Dredd: Once Bitten, Twice Hopeful...

I don't know how many of you remember 1995's Sylvester Stallone take on perhaps the most famous character in modern British comics? Judge Dredd, in most people's memories, was an absolute disaster: the plot was a overloaded hodge-podge of stories, the comic relief was risible -- and not in a good way, the film lacked any of the depth and satirical wit of the strip, and it got the hero fundamentally wrong. And yet, oddly enough, it was still better than Batman Forever, which the critics of that year somehow neglected to pan, leading to them being surprised when the absurdity that was Batman and Robin came along.

I am the Luuuuuuhhhhh!!!!!

Truth be told, the 1995 Dredd wasn't all bad. Diane Lane was very watchable, and even at his hammiest Max von Sydow brightened the screen, and in terms of design I really liked it: Mega-City 1 looked good, and both Mean Machine and the misplaced Hammerstein were spot-on, and things like the bikes and the prison ship were great. But then there were the judge's uniforms.

I've seen a hell of a lot of people sneering online at them, dismissing them as leotards with gleaming pads, and drawing special attention to Stallone's mighty codpiece, but the thing is, stuff that can look great in comics just looks implausible on the screen. Why do you think the cinematic versions of the Batman and the X-Men shun spandex for body armour and leather? That's why, at least in terms of design, I'm looking forward to next year's sally at Mega-City One's finest, with Karl Urban in the title role.

Until this week we'd not had much to go on in terms of what the new judge's uniform would look like -- a distant blurry shot of a judge on a none-too-promising bike, a very murky headshot of Dredd, and the above picture of the film's eponymous hero pointing his Lawgiver at -- well, who knows?

But then, this week, Empire featured a host of shots from the film and some enterprising soul decided to scan them and post them online for the whole world to see. They're encouraging, I think. For starters, we can see that Urban's Dredd isn't a pumped up ogre. This is as it should be. I'll always remember David Bishop explaining to an aspiring artist at the UK Comic Art Convention back in the day that Dredd isn't meant to be a musclebound giant -- he's more of a lean, mean, fighting machine. And indeed, early Ezquerra and Bolland drawings of Dredd were anything but overmuscled, while such artists as Mike McMahon and Brendan McCarthy did wonderfully skinny Dredds.

Perhaps more encouraging still is the fact that the uniform's been changed to look more practical, more gritty. The shoulder, elbow, and knee pads, which have grown to proportions as impractical as they are impressive in the comics, have been reduced to a far more plausible size, not unlike those from the strip's earliest days. The tight leather-esque suits have been ditched too, in favour of something that looks like a natural development from modern riot gear. It looks genuinely futuristic, but rooted in the present; it suggests a future with a past.

The one concern, I feel, lies with the helmet. I've already seen people grumbling, saying that it looks silly, as though it's too big for the judges' heads. I don't blame them, really, but I think they should hold their fire. The simple fact of the matter is that the judges' helmets are very difficult to get right. For all that some people didn't like the helmet Stallone wore -- though they liked things less when he removed it -- it represented a decent stab at handling some serious design problems with the helmet of the comics. 

There are at least two big problems with Dredd's helmet, as we see it in 2000AD. 

In the first place, it only looks good if we presume Dredd's head -- and indeed the judges' heads in general -- is very small. And I mean very small. Even the most realistic takes on Dredd's helmet presuppose that he has an astonishingly tiny head. Dredd wasn't the only character so afflicted in 2000AD. After all, one look at Torquemada's helmet in 'Nemesis the Warlock' should have got you wondering what kind of abnormal had a head that could fit into that thing. For all that Bryan Talbot is a comic genius, I never really bought his Torquemada, because he was clearly a normal man wearing an impossible hat; Kev O'Neill, on the other hand, just drew freaks, and so could get away with it. 

Linked with this is the whole issue of the back of the helmet; if the helmet protects the nape of the neck adequately,  it bars the wearer from looking up or from shooting when lying down, such that the only helmets that could really be plausible in this respect are ones that are flared out at the back.

Those are simple issues of ergonomics, but I think there's another issue too, and that's vision. Dredd's helmet is almost always drawn such that he must be squinting at the world through a narrow slit; certainly, he'd have had no peripheral vision, and you'd rather think that's something he'd want. Stallone's helmet didn't skimp in that respect, ensuring the visor was very wide, and effectively removing the nose-guard. 

Having loved comics and gotten my school magazine banned through my strips when a schoolboy, I used to go to comics conventions back in my late teens, speaking to artists and editors in the hope of getting advice and maybe -- eventually -- becoming a comics artist myself. I got encouragement, too, especially from Bryan Talbot and Steve Pugh, with both of them saying I'd definitely make it if I just practised more -- and my finals soon put paid to that, with life taking a different course soon afterwards. Looking through my portfolio, Steve Pugh was very impressed by my take on Dredd, commending my design work on the helmet in particular. I think it was obvious that I'd spent a lot of time trying to resolve the issues of vision and mobility.

As it happens, I think the vision issue's not a big deal; we can just assume there's kind of an lcd display running across the inside of the helmet, effectively giving the judges a far greater field of view that the visor itself would allow. But that still leaves the fact that the helmet needs to fit on the head, needs to allow the head to move, and needs some padding inside it to cushion any impacts.

Unless you've lots of hair for padding anyway. In which case you'll probably ditch the helmet.

All round, I think the new uniform looks great. I just hope the script, directing, and acting are as good -- and given that Alex Garland penned 28 Days Later, there must, at least, be some slight grounds for hope.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Four

While I've been busy trying to do my work and make sense of the fallout from the Cloyne Report -- and if you want to read that, scroll down to Tuesday's post and to a few before that -- the Brother's been continuing his epic artistic cycle around Ireland.

We left him, last Thursday, painting in Clonakilty, before going to stay with some lovely people who refuelled him with spicy food and tea in a specially-bought big blue mug. More painting the next day, and then some sightseeing in the afternoon, visiting Drombeg Stone Circle, Glandore, Union Hall, and Castletownsend. The hospitality continued with tea being -- as the wonderful mother of a wonderful ex of mine said when I first set foot in her house -- on tap, and then he was away leaving behind him a lovely painting of Red Strand.

Having stayed on Friday with the same old friend he's stayed with on Wednesday, he set off again on Saturday, battling cramp as he cycled through west Cork, backtracking a few miles to South Ring to paint some more, listening to the curlews, and the terms, and the tide, putting on an extra T-shirt against the cold, and muttering in exasperation as boats he was painting would sail out of sight. In a heroic bit of stereotyping, a lady he'd never met before came out of her house, approached him, and bestowed upon him a mug of tea and a big plate of sandwiches and cakes. With two paintings nearly complete, and an hour and a half behind schedule, he saddled the bike and faced north then west again, heading off back through Clonakilty and onwards through the hills to Skibbereen. Settling in there was a near run thing, as his bike took a puncture, his phone got sickly, and a B&B that had promised him a room turned him away on arrival, saying they'd given it to someone else. Still, a wonderful hostel stepped into the breach, giving him for the price of a dorm bed a family room where he could paint in privacy into the night.

Sunday then saw him painting in the tranquility of Skibbereen, and then refuelling with tea and some much needed food before heading north towards Bantry, tired though he still was from the punishing effect of the back roads of rural Ireland. Monday began with him eating his breakfast with mixed feelings, noting that every time he finishes a rasher himself, he misses his dog. Even with another night's rest, he set off that day at far from peak condition, his calf still hurting from the cramp that'd first struck him on Friday, and his knees still far from happy with the punishment they were getting, ploughing his lonely and determined way past sights both bleak and beautiful.

Still, tired and sore though he was, he found time to admire gorgeous views whilst drinking tea and made it to Glengarriff, aching and exhausted from spending the day marvelling in pain at the beauty all around him. The view out his window was great, and perhaps nicer still in the morning.

I was reassured to see him tweeting again on Tuesday, as in the dead of night he'd tweeted a deperate cry that his tablet had died, rendering him computerless, but following a friend's advice and trying the hard reset had been all he'd needed to do to resuscitate the beast. He said his goodbyes to Glengarriff, where the local Gaelic club had obviously won something recently, and headed north, to torture his knees further by climbing through the mountains to Kenmare. Off he went, then, to great encouragement and with someone else having attempted a rendering of him with the air of, as someone said, 'the conquering barbarian about him'. Somehow his knees did the job and got him through Caha Pass, over the mountains, and out of Cork into Kerry, his ninth county, in one piece, consumed though he was with a bottomless craving for tea as he arrived in Kenmare and settled down in the street to paint.

More painting in Kenmare was on Wednesday's agenda, as he supped his tea and wondered how the weather would turn out. It was -- technically -- dry, but it was dark and cool and hinting at rain. Taking his paints to the street again, he settled down outside the aptly named Cupán Tae where €2.50 got him three pots of tea, and he'd no shortage of people to talk to. Onward and upward then on a few mouthfuls of brown bread to Moll's Gap, and down along a bumpy twisty road, thankfully free of coaches, through Muckross to Killarney itself, pushing just a few miles further to a little cottage and hot teapot, wrapped in cosy anticipation. During the night he fell asleep at the table last night, and waking shivering and with tingling feet, he took some more tea, making everything seem better, and then went to bed.

As for today? Well, last I looked he'd been watching a match, and muttering darkly about how frustrating it can be when you're chasing the sunset while painting a field of hay, only for the farmer to come along and start baling it. Now if only you could make the sun stand still...

As I keep saying, you can and should follow him on his blog and especially on Twitter, where his hashtag's #paintingtour. And again, as I've also 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...

Stewart Lee, or When Comedy's Medium is its Message

I've been a fan of Stewart Lee's for a long time, ever since one of my closest friends introduced me to Pea Green Boat, that hilariously and horrifyingly mesmering blurring of the boundaries between comedy and nightmare. I haven't liked every thing I've seen or heard Lee do -- one routine in particular left me very uncomfortable, though I could see why he did it -- but on balance I find him the most relentlessly intelligent comedian I've ever experienced. And I say that having been to see him twice, and with five DVDs, two CDs, and a book of his work sitting on my shelves. I loved his latest TV series, which I think was even better than the previous one, and was fascinated to watch routines mutate from a full version in one live show into a much shorter version in another live show, into a briefer and highly modified version when performed in Ireland, and then be released, tuned to perfection, on television.

One of the most impressive things about his work is how he draws attention to the craft of comedy -- indeed, he does so to such a degree that a lot of his work is comedy about comedy, what I might, if I were feeling pretentious, call 'metacomedy'. But I'm not, so I won't.

It was odd to see him in the news in recent weeks, with a line from one of his shows being put -- wholly devoid of context -- to an obviously embarrassed Michael McIntyre. Of course, as every good Evangelical will tell you, a text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text, and it's utterly meaningless to rip one phrase out of a whole show, especially a show as tightly-written as Lee's tend to be. I was glad to see his response, forwarded to me by a friend a few days back. As one would expect, it's a scornful dismantling of the British media and its tendency to conjure up stories from little more than whimsy and bile.

Lee's fascination with the craft of comedy is at the heart of his superb 2010 book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, and it leads him to see others through the prism of the performance of comedy. For instance, starting on page 156 of the book, he says...

'I suspect, reluctantly, that the actual business of being a priest isn't that different in some ways to the business of being a comedian. My wife took me to her church in Gloucester. I always listen to the way the sermons are pitched with interest. It was a mixed audience -- old Irish fellers, lots of displaced Filipinos, Poles, general Catholic diaspora, many without English as a first language. Tough crowd. And the Father's out of the pulpit, down in the aisle, shouting, jumping around, working the room. The priest that did our marriage course in Stoke Newington faced a similar problem of playing to an incredibly varied demographic. His approach was to speak softly and calmly about some incident or personal story that seemed a million miles away from religion, then, having drawn the punters in, to clobber them with a theological right hook. Most priests are rubbish performers, though, and one wonders how an organisation as wealthy as the Catholic Church, for example, can't spare some money to school the poor sods in a few basics of stagecraft. That said, the good ones are an inspiration, and let's not forget a lot of them are turning over a new twenty minutes each week, which makes even the stalwarts of the Comedy Store's Cutting Edge Team look lazy.'

It's a book I really can't recommend enough, not least because its structure and mannerisms are impressively akin to his shows. We know that the 'Stewart Lee' of the performances is to some extent a construct, a distilled version of aspects of Lee's own character, but what of the 'Stewart Lee' who introduces and comments on the scripts of the three shows discussed in the book. We see the irony and the mechanisms, the repeated jokes and the call-backs that are at the heart of his work. How much of this are we meant to take seriously?

But then, I like the idea of a book about comedy being itself -- in effect -- a comedic performance, especially given that Lee's comedically dissecting his own comedic dissections of comedy and other comedians. It's probably not surprising that I'd like this, given my love for comics about comics, or of Vermeer's painting about painting. I like it when media discuss themselves; it just shows what they can do. I like it when the medium and the message admit that they're one and the same.

Lee's not for everyone by any means, but his latest TV series was a perfect example of comedy can be about comedy, and how it's perfectly possible to be extremely funny and deadly serious at the same time. I'll look forward to getting the DVD before the year is out.

How Many Questions on the Cloyne Report?

42, if you're interested. It struck me that it mightn't be a bad idea to pull together in a straightforward questions-and-answers format most of my thoughts on the Cloyne Report and how people are reacting to it. It might be useful.

1. What's going on? Why has the Papal Nuncio to Ireland been recalled to the Vatican?

Nobody really knows. Certainly, experienced Vatican observers haven't been quick to say when such a thing last happened. Some think it's a diplomatic snub to Ireland for the Taoiseach having basically defamed the Pope and the Vatican in his speech last week, but most reckon it's simply so that he can consult in person with those in Rome who'll have the job of responding formally to the Cloyne Report and the various claims made by the Taoiseach and other members of the Government. The Government doesn't think that the response of the Pope's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, constitutes an official response, and has refused to engage with it, other than, in the case of the Minister for Justice, to dismiss it as 'disingenuous'.

2. What exactly is the Cloyne Report, and why is it causing such a storm?

It's a report into an investigation by Judge Yvonne Murphy and others into how, between 1996 and 2009, the diocese of Cloyne, in County Cork, dealt with allegations of child sexual abuse and expressions of concern about clergy; these allegations dated right back to the 1930s, though the decade to which most complaints related was the 1960s, and roughly two-thirds of the allegations, as far as we can say, were in connection with people who had at the time been young children. The Report found that neither the then bishop of the diocese, John Magee, who was stripped of his authority by Rome in March 2009, nor his vicar general, Denis O'Callaghan, had ever made any attempt to follow the Irish Church's own guidelines for dealing with allegations of child abuse.

3. Why did they do this?

In the case of John Magee it's difficult to tell; the Report makes clear, however, that Denis O'Callaghan was deeply opposed to the Church dealing with allegations of abuse in a rules-based way, strongly believing that a more pastoral approach would always be better. The Report holds that those who were opposed to following the guidelines felt entitled to do so because the Vatican had issues with the guidelines.

4. Why did the Vatican have issues with the guidelines?

In 1996 the Irish bishops -- including Magee -- drew up a set of guidelines for dealing with allegations of child abuse. They sent these guidelines to Rome in the hope of getting official approval for them. In 1997, the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy replied, saying that the guidelines were problematic: they had potential to clash with canon law, such that there was a concern that abusive priests found guilty through procedures conducted under the guidelines could successfully appeal to Rome on procedural grounds, and it had unspecified concerns about mandatory reporting. The Congregation did, however, insist that canon law should be meticulously followed in dealing with these matters.

5. Canon law? What does that have to do with anything?

Canon law is really just the name we give to the Church's own internal rulebook. The Church, existing throughout the world, needs a universal set of rules than can apply as effectively in Cuba and China as in Ireland and the Philippines. These rules need to take account of the fact that while freedom of religion is accepted in countries like the United States and Germany, it is seriously curtailed in countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Back when the Murphy Report on the Dublin Archdiocese was issued in 2009, there was a lot of talk about canon law, but what the Murphy Report made clear was that canon law was never the problem in Dublin. The problem was that canon law wasn't applied.

6. So the problem in Cloyne is that the guidelines weren't followed, but that canon law was?

No, canon law wasn't followed either. Denis O'Callaghan didn't believe that abuse was best dealt with through a rules-based approach. He thought a pastoral approach was the way forward. John Magee didn't seem to care either way.

7. How exactly did Cloyne deal with allegations?

It's hard to summarise, save that the best word to describe O'Callaghan's methods is 'unsystematic'. Removal of accused priests from ministry -- recognised as the most important thing the Church can do when it receives allegations -- seems to have been normal, but the Diocese' monitoring of accused priests wasn't up to much, and in a lot of cases it failed to pass on allegations to the Gardaí in a timely manner, if at all. Interestingly, the Report notes that Magee seems never to have indulged in the notorious practice known in the American public school system as 'passing the trash'. Of all the priests about whom allegations were received or concerns raised, only two are in ministry in the diocese now.

8. How many allegations did the diocese receive?

The Report deals with allegations against nineteen priests, including John Magee himself --

9. John Magee? There were allegations against the Bishop?

Yes. Well, sort of. There was a troubling incident or series of incidents, but it seems that the matter in question, while inappropriate and unwise, couldn't possibly be deemed child sexual abuse. It's difficult to see what the Diocese' response to an allegation of something that certainly wasn't child sexual abuse is doing in a report on how the Diocese dealt with allegations of child sexual abuse, but there you have it. The Report's not perfect.

10. Right, so it deals with allegations against eighteen priests. That's a lot, isn't it?

It is, though it depends on what you mean by a lot. The Devil's in the details, and when thinking of these eighteen priests, it's worth keeping mind that the Report notes that 430 priests were incardinated in the Diocese between 1932, the year in which the oldest priest covered in the Report had been ordained, and 2010, and that there has been only one case in Cloyne where a court decreed a priest guilty of any sort of sexual abuse. I think even one is one too many, really.

• Two of the cases deal not with allegations but mere expressions of concern, one about an isolated episode seventeen years earlier. 
• At least three allegations were against priests who had died before any accusations were received, so they weren't given any opportunity of defending themselves -- indeed, a fourth such case is almost certainly related to a long-dead priest, the identity of whom remains unknown even now -- and three complaints were about priests who died soon after allegations were received. 
• In four cases, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided against pressing charges, and although charges were brought in a fifth case, no criminal prosecution took place. 
• The Director of Public Prosecutions repeatedly decided against pressing charges against yet another priest, identified in the Report as 'Father Ronat' and in the Elliott Report as 'Father B'; however he has since been tried and acquitted.
• In only one case has a priest of Cloyne diocese been convicted of any crime related to abuse: this priest, the Report's 'Father Caden', pleaded guilty to gross indecency and received an eighteen-month suspended sentence.

11. So you're saying that only one of these priests was guilty of child abuse?
No, I'm certainly not saying that. Other than the case of Father Caden, for example, it seems that two other priests admitted abuse of minors. One accused priest, who died in 2002, some years after the Diocese had heard of his misconduct in the 1960s, had admitted his behaviour to his superiors, but neither they nor the Gardaí had made any effort to have him face justice. Another priest, after admitting that he'd had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl -- which she denied -- then fled the diocese, eloping with a married woman. More broadly, lots of these allegations have a ring of truth about them -- although at least one looks almost certainly false -- but it's fiendishly difficult to prove anything in child abuse cases, especially ones relating to events that took place decades earlier, and at least in Irish civil law we hold to the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty.

12. Were any children harmed because of the Diocese' unwillingness to follow the bishops' guidelines?
Apparently not. Certainly, the Report never makes such a claim -- although the Church's own investigation into Cloyne, included as an appendix to the main report, had concluded that Magee and O'Callaghan's actions were such that children had been placed at risk of harm.

13. Did Magee and O'Callaghan break the law in this respect?
Again, apparently not. The Report details how in January 2009 a member of the public made a complaint to the Gardaí that Magee had endangered children by withholding information from the Gardaí, but the DPP advised that no criminal offences had been disclosed, noting that the reckless endangerment of children only became an offence in Irish law in 2006.

14. Did they break any laws at all?
The Report only finds that they scorned the Irish bishops' guidelines. It's apparent from the Report that they also broke the moral law of God and the canon law of the Church, but it is equally apparent that they did not break the civil law of the State. So if -- unlike me -- you're going to take the view that the only law that matters in these affairs is the law of the land, then no. They didn't break any laws.

15. Were things ever handled properly?
Not by Magee and O'Callaghan prior to 2008, but yes. The Report details one instance of a complaint made against a member of a religious order who had been based in Cloyne; this event, complained of in 2002, allegedly took place in 1966. The priest denied the charges against him, and the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to prosecute, citing 'the minor nature of the incident, the delay in reporting same and the lack of corroborative evidence'. The Report found that 'As is often the case with child sexual abuse complaints, where there is a credible complaint and a credible denial, there is, unfortunately, no resolution.'

16. Right, so let’s get back to the Taoiseach’s speech. What was it about?
The speech was in support of a motion that the Dáil 'deplores the Vatican’s intervention which contributed to the undermining of the child protection frameworks and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish bishops'

17. The Vatican's intervention? Does he mean the 1997 reply to the bishops?
He does. I know, a reply is hardly an intervention, but there you have it. In my experience if you ask somebody for something, you have to be prepared for the possibility that they'll say no.

18. Is there any evidence that the Vatican's 1997 reply undermined the bishops in the implementation of their guidelines?
Not as far as we know. The Cloyne Report claims this several times but never shows it. The fact that Denis O'Callaghan may have felt vindicated by the Congregation for Clergy's refusal to make official the bishops' guidelines doesn't look particularly meaningful in light of how he also wholly ignored the Congregation's insistence that canon law be meticulously followed.

19. The general theme of the Taoiseach's speech seems to have been that everything is Rome's fault. Am I right in thinking that the Taoiseach said that the Cloyne Report exposed an attempt by the Vatican, in the last three years, to frustrate an official Irish inquiry?

Yes, you are.

20. And did it?

No. The Report says very little about the Vatican’s dealings with the Commission. It says that the Commission asked the Papal Nuncio – the Vatican’s representative in Ireland – to supply any documentation the Nunciature held in connection with how the diocese of Cloyne had dealt with abuse allegations received between 1996 and 2009. It says that the Nuncio explained that the Nunciature didn’t hold any documents but that the Diocese held everything and was obliged to comply with the law of the land. And indeed, it says the Diocese did just that. The Report doesn’t criticise the Vatican at all in this respect.

21. So everybody cooperated with the Commission?

Oddly, no. The Office for the Minister for Children claimed privilege over legal advice it had received. The Commission explicitly contrasts the actions of the State in this regard with those of the Church, saying: ‘The Commission notes that, in contrast, the Church authorities provided the Commission with its privileged documents and the Gardaí and the HSE did not claim privilege over any documents.’

22. Did the Taoiseach acknowledge this in his speech?
Kind of. He alluded to 'unseemly bickering' between the Minister for Children and the HSE. He reserved all his serious criticism for Rome.

23. Even though Rome doesn't seem to have had any influence on events in Ireland?
That's putting it mildly. For what it's worth, it seems that the bishops ignored the Congregation for Clergy's reservations about the 1996 guidelines and did their own thing anyway. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing -- in this case -- just that it shows how frail Rome's grip on the Irish Church is.
 
24. Did the Vatican seriously tell the bishops that they weren't to report abuse allegations?
Of course not. The Congregation for Clergy expressed concerns about mandatory reporting in its 1997 reply, but in a November 1998 meeting with the bishops at Rosses Point in Sligo, the then head of the Congregation for Clergy explicitly told the Irish bishops that they 'should not in any way put an obstacle in the legitimate path of civil justice'.

25. Hmmm. Well, anyway, let’s stay with the Taoiseach. Maybe he was speaking of the previous Nuncio’s failure to respond to the Murphy Commission’s request that the Nunciature supply the Commission with any documents it might need that the archdiocese of Dublin would lack, or to confirm that the Nunciature held no such documents?

That is how the Irish Times tried to excuse it in its editorial on the subject, but leaving aside that that happened in February 2007 -- more than four years ago, and thus not within the last three years -- it had already been covered in 2009’s Murphy Report. The Taoiseach can hardly have been referring to that when he said the Cloyne Report had revealed interference for the first time. Indeed, a Government spokesman later clarified the Taoiseach’s statement by saying that he wasn’t talking about anything in particular, but was just generally referring to the cumulative effect of the Vatican’s actions.

26. So the Taoiseach said one thing, when he actually meant something completely different?

Indeed he did. There’s a word for that where I come from.

27. Are you saying the Taoiseach lied to the Dáil?
Hey, you said it. Of course, you'd not be the first person to have said something along those lines in recent weeks.

28. What do you mean by that?
Well, before the Cloyne Report distracted everybody, the Taoiseach and the Government had gotten themselves into a spot of bother. On 8 February this year, during the election campaign, the Taoiseach -- as he is now -- gave a speech in which he pledged to protect and defend the accident and emergency services of Roscommon County Hospital.  The two local Fine Gael TD's, Denis Naughten and Frank Feighan, were re-elected. In the aftermath of the election the Government, acting on the advice of the Health Information and Quality Authority -- which based its advice on conditions in a hospital in Cloyne, ironically enough -- decided to shut Roscommon County Hospital's A&E department.

This led to uproar, predictably, and questions were asked in the Dáil about whether the Taoiseach had misled people on such matters. The Taoiseach dismissed this line of questioning as 'pathetic', and insisted that he was on the record as having stated on numerous radio stations throughout the campaign that he would not be making promises he couldn't keep. Once a recording appeared of him having indeed announced that he would protect Roscommon's A&E facilities, he apologised over any confusion he might have caused by his making two such contradictory statements. The leader of the Opposition accused him of having misled the Dáil and challenged the Taoiseach on this very point, saying:

'It was you who personally promised to tell it straight. It was you who denied to RTÉ and to this house that you made any promise in relation to Roscommon Hospital. And you were caught out. And I find it incredible that that you cannot face up to that here in the house today and put the record straight.'

29. So a politician has lied twice. This looks like common-or-garden political opportunism, then. Has it worked?
I'm afraid so. It seems that misleading the Dáil once gets you into trouble, but doing so again gets you right out of it. A bit like repeatedly rolling doubles in Monopoly, I suppose. The Taoiseach's very popular at the moment. It doesn't hurt that the most eloquent and prominent voices in our national media have had their knives out -- and not always without reason -- for the Church for a long time; they'll forgive their champion a lot. And he has caught a popular mood, such that anyone who actually shows any sign of having read the Report tends to get dismissed out of hand by a horde of people sneering 'Well, you can prove anything with facts, can't you?'

 30. But the Report must say quite a bit about the Vatican, though, surely? I mean, the Taoiseach can hardly have been lying when he said the Report excavated the disfunction, disconnection, elitism, and narcissism that dominate the Vatican... he must have something to go on?

No, the Report says basically nothing about the Vatican, which is hardly surprising, as it wasn’t an investigation into how the Vatican handles things. It does claim, as I’ve said, that a 1997 Vatican response to a 1996 document drawn up by the bishops had the effect of undermining child protection in the Irish Church, but aside from providing no evidence to support this claim, it never says that this was the Vatican's intention.

31. What of the line about the Vatican responding to evidence of betrayal and abuse, not with sympathy, but by parsing and analysing it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer?

The Report says only four of the abuse cases dealt with in the Cloyne Report were ever passed over to Rome, these being the cases of the pseudonymous fathers Ronat, Calder, Drust, and Caden.  It says nothing at all in connection with how the Vatican dealt with three of these cases, as they were only passed to Rome in 2009 and had not been resolved when the Commission began its work. As for the complaint against ‘Father Caden’ by a fellow priest, the Report notes that allegations of this abuse, committed in the early 1980s, were passed to Rome in December 2005, with a decision being made in April 2007. That decision was that Caden should remain barred from exercising any priestly ministry, as indeed he had been since before the Diocese had contacted Rome, and that any breaches of disciplinary measures or repeated abusive behaviour would result in further sanctions. I can’t see how one could construe anything from this about Roman disfunctionality or any of the Taoiseach’s other accusations. 

And for what it’s worth, in my experience canon lawyers don’t have ‘gimlet eyes’.

32. But didn’t the Pope say that the Church shouldn’t be held to the same standards as civil society? The Taoiseach said he did...

No, the Pope didn’t say that, although by quoting a truncated sentence out of context, the Taoiseach certainly gave that impression. In an official 1990 document called Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, the then Cardinal Ratzinger said that the Church is a mystery of communion, in which all of us are called to strive with sincere hearts for a harmonious unity in doctrine, life, and worship, such that: ‘For this reason, standards of conduct, appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy, cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.’ He explained that Christian truth is diachronic, such that the faith of the Church today must remain that of the earliest Christian community, and cannot be altered on the basis of opinion polls or even large numbers of modern theologians: we cannot impose our opinions on the truth.

33. That sounds like a fairly obscure document. How on earth would the Taoiseach know about it? Does he have any friends who are priests? Or any advisers?

Well, it’s funny you should say that. One of the Taoiseach’s closest advisers is Frank Flannery, Fine Gael’s Director of Organisation and Strategy, and both of Frank’s brothers are priests. One of them, Tony, is a founder member and a prominent voice in the new Association of Catholic Priests.

34. The Association of Catholic Priests? What’s that?

Between 1975 and 2007, Ireland’s priests were organised as a sort-of trade union called the National Conference of Priests of Ireland. Highly unwieldy and fairly ineffective, the organisation collapsed after Father John Littleton, its president, retired;  not one of the NCPI’s 6,000 members was willing to go forward to replace him. The Association of Catholic Priests is a sort of successor movement, proposed by Tony Flannery and others last summer and founded last autumn.

35. So all Irish priests are members?

No. Not even close. Maybe one in ten is. The ACP was never intended to incorporate all priests, as its founders believed this would be impossible considering the diversity of opinion in the Irish Church. Openly expressing from the start a ‘strained relationship between priests and their bishops,’ among its initial aims was to look seriously at ‘the ministry, government and sexual teaching of the Church’.  Thus far it hasn't much more than 500 or so members, all from the most liberal end of the Church in Ireland, and with few if any of them among the Church’s younger priests. Before the last fortnight or so it has been vocal mainly in opposition to the universal introduction of a new, more accurate translation of the Mass throughout the English-speaking world.

36. What did the ACP think of the Taoiseach’s speech?

It seems to have thought it was, in the main, great. Tony Flannery wrote an article for the Irish Times saying that he was happy with it, and that all the members of the association who rang him said they were delighted with it. He thought it was good to hear the Taoiseach challenge the Vatican ‘so strongly, so eloquently, and with such dignity’, given how he dislikes the way the Vatican conducts its business. Brendan Hoban, another ACP founder, said that the Taoiseach’s speech was an object lesson in leadership from a man who is proud to identify himself as a faithful, practising Catholic, and that the Taoiseach had effectively articulated how the dominance of Rome is strangling the emergence of a people’s Church in Ireland. The Taoiseach claims to have been astounded by how many letters he’s received from priests, praising him from speaking out as he did, but I rather suspect that most of those letters were from members of the ACP.

37. So you basically think that the Taoiseach, in attacking Rome while defending Ireland’s ‘good priests’, was acting as a mouthpiece for liberal Irish priests.

More or less, yes. I seriously doubt that was his plan -- political opportunism and the need to distract people from the Roscommon debacle aside, I think his main concern was to express a sincere and thoroughly understandable sense of frustration -- but yes.

On the other hand, though, the Government may have gone too far in its rhetoric about the Seal of Confession. Even Tony Flannery, Brendan Hoban, and the ACP spokesman P.J. Madden have spoken out against the Government’s declared determination to render illegal the failure to disclose information acquired even through Confession.

38. Is the Seal of Confession really under threat?

No, almost certainly not; if it is, it has been for some time already. Under existing laws, passed in 1997 and 1998, Irish citizens already have obligations to report certain serious offences where they do not have ‘reasonable excuse’ for not doing so. When shorn of anti-clerical rhetoric, the proposed new law will simply extend the existing principles so that sexual offences against children and vulnerable adults are recognised as among these serious offences. The current legislation does not define what constitutes ‘reasonable excuse’, and there is no plan for the proposed legislation to do so. This shall be a matter for the courts.

39. So the courts could rule that the intrinsic confidentiality of Confession is not such that it would constitute a reasonable excuse for withholding knowledge of, say, terrorist offences or child abuse?

It’s highly unlikely. In the first place, it seems likely that any such attempt to force a priest to disclose anything revealed in Confession would be in breach of the protections of privacy and religious freedom guaranteed explicitly or implicitly both by the Irish Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. Granted, there are public order exceptions to those rights, but the onus would be on a prosecutor to show that such guarantees did not apply in a particular instance. 

What’s more, the Seal already has a measure of protection in Irish common law. Although the decision made in Cook v Carroll (1945), recognising the privilege of parishioners in communications with their parish priest, was based on part on a part of the Constitution which has since been changed, it retains its status as a binding precedent. In 1999 a non-binding opinion was expressed by Judge Hugh Geoghegan in the High Court to the effect that given the nature of Confession, a priest could probably not be compelled to disclose what had been confessed to him even if a penitent gave him permission to do so.

40. Couldn’t the Government bring in legislation specifically to remove these common law protections?

Perhaps, but given that it doesn’t plan on redefining what constitutes a reasonable excuse, that’s not on the cards. The Seal is safe. The safety of the many thousands of those in whom abuse survivors have confided, is, on the other hand, a different matter. Is ‘my husband told me what happened to him when he was younger, but I didn’t report it as it hurts him too much even to talk about it’ a reasonable excuse? What about ‘my oldest friend told me what happened to her, but I didn’t report what she said because she said she couldn’t face the idea of going through this in court, and besides, she said it was a long time ago, and she hoped the fella who did it had got help, that he’d changed...’? 

41. Are there likely to be many people in such a position?

There are. Child abuse seems to have been endemic in Ireland; just looking at the figures from the 2002 SAVI Study, it seems that 27 per cent of Irish adults in 2001 had been victims of sexual abuse while children or adolescents, with just under 0.5 per cent of Irish adults at that point having been abused by clergy. The study indicated that roughly half of those survivors had told somebody -- usually family or friends -- of having been sexually abused as a child, but had not reported this to the Gardaí. It seems that there must be at least tens of thousands of Irish adults who are currently withholding knowledge of child sexual abuse -- indeed, the number of such adults may well be much higher than that.

42. So, to wrap up, what does the Cloyne Report mainly tell us?
It tells us that although the Irish Church's child-protection procedures are far more stringent than those of the Irish State, which it describes as less precise and harder to follow than those of the Church, being especially weak in the area of monitoring, even the best procedures in the world are worthless if the people who have the job of implementing them aren't willing to do so. It is damning in its criticism of John Magee and Denis O'Callaghan's failures, but it says nothing whatsoever about the wider Church, in Ireland or abroad.

On Norway, and the Sun, and Speaking Too Soon

Charlie Brooker has a fine piece in today's Guardian where he is more scathing than usual about the British media, saying, for instance:

'I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.

Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won't identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like "madman", "monster", or "maniac" won't do, either. There's a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media's going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.

On Friday night's news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to al-Qaida. Countless security experts queued up to tell me so. This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn't add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they're the experts. They're sitting there behind a caption with the word "EXPERT" on it. Every few minutes the anchor would ask, "What kind of picture is emerging?" or "What sense are you getting of who might be responsible?" and every few minutes they explained this was "almost certainly" the work of a highly-organised Islamist cell.

[...]

Soon, the front page of Saturday's Sun was rolling off the presses. "Al-Qaeda" Massacre: NORWAY'S 9/11 – the weasel quotes around the phrase "Al Qaeda" deemed sufficient to protect the paper from charges of jumping to conclusions.'

Even as the front page of the Sun was previewed online, friends of mine were sceptical. The quotation marks were the big clue, and the standard quip was that, now barred from hacking phones and bribing police, the Sun had just taken to making stuff up. No other paper, it's worth noting, ran a frontpage headline even tentatively ascribing blame. It's worth taking a look at that front page.

Fantastic, isn't it? And that's nothing compared to what was inside. I don't mean what they left on the website after they corrected it once it became obvious how wrong they were. I mean what they printed, and published, and what several million people will have read on Saturday morning.

The current line is increasingly that Anders Behring Breivik is a fundamentalist Christian. This is obviously wrong too. He may call himself a 'Christian' on his Facebook page, but page 1307 of his online manifesto reveals a rather idiosyncratic understanding of what it is to be a Christian:

'If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.'

So while I'd certainly say that as someone who's been baptised he is -- ontologically speaking -- a Christian in the strictest and original sense, it's pretty clear that he's not a Christian in the more mundane sense of what he believes. Certainly, it's clear than nobody who thinks of Christianity as a mere matter of belief could ever say that he's a Christian in any sense. Christians often say that Christianity isn't a religion so much as a relationship, and although this is a cliché, it's only one because it's true. Christianity can be 'a cultural, social, identity, and moral platform' but it can only be that if it is first a living relationship with Christ.

I'm not using a 'no true Scotsman' argument here. This is an empirical thing, insofar as we can judge based on what this Eurabia-obsessed nut has written and said. After all, as Lewis said in Mere Christianity:

'It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men's hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge.

It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.

We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts 11:26) to "the disciples," to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were "far closer to the spirit of Christ" than the less satisfactory of the disciples. The point is not a theological, or moral one. It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.'

Breivik clearly distinguishes between 'religious' Christians and  those for whom 'Christian' is a synonym for someone with a certain understanding of the West, that being a reconstructed fantasy Christendom, starkly opposed to the Marxist-Islamist 'Eurabia' of so many right-wing nightmares. In truth, though, I don't think anybody should be trying to pigeonhole him among their enemies. He's a nut, that's all, one who's consumed by a violent hatred of Islam. More than that, I really don't think we can say.

A Perfect Departure

Having babbled about London the other day, I was reminded of one of my favourite passages describing the city, penned, aptly enough, by the great Patrick Leigh Fermor, who I've quoted here once upon a time. It describes his departure from London on the rainy night of 9 December 1933, as he set off on his great journey to Istanbul, where, I presume, at least seventeen people tried to persuade him to buy a carpet.

'"A splendid afternoon to set out!", said one of the friends who was seeing me off, peering at the rain and rolling up the window.

The other two agreed. Sheltering under the Curzon Street arch of Shepherd Market, we had found a taxi at last. In Half Moon Street, all collars were up. A thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Picadilly; the Jermyn Street shops, distorted by streaming water, had become a submarine arcade; and the clubmen of Pall Mall, with china tea and anchovy toast in mind, were scuttling for sanctuary up the steps of their clubs. Blown askew, the Trafalgar Square fountains twirled like mops, and our taxi, delayed by a horde of Charing Cross commuters reeling and stampeding under a cloudburst, crept into The Strand. The vehicle threaded its way through a flux of traffic. We splashed up Ludgate Hill and the dome of St. Paul's sank deeper in its pillared shoulders. The tyres slewed away from the drowning cathedral and a minute later the silhouette of The Monument, descried through veils of rain, seemed so convincingly liquefied out of the perpendicular that the tilting thoroughfare might have been forty fathoms down. The driver, as he swerved wetly into Upper Thames Street, leaned back and said: "Nice weather for young ducks."

A smell of fish was there for a moment, then gone. Enjoining haste, the bells of St. Magnus the Martyr and St. Dunstans-in-the-East were tolling the hour; then sheets of water were rising from our front wheels as the taxi floundered on between The Mint and the Tower of London. Dark complexes of battlements and tree-tops and turrets dimly assembled on one side; then, straight ahead, the pinnacles and the metal parabolas of Tower Bridge were looming. We halted on the bridge just short of the first barbican and the driver indicated the flight of stone steps that descended to Irongate Wharf. We were down them in a moment; and beyond the cobbles and the bollards, with the Dutch tricolour beating damply from her poop and a ragged fan of smoke streaming over the river, the Stadthouder Willem rode at anchor. At the end of lengthening fathoms of chain, the swirling tide had lifted her with a sigh almost level with the flagstones: gleaming in the rain, and with full steam-up for departure, she floated in a mewing circus of gulls. Haste and the weather cut short our farewells and our embraces and I spend down the gangway clutching my rucksack and my stick while the others dashed back to the steps -- four sodden trouser-legs and two high heels skipping across the puddles -- and up them to the waiting taxi; and half a minute later there they were, high overhead on the ballustrade of the bridge, craning and waving from the cast-iron quatrefoils. To shiled her hair from the rain, the high-heel-wearer had a mackintosh over her head like a coalheaver. I was signalling frantically back as the hawsers were cast loose and the gangplank shipped. Then they were gone. The anchor-chain clattered through the ports and the vessel turned into the current with a wail of her siren. How strange it seemed, as I took shelter in the little saloon -- feeling, suddenly, forlorn; but only for a moment -- to be setting off from the heart of London! No beetling cliffs, no Arnoldian crash of pebbles. I might have been leaving for Richmond, or for a supper of shrimps and whitebait at Gravesend, instead of Byzantium.'

Perfect, isn't it? That's how A Time of Gifts begins, and it always strikes me as the kind of prose you could throw at young writers of English as a case study in how the language can be played in the hands of a master. I tend to forget, oddly enough, that the tale begins at Shepherd Market, which is one of those spots which has grown to mean a lot to me over the years, which is good going given how Mayfair was once wholly unknown to me. Now, though, it's a key point in my personal map of London's topography, forever linked with quite a few friends, one of whom, sadly, I'll never see again. It's not just me who's the poorer for that.

Painful Truths

I was just amused there on Twitter to see Barry Glendenning, once of Dublin's Hot Press and now of the Guardian, getting into a minor spat with the sort of Evertonian that lets the side down a bit. Glendenning began the affair by drily remarking that:

'Phil Neville tweeting that Everton's youngsters are the 'future of the club'. Aren't they the future of richer clubs?'

Sadly, this is probably all too true, unless we manage to get a whole brigade of brilliant ones, sell them for a fortune to Continental sides, and use that money to climb the Premier League, which, as I've said in the past, is basically a rigged game. Anyway, in leapt the sort of Evertonian who gives the rest of us a bad name, declaring in indignation: 'your just a knob ed'

And thus began a bit of a squabble into which I like a fool rushed in where an angel would have feared to tread. Somewhere along the way, it was pointed to Barry that somebody had had obviously had fun with his Wikipedia entry, and to have done so some time ago -- more than a month -- which is impressive, given how scathing it is:

'Barry Glendenning is an Irish sports journalist who currently holds the position of deputy sports editor on the Guardian Unlimited website run by the UK newspaper The Guardian. He is perhaps best-known for his work on Guardian Unlimited's football podcast Football Weekly hosted by James Richardson. He is well known for his smug, superficial style, and usually contributes little to the discussion beyond listless anecdotes from his personal life; for instance, spending 5 minutes discussing the curry house he went to the previous Saturday. He also regularly contributes to the site's satirical daily email service, The Fiver. He is also often found at the helm of the Guardian Unlimited "minute by minute reports", which feature live text coverage of Premier League and Champions League games and internationals. He also writes about horseracing and table tennis. In recent years, Glendenning has become a vocal critic of The Irish County Woman's Association.

Barry has also mastered one chord on the guitar, which is the chord of A. He hopes one day to master another chord, at which point he will turn his attention to his other great love, the castanets.'

I say it's impressive that it's not been corrected because, well, I once modified an entry and was swiftly told off for doing so. It was the page for Dominic Monaghan, he of Lost and 'Merry in The Lord of the Rings' fame, which had said that his family had lived in Manchester but had moved to Heaton Moor in Stockport. Given that I'd lived very close to them, I corrected this entry, and then whimsically went on to say that:

'[...] the local pub, the Moor Top, has a large sign saying "Eat, Drink, and Be Merry", in presumed reference to the local celebrity.'

This, as it happens, was at least partially true. The Moor Top did have such a sign, though it doesn't now. And it probably isn't connected with Monaghan, though I always liked to think it was. Anyway, hardly had I made the change that someone corrected it, switching things back to say that his family had moved to Manchester; I discovered this when I next logged into Wikipedia a few hours later to see a large banner plastered over the site, telling me off for mucking about. I contritely made another adjustment, so that it at least no longer falsely claimed the Monaghans had shaken the dust of Stockport from their feet, but I decided to keep my theories about the local pub to myself.

I hope Glendenning leaves entry as it is. That'd be an entry worth quoting in an obituary.

A Mole in the Great Wen

Unlike many of my friends in academia, I wasn't particularly thrown -- on a personal level -- when the Government here in Britain decided that universities here weren't going to be funded as they had been. Sure, I was disappointed, not least because I think it's a big mistake and that it's nonsense to think that the market sorts everything out. After all, even when it comes to so-called 'priority subjects' like engineering and sciences, if we follow a straightforward neo-liberal economic model, I don't see why they should be supported by the State either; the logical question for a laissez-faire thinker in connection with the universities should surely be 'what are universities for?' Because if the answer is 'research', why not just allow the research to be done where it can be done most effectively, and buy the results? University research is irrelevant to vast majority of those who study in universities, after all; for most people in Britain, if we think purely in terms of the 'market', universities are about teaching, and that's it.

No, obviously I don't believe that's the sole function of universities; I just think that that's the inevitable and logical end of any argument that tries to justify British universities in a free market.

Anyway, the reason the new arrangements here, which will have the effect of deracinating all employment in my field, didn't bother me too much on a purely personal level, was that I'd already long decided on quitting academia. The plan has been that once I'd finished my studies and worn my clown costume and silly hat, I'd shake the dust from my shoes and walk away.

Given a choice I'd like to go to London. Well, Rome and Berlin and Paris and New York and Vancouver would appeal too, as would settling back properly in Dublin, but in real terms I've thought of London. I love London; it has a texture and a breadth like no city I've ever visited.

I don't know when the fascination began. With a childhood love of the Household Cavalry, watching them on the television and wishing I could be one, I suppose. I first set foot in London when I was fifteen, whirling through on the return leg of a school tour to the Continent -- we whizzed passed the Houses of Parliament and Nelson's Column, attended and nearly fainted at an impromptu mass in a small chapel somewhere in the bowels of Westminster Cathedral, wasted a ludicrous amount of time in the Trocadero Centre, spotted some of the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 on Petticoat Lane, and waited for our bus in Hyde Park, gathered by the statue of Achilles and within easy sight of Apsley House, which nobody ever thought to point out to us had been the home of the greatest Dubliner ever to -- allegedly -- be ashamed of the fact.

I started regularly visiting when I was eighteen, staying with a sister or two on its outskirts and scuttling in almost every day, whether to comic conventions -- I wanted to be a comic artist -- or to comic shops, all the while trying to take in more and more sights: the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Cabinet War Rooms, the London Eye, Saint Paul's, or the Public Records Office, say, all the while attending conventions and seeing exhibitions, of Ingres portraits and Monet lilies, say, or of all manner of Star Wars props. And though I travelled all over London during at this point, sometimes even staying with friends who had moved there or who I'd made and who lived there, in a fairly profound way I never knew London. I'd been to Harrow and to Finchley; stood outside Buckingham Palace; drank between Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square; eaten a pork bun in China town; spent endless hours in Foyles and the bookshops of Charing Cross Road; marvelled at the comics in Gosh! Comics on Great Russell Street, the Forbidden Planet on new Oxford Street, and Mega City Comics on Camden's Inverness Street; even listened to Scott McCloud expound his theories way out in Ladbroke Grove. But I didn't know London, which became absurdly apparent when staying in Mayfair at a very weird gathering and me utterly clueless as to where we were.

Because I never walked anywhere.

I used to be able to get cheap tube tickets, you see. 25p to anywhere in Zone 1, and never more than a pound anywhere in London. So for me I had this strange, mole-like view of London. I knew the Tube, and I knew destinations near Tube stations, and I knew that you could never get lost in Central London, because after wandering more than a couple of minutes you were bound to find a Tube station, and then you'd be safe.

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere fascinated me when I first saw it on telly, and moreso when I read the book, and bought the series and watched Neil's commentary on it. There were disused Tube stations? Indeed, there's a whole London below London! I've since read quite a bit about London -- fun introductions to the city's quirks like Tim Moore's Do Not Pass Go, dense introductions to its arcana like Peter Ackroyd's London: the Biography and Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory -- the kind of books that like Alan Moore's From Hell reveal just how fascinating the most apparently banal of places actually are -- and specialist explorations of its peculiarities, like E.J. Burford's London: The Synfulle Citie and Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman's London Under London: A Subterranean Guide.

Trench and Hillman's book is fascinating, delving into the history of tunnels under the Thames, Tube lines and disused stations, military installations, mail tunnels, pneumatic tubes, bunkers, catacombs, and lots more, not the least of which are London's underground rivers. London used obviously to have lots of rivers, you see, the most well-known of which probably being the malodorous Fleet, which rose in Hampstead Heath and flowed southeast to join the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge, just off modern Fleet Street, reeking from the by-products of the local tanners. Its route has been mapped out pretty clearly on this Google Map, and seemingly if you sit outside the Coach and Four pub in Farringdon, and listen carefully, you can hear it through the grating on the ground. Or, if you've a deathwish, and want to risk wandering about in tidal tunnels that can fill in thirty minutes' flat, you can visit it, like these heroically mad people.

Well, I may not know London as well as its sub-urban explorers, but I know it fairly well now. I get the bus nowadays, and I walk. I've walked from Islington to the British Museum and the National Gallery and out to Victoria Station, from Fulham to Saint Paul's and up to Holborn, from Chelsea through Knightsbridge to Victoria and Westminster too many times, from King's Cross Station to Paddington and then made my way to Trafalgar Square and thence along the old shores of the Thames to the best pub in England.  And I've wandered aimlessly too many times in Shoreditch and Bloomsbury, Herne Hill and Dulwich, Wood Green and Manor House, Earl's Court and South Kensington, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, and along the South Bank.

And once, from a train, I saw where all the old red phone boxes go to die.

There are none so deaf as those who will not hear...

Right, well, I'm not going to talk about Cloyne today, save to say that I'm glad that most of the letters in today's Irish Times have recognised that, whatever John Magee and Denis O'Callaghan may have done, and for whatever reasons, the Taoiseach's statement the the other day was completely over the top in its criticisms of the Church and rather coy in admitting the shortcomings of the State. And indeed, Breda O'Brien's column implicitly makes a very good point when she says:

'No one could doubt Enda Kenny’s sincerity. However, had he read the Cloyne report in full, it is doubtful that he could have reached the conclusion that the Vatican was in the business of obstructing a sovereign state.'

I think that's the thing. There's no way Enda's read the report in full. I've no doubt he read bits of it, but how on earth would the Taoiseach, at a time of such economic craziness when even George Osborne is starting to concede that European fiscal union may be a smart move   -- even if that means a two-speed Europe with Britain on the outskirts -- ever find the time to read a 400-page report? He's obviously depended on others to interpret it for him. And this, of course, leads to crazy claims such that the Vatican within the last three years has attempted to investigate Irish investigations into how Irish clergy handled abuse allegations. This, as I've said, is hogwash, and hogwash of such an order that the odious Kevin Myers felt obliged to retort:

'What? As recently as three years ago? No, actually. A Government spokesman later explained this did not refer to any specific event, but described the cumulative effect of the Vatican's actions. Quite so: what need of accuracy when the mob is abroad?'

That was yesterday's Irish Independent, of course, and no, before you ask, I'm far from happy about being on the same side of an argument as Myers again. Still, he's right. There's nothing whatsoever in the Report that suggests that the Vatican did anything within the last three years to obstruct anything in Ireland, despite the Taoiseach having explicitly said that the Cloyne report had exposed such behaviour and that this was the first time there had ever been evidence of such!

Yesterday's Independent also has an excellent piece in it by David Quinn, who seems to be one of the few people in Ireland who has read the report and one of a perhaps even smaller number who has a handle on how the Vatican actually works, unlike so many of those sneering at him as someone who would defend the indefensible. Those charges seem deeply unfair. Quinn's column is primarily a response to false claims made by the Taoiseach, the Irish Times, and others against the Vatican and by insinuation the Pope himself, and in his response he doesn't shirk criticism of some elements in the Vatican, as indeed Diarmuid Martin has done. In particular Quinn singles out for criticism the retired Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, former head of the Congregation for Clergy, a man whose views were not prevailed over in the Vatican by the man who is now Pope until 2001, and who the Pope's official spokesman has criticised for his excessively protective attitude towards priests. Quinn makes it clear that he had not intended to write such a column. On the contrary, his aim had been rather different:

'I was going to write this week about the need for the church in Ireland to do something very dramatic in order to categorically demonstrate it is deadly serious about child protection.

I was going to suggest that the bishops do something along the lines of what Fr Vincent Twomey proposed on 'Today with Pat Kenny' on Tuesday, namely that most of them should resign, that there should be a swingeing reduction in the number of dioceses and that a new generation of bishops should be appointed to lead the church here.'

Look, there are still some Catholics -- thankfully a very small number -- who try to claim that abuse basically never happened, and that people claiming abuse are just after money. I spent a long time after Mass the other day trying to explain the realities of the situation to just the second such Catholic I have ever met. But they are a tiny number, and it's clear that David Quinn isn't among them. Indeed, a few days ago in the context of a piece about the serious child-protection failings of the modern Irish State he wrote that:

'The Irish church has rightly been excoriated over its child-protection failings.'

And a few days before that  he wrote a  piece condemning the 'priests first' attitude that has so blighted the Irish Church, bookending his piece by saying:

'A toxic culture of clericalism has almost destroyed the Catholic Church in Ireland. This is confirmed by yet again another investigation, this time into the diocese of Cloyne. [...] Unless that malignant culture of clericalism is destroyed once and for all, the church itself will be destroyed.'

Quinn may be swimming against the stream of many of modern Ireland's louder voices, but I don't believe he's dishonest or deluded, let alone in thrall to the Irish bishops. He thinks it'd be best if most of them stepped down, for Heaven's sake! 

Still, people don't listen to him, because he's one of only a handful of people who are ever willing to make the case, honestly, for the Church in modern Ireland. There's been a particularly nasty campaign against him on Twitter over the past couple of days, but even aside from that, I find that people switch off when he says anything, and don't listen to what he says because, as far as they're concerned, 'he would say that'. This sort of attitude has been a problem for ages. I remember once, back in the nineties, a friend of mine was telling how she'd been watching the telly and William Binchy had been on it, arguing in an articulate and reasonable way about why he believed abortion was wrong. 'Turn him off,' my friend's mother had said, 'he's starting to make sense.'

That was much more substantive than I'd planned on it being. Perhaps tomorrow I should talk about Batman, or Ingres, or Herodotus, or Harry Potter. Hmmm...

I can't believe I'm having to talk about Cloyne for a fourth time...

Fanciful and disingenuous nonsense in the editorial of today's Irish Times, unfortunately, showing -- if there could be any doubt -- that our so-called 'paper of record' has no interest in the truth where the Catholic Church is concerned.

Here's a letter on the letters page, to begin with, raising what I believe are pertinent points:

'It is disappointing to see The Irish Times reporting the Taoiseach’s speech on the Cloyne report without noting how, in claiming that the Vatican has attempted within the last three years to frustrate an inquiry into Irish abuse, he appears to have misled the Dáil.

The report states that the nuncio said – correctly – that the nunciature does not deal with abuse cases, and that the diocese would have all the relevant information and was obliged to comply with national laws and regulations. The report states the diocese handed over everything of relevance, including privileged communications. How can this be construed as a failure to co-operate with the inquiry, let alone an attempt to frustrate it? 

Even the Vatican’s now notorious 1997 “intervention”, as the Tánaiste has described it, was nothing of the sort. The report attests that it was a response to the bishops’ request that their agreed guidelines should be made binding. The Vatican refused, explaining that the guidelines could conflict with canon law, such that any abusive priest found guilty under them could potentially and successfully appeal to Rome on procedural grounds. It is hard to see how its insistence that canon law procedures should be “meticulously followed” could be construed as an encouragement to those who were determined to avoid enforcing the church’s rules. 

The report recognises the church’s child protection policies are far superior to those of the State. It shows, however, that such policies are worthless if those tasked with implementing them are unwilling to do so. 

The Cloyne report is a damning indictment of John Magee and Denis O’Callaghan, but it reveals little about the modern Irish church'

You'll note that the privileged communications Cloyne handed over to Judge Murphy included all relevant ones passed on to Rome.  Again, Murphy explicity says that she was given everything.

And how does the paper's editorial respond to such points, raised even by the Pope's official spokesman?

'And what of the charges to which the Vatican must respond? Over the top, as some apologists suggest? Mr Kenny did not elaborate beyond the claim that the Cloyne report “exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry”, clearly a reference to the snubbing of the Dublin commission by Rome, and the subsequent outright refusal of the papal nuncio to assist the Cloyne commission. The nunciature “does not determine the handling of cases of sexual abuse in Ireland and therefore is unable to assist you in this matter,” Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza had written disingenuously. 

That non-co-operation was profoundly obstructive and certainly not peripheral to the inquiries’ remit. The opening of the files in Rome would have demonstrated – will yet demonstrate – the deeply embarrassing reality that the Vatican, at all stages, has had a far greater and earlier knowledge of the detail and scope of priestly abuse than the appropriate agencies of the State, and just how little it did about it. Hence Mr Kenny’s assertion that “the rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’.” 

And the silence was not just about avoiding such revelations, but driven by what Mr Kenny calls the “gimlet eye” of lawyers. It was an essential element of the Vatican’s worldwide twin-pronged legal strategy to avoid civil litigation. On the one hand it rests behind the dubious diplomatic principle – particularly in the context of the Vatican – of sovereign immunity, the idea that a state can do no wrong. On the other, on the repeated, fictional assertion that the Vatican plays no part in handling abuse. 

The undermining of the work of an official inquiry into such serious matters is not the act of a friendly state. Mr Kenny has every right to point it out, and forcefully.'

It's bizarre to learn that the editor of Ireland's supposed newspaper of record can't read.  So the Taoiseach's claim that the Cloyne report 'exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry' is 'clearly a reference to the snubbing of the Dublin commission by Rome', is it? Let's look at what Enda said again, shall we:

'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.'

Yes, that's right. Enda says that Cloyne is 'different' from the Dublin report, because 'for the first time', he said, it exposed an attempt by the Vatican to frustrate an investigation carried out by the Irish State. In other words, whatever he meant, he clearly wasn't talking about Yvonne Murphy's investigation into how the Archdiocese of Dublin had handled abuse allegations between 1975 and 2004. The Taoiseach was quite explicit about that.

What of 'the subsequent outright refusal of the papal nuncio to assist the Cloyne commission'? Well, we know what happened there, as is described in the letter or, if you're interested, in section 1.15 of the Cloyne Report. Judge Murphy wrote to Archbishop Leanza in 2009, asking for the Nuncio to submit any papers the Nunciature had about the matters under investigation, and the Nuncio replied saying that he had no such papers as the Nuncio doesn't deal with such matters. He explained that the Diocese of Cloyne would have dealt with these matters and was obliged to comply with all civil laws and regulations, and as the Report recognises at section 1.16, the Diocese did just that, handing over all relevant documentation, including copies of all relevant privileged communications. Doesn't this strike you as vastly more helpful than the behaviour of the previous Nuncio in connection with the request about the Dublin archdiocese, him not even having replied to Judge Murphy's request? The Report doesn't even once criticise the current Nuncio. Not once.

The claim that the Church repeatedly and falsely claims that the Vatican has no part in handling abuse allegations is, of course, a complete lie. The Report merely records the Nuncio as saying that the Nunciature doesn't handle such allegations, which is correct. But don't believe me. Just go back to the Cloyne Report and read it for yourself. Look up every reference in it to 'Rome', 'Vatican', 'Nuncio', and so forth. Do you see even a hint of criticism -- the slightest insinuation -- that Judge Murphy and her sidekicks believed their work had been hampered in any way by the Nuncio's response? And do you not think there might have been something there if Judge Murphy had genuinely felt that the Nuncio or the Vatican had indeed been 'profoundly obstructive', as today's lurid editorial puts it?

No, this isn't about protecting children. It's about distracting people from the economy and the health service, and it's about selling newspapers. That's all.

In 2002 a huge national survey found that one in 240 Irish adults had been sexually abused by a religious minister, and that more than one in four had been abused by somebody else. This kind of shouting achieves nothing. We have huge problems in Ireland, and they'll not be solved by shouting at other people. We need to turn the mirror on ourselves.