the response of the Congregation for Clergy (C1.18, 1.76, 4.21). Does that really strike you as an 'intervention'? 

If somebody asks you a question, and you reply, is that an intervention? Even if the reply you get isn't the reply you'd wanted?

Gilmore seems to be trying to say that Rome interfered, whereas basically what happened is that the bishops drafted a common response, asked Rome if it could be made binding, and were told that it couldn't, as the Congregation for Clergy had concerns about it. As I said the other day, there's no suggestion in the Cloyne Report that it was the intention of the Vatican to undermine the Irish Church -- let alone the Irish State. Frankly, even insofar as the Report says that this was the effect of the Vatican's answer, it's only evidence for this is the actions of one priest, a priest who the Report shows as having utterly flouted the Vatican's instruction in that same 1997 reply that canon law should be 'meticulously followed', and who later interpreted a 2001 instruction in accordance with the subtext he imagined was there rather than the text that was!

Now, I'm not saying that the 1997 reply was the response the Irish bishops wanted, or that it's one the State would have hoped for, but that's not to say it wasn't legitimate. This is blatantly obvious from the Report itself, such that I'm left wondering whether Gilmore's not read the report, can't read, or is simply using the sexual abuse of children decades ago by Catholic priests as a political football, something he can use to distract the country from the Government's performance in other spheres. After all, how can a country with no army to speak of rattle its sabre in a jingoistic way, other than to rattle it against a country which famously has no divisions at all...

A Proposal to Deprive the Abused of Healing, and to Criminalise their Loved Ones

The Taoiseach, Tánaiste, Minister for Justice and Equality, and Minister for Children are talking utter nonsense, I'm afraid. Should they succeed in making mandatory the reporting of all 'knowledge' of sexual abuse, irrespective of how one comes by that knowledge, such that failure to report abuse will be a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison, they will have succeeded only in creating an unenforceable and unconstitutional law, that will deprive thousands of abuse victims of the possibility of achieving any kind of peace in this life, while criminalising many thousands more.

Don't believe me? Well, let's crunch some very grim numbers.

If the 2002 SAVI Study, conducted by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in association with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, is any way accurate, child sexual abuse has been endemic in Ireland. You can read the Executive Summary of it online, though the full study seems no longer easily available -- I downloaded it years ago.

It can be hard to make the numbers make sense at times, and though I may go through them at some point it'd just clutter things to do my rough work now, but the Study can be gutted to reveal the following core points, based a high response rate and a sample of more than 3,000 people:

• Roughly 27 per cent Irish adults in 2001 had been the victims of child sexual abuse.
• Just under 65 per cent of child abuse victims had been abused whilst under the age of twelve. 
• Over 48 per cent of abuse survivors had never disclosed their experiences to anyone before being surveyed.
• Just under 52 per cent of abuse survivors surveyed had previously told family, friends, or others of their experiences.
• Only about 5 per cent of abuse cases had at that point been reported to the Gardaí.
• Just 16 per cent of 38 abuse cases reported to Gardaí had gone to court; of these six cases, only four had resulted in a verdict of guilt.
• In other words, little more than 10 per cent of reported abuse cases had by 2001 led to a criminal conviction.
• More broadly, only about 0.5 per cent of abuse cases had at that point led to a criminal conviction.
• Fewer than 1.7 per cent of abusers appear to have been religious ministers of any sort.

Now, think about this. At least in 2001, when the survey was conducted, more than a quarter of Irish adults had experienced child sexual abuse, almost half of abuse cases remained undisclosed to anybody, and of those that had been disclosed, the vast majority had not been passed on to the Gardaí. Or, putting it another way, 12.5 per cent of the Irish adult population in 2001 had told people of having been sexually abused when they were children, but neither they, nor anyone they had told, had passed this on to the Gardaí.

How many people did they tell? That's impossible to tell, really, but let's assume, for the sake of convenience, that they all told just one person each, and the people they told hadn't themselves been abused. In reality, I think many will have told more than one people, and that some of those who they told will have been told by others of their abuse, and that some of them are survivors themselves, but still, let's assume those possibilities cancel out, and just run with one confidante per survivor. 

This means that -- victims aside -- one in eight Irish adults in 2001 was witholding knowledge of child abuse from the Gardaí. According to the 2002 census, there were 2,904,172 adults in Ireland the year after the SAVI Study was conducted. It seems that something of the order of 360,000 of them must have been withholding knowledge of child abuse.

Victims trapped in their pain, and Confidantes threatened with prison...

360,000 people. That's how many people Deputies Kenny, Gilmore, Shatter, and Fitzgerald look set to criminalise. Not thousands. Not tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. The husbands and wives of abuse victims. Their partners, their parents, their children, and their friends. And yes, their doctors, their social workers, and their priests too. But not just them. This isn't about the Church. It's about all of us.

Are we guilty of endangering other children by keeping our mouths shut? Maybe, and I think we need to try to find a way to resolve that. But this crude rabble-rousing isn't the way forward.

If you'd been abused, and you didn't want to go to the Gardaí -- for whatever reason -- do you really think you ought to be deprived in confiding in anybody, deprived of getting some small measure of healing by opening up and telling someone you loved what had happened to you when you were small, about why you have the cracks you do, why you find it so hard to love, to trust, and even sometimes to touch? That's what this law threatens to do. It'll force thousands of abuse survivors to choose between asking their loved ones to turn themselves into criminals or remaining trapped in their pain.

Is this something we really want to do?

I have a very strong interest in my Church being such that it does not in any way hinder children in coming in Jesus, and in my nation cherishing all its children equally. We have a terrible problem at home. This isn't the way to fix it. I don't know what is, but this isn't it.

A Fortnight is an Absurdly Long Time in Politics...

Well, today looks like it's going to be a big day in Hackgate, with Rupert and James Murdoch joining Rebekah Brooks in facing the Culture Committee in Parliament. Obviously, the place to track what's going on is the Guardian's live blog, as it's been for weeks, but I'd not shun the BBC's coverage either. Tom Watson has warned us against expecting too much, though. Getting through this whole affair, he says, is like slicing a cucumber.

I'd not expect today's slices to be particularly thick, though much of the interest will come from the fact that Rupert and Friends are trying to fight a two-front war, and each war requires different tactics. 'The PR advice,' reports the Guardian, 'will be to look them in the eyes, tell the truth and look upfront for the global TV audience. The legal advice will be to say nothing.'

Given how much has gone on in this whole affair, I thought it'd be useful to put together a timeline of events over the last fortnight, just listing the key points. It's basically the stuff I blurred over in my last post about David Cameron and how he clearly failed to embrace the famous axion about Caesar's Wife where Andy Coulson was concerned. I owe a lot to the wonderfully straightforward BBC timeline, of course, and to trawling through the Guardian's blog, where Alan Rusbridger's team have been doing astonishing work -- Andy Sparrow's been assiduous in his coverage, and Nick Davies, I'm increasingly convinced, deserves the highest honours this country can give. Channel 4 has given us a handy diagram showing some of Rebekah Brooks' connections, which is a good introduction to things, but is really too simple; Rebekah's web, I fear, is far more complex than that, and I'm pretty sure she's not the one at the centre of it.

Monday 4 July

• In the aftermath of the conclusion of the trial of Levi Bellfield for the murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler in 2002, the Guardian reports that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked by News of the World reporters in the days after she went missing.
• Labour MP Tom Watson calls on David Cameron and Ed Miliband to act in response to the news.
• Ed Miliband says that the police must get to the bottom of the matter, which he describes as cruel and immoral beyond belief.

Tuesday 5 July

• From Afghanistan, David Cameron describes the phone-hacking as a truly dreadful act, and urges the police to pursue the matter vigorously.
• Yvette Cooper calls for a wide-ranging inquiry into phone-hacking.
• Ed Miliband says that Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World at the time of Milly Dowler's disappearance, should consider her position in News International, and calls for a public inquiry into the matter.
• It is reported that the familes of murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman had been contacted by detectives investigating phone-hacking.

Wednesday 6 July

• Further reports suggest the phones of family-members of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq may also have been hacked.
• Companies begin announcing they are withdrawing advertising from the News of the World.

Thursday 7 July

• The Independent Police Complaints Commission says it will be taking over the investigation into claims that police had been bribed by the News of the World, after it is reported that £100,000 was received by up to five officers.
• James Murdoch, chairman of News International, announces that Sunday's edition of the News of the World shall be the last one.
• Ed Miliband again calls on Rebekah Brooks to resign.

Friday 8 July

• Clive Goodman, former News of the World royal editor, is arrested a second time in connection with phone-hacking and bribery of police officers.
• Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor and press officer for David Cameron, is likewise arrested in connection with phone-hacking and bribery of police officers.
• An unidentified 63-year-old man is arrested in connection with phone-hacking and bribery of police officers.
• David Cameron says that the Press Complaints Commission would be scrapped, and that there should be two investigations into the scandal, with one into phone-hacking to be led by a judge and one into media standards by a panel of experts. He continues to maintain that his appointment of Andy Coulson had not been a mistake, saying that he felt Coulson was entitled to a second chance.
• The Guardian reveals that in February 2010 it had warned Steve Hilton, David Cameron's director of strategy, about Andy Coulson, with particular reference to his connections with the convicted criminal John Reese, then awaiting trial for an axe-murder.
• Police say they are investigating whether a News International executive might have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive in January, just as Operation Weeting was beginning.
• Rebekah Brooks has meeting with News of the World staff, in which she tells them that they would understand in a year's time why the paper had to close, saying that 'eventually it will come out why things went wrong and who is responsible. That will be another very, very difficult moment in this company's history.'

Saturday 9 July

• Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman press David Cameron to appoint a judge without delay to head the hacking inquiry; Downing Street says it's going as fast as it can.
• Paddy Ashdown says that in the days leading up to the Coalition agreement in May 2010, he warned David Cameron against having Andy Coulson, about whom he had evidence that had not been made public for legal reasons, as Downing Street's press officer.
• Nick Clegg says that he raised similar concerns but was rebuffed by David Cameron who said that it was right to give Andy Coulson a second chance.
• More than 4.5 million copies of the last News of the World are printed, as News International expect it to become a collectors' item.

Sunday 10 July

• The final edition of News of the World goes on sale. While initial sales figures suggest 4.5 million copies had been sold, it is later revealed that the real sales figure was 3.8 million copies, still the paper's highest sales since 2004.
• Ed Miliband says that Rupert Murdoch should drop the BSkyB bid and sack Rebekah Brooks. In the meantime he says that Labour are planning to table motion to force the government to suspend the BSkyB deal until the phone-hacking investigations are complete.
• Chris Huhne says that David Cameron had run very serious risks in appointing Andy Coulson as his press officer, and that the Lib Dems may back Labour's motion.
• Rupert Murdoch arrives in the UK.
• John Yates, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, admits his 2009 decision not to reopen the phone-hacking investigation had be a 'pretty crap one'.

Monday 11 July

•  It's reported that News International journalists bribed police officers to get details about the movements and contact details of members of the royal family and their friends.
• Jeremy Hunt refers BSkyB deal to Competition Commissioner.
• It is reported that News International journalists repeatedly targetted former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail, obtaining material from his bank account and legal file, trawling police computers for data on him, and apparently hacking into his accountant's computer.
• Gordon Brown claims News International had tried to destroy him, and that he had been forced to go public about his baby son's illness after Rebekah Brooks rang him to tell him that the Sun knew about it.

Tuesday 12 July

• Peter Clarke, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, says that News International did not cooperate with the original police investigation and had lied to it.
• Sue Akers, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, says there are about 4,000 people named in Glenn Mulcaire's notes.
• The Culture Committee says that it shall be asking Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch, and Rebekah Brooks to appear before it.
• Labour announces text of Parliamentary motion expressing opposition to Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB bid.
• News Corp announces buyback of $5bn worth of shares.
• David Cameron has a meeting with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg to discuss the terms of the judge-led enquiries into the media, with Miliband calling for a wider judge-led enquiry than one limited to just the News of the World and phone-hacking.
• Downing Street announces that the government shall support Labour's motion to oppose Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB bid.

Wednesday 13 July

• Hours before Parliament votes in support of the Labour motion expressing opposition to Rupert Murdoch's bid to buy all of BSkyB, Murdoch announces that he is abandoning the deal.
• David Cameron announces twin enquiries into Media standards -- one into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, its relationship with police and the failure of the current system of press self-regulation, and one into phone-hacking and related matters in British newspapers. Judge Leveson is to head both enquiries.
• Ed Miliband accuses David Cameron of a catastrophic error of judgement in appointing Andy Coulson as Downing Street's Press Officer, in particular with reference to ignoring warnings.
• Senior American politicans call for investigations into News International activities in the USA.

Thursday 14 July

• Neil Wallis, former News International executive and deputy to Andy Coulson, is arrested.
• The FBI announces it is to investigate whether familes of 9/11 victims had been phone-hacked.
• Rebekah Brooks agrees to appear before Committee investigating why News International executives gave false evidence to Parliament.
• Following receipt of summonses, Rupert and James Murdoch likewise agree to give evidence to the same Parliamentary Committee.

Friday 15 July

• Rebekah Brooks resigns as chief executive of News International.
• Rupert Murdoch makes personal apology to the family of Milly Dowler.
• David Cameron admits to 26 meetings -- other than informal walks and rides with his constituent Rebekah Brooks -- with senior News International staff over previous 15 months, and that Andy Coulson was his guest at Chequers two months after Coulson's resignation.
• Les Hinton resigns as chief executive of Dow Jones & Co.

Saturday 16 July

• Rupert Murdoch publishes a full-page apology in every British national paper.
• William Hague, who prior to returning to the Conservative front bench in 2007 wrote a £190,000 p.a. for the News of the World, defends David Cameron's having had Andy Coulson as a guest at Chequers after his resignation.
• Elisabeth Murdoch is reported to have blamed James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks for the crisis in News International.

Sunday 17 July

• Ed Miliband says that Parliament should sit for an extra day to discuss the entire News International affair.
• From South Africa, David Cameron announces that he shall be asking Parliament to sit for an extra day -- Wednesday -- this week.
• It is reported that Andy Coulson, despite being backed by George Osborne and William Hague, had not been David Cameron's first choice to be his press officer, and that Cameron only chose him after beeing pressed to do so by Rebekah Brooks.
• Rebekah Brooks becomes the tenth person arrested over phone-hacking allegations.
• Paul Stephenson resigns as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police over his having employed Neil Wallis, the former deputy to Andy Coulson, as a strategic advisor, drawing comparisons between his relationship with Wallis and that of David Cameron with Coulson.
• Ed Miliband calls for new media rules to limit unhealthy concentrations of power in individuals such as Rupert Murdoch.

Monday 18 July

•  The US Department of Justice contacts the UK's Serious Fraud Office with a view to investigating News International's activities in Britain, as News International's parent company News Corp is an American company, and it is illegal for American-based companies to bribe foreign officials.
• John Yates resigns as Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
• Sean Hoare, News International whistleblower, is found dead.

And unfortunately, while all this is going on, there've been people whinging about other papers, especially the traditionally-Labour supporting Mirror and to a slightly lesser degree the traditionally-Conservative Mail. They need looking at too -- I don't think anybody doubts that -- but it's striking that those shouting loudest about them now are those who sneered for years as the Guardian kept ploughing away at the News International phone-hacking story. Driving much of this has been resentment at how close ties between the Conservative party and the Murdoch press are being played on by enemies of both; essentially, they're urging a retaliation against the Mirror as a traditionally Labour-supporting paper. Paul Dacre's Conservative Mail is a target simply because if it'd make no sense to leave it out of a broad investigation into the Sun and the Mirror.

A diary entry on today's Conservative Home makes this approach all too clear:

'So to mount an operation defending the Prime Minister ought to be straightforward. [...] And as well as defence there is counter-attack. [...] Where is the publicised push to haul Piers Morgan before a Select Committee?  (The running on the story has been made by Guido Fawkes.)  Why is there no campaign to ram home the message that the Daily Mirror carried out three times as many illegal transactions as the News of the World (according to the Information Commissioner)?  Who advised the Prime Minister to fly off abroad rather than go on TV here - telling viewers that his priorities are theirs: curbing the deficit, controlling immigration, improving schools, tackling the Euro-zone crisis?  How come published details of meetings with Rebekah Wade were wrong?

The buck for all this stops not with CCHQ but with Number 10.'

Of course, this rather glosses over the fact that Morgan was part of the same school of Sun journalists as Brooks and Coulson, and that he lost his job after publishing fraudulent pictures of British soldiers as part of a story that attacked the actions of a Labour government, but more to the point neither Morgan nor the Mirror has the power to make or break Prime Ministers -- indeed, even the Mail doesn't have really have that, as it'd never support Labour or the Lib Dems. Only the Murdoch press, with its variable loyalty, makes a real difference in that regard, using its smut and its sports coverage to lure in people who'll then read what it laughably calls 'news'. 

For decades the Murdoch press has lied about Europe, brainwashing the British people into thinking it's bad for Britain, convincing the Conservatives they'd been wrong to lead Britain into a process of ever-closer union, despite Thatcher's arguments for their doing so, and seemingly threatening to turn on Blair's Labour government if it didn't agree to a legislation on the since-abandoned EU Constitution. For two years before the Iraq war it cried out for an invasion and all 127 Murdoch papers screamed for one in the weeks and days leading up to the attack, with Murdoch speaking to Blair three times in those last nine days before invasion and the Sun lying about France's attitude to Iraq. It lied time and again about the Lisbon Treaty, and about the Alternative Vote and about a thousand lesser things, but to list its lies would take forever; if you really want to wallow in Murdoch's filth you can have fun seeking some of it out on Tabloidwatch -- just use the 'Sun' tag -- or on The Sun -- Tabloid Lies.

That's what this is about, above all. It's about an organisation that has been a cancer in British politics and discourse for decades, an organisation that can sway elections, that has controlled the government of the land and that basically is the modern British establishment. It's nonsense to claim that if someone dislikes the Sun they don't need to buy it; others will buy it, and will believe its lies, and when they vote they will do so based on false information because they've been lied to by Murdoch. We all have to live with their political decisions.

So this matters. If all goes well, and I fear it won't, we may look back on this year's 4th of July as Britain's Independence Day.

When Funny Comics Aren't Good Comics

Just something light today, I think, as the last couple of posts have been about as serious as can be.  I've never got Dilbert, I'm afraid. I've no shortage of friends who love it, but while I see why they like it, I just don't think it's a very good cartoon strip.

Don't get me wrong: I think it's both funny and clever. I just don't think it works as a comic should. I've long subscribed to Scott McCloud's definition of comics as 'Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer,' and I think that Dilbert nearly always misses the point. 

That Dilbert is a comic is indisputable. Whether Dilbert is a good comic, however, is a different matter, and to me it's significant that the pictures contribute hardly anything to most Dilbert strips. Scott Adams' words are good and clever, but I don't think they ever really gain from being linked with pictures. In Dilbert, as far as I can see, the pictures don't complement the words, or add to the words, or lead one to wonder whether there might be more going on than is simply revealed in the words. All they do is identify the speakers, and literature isn't lacking in devices that do likewise. Most Dilbert strips could be one-paragraph gags, and probably would be, were it not for the fact that we're not used to newspapers running such things. In Dilbert, as far as I can see, the pictures are there not to add an extra dimension of meaning to words, so much as to give the words an excuse to be there at all.

I enjoyed the strip from last week I've posted above. It's funny. It made me laugh. And it's made other laugh more when I've told them the words. It doesn't need pictures. You couldn't say that of Peanuts. Or Calvin and Hobbes. Or Red Meat. Or even Garfield...

Reflections on the Cloyne Report

It has, of course, always been the teaching of the Church that the Church is a visible organisation holding saints and sinners: we should never confuse the Ekklesia with the Elect. Matthew gives us the image of the Church as a great net, holding good fish and bad, and nobody should ever be so arrogant or ignorant as to think that simply being a Christian is guarantee of salvation. To argue that way is to fly in face of Jesus' plain teaching. Many are called, he says, but few are chosen.

Today's Gospel reading, from elsewhere in Matthew 13, teaches the same thing, and warns us against throwing babies out with the bathwater in attempting to purge the Church of its worst elements:

'Jesus proposed another parable to the crowds, saying: "The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed darnel all among the wheat, and made off. When the new wheat sprouted and ripened, the darnel appeared as well. The owner's servants went to him and said, 'Sir, was it not good seed that you sowed in your field? If so, where does the darnel come from?' 'Some enemy has done this,' he answered. And then the servants said, 'Do you want us to go and weed it out?' But he said, 'No, because when you weed out the darnel you might pull up the wheat with it. Let them both grow till the harvest; and at harvest time I shall say to the reapers: First collect the darnel and tie it in bundles to be burnt; then gather the wheat into my barn.'"

[...]

"The sower of the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world; the good seed is the subjects of the kingdom; the darnel, the subjects of the evil one; the enemy who sowed them, the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; the reapers are the angels. Well, then, just as the darnel is gathered up and birnt in the fire, so it will be at the end of time. The Son of Man will send his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that provoke offences and do evil, and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth. Then the virtuous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father. Listen, anyone who has ears!" '

Given the developments of the week, it's hardly surprising that in preaching on this at Mass in Dublin's Pro Cathedral today, Diarmuid Martin's homily linked this passage with the Cloyne Report. He could hardly avoid doing so, to be fair. I think it's worth quoting him in full:

'Only a few months ago, here in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, we celebrated a liturgy of lament and repentance reflecting on the shattering facts regarding the wide-ranging abuse of children by priests and religious in this diocese and about the manner in which the Church in this diocese responded to that abuse.

It was for me a moment of hope. The liturgy had been prepared by survivors of abuse and survivors took part in the carrying out of the liturgy. Courageously, men and women who had been abused spoke out about their hurt and their hopes. It was a moment which I know brought healing to many and gave them renewed strength in themselves and some sense of renewed hope in the Church which had not believed them or had even betrayed them. At that liturgy I saw many faces that I knew in tears; I watched others whose names I will never know sit alone in silence and sadness.

My first thoughts on reading the Cloyne report went back to that liturgy and to those who organized it and took part in it. I asked myself: what are they thinking today? Are they asking themselves if that entire liturgy was just an empty show? Were they being used just to boost the image of the Church? Were their renewed hopes just another illusion about a Church which seems unable to reform itself? Was their hurt just being further compounded?

As I reflected, the first emotion that came to me was one of anger:

• anger at what had happened in the diocese of Cloyne and at response – or non-response – that was made to children whose lives had been ruptured by abuse;
• anger at the fact that children had been put at risk well after agreed guidelines were in place which were approved by all the Irish bishops;
• anger at how thousands of men and women in this diocese of Dublin must feel, who have invested time and training to ensure that the Church they love and hope can be different would truly be a safe place for children;
• anger at the fact that there were in Cloyne – and perhaps elsewhere – individuals who placed their own views above the safeguarding of children, and seemingly without any second thought placed themselves outside and above the regime of safeguarding to which their diocese and the Irish bishops had committed themselves.

Paradoxically, appealing somehow to their own interpretation of Canon Law they had put themselves even above and beyond the norms which the current Pope himself has promulgated for the entire Church.

Some years ago I was criticized in some Church circles for speaking of strong forces still present in the Church which “would prefer that the truth did not emerge”. “There are signs”, I said, “of subconscious denial on the part of many about the extent of the abuse which occurred within the Church of Jesus Christ in Ireland and how it was covered up. There are other signs of rejection of a sense of responsibility for what had happened. There are worrying signs that despite solid regulations and norms these are not being followed with the rigour required”.

Much has, thank God, been undertaken within the Catholic Church to address the facts of the past and to improve safeguarding procedures. The Catholic Church in Ireland is a much safer place today than it was even in the recent past.

Much is being said, on the other hand, that despite words the Church has not learned the lessons. Both statements are true. At our liturgy of lament and reconciliation I stressed that that event was only a first step. “It would be easy for all of us”, I said, ”to go away this afternoon somehow feeling good but feeling also ‘that is that now’, ‘it’s over’, ‘now we can get back to normal’”. I repeat once again what I said on that occasion “The Church can never rest until the day in which the last victim has found his or her peace and he or she can rejoice in being fully the person that God in his plan wants them to be”.

That is a challenge not just for bishops and Church leaders. It is a challenge for all. Obviously in this diocese it is a challenge to me personally. I know my own inadequacies and I do not wish to present myself as being better or more expert than anyone else. Like all of us, I need to have the courage to address my responsibilities with the utmost honesty day by day.

All of us need to have in place systems of verification and review which help us to identify mistakes made or areas where more can be done or things can be done better. We need to continue to build a cooperative climate where all the institutions of the Church work in a constructive way together and with the institutions of the State, which bears the primary responsibility for child safeguarding in the country.

I thank the priests and lay persons in this diocese who have committed themselves to implementing our child safeguarding policies and I appeal to them not to be become frustrated or indifferent. The Church needs you. The children who frequent our Churches need you. Parents need to be reassured by your presence. Public recognition is due to the mobilisation within the Church of so many volunteers who are in the front line in our parishes and organizations in child safeguarding.

Those priests who have ministered untarnished and generously over years – indeed for an entire lifetime – should not be made scapegoats and objects of hate. Priests deserve recognition for the good they do and they need the support of their people. I appeal to those priests who have become demoralised and half-hearted not to give in to cynicism but to heed the Lord’s call to renewal and conversion.

However, those in Church and State who have acted wrongly or inadequately should assume accountability.

What is at stake here is not just the past, but the future of our children and our young people and the need to foster a healthy environment across the board in which our upcoming generations are cherished and can grow to maturity. This is a huge challenge and cannot be addressed in a patchwork manner. The early results of the most recent census indicate that there will be a significant growth in the numbers and the proportion of children and young people in our population in the coming years. This will inevitably require significant investment.

While recognising the challenges of our current economic crisis, our long-term economic planning cannot overlook the need to provide not just protection but also vision, hope and opportunity for this future generation. The Proclamation of 1916 contained a vision of solidarity and inclusivity which dreamt not just of the freedom for Ireland’s people, but also of their welfare; it hoped for “equal rights and equal opportunities for all its citizens”; it dreamt of a society “where all the children of the nation would be cherished”. These are perennial goals for our nation which must at all times be a clear focal point for future economic and social planning.

The same proclamation and vision of those who founded our republic recognised that religious and civil liberty of all was to be fostered. A republic is not indifferent to the faith of its citizens. A republic respects the specific rights of believers. It recognises the role of believers in contributing to the common good as they journey with others in search of that hope to which we are all called as human beings and believers.

Great damage has been done to the credibility of the Church in Ireland. Credibility will only be regained by the Church being more truly what the Church is. Renewal will not be the work of sleek public relations moves. Irish religious culture has radically changed and has changed irreversibly. There will be no true renewal in the Church until that fact is recognised.

The Church cannot continue to be present in society as it was in the past. That is not to say that the Church will be renewed by that changed culture or should simply adapt itself to the vision of that new culture. The Gospel reading reminds us that the Church lives its life in the midst of different cultures and indeed with the presence of sin in its own midst.

As believers we know that in the long-term Christ who sows the good seed in our midst will work tirelessly to see that those forces “that provoke offence and who do evil” will not prevail but will face judgement on their lives. It would however be false to interpret the Gospel reading as if we should simply sit back and allow good and evil to grow together in the hope that in the end the good will win out. It is reminding us that fidelity to the message of Jesus is the way in which we will ensure the victory of the good.

The Gospel reading cries out: “Listen”, anyone who has ears”. Rarely more often than in our day are we as believers called to listen, to take note, to be alert and on our guard, so that the virtuous life will shine through us in our world. To do that we must renew ourselves and, as the second reading reminds us, allow the spirit of God to put into our lives a goodness and a love that cannot be summed up in our words. It is only then if we love good that we will drive evil away from us.'

I think Dublin's been blessed in Archbishop Martin. We need more like him.

On Wading Through The Cloyne Report

It's very difficult to talk about the Cloyne Report. It's difficult because to read the Report is painful, and because there's a huge amount in it, and because it's being misreported, and because it inevitably -- and rightly -- spurs strong feelings. For some it's a fiery indignation, for others a resigned depression; I cannot imagine anyone reading it in a spirit of hope.

I've read the Report a couple of times now, as I did with the Murphy Report, and I've skimmed it a few times, using the index and electronic searching in order to put some kind of order on it. It seems to me that the one and only thing that the Report makes absolutely clear is that even if you have the best policies and procedures in the world, it won't mean squat unless people are willing to follow them. Sadly, it's all too clear that neither Bishop Magee nor Monsignor O'Callaghan had any such intention.

The Report, after all, recognises that the Church's child-protection policies are far better than those of the State. It says the State's policies are less precise and more difficult to follow than those of the Church (Cloyne 1.15), and reiterates the Murphy Report's observation that while the monitoring of sex abusers is very difficult, there is greater monitoring of clerical child sex abusers than any other child sex abusers (C1.62, Murphy 1.81-6), these being, in effect, free to do whatever they like (M1.83).

But, of course, all this doesn't mean squat if the people who have a job of implementing these policies aren't interested in doing so. This, of course, is exactly what the Murphy Report observed of Dublin -- that Dublin's child-protection structures work well, but that their doing so is heavily dependent on the demonstrated commitment and effectiveness of the Archbishop and the Director of the Child Protection Service (M1.16).

Unwillingness to Follow Guidelines

Why weren't Magee or O'Callaghan interested in following the Irish Church's agreed guidelines? Granted, as the Murphy Report points out, the Framework Document wasn't binding on the bishops who agreed it (M3.42), but still, given that Magee had signed up to and published it within his diocese, one would have expected him to have made a serious effort to implement it. I'm afraid Magee's motives seem far from clear in this whole affair, but O'Callaghan seems to have been driven by a peculiar mixture of kindness, clericalism, a respect for what he believed to be due process, and an arrogant conviction that he knew best. In 2002, for instance, he wrote that he felt it was not for the Church to pass on allegations of abuse to the State, as he felt that so doing compromised the Church's position (C4.77):

'On the issue of reporting to civil authorities I have always been of your mind and endorse everything you say. I am convinced that reporting should have been left to the complainants. Our role in the whole process has been compromised by taking on direct reporting as part of our remit. Why should we take it on ourselves to report when the complainant does not want it done? This commitment on our part also seriously compromises our relationship with the priest against whom allegations have been made.'

Some years later he looked back on 1996, when the bishops had been working on guidelines for dealing with abuse allegations, saying that he was deeply disappointed with the bishops, feeling that (C1.43):

'They were walking away from the strong positive tradition of Christian Pastoral Care as inspired by the words and actions of Jesus himself. They would surrender all pastoral discretion and would hand over to secular agencies overall responsibility for alleged offending priests who had abused their position of trust and given serious scandal. The Bishops rolled over under pressure from the media. And they expected Rome to endorse the new policy!'

This, as it happens, tallies with one of the running themes in the Murphy Report: that the Church's authorities had no desire to implement the Church's own rules. The problem isn't Canon Law, despite the claims of far too many commentators over the last year or two; rather the problem was that Canon Law wasn't followed (M1.15, 1.17, 1.18, 1.25-6, 1.62, 4.3, 4.11ff.). The Murphy Report records Monsignor Dolan, Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Dublin, as having said that Canon Law (M4.12):

'... had been judged by many, rightly or wrongly to have had a significantly negative impact on the mission of the Church, this attitude could perhaps best be summed up by the following: that many placed more faith in the code than in the Gospel.'

It seems that Monsignor O'Callaghan shared this view and evidently regarded the Framework Document as even worse. The Framework Document was both more clear and more strict than Canon Law, demanding the reporting of abuse allegations to the State; Canon Law merely required the Civil Law be followed with regard to reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities, and given that the State does not require that abuse allegations be passed on (M1.16), the Framework Document went further than both Canon Law and the law of the land. O'Callaghan regarded this as putting the Church in an impossible position and being wholly contrary to a spirit of Christian forgiveness. I see his point, but it is blatantly obvious that in most cases, as Murphy points out of how matters used to be handled in Dublin, in practice this attitude extended only to clergy, not being extended to the laity and in particular 'it did not extend to lay complainants of child sexual abuse' (M4.15).

Ambiguity and Unsupported Inferences in the Report

The report, it should be pointed out, is not without flaws. It's hard to make such a point without seeming like a craven apologist, but I think it has to be said. I'd felt uneasy reading the Murphy Report where there's a section about an abuser having once operated in my home parish and much is said of the Parish Priest's involvement in matters, in terms of his mishandling of concerns. However, the priest repeatedly identified as parish priest was never more than a curate in the parish. This may seem a minor point, but it has some significance to the case study, and in any case, if I could spot such an egregious error in connection with the only parish dealt with in that report that I know intimately, I could not help but wonder what errors there are in connection with other cases described. I know, Murphy & Co had tens of thousands of documents to wade through, but even so, this bothered me...

Unfortunately, the Cloyne Report doesn't put me at ease in this regard, as I feel it's problematic in at least three key respects.

The first is that it's unsystematic; granted, this may in some respects be a function of the diocesan files having been haphazardly maintained, but even so, some of the cases described are described in absurdly vague terms. Chapter 13, for instance, describes how a lady claimed that she and her brother had been abused by a 'Father Moray' who had died six years earlier: there's no indication of when this alleged abuse took place, or how old the siblings had been at the time. This may seem trivial, but there are three instances where the details simply don't add up.

• 'Father Drust' is alleged to have engaged in abuse of one girl between 1967 and 1971 (C15.4), but the Report states that he began abusing her a few months after meeting her in 1964 or 1965 when she was seven or eight (C15.10), and stopped abusing her when she was eleven in 1968 or 1969 (C15.15); clearly these dates do not match. 
• 'Father Tarin' is said to have abused one girl -- the Report calls this 'a vicious sexual assault' -- in the early 1950s either when she was about six (C16.4) or around the time of her First Communion when she was eight (C16.8). 
• Chapter 26 details how Magee himself is said to have inappropriately hugged a young adult male, but the Report gives no indication of when this happened. More importantly, it is unclear on the youth's age (C26.4), despite the fact of the Report stating that although he had been accepted for a place in seminary when he was approximately 17½ years old he had to wait until he was 18 before starting his studies (C26.3), and that the youth was first hugged by the bishop at a meeting just before the start of the seminary year when he was due to begin his studies (C26.4). At least on the basis of the Report, he must have been eighteen at the time, but the Report seems unnecessarily vague on the matter. 

I'm not disputing the truth of any of the allegations, just observing that the Report hasn't done a good job of recording them, seeming unaware even of its internal contradictions.

The second point of concern for me is that I don't see that the Magee episode as described in Chapter 26 has any place in the Report at all. I don't dispute for a moment that it's troubling, but what's clear from it is that it concerns the bishop having allegedly hugged an admittedly young adult male, and having kissed him on the forehead. Everybody who considered this matter -- the diocesan delegate Father Bermingham, Ian Elliott of the National Board for Safeguarding Children, Archbishop Clifford, and the Gardaí -- all took the same view, which was that though Magee's behaviour was inappropriate, given the actual details revealed and Joseph’s age at the time, the behaviour described did not constitute an allegation of child sexual abuse. Given that the remit of the Report was to report on the handling of allegations and suspicions of child sexual abuse received by the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009, I really don't see why this is in the report at all. I'm not saying it's good; it's nothing of the sort. I'm just saying it's not in the remit of the Report.

The final major issue for me in this regard concerns what the Report says about the Vatican's involvement, something the Government seems to have latched on to, and something that journalists appear to be distorting by the hour in a weird version of Chinese whispers. The Report does not at any point say that the Vatican ever set out to undermine the Irish bishops, let alone the Irish state. The Report describes how the Irish bishops' 1996 Framework Document was sent to Rome in the hope of it getting Rome's approval, such that it should be regarded as canonically binding, and how a year later the Papal Nuncio passed on the response of the Congregation for Clergy (C1.18, 1.76, 4.21). The Congregation for Clergy clearly thought of the Framework Document as a study document -- and there's no suggestion that anybody ever corrected this understanding -- and expressed serious reservations about it in two regards. Firstly, there was a concern that it might conflict with Canon Law, which had primacy, such that an abusive priest found guilty under the procedures of the Framework Document would inevitably an undesirably could well have an appeal to Rome upheld on procedural grounds alone. Secondly, it expressed unspecified moral and canonical concerns about the Framework Document requiring the mandatory reporting of all allegations and concerns to the State. For all that, it insisted that Canon Law had to be followed in these matters -- Canon Law, it should be stressed, mandated that the State's laws in these matters should be followed (C4.26), and the State did not then and does not even now require mandatory reporting of such matters (M1.16).

While the Report does not in any way claim that it was the intention of the Vatican to undermine the Irish Church -- let alone the Irish State -- in connection with this, it insists that this was the effect of the Congregation for Clergy's decision, saying that (C1.18):

'This effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures which they had agreed and gave comfort and support to those who, like Monsignor O’Callaghan, dissented from the stated official Irish Church policy.'

This claim is repeated several times (C1.76, 4.22, 4.91), and it does seem to be supported, at least with reference to Monsignor O'Callaghan, who is reported as having disdainfully written of what he regarded as the bishops' folly in having expected Rome to endorse the Framework Document (1.43). However, the Report offers no evidence whatsoever of anybody other than O'Callaghan having found comfort in the Congregation for Clergy's response, and it really does seem as though O'Callaghan would have done his own thing anyway. After all, despite the Congregation for Clergy's insistence that the Church's established Canon Law procedures should be 'meticulously followed' (C4.21), O'Callaghan made no effort whatsoever to abide by their instruction. Indeed, once the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was given the job of centrally dealing with this sort of stuff in 2001, so that Rome could make sure abuse cases were handled properly, O'Callaghan read this as primarily being about respecting the rights of accused priests (C4.24), and not about the rights of victims of clerical abuse. This was the subtext of the CDF's 2001 instruction, he said. The reason why he had to say this was the instruction's subtext is because it blatantly wasn't in the text! In hindsight O'Callaghan is open and contrite about his clerical bias (C1.27):

'I regret also that I tended to show favour to accused priests vis-à-vis complaints in some cases. I realise now that in some instances I became emotionally drawn to the plight of accused priests and in this way compromised my care of some complainants.'

Given this and all the evidence, I think it's pretty clear that no matter what Rome could have said in 1997, O'Callaghan would have found a way of sticking to his pastoral guns; he would have found comfort and support in whatever the Congregation for Clergy had decided. The facts as revealed in the Report are a damning indictment of Magee and O'Callaghan, but not of Rome, or indeed of the other bishops.

Lest Anyone Take False Solace...

It's utterly clear from the Report that Magee had no serious interest in protecting vulnerable children in his diocese, or in remedying harm done to his flock in the past. It's equally clear that for whatever reason he handled complaints in a duplicitous manner, and was grossly irresponsible in delegating the handling of complaints to a man who was openly opposed to the bishops' own policies for dealing with child abuse allegations, and who was far from keen on clerical discipline of any sort whatsoever.

There are those who will rightly point out that the Cloyne Report is not a report on clerical abuse, but is, like the Murphy Report, a report on how the diocese dealt with allegations of abuse and related expressions of concern. This is true, and indeed, although the Report features 19 case studies, only one of these has thus far led to a conviction, that being an 18-month suspended sentence (C21.100). However, that's not to say for a moment that the other cases are devoid of truth, and indeed even leaving aside cases where priests accepted the truth of what had been alleged against them (C10.6, 14.7, 16.10), it seems clear that there's truth to several -- if not almost all -- other allegations.

Others will argue that although the diocese was approached about these events in recent years, between 1996 and 2009, the bulk of the alleged incidents happened a long time ago. Again, this is broadly true, with some cases dating back to the 1930s and the largest number of cases relating to the 1960s, but even so that's not to say that all is good now. The Report testifies to two instances of suspicious activity without complaints of any sort, one in the 1990s and one in the 2000s, an unproven allegation relating to an event in the early 1990s, and one other instance, where a priest (who later eloped with a married woman) admitted in 2000 to having had a relationship with a teenage girl, something the girl herself denied. I'm sure things have improved enormously, but that's not to say that there aren't tares among the wheat even now.

Conversely, another common thing that some within the Church will claim is that abuse is a post-Conciliar problem, that it didn't happen before Vatican II. Now, there is quite a bit of truth in this, in that insofar as we have statistical evidence on abuse in America -- the John Jay Institute having done an enormous study on clerical abuse there -- it seems that abuse was low in the 1950s, rose sharply in the 1960s, peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has been steadily declining ever since, with reporting of abuse really only beginning in the mid-1990s. However, the Cloyne data testifies to some abuse having gone back to the 1930s, and I don't think there should be any shirking of the fact that during the decade when most abuse seems to have happened in Cloyne -- the 1960s -- the abusers had clearly been selected and trained in the years before the Council. For what it's worth, just to crunch the data, I think we have to leave out the case where two priests were clearly wrongly accused (C22), the Magee incident since that clearly wasn't child abuse (C26), and the case of 'Father Moray' since the report gives no indication of when the accusation refers to (C13). Allowing for that, then, it seems that between 1996 and 2009, accusations we should regard as credible even if unproven were made against fifteen priests who had operated in the diocese:

• The earliest accusation against four priests relate to events in the years before the Council (C16, 19, 20, and 25).
• Four priests who were trained before the Council were accused of having committed abuse in the 1960s (C10, 11, 15, and 17).
• Seven priests were accused of having committed abuse, or had concerns raised about them, in the years after the Council (C9, 12, 14, 18, 21, 23, and 25).

One of the most common arguments made about clerical abuse is that it's not really paedophilia in the vast majority of cases, but is, rather, ephebophilia, in that it relates to adolescent males, rather than to children proper. Yet again, the American statistics show that there is something to this, as it happens, but it doesn't seem to have been the case at Cloyne. Certainly, if we take the allegations at face value and given that it's really only possible to analyse fourteen of the cases statistically, it seems that at least nine allegations or concerns related to prepubescent children, three related to adolescent males, and two related to adolescent females. This, as it happens, is in line with the SAVI Study's findings in 2002 that two-thirds of Irish adults who had been sexually abused in their youth were sexually abused before the age of twelve. There's no getting around the fact that most of the allegations and concerns dealt with in the Cloyne Report relate to children.

I'll have more to say on this over the next day or two, not least in connection with the Government's hysterical response, but I thought it was worth laying out the facts on this, as far as I can see them. I've read the SAVI Report, the Ferns Report, the Ryan Report, and the Murphy Report already, so it made sense to read this properly, grim though it is. It's important to me that the Church of which I'm a member not be a haven for paedophilia, and small though the consolation is, I'm glad that most of the reports relate to events long ago, that the Cloyne Report recognises the quality of the Church's procedures, that Magee is no longer bishop in Cloyne, that even Magee didn't resort to the tactic of moving priests from one parish to another if they came under suspicion (C1.58), and that the only case in the Report which relates to allegations handled by a religious order rather than the diocese was handled impeccably.

That, at least, gives hope that Cloyne might well be an exception, rather than the rule, which I think is what we all fear.

'Rules get a bad rap, but the rules are what define the Muppets'

I am, as far too many friends of mine are painfully aware, a huge fan of the Muppets. I've blogged about them here a couple of times, whether listing and linking to some of their finest ever sketches, or else linking to a screenshot of Cyndi  Crawford dressed as a Frogeteer and singing alongside a Muppet shamelessly based on that old fraud L. Ron Hubbard.

There's a fascinating article by Elizabeth Stephens over at The Awl, entitled 'Weekend at Kermie's: The Muppets' Strange Life After Death'. I don't by any means agree with everything she says but she certainly raises some good points, starting from her springboard that is the new Muppets film, which she certainly admits is an exciting prospect. To be fair, how could it be otherwise, combining as it does the Muppets, Jason Segel, and the ever-watchable Amy Adams?

Stephens thinks the film, no matter how good it is, has some massive hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is that the Muppets aren't who they once were, or, at any rate, they don't sound or move like they once did. I started to wonder this recently, when someone queried my Kermit the Frog impression and seriously tried to argue that Kermit sounds more like Bert than Ernie. 

'No, he doesn't,' I insisted. 'Kermit and Ernie were both voiced by the same person, both by Jim Henson; Bert was voiced by Frank Oz, he of Miss Piggy and Yoda fame. Kermit basically is Jim Henson's voice; Ernie is Jim just making his voice sound rounder.'

The problem, of course, is that I was almost as wrong as I was right. Jim Henson, to our enduring loss, died twenty-one years ago. He didn't voice Kermit in Muppet Christmas Carol, or Muppet Treasure Island, or Muppets from Space, and if Kermit ever appeared in Muppets Tonight -- I can't remember -- Jim didn't voice him there either. Steve Whitmire, who's also the voice of Ernie nowadays, did duty back then, so I suspect my friend heard my Henson-esque take on Kermit and felt it just didn't rhyme with Whitmire's Kermit, which he surely knows better.Stephens' feeling is that it's just not the same:

'From 1955 to 1990, Kermit the Frog was voiced and performed by Jim Henson. After that, Steve Whitmire, known for his smart-mouthed Rizzo the Rat, took over. Whitmire’s Kermit sounded a lot like Henson's, but his voice was a little thinner, and his singing more rhythmic and less melodic.

Let me preface my next statement by saying that I know it will seem ridiculous to the casual reader, inflammatory to a good many fans, and downright specious to the expert of rhetoric, but for me watching Steve Whitmire’s Kermit is akin to watching someone imitate a mythic and longed-for mother—my mother—wearing a my-mother costume in a my-mother dance routine. This person’s heart is in the right place, which only makes it worse. “You should be happy,” the person pleads with me, “Look, Biddy! Your mother is not gone! She is still here.” Now, no one would ever do that. No one in her right mind would think it would work. A child knows his mother’s voice like he knows whether it's water or air he's breathing. One chokes you and one gives you life. Strangely, I feel the same about Kermit. Whitmire is an amazing performer—especially as the lovable dog Sprocket on “Fraggle Rock”—but, when he's on screen as Kermit, I can feel my body reject it on a cellular level.'

Crazy? Maybe, but she has a point. Indeed, she has a lot of points, and most of them are good. Her overall thesis, though, is one I'm not sure of. She's basically saying that the Muppets were the work above all of one man, that they were of their time, and that they should be allowed die rather than becoming an anonymous product, like any other Disney property.

Well, maybe. If that were happening -- and there's an element of it -- I'd agree. Certainly I felt watching Muppets Tonight that while it was often very funny, it lacked the poignancy -- the heart, even -- of The Muppet Show. Rizzo the Rat, Seymour and Pepe, Johnny Fiama, all those guys -- they're funny, but they're not flawed. Henson once described his job as being akin to Kermit's, saying 'Kermit finds himself trying to hold together all these crazy people, and there’s something not unlike what I do.' That was really at the heart of the old show -- that Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo and others were all, basically, frail and damaged individuals, desperate for people to care about them. The show was hilarious, but somewhere in that levity was a sense of tragedy too, a sense that there are cracks in all of us.

Still, it was in the post-Henson era that I rediscovered my love for the show, and did so through a post-Henson show. I was babysitting my nephews once upon a time, and agreed to watch with them their video of Muppet Fairy Tales. Made in 1994, four years after Jim Henson's death, the Muppets' take on 'The Elves and the Shoemaker' is priceless. Kermit plays the shoemaker, with Robin as his grandson, and the elves all look and sound like Elvis, and make them loads of blue suede shoes; at the end, the shoemaker and his grandson provide them with new clothes, like in the story, save these clothes are white satin jumpsuits, and the lads don their new clobber and head off the Vegas. That was clever enough to intrigue me, but what really stuck in my head, and which I'll often quote to an admixture of horror and delight, was Miss Piggy's stunning performance as the clever pig with the house of bricks in 'The Three Little Pigs.' Watch it. Seriously.

And Muppet Christmas Carol is very very good, and Muppets from Space seemed to be exactly what the old show and films were about. It may have been a bit of a false dawn, but I think it showed that all wasn't lost.

And then, of course, there was that whole business with Sesame Street's Big Bird sitting side by side with television's most attractive woman on The West Wing.

Quite possibly the greatest moment in the history of television.

That was in 2004. There's life in the old frog yet. Roll on November. Like Jason Segel, I can't wait.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Two

And so the Brother's Odyssey continues.

We left him a week ago on a Kilkenny hillside, surrounded by singing sheep. He rested after that, and painted in the rain and then last Saturday pedalled his way from Carlow through Wicklow into north Wexford, where on Sunday he painted at Tara Hill and greenfly menaced him, doing their best to go for a swim in his tea.

Monday saw him summarising how things had been going thus far, and then set off on his first day of cycling without a host, and him making his way from north of Gorey towards Wexford town. He stopped by the beach at Courttown, as you do, and at an old friend's house, forgetting he was away in Turkey, and again to have lunch by the memorial for those who died in the sinking of the emigrant ship Pomona in 1859. Using Twitter -- that being a big part of the trip, after all -- he spread the word that he was looking for somewhere to stay, and planning on funding the night by selling a painting.

'We've just one room left and it's very small,' said one lady.

'There's only one of me and I'm very small,' he said, drawing her gaze away from his still-ample bolg.

Utterly knackered on Tuesday after the previous day's exploits, he set himself up at Wexford's Crescent Quay to finish the painting he'd been too exhausted to finish the previous day.

Off he went then to Kilmore Quay, fifteen miles or so away to the south and a place I know all too well from studying Ordnance Survey maps and town plans in Leaving Cert geography classes. The brother knows it rather better now, having worked on a couple of paintings there, and done some sketching in his notebook, and admired the Vigil Statue in the Memorial Garden, and gone for a cycle along the south coast in the evening.

Yesterday, he said in the morning, was the nicest day in the history of the Universe. He pedalled on west from Kilmore Quay, stopping to look at the curlews and oystercatchers, before making his way through Wellingtonbridge and on to Arthurstown, taking a ferry from Ballyhack over the estuary of the Three Sisters, the Nore, the Suir, and the Barrow to Passage East.

Finally and into his seventh county -- Waterford -- with knees aflame he made it to Tramore, and on a couple of miles further.

Today's been a Waterford day, cycling through his second Kill village of the trip, and eventually getting him to Dungarvan far later than he'd have wished. I'm fond of Dungarvan, as I'd a lovely family holiday there when I was fourteen or so; I don't remember too much of it, alas, other than the grey house we stayed in, the apple tree in the garden, days out at the beach, looking for cheap books in Dungarvan's shops, watching Zulu in the living room, and a long walk with my Dad on country roads at night where on spotting a white line in the centre of the road I declared with relief that we'd obviously hit civilization at last.

The Brother's knees, as ever on this trip, are killing him. I'm thinking he should get himself some Glucosamine; Sister the Eldest got me on it years ago. My favourite version was Jointace, with cod liver oil being the carrier; I don't know whether it made a real difference in itself or whether it just had a hell of a placebo effect, but it did the job.

Anyway, two weeks down, and seven counties cycled through. Only twenty-five more to go. Keep following him on his blog and especially on Twitter, where his hashtag's #paintingtour. And again, as I've said before, if you think there's a chance he might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live and you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, you should let him know. Just send him a message. It's not called social networking for nothing...

Never Judge a Book by its Cover

There's a remarkably tedious article about the third Christopher Nolan Batman film in today's Guardian. Peter Owen squints at the teaser poster for far too long, and proceeds to tell us that the film is obviously going to be crap. The Dark Knight, he says, 'took itself far too seriously, most of all in its lumpen and simplistic attempts to comment on the war on terror,' and as for The Dark Knight Rises, well...

'The new poster suggests the next film will fall into some of the same traps. It hums with seriousness and portentousness, with its black and white colour scheme, hints of awful destruction, and depiction of an empty city totally devoid of people – never a promising sign. It's claustrophobic, joyless, and derivative, like the poster for Batman Begins or one of those for Nolan's Inception, which depicted buildings tumbling like cliffs into the sea while Leo, Juno and the rest stared upwards with sombre, blank stares as vacant as the film itself.

The Dark Knight ended with Batman on the run from the police, having nobly taken the blame for Two-Face's murders so that Gotham's citizens don't find out that their upright, morally impeccable district attorney Harvey Dent had turned evil. The new poster suggests a city literally falling to pieces without him, his bat symbol representing the only chink of light – or hope – in the gloom.'

Now, call me old-fashioned, but if you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you certainly shouldn't prejudge a film by its trailer, let alone its poster. Frankly, the article's nonsense anyway. Owen grumbles that the film looks set to repeat the classic error of too many superhero films, that being an abundance of bad guys. Granted, as a general rule of thumb a variant of Occam's Razor would make a good maxim for superhero films, in that villains should not be multiplied beyond necessity. However, leaving aside that I'd trust Nolan with a whole brigade of nasties, Owen clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. Of Batman Begins, for which he has at least a sneering regard, he says:

'The only supervillain involved, the Scarecrow, an evil psychiatrist experimenting on asylum patients, was not too over the top, and his costume not too silly'

Whereas of The Dark Knight Rises, he proclaims:

'... judging from the cast list, Nolan has already booked in far too many villains, including Catwoman, Ra's al Ghul ("rumoured" on imdb.com) and Bane, an uninteresting, monosyllabic lunk who broke Batman's back in the comics a few years ago.'

Given that Ra's al Ghul was the principal villain -- there were three, the others being the Scarecrow and Carmine Falcone -- in Batman Begins, and that Owen appears not to have noticed, I think his witterings can be safely discarded. You remember, don't you? Played by Liam Neeson? Trained Bruce Wayne? Used the Scarecrow and Falcone as his pawns? Burned down Wayne Manor? Attempted to destroy Gotham City? No?

While the Guardian has been covering itself in glory over the last fortnight, it's useful to be reminded that even Homer nods sometimes, and that paper doesn't refuse ink.

Looking at Vermeer

I watched Girl with a Pearl Earring tonight, feeling a need to get away from the claustrophic mounds and stacks of books, articles, folders, refill pads, scraps of paper, printed pages, pens, pencils, and random bits of stationery that are currently cluttering and breeding on every horizontal surface in the house. It's a busy time.

I liked the film. It's beautifully shot, in a manner reminiscent of Vermeer's paintings, and is remarkably still, with Colin Firth, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Wilkinson all being excellent. Not a lot happens in it, and that which happens tends to happen in a restrained Merchant-Ivory kind of way, but somehow that seems fitting. Sure, it's mostly made up -- or, at any rate, the book on which it's based is mostly made up -- but then, given how little we know of Vermeer's life, this is hardly surprising. I have three books about him upstairs -- Wheelock's Vermeer: The Complete Works, Bailey's Vermeer: A View of Delft, and Gowing's Vermeer, the latter being widely regarded as one of the most profound pieces of art criticism ever written and being included in the Modern Library's 1999 list of the twentieth century's hundred greatest non-fiction books in English -- and yet none of them really tell us much about the man himself. We know hardly anything about him.

To be honest, I kind of like that ignorance. Vermeer epitomises the ideal artist as described by James Joyce -- or at least his youthful fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus -- in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

'The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.'

There's a distance and an anonymity in Vermeer's work, a serene perfection that doesn't lecture or lure; it merely invites us to watch, and to see the transcendent beauty in the ordinary.  I'm not sure there's even one painting out there, with the very possible exception of Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres, that I've spent as long looking at as Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid which is in Dublin, but I don't think I've ever spent as much time on one occasion just soaking up a single painting as I did back in March when I went to London's Dulwich Picture Gallery to see The Music Lesson.

Normally kept as part of the Queen's private collection, The Music Lesson was on loan to Dulwich as part of Dulwich's bicentennial celebrations. It's perfect, isn't it? The light, the shadows, the reflection, the detail, the colour, and perhaps above all that wonderfully geometric composition. I decided that day that I was going to try to see every Vermeer in the world before I die. I think I've only seen four so far, but I've plans for a fifth before the summer's out, and I'm already hoping to see at least another seven -- those in the Netherlands -- next year. 

With eight Vermeers in New York, and a further four in Washington, a trip to America will have to be on the agenda too. I guess I'd better start putting plans in motion.