Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Ten

So, as you'll remember from last week, the brother was in Sligo, where, nine weeks into his Painting Tour of Ireland, he'd taken a trip out to Lough Gill, there to squint across to Innisfree. It was at Lough Gill that he saw a sign warning him of cars crawling, like Scottish plesiosaurs, from the lake, a phenomenon first documented by Yeats in his lesser-known work, 'Car Pool'.

Friday saw the Brother missing a Dalkey Open Bottle night and poring over maps and unfinished paintings as he plotted an ambitious week, taking in more counties than any week thus far. He'd opened with a five-county week, as you'll surely recall, but since then he's lingered more, visiting two new ones in his second week, one in each of his third and fourth weeks, two in each of his fifth and sixth weeks, none at all in his glorious Galwegian seventh week which included what may have been his favourite ever day in the saddle, one in his eighth, and one in his ninth. Fifteen counties he'd covered, but with time running out, he was needing to make plans, and hopefully plans that wouldn't entail him painting, like Picasso, while riding a bicycle.

With the poring and plotting done, it was time for him to stary pedalling and painting, cycling out to Ballygawley there to buy some potato cakes and perplex me by describing it as our namesake, but given its proper Irish name, he's absolutely right. Onwards then to Riverstown in the rain, aptly enough, where he shook his head at the superabundance of hanging baskets, that hallmark of the typically tidy Irish town, and carried on past Lough Arrow and into Roscommon, his sixteenth county.

This week we shall be mostly seeing lakes. And rain.

Onward he pedalled past Lough Key, where he'd had a holiday with the lads from over the road back in his early teens, and though he'd been hoping to make it to Carrick-on-Shannon, reason and the rain won out and he stopped in Boyle, sodden, starving, and saddlesore. Seemingly, it wasn't quite as devoid of people as photographic evidence would suggest. With a busy evening's painting ahead of him, he found a B&B and swiftly went in search of food, settling for a rather dangerous-sounding choice in Shop Street's Troy Deli: a twelve-inch pizza, festooned with kebab meat. Perhaps not advisable fare for normal people, but if you're touring Ireland under your own steam, I reckon it'd be safe enough. It takes calories to cover ground, after all. And, you know, it might be tasty.

-- Is that your bicycle, he was asked.
-- It is, yes.
-- There's a fair length on it.

And that was Friday. Saturday saw him waking up to a lovely view of Boyle Abbey, and then carrying on south-east, hitting Carrick at noon or so, crossing the bridge into Leitrim and pedalling another hundred yards or so to be treated to lunch by someone who's been following the Brother's exploits here -- and thank you so much! -- in the company of his brood, who were very impressed with my the Brother's beard and his energy. As the Brother later said, 'Today a stranger stepped out of the internet into offline life to treat me to lunch on the road. Follow @gkcwsc Make him love the twitter'.

Although the Brother had crossed over into Leitrim for his lunch, he didn't count that as a seventeenth county, feeling that being barely a hundred yards into a county hardly counted, especially when he'd be covering more ground there soon enough, so he cut back to Roscommon, carrying on through Kilmore and Forest View, crossing the Shannon at Termonberry, and entering his real seventeenth county, that being Longford. South he cycled then, through Clondra, Kilashee, and Lyneen until he reached Kenagh, his base for the night.

Kenagh, in case you're wondering, is where a youthful Dave Allen lost a chunk of a middle finger. I have no idea whether or not it's anywhere to be found in the neighbourhood, but if it is and you come across it, I imagine you'd be allowed to keep it. I learned this when I stayed in Kenagh myself a couple of years back, visiting the same friends who hosted the Brother on Saturday evening, a lovely couple whose wedding I once blighted by falling asleep in a way that did me no honour whatsoever. If you're good, I may tell you the story someday.

Sunday morning saw him being graced with an immense breakfast of rashers and eggs and lashings of sausages, all washed down with a balthazar or so of tea, and then settling in for some serious painting in the rain while my friends took themselves off on a cycle of their own, an organised 50 kilometres tour of Longford. Regretting the time constraints on the trip, not least because he'd not be able to get out to see the Corlea Trackway, a second-century BC road in the bog near Kenagh, he saddled up again, and set off, this time heading north. The rain was gone, he felt, and it was time he was too.

Off he went through Longford town, with its sinister courthouse and foreboding cathedral, and north through Drumlish and into Leitrim, which this time earned itself the title of Eolaí's Eighteenth County to accompany its prior title of Ireland's Only County Without Traffic Lights. Onward he rode, north to Cloone and then east through Carrigallen, before turning north again, edging his way a mile or so across the Leitrim border into Cavan, his nineteenth county, there to stay in Doogarry, a stone's throw from this charming spot.

His arrival was clearly a special event, with his host's nine-year-old son preparing for it by cleaning the bathroom for his first time ever. This must be what Billy Connolly had in mind when he said he reckoned he thought the Queen thought the whole world smelled of fresh paint...

Like I said. Lakes. Get used to it.

If Sunday had been notable for being his first three-county day since he made his way from Kerry to Limerick via Clare in the fifth week of his Odyssey, Monday's most memorable feature was to be the rain, it being the wettest day of the trip so far. It didn't start that way, though. No, first there was some painting in the sun, fuelled by tea and with a nervous eye on the sky, and then it was time to push on through the most diabolical of conditions. North he rode, lakes to the left and lakes to the right, pedalling on through Bawnboy and on to Swanlinbar, there to recover with potato cakes after a detour and a mudslide on a road that just wasn't there.

Over the border, then, into Fermanagh, the twentieth county of the trip, heading north to Letterbreen, and then west, through Belcoo to Cavan's Blacklion, but back then into Belcoo, more drenched than ever after the wettest day of the tour, there to spend the night in his twentieth county.

By this point it was getting difficult to tell where the puddles stopped and the lakes started.

Tuesday saw him making his way back through Blacklion again, cutting across Cavan along the southern shores of Lough Macnean. It wasn't long before he was back in Leitrim, with the wind almost blasting him under a van as he cycled through Glenfarne to Manorhamilton, and the rain swirling and crashing about him. A break in Manorhamilton was well deserved, as was the rather peculiar lunch that presented itself on the menu: a chicken, bacon, mushroom, and banana sandwich.

Yes, you read that right.

While the Brother was fighting with the elements and sampling gastronomic oddities, plans were being made for his return to Sligo, this time to stay with Annie West. Seeming, she had big plans for his arrival. According to her Twitter feed, she had contract cleaners, an interior designer and a couple of plasterers all getting things ready, while she herself was sorting out some William Morris wallpaper and a huge consignment of eighteenth-century Italian furniture for his room, all the while fretting about whether she'd be able to install an Adams fireplace before the Brother pedalled up the path. And that's not to mention the time she claimed to be putting into training the dog and cat to avert their eyes appropriately. Call be sceptical, but I think she might have been exaggerating ever so slightly, at least about the trumpets, bugles, guns, and bunting. Mind, I've not met the lady, so who am I to judge?

Before braving the elements once more, the Brother saw fit to delight the Battlestar Galactica fans among us with a fine Leitrim shot, and then it was off he set again, back into what he described as the 'windiest, blusteriest, paininthearseiest' day of cycling thus far. This time he left the main road, taking a quieter road to Glencar, past the lake and waterfall of 'The Stolen Child' fame, soon reaching Sligo again, turning north by Drumcliffe to be greeted by miles of bunting, trumpets, bugles, a twenty-one gun salute, and buckets of tea* as he brought to a close a rare and tempestuous four-county day.

Happy and safe and warm and dry that evening, he pored over maps and delighted to see that while he'd been battling against the elements, the tale of his Painting Tour, as told by John Lee, had been picked up by the Huffington Post.

After Tuesday's exploits, yesterday was very quiet, with hardly a tweet from the Brother, other than an understandably glum comment about how dispiriting the weather was -- there's not much joy in cycling in such apocalyptic conditions, especially when the nicer side roads have to be shunned in favour of the bigger, faster, dirtier roads, where puddles and vans can combine to such soul-destroying effect. To judge by Twitter, you'd think he'd ended it with his bike tended by ducks,  rumours starting to spread that he'd been kidnapped and wasn't to be allowed leave.

The Brother's favourite bike shot of the trip, taken during Wednesday night's dinner.

Instead, it seems he'd indeed spent the day painting Annie's house while she worked in her studio, before going up the road to stay with Donal Conaty, the Man Behind The Mire, there to dine and paint and chat and sleep.

And as for today? Well, the Brother started the day reckoning it'd be hard to leave Sligo -- and not because he was trapped in a Misery-style situation by a wannabe Kathy Bates, but just because he liked it so much there and weather looked to be getting ready to take arms against him yet again.

Still, the weather was good to begin with as he was taken for a drive by Streedagh Strand and up to the Horseshoe Pass; unfortunately his camera decided to pack in, leaving him to describe the day as the best he'd ever had for photographs he'd not taken. Back from the drive he had to race against time to manage a very hasty painting of his hosts' house before leaping onto the bike to make it Donegal town before sunset. The afternoon dash hit a hitch almost immediately, as soon after Mullaghmore he was struck down with stomach cramps, and so forced to rest on Leitrim's tiny coast, there to let his stomach settle and to take some tablets to help his left leg. The terrain may be easier now than it was in Cork and Kerry, but the weather can't be making things any easier on the Brother's legs -- when you have to fight with the bike to make it move, you're heading for trouble, and especially with the days getting shorter and there being less time available to cycle and to paint.

The tablets having done their work, and after his first ever power bar, he set off again, winding his way into Donegal, his twenty-first county, through Ballyshannon, and eventually arriving to a bunting-festooned Donegal town.**

Six counties in a week. You can't help admiring that. I'd still not put money on him managing every county in the country, given the logistics of what's left of the trip, but as Meatloaf would probably say, thirty out of thirty-two ain't bad. Or twenty-nine or twenty-eight, to be fair. The clock's ticking, and time shall be money.

So, what does the next week hold? Truth be told I'm not entirely sure, save that he's clearly planning on heading across Tyrone into Derry and from there into Antrim and Down. Other than that, I really don't know.

Still, if you think the Brother might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live, especially if you're in Down, Armagh, Monaghan or, well, anywhere else that looks even plausible over the next fortnight as the Brother makes his way home to Dublin, and if you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, do get in touch with him. As long as you have a kettle, tea, milk, and somewhere to doze, he'd love to hear from you.

There's only a fortnight left of the Painting Tour, and if you want to get onboard, you can follow it on the Brother's blog and above all on Twitter, where the hashtag's #paintingtour. The Brother's Facebook account's worth a shout too, but Twitter's where most of the real action is. 

Don't be afraid to give Ireland's first digital nomad™ a shout -- the tour's about Irish social media as much as it is art and the Irish countryside, after all.

* Or at least one of the above, after stopping cycling in sodden terror, but yards from his destination, with a storm bellowing around him, trucks roaring past, and his hostess waiting across the road in her car, having come out to look for his body.
** No, really. Look at the picture.

The Taoiseach's Speech Revisited

In the aftermath of the Cloyne Report -- and to a lesser degree before it -- I've written a lot of posts about abuse in Ireland. Those of you who've been following me will understand where I'm coming from on this, but for any newcomers, it may help if I quickly explain three things.

First, I believe sexual abuse is endemic in Ireland. Research carried out by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in connection with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, and published in 2002 as the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) Study, indicated that 27.1% of Irish adults surveyed in 2001 were survivors of one form or another of child sexual abuse. Based on the 2002 census figures, this means that a decade ago there must have been something of the order of 780,000 Irish adults who'd been abused as children. Of these, 530,000 had been subject to contact sexual abuse, and of those, 120,000 had been raped.

(It's difficult to tell whether abuse is significantly more prevalent in Ireland than elsewhere. Different sampling and research methods have been used in different countries, such that it's hard to compare figures. It looks as though Ireland is among the worse countries for this sort of thing, but the evidence doesn't suggest that it is an outlier in a general sense. As a clue towards this, Colm O'Gorman's One in Four organisation was founded in the UK in 1999, three years before the SAVI study revealed that the abuse rate in Ireland indeed was roughly one-in-four.)

Second, I believe the constant media focus on the Catholic Church in respect of this is not merely unfair, but is in fact dangerous. I don't deny for one moment that there have been far too many priests who ruined the lives of Irish children, and that the Irish superiors of these priests were -- for whatever reasons -- unwilling or unable to take decisive steps to protect those children. They disgraced themselves and the Church, and they have done untold harm to -- I suspect -- several thousand Irish children. Having said that, the SAVI figures indicate that for every survivor of sexual abuse committed by a priest, there are fifty-nine survivors of sexual abuse committed by people other than clergy. These are hardly ever discussed in the media or by Irish politicians, as the focus of debate in these matters remains relentlessly -- and almost exclusively -- trained on the Church.

The narrative that paints abuse in Ireland as primarily a clerical problem commits a grave injustice against the hundreds of thousands of Irish abuse survivors whose stories are largely ignored, and it directs people away from where the real dangers are to Irish children nowadays. Almost all sexual abuse takes place within the broad family circle, being committed by immediate and extended family, family friends, neighbours, and babysitters; by choosing to keep the abuse discussion focused on historical matters within the Church, we distract people's attention from genuine and greater threats in their own homes. In doing so, we're putting Ireland's children at risk.

Third, in connection with Cloyne in particular, I have been appalled at how the Irish Government has sought to use child abuse as a political football, and has taken advantage of the fact that children were abused by priests in Cloyne in order to grandstand and posture. I appreciate that this is a difficult time to govern, given the mess the country is in and the limitations on what the Government can do, but I don't think that there's any excuse for the bluster and the lies that have disgraced Ireland's public discourse over the last couple of months. The Cloyne Report found, in essence, one thing, which was that over a thirteen-year-period, two clergymen didn't apply the Church's own rules. That's all. It didn't find that the reported abuse occurred, though I'm inclined to believe that in most cases it did, and it most certainly didn't find that the Holy See had sought to cover up abuse.

In short, I believe abuse is a hugely serious problem in Ireland, such that more than a quarter of Irish adults appear to have been abused in their childhood, almost all of them having been abused by people who weren't priests and who were usually within the family circle. We need to deal with this, and we need to do so very carefully. Basically, we need to take a good, long look at ourselves, and refrain from pointing fingers at other people as though they're responsible for our problems. They're not. We are. A good start would be for the Government to engage with the problem in a serious way, rather than by trying to make political capital out of children having been sexually abused.


Which brings me to Enda Kenny...
Back in July, as we all know, Enda gave a speech in the Dáil in which he said a lot of admirable things about what the Irish State should be doing to protect Irish children, glossed over the failings of State institutions identified in the Cloyne Report, passed over entirely the failings of the two Irish clergymen on whose actions the Cloyne Report was concentrated, and said an awful lot of things about the Vatican which were completely false and had no basis whatsoever in the Cloyne Report.

And people loved him for it. Because it's okay to lie to the Dáil if it's about somebody you dislike.

The Irish Government demanded answers from the Vatican, and last week it got them. One particular detail, however, remains to be explained. Here's Enda blustering in full gale:

'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.'

In its response to the Irish Government, the Vatican devotes three paragraphs to this particular claim, noting that in the aftermath of the speech, a Government spokesman admitted the Taoiseach hadn't been refering to anything in particular when he made that claim. The response goes on to note that the Cloyne Report made no statement that could conceivably support the Taoiseach's claim, and that in the report the Murphy Commission acknowledged the full co-operation it had received from all parties, including the Church, which -- unlike the Department of Health -- even made available all relevant privileged communications.


One Good Cop?
Now, on Saturday Archbishop Martin made a statement in which he noted the sober measured tone of the Vatican response, and said that he hoped it wouldn't become an occasion for further polemics, as these do very little for the protection of children and the support of survivors. Martin had, of course, made a similar point in the immediate aftermath of the Taoiseach's speech.:

'I don’t want to see a polarisation between Church, State, Voluntary groups -- we all should be working together to see that children are protected.'

He's completely right, of course. Abuse appears to be endemic in Irish society. Trying to create a polarised conflict between Church and State will do nothing to help this situation, and will only do harm. We have, over the past couple of months, been on the brink of a deeply divisive and profoundly damaging internal conflict, just at a time when we need to be working together. It wasn't for nothing that I quoted yesterday from one of the most famous descriptions of what happens during internal wars. It's very obvious that those determined to stir up such a conflict don't have the interests of abuse survivors or vulnerable children at heart. They may say they do, but they don't. At most, they might have genuine concern for the interests of the one-abuse-survivor-in-sixty who'd been abused by a priest, but it's pretty clear that they either don't know or don't care about the other fifty-nine.

Anyway, although much of his statement was spent trying to calm tempers and put out fires, Archbishop Martin felt obliged to pick up on one specific allegation:

'One of the key points of the Taoiseach’s intervention was the assertion that “the Holy See attempted to frustrate an enquiry in a sovereign democratic republic as little as three years ago not three decades ago”.  There is no evidence presented in the Murphy Report to substantiate this, the Holy See could find no evidence and the Department of An Taoiseach’s office said that the Taoiseach was not referring to any specific event.  This merits explanation.'

And it does. You can't just say things like that. It's not just that it's not diplomatic. It's a matter of basic decency: you can't hurl around accusations unless you're willing to back them up.



Venturing an Explanation
Of course, some have thought it requires no explanation at all, presumably in the assumption that if you don't like somebody it's wholly acceptable to say whatever you like about them. Others, apparently, seem to think that publicly-expressed serious allegations don't require public justifications. Andrew Madden seems to think it's all very straightforward, at least according to the Irish Examiner:

'As for the reference by Mr Kenny, [Madden] said he had checked with Mr Kenny’s department at the time of the Dáil speech and was told it referred to the failure by the Cloyne hierarchy to implement child protection guidelines until 2008 and to the refusal by the papal nuncio in Ireland, Giuseppe Leanza, to answer questions to the independent Murphy Inquiry in the belief that foreign diplomats were not expected to answer to national commissions or tribunals.'

Keep that in mind. In July the Department of the Taoiseach was, at least according to one prominent abuse survivor, taking the line that the Taoiseach's claim about the Cloyne Report having revealed an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an Irish statutory inquiry since 2008 referred to

a) the failure of two Irish clergymen to implement the Irish Church's own child protection guidelines, something which only a maniac could claim was the same as an alleged attempt by Rome to frustrate a statutory inquiry,

and

b) the refusal, based on the belief that foreign diplomats had no obligation to answer to national commissions, of Giuseppe Leanza to answer the Murphy Commission's questions, something which the Cloyne Report does not report having happened.

Now, leaving aside that neither of these instances tallies with the Taoiseach's speech, as is obvious to anyone who's read both it and the Cloyne Report, Enda has since attempted to explain what he meant, and has done so in a way that contradicts this previous explanation, allegedly offered by his office.


The Story as it currently stands...
Speaking at a Fine Gael meeting in Galway, Enda said of the speech that he'd been trying to reflect the frustration of the Irish people, insisting:

'I made the point that this is a statutory commission of inquiry and as such nothing less than full cooperation is required, and anything less than full co-operation in my view is unwarranted interference.'

All of a sudden the mystery is solved! Words mean what they want to mean where Enda is concerned. 'Interference,' as far as he's concerned, has a meaning broad enough to mean 'no interference whatsoever'. He didn't stop there, though:

'As a member of the Catholic Church, I want to see the Church of which I am a member as absolutely above reproach in the issue of this and other areas. And for that reason, my claim in the Dáil still stands, because this was a statutory commission of inquiry. And in 2006, and 2007 and in 2009, there were requests for information and assistance to the Vatican by the Murphy Commission and in each of these cases that request was either refused or rejected.'

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I think it'd not be remiss of us to look again at what Enda actually said in the Dáil. He said that the Cloyne Report showed, as no investigation had ever before done -- and he specifically contrasted it with Murphy Commission's Dublin Report -- an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an Irish Inquiry, this having happened, he said, less than three years earlier.


2006 and 2007 were more than three years ago, Enda...
Whatever happened in 2006 and 2007 is obviously irrelevant to Enda's claim, as events prior to 2008 predate his rhetorical three-year timescale. Only the 2009 event can possibly have had any relevance to this allegation. Having said that, it's worth sketching the two incidents.

In 2006, the Murphy Commission wrote to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, asking it for information, and got no reply, the CDF instead contacting the Department of Foreign Affairs, asking why the Commission had not gone through diplomatic channels (Dublin Report, 2.23). The Dublin Report omitted to mention that in contacting the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Vatican said that if the Irish Government wanted it to address this matter that it would like it to be sent through diplomatic channels -- in other words with a covering letter from the Irish Government -- and that it would co-operate. A subsequent effort was not made to contact the Vatican in this regard, as though a statutory body, the Murphy Commission did not believe it was appropriate to use diplomatic channels. The Irish Government seems to have let the issue drop. That's our problem, not the Vatican's.

In 2007, the Murphy Commission wrote to the then Papal Nuncio, Giuseppe Lazzarotto, asking him to supply any relevant information the Nunciature had, other than that already produced or to be produced by Archbishop Martin, or to confirm that he had no such documentation, if that was the case (Dublin Report, 2.24). Lazzarotto did not reply, which was undoubtedly very bad manners. While I still think an explanation for this would be desirable, I don't see that this rude lack of co-operation would have impeded the Murphy Commission in any respect, given how the Nunciature doesn't handle abuse cases, and how the Dublin Archdiocese disclosed all relevant documentation to the Commission.


And that takes us to 2009
So, what happened in 2009? Well, the Cloyne Report describes quite clearly how it approached various bodies for any data they might have held relevant to the Commission's work, with the Nunciature being asked to submit any information which it had about the matters under investigation (2.11). The Nunciature replied saying that it held no relevant information as it did not determine the handling of abuse cases, something which is true and which the Cloyne Report does not contest. It's hard to see how saying that you lack information which you genuinely lack could ever be construed as a lack of co-operation, much less interferences, but I guess the Taoiseach's mind works in its own way.

It's also striking that this is clearly a more helpful response from the Nunciature than the sepulchral silence of 2007, such that I can't for the life of me see how Enda could ever maintain that this was worse than the unresponsiveness of two years earlier. Remember, Enda said that the Vatican's actions within the last three years, as revealed in the Cloyne Report, had been worse than anything the Dublin Report had described it as doing.

The Nunciature, however, didn't stop with that, and added that the Diocese of Cloyne was obliged to comply fully with all Irish civil laws and regulations. In effect, given that the Murphy Commission was a statutory inquiry, it said that the Diocese of Cloyne was obliged to comply fully with the Commission, not least by submitting any information it held about the matters being investigated. The Commission notes that the Diocese did just that, even supplying all privileged communication, including privileged copies of communications that had been sent to Rome (2.12).

In this, it should be noted, the Church stands in sharp contrast to the Irish Department of Health and Children which refused to disclose a number of documents, claiming privilege over them (2.11). Presumably, by failing to co-operate fully with the Commission, the Department of Health and Children is, in our Taoiseach's flexible mind, itself guilty of 'unwarranted interference'.


Anyway, in short, the Taoiseach lied. I've said it before, and I'm not the only one to have done so, and doubtless I'll say it again. He lied to the Dáil, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he did so in an attempt to make political capital out of children having been abused. That was a vile thing for him to have done, and he should be ashamed of himself.

The Vatican's Response to the Irish Government: First Thoughts

Whether or not it was the Californian Senator Hiram Johnson who coined the phrase, 'when war comes, the first casualty is truth,' is a matter of some debate. What's clear, though, is that others expressed a similar sentiment before him. Samuel Johnson, for instance, writing in The Idler in 1758, numbered the diminution of the love of truth among the calamities of war. More than two thousand years before Johnson, however, the Athenian Thucydides had made the very same point in his description of social unrest and civil war in the Greek world of the fifth-century BC:

'Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.'

I've been thinking about this passage quite a bit over the past few days, as I've been watching from afar the reactions in Ireland to the Vatican's response to the Cloyne Report and to the views expressed about that report by the Irish government.

I happen to think that the response is a good one. It comprehensively explains the Vatican's own actions in connection with the Cloyne Report in a calm and measured way, attempting to banish misconceptions while at the same time seeking to defuse tensions.

Unfortunately, it seems that where the current Irish government is concerned, to be accurate is to be 'very technical and legalistic', while facts are to be dismissed as 'pettifogging detail'. For others, familiarity with what the Cloyne Report actually says is not straightforward evidence of the document having been read in a careful and responsible way, but rather is the unmistakeable sign that 'the gimlet eye of the canon lawyer' has been at work. 

I'm not sure when accuracy, honesty, and thoroughness stopped being regarded as virtues. I may have been away too long.

Anyway, Let's take a look at the Vatican's response. Not in detail -- it's short enough for everyone who actually cares about this matter to read the whole thing for themselves, and I'll return to this tomorrow in any case -- but just to pull out a few salient points to help in thinking about it. It might be worthwhile, first, to refresh your memories on the key issues related to the Cloyne Report.


1. Who's the response for?
The response is addressed, quite explicitly, to the Irish Government, in the person of the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs. It is a formal diplomatic communication from the government of one state to that of another. Atypically, this communication has been published on the Vatican website, but this is in the interests of transparency and of the need to refute publicly certain public allegations made against the Vatican. Unlike last year's pastoral letter it is not directed to the Irish Church or the Irish people in general, and should not be read as though it is.

This must especially be kept in mind when Irish politicians or pundits complain about the response being largely devoted to stuff that's of little interest to Irish parents or the Irish people in general. Leaving aside how I'd hope that Irish people would, in the main, still be interested in the truth, the response isn't addressed to Irish parents or the Irish people in general. It's addressed to the Government.


2. What does the response address?
As requested by the Irish Government, the letter is a response to two things: the Cloyne Report itself, and the Irish Government's views on the matter. At its heart is a response to the Tánaiste's demand for an explanation of why, in the Government's view, the Vatican intervened to have priests believe they could in conscience evade their responsibilities under Irish law:

'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.'

Given the Cloyne Report's allegations about the effect of one letter from the Vatican, the Governmental comments about that claim and allegations of Vatican interference in the development of the Cloyne Report, and the subsequent parliamentary censure of the Vatican, it is entirely natural that the Vatican response focuses, in the main, on those claims. The Irish Government made very serious allegations about the Vatican. It's hardly surprising that the Vatican's response is a rebuttal of those charges.


3. Why doesn't it say more about abuse and cover-up in Cloyne?
Why would it? The letter's a response to a demand from the Irish Government for an explanation about the Vatican's own actions; it's not a response to a demand for a comment on the behaviour of Irish clergy.

The Vatican takes pains in the response to avoid interfering in the business of the Irish State, and as such properly refrains from commenting on the detail of matters which may yet come before the Irish courts. Having said that, it utterly condemns the abuse of children by Irish clergy, is unambiguous in its condemnation of the failures of John Magee and Denis O'Callaghan to follow either the Irish bishops' agreed child-protection policies or the universal rules of the Church as a whole, and expresses deep sorrow for abuse committed by Irish clerics, and for the suffering undergone by their victims.

Pundits and politicians wittering and whinging about how 'the Vatican just doesn't get it' are themselves missing the point. The Vatican was asked for an explanation of why it allegedly interfered in and obstructed Irish matters, and it has given such an explanation. Anything else is completely off-topic. This response is very much to the point.


4. Okay, well, what exactly are the issues the Vatican's addressing?
A few things, really, all of them being concrete and clearly defined.

• The Cloyne Report's claim that in a 1997 letter the Vatican refused the Irish bishops' request that their 1996 Framework Document be granted  formal recognition and given the status of Canon Law (4.21).
• The Cloyne Report's claim that the Vatican letter undermined the Irish bishops' Framework Document by describing it as a 'study document' (1.18, 4.21).
• The Cloyne Report's claim that the Vatican's  letter greatly strengthened the position of those in the Irish Church who were opposed to the implementation of the Framework Document, and encouraged them in their opposition to it (1.76, 4.22, 4.91).
• The Tánaiste's claim that 'the Vatican intervened to effectively have priests believe they could in conscience evade their responsibilities under Irish law'.
• The Taoiseach's claim that, 'for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse [the Cloyne Report] 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.' 
• The Taoiseach's implication that the Pope takes the view that the Church is not bound by the standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy.
• The Taoiseach's claim that the Vatican responded to evidence from Cloyne abuse victims in a way that was legalistic rather than sympathetic.
• The Dáil motion that deplored the Vatican’s intervention as contributing to the undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish Bishops.

5. Didn't Enda also accuse the Vatican of downplaying and managing the rape and torture of children in order to uphold the power and reputation of the Church?
He did, yes. The Vatican's response doesn't directly address this, as it's a very broad and vague claim, and one which is in no way supported by the Cloyne Report. I don't see how it could have been addressed head-on without escalating matters further; it seems to me from reading the Vatican's response that the Vatican is in fact pulling its punches, stopping short of pointing out the clear fact that the Cloyne Report, the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, and the Dáil had all, in effect, made claims against the Vatican that would under other circumstances constitute defamation under Irish law.

That said, the response points out that during the period covered by the Cloyne Report, the Vatican received no evidence of abuse in Cloyne until 2005, when one case was submitted to Rome (21.40), with the effect that the offending priest was barred from exercising his priestly ministry (21.62); he has since, of course, been given an eighteen-month suspended sentence by the Irish State. Since then, a few cases have been referred to Rome in 2009, but as no decision on these cases had been made at the time the Report had been drawn up, the Report didn't comment on the Vatican's handling of them in any sense; Enda could hardly have had them in mind when he made his claims about how the Vatican responded to abuse allegations from Cloyne. Implicitly, then, by showing how the only abuse case handled in full by the Vatican while the Murphy Commission was investigating Cloyne had resulted in the barring of a priest from acting as one, the response demonstrates the absurdity of the Taoiseach's claim.

What's more, the response details at length, in sections entitled 'Church legislation on child protection', 'Circular Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (3 May 2011)', and 'Specific attention to the situation in Ireland: the Letter of Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholics of Ireland (2010)', the constructive steps the Vatican has taken to address the problem of child abuse by clergy, steps that can hardly be dismissed as attempts to downplay abuse.

If the 2002 SAVI figures are accurate, over a quarter of Irish adults are survivors of child sexual abuse, with roughly one adult in 240 having been abused by a priest. This is a horrifying reality, and is something we all need to work together to fight. By effectively turning the other cheek in response to the most vicious of the Taoiseach's allegations, the Vatican is declining the opportunity to exacerbate the situation by replying in the polemical manner the Taoiseach's calumnies deserve; instead it's giving everybody a chance to lower their arms and work together to protect and help Irish children.


6. Right. Well, why didn't the Vatican grant the Irish bishops' request that their 1996 Framework Document be granted  formal recognition and given the status of Canon Law?
For two reasons, basically, the first of which was that the Irish bishops didn't ask for it to be granted such recognition, and the second of which was that the Vatican felt that such recognition wasn't necessary, given the unanimous support of the Irish bishops for the new guidelines and the ability of each bishop to implement the guidelines within their own dioceses.

There's more to it than that, but that's the essence of it. You'll note that the Cloyne Report got this wrong, by the way. It expressly states that the Irish bishops sought recognition for the guidelines, when they did no such thing. As I've said before, the report is far from being a perfect document.


7. Well, why did the Vatican describe the Framework Document as a 'study document'? 
Because that's basically what it was. It was presented to Rome as a step towards a formal legislative process, due to be published not by the Irish bishops but by an advisory committee for the bishops. It was as a step towards a formal legislative process that the Vatican commented on it. The Congregation for Clergy had already played a part in the creation of the Framework Document, and it most certainly did not reject the guidelines, let alone bar the Irish bishops from applying them. On the contrary, it merely expressed some concerns about the guidelines, which were obviously in need of being field-tested, and warned against the implementation of the guidelines in such a way that could later lead to the overturning -- on procedural grounds -- of disciplinary decisions.


8. Isn't it true, though, that the 1997 letter encouraged those who were opposed to the guidelines?
It doesn't seem to have done. It's not even clear how widely disseminated this letter was; the Cloyne Report describes it as a strictly confidential letter to the Irish bishops (4.21), and gives no indication that it ever passed beyond the bishops themselves

In any case, whatever the Irish government may say, the Vatican is right to say that there is not a jot of evidence in the Cloyne Report that supports its claim that the Vatican's 1997 reservations about the Irish bishops' 1996 child-protection guidelines had any impact whatsoever on the implementation of those guidelines in Cloyne or any other diocese. I'd challenge anyone who doubts this to trawl through the Cloyne Report in search of any evidence for this hugely damaging and -- I believe -- false allegation. The nearest thing the report offers in support of its claim is a scornful 2008 quotation from Denis O'Callaghan about how the Irish bishops had expected Rome to endorse a wholly separate 2005 document.


9. But what about the Tánaiste's claim that the Vatican convinced priests they could in conscience evade their responsibilities under Irish law?
What responsibilities? What law? You can't evade things that don't exist.

Up until 1997, the failure to report a felony was but a misdemeanour in Irish law, and it was removed from Irish law altogether by April 1997's Criminal Law Act, which created the new offence of 'concealing an offence', applicable only when someone has been bribed to conceal an offence. Of the fifteen members of the current cabinet, nine had been members of the government that introduced that Act, five -- including the Taoiseach -- as full ministers and members of the cabinet, and four -- including the  Tánaiste -- as ministers of state.

It is true that the Congregation for Clergy had reservations about the Framework Document's requirement that any allegations of abuse -- or even concerns expressed about the possibility of such -- should be reported to the State, but given that the Irish Government itself decided over the course of 1996 and 1997 against the introduction of mandatory reporting, I don't see that there's any evidence that the attitude of the Congregation for Clergy in 1997 was any different from that of Enda Kenny, Richard Bruton, Michael Noonan, Brendan Howlin, or Ruairi Quinn.


10. So aside from the fact that that claim is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, it's got no basis whatsoever, as you can't undermine something that's not there?
Exactly.

For what it's worth, time and again throughout the Vatican's response, it stresses the need for the Irish Church to cooperate with the laws of the Irish State, how bishops have never been impeded from reporting cases of abuse to the State, and how bishops were explicitly told in 1998 never to obstruct in any way the course of civil justice. Indeed, it's a basic principle of Church teaching that all Catholics are obliged to obey all just laws of the State in which they live.

(Obviously, some states have blatantly unjust laws, and Catholics are most certainly not bound to obey them. Have a think about things that, say, Idi Amin's government or Pol Pot's came up with and you'll understand why the Church doesn't demand that Catholics obey the law regardless of what it might be.)


11. What about Enda's claim that the Cloyne Report exposed -- for the first time ever -- an attempt within the last three years by the Vatican to frustrate an official Irish inquiry?
Well, as I said at the time, that was clearly nonsense, and the Vatican's pointed that out. The Cloyne Report in no way criticises the Vatican for a failure to cooperate with it, reserving its sole criticisms in that regard for the State. With reference to the Papal Nuncio, it says he told the Commission that he held no documents that would be of use to it, but that the Diocese, which held all documents, would be obliged to cooperate fully; the Report says it did just that, even supplying all privileged communications.

I'll come back to this tomorrow, as Archbishop Martin has asked the Taoiseach to explain his public allegation, and the Taoiseach has responded with a self-refuting ball of bluster. In the meantime, this fellow nails what really happened: the Taoiseach lied to the Dáil. 


12. And the Taoiseach's implication that the Pope didn't regard the Church as needing to operate in line with the standards of civil society?
As the Vatican points out, the passage the Taoiseach quoted was one about theological methodology, basically saying that theological truth isn't a matter of passing fashion, and as such cannot be determined by opinion polls or focus groups or even the collective views of groups of academics. It had nothing to do with Church governance or canon law or anything other than theology, as I explained back in the day.


13. It sounds like the Taoiseach has tried to mislead the Dáil in more than one way, so. And with success. What of his line about the Vatican responding to allegations of abuse not with sympathy, but with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer?
I think this is very unfair on the canon lawyers, who are just trying to ensure the rules are followed. More to the point, though, I covered this above, at point 5, and back in the day, at point 31 of a very long post on the Cloyne Report in general. Given that the report details only one instance of abuse that had been dealt with by Rome, that being submitted to them in 2005 with the complainant being believed and the accused priest being barred from exercising any priestly ministry, there's simply no evidence on which the Taoiseach could base such a claim.


14. That leaves us with the Dáil motion, deploring the Vatican’s intervention as contributing to the undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish Bishops. How does the Vatican respond to that?
Well,  we've basically covered this too, at point 8 above. The Dáil deplored the effect of the Vatican's 1997 letter, but as we've seen, there's nothing in the Cloyne Report that hints at the letter having had any effect at all. The Report shows Denis O'Callaghan as having openly viewed the Framework Document with contempt, but it doesn't cite him as drawing on the Vatican's letter in support of his views, and indeed, it makes it clear that he was as opposed to implementing canon law as he was the Irish bishops' own guidelines.


15. Okay. I've heard people claiming that in this response, Rome is trying to localise the problem, to say it's nothing to do with the Vatican, and that it's an Irish problem. Is there any truth to that?
The fact is that contrary to popular belief, the Church is incredibly decentralised, with most decisions being taken at the lowest possible level. This shouldn't really surprise us: given that the Vatican's operating budget isn't a lot more than half that of University College Dublin, it can hardly be expected to micromanage things. In practice, as the Ferns Report explained back in the day and the Vatican's response spells out, dioceses have a huge degree of autonomy, to an extent to which one might almost hold that every bishop is Pope in his own diocese. Almost.

The point being: it's impossible to analyse these issues fairly unless we understand just how localised the Church is. Indeed, the Irish Church has more than 180 separate parts, and there's nothing remotely resembling a clear chain of command in Ireland, leading everything back to Rome. It's very clear that Magee and O'Callaghan did their own thing in Cloyne, and nobody in Rome was any the wiser until the Elliott Report brought their mismanagement of affairs to light. That, of course, was promptly followed by a debate over whether Magee should step down, with him being unwilling to do so until he had a meeting with the Nuncio, after which he requested that he be relieved of duty.

Yes, I know these localised problems appear to have happened everywhere, both in terms of the abuse itself and of mismanagement of abuse. This does not mean that the mismanagement was in any way centralised, though. If anything, it seems that it was something that arose naturally from clericalist cultures and the natural tendency of people to trust and look after those with whom they have close ties. What Benedict seems to have been trying to do from Rome is to find a centralised way of short-circuiting the all-too-common local tendency towards clericalist mismanagement.

There are those who don't like Rome having an influence on how the Irish Church runs things, but given the hames the Irish Church has made of dealing with clerical abuse, I don't see that we should be looking for an exclusively Irish solution to an Irish problem.

And child abuse -- let's not beat about the bush -- is most definitely an Irish problem. 


More tomorrow, with particular reference to the Taoiseach's claims. And sorry I've been slow with this. I've been away, and I've been very busy at my own work, it being at a crucial stage, and in terms of this I've been trying to get a handle on the original nature of the Irish request, the text of the response, and the governmental and media reactions at home.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Nine

Years ago in Mayo, whilst spending my days bounding across bogland to one neolithic site after another, my afternoons poring over German analyses of ancient battles, my evenings having a jar in McGuire's bar, and my nights playing backgammon before a turf fire, I was introduced to a wonderful 1841 travel book, Caesar Otway's Sketches in Erris and Tyrawly, in which the inestimable Tipperary Anglican opined:

'We now came in sight of Lough Carrowmore, the largest lake in Erris; it is one of the three lakes which Partholan, if we are to believe Keating, discovered on his inspection of Ireland after his landing thereon -- others had not yet been formed. But though it be old, it is ugly; the eye looking northward from the road we are travelling on, taking in nearly its greatest length, about four miles; and it is far from beautiful -- the surrounding hills are neither grand nor varied in their forms, the desolate bog comes down on all sides, and surrounds it with its melancholy cincture; the islands are few and flat, and not even a furze, or bramble bush decorates their stony and wave-washed shores, over which the cormorant urges its slow and ungainly flight, and from whose rocks the curlew sends its melancholy pipe. I have not seen since I left the borders of Lough Derg, (where supersition disgraces what nature has made but ugly,) a more desolate, and at the same time unpleasing water, than Lough Carrowmore.'

You don't get that in Bill Bryson. 

We left the Brother last Thursday after he'd arrived in Bangor Erris, having cycled in the rain and the golden hour through the beauties of Ballycroy. The next day saw him setting off north again, along the western shore of Lough Carrowmore, through Barnatra and Inver, looking over towards Rossport before making his way to Pollatomish, there to stay at Kilcommon Lodge, one of my favourite places in Ireland, and I place to which I'd love to go back.

Though it be old, it is ugly. Right... it's worth clicking on the links for the colour original, btw

You'll know of Pollatomish, of course, if you've watched the news at all in Ireland over the last few years. It's an absolutely magical place in the most beautiful of surroundings, which sadly has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. There was a major landslide there in September 2003, and though that'd be problem enough, it pales into insignificance next to the story of the Corrib Gas Field, Shell to Sea, and The Pipe.

If you haven't seen The Pipe, or An Píopa in its Irish-language version, then you should track it down. Somehow. It's both heartbreaking and inspiring, and important too. The whole story is one people should know, inviting questions anybody interested in modern Ireland should be asking. I visited Broadhaven Bay a few times just as this whole storm was beginning to brew, so it's kind of personal to me, but I think it's something people need to know about. It's not just a story of the usual suspects blocking progress, and I don't think it's typical NIMBYism either. You might disagree with me, of course, but don't do it out of hand, Track down the film, and do some reading, and watch other documentaries, and even visit the area if you can. And think.

Saturday saw the Brother thinking Mayo was so beautiful he needed to see more of it, so off he set to look at the where all the action is regarding Shell's activity, before returning along the eastern shore of Lough Carrowmore through Bangor and Bellacorick, site of the famous Musical Bridge, to his next host, just outside Newport, where he'd planned on being a couple of nights earlier. 70 kilometres of cycling all told, and much of it in the rain, with him arriving in Newport drenched through.

Sunday was a day for painting, and for watching Dublin beat Donegal in what at least began as a very ugly match. 'Japers,' said the Brother, 'Japers, to think I stopped actually watching paint dry to watch this.' Still, Dublin won, the hard way, in what the Brother says was an amazing spectacle. They'll be facing Kerry in the final. It's been a while.

Leaving his hosts with a painting of Skerdagh School, on Monday he was off again, hoping to push himself to Enniscrone. Not sure of his route, he decided that to hold off deciding until he reached Pontoon, between Loughs Conn and Cullin, and by Lough Conn he stopped to drink some tea and eat some boxty. Onward he peddled to Ballina and beyond, before a sudden attack of common sense struck him with the thought that Enniscrone was too ambitious a destination, and he turned back to Ballina.

-- Can I get milk, a big glass, a carton? he asked the man in the B&B.
-- You want to drink milk?
-- I want to make tea all night.
-- I'll give you a big jug, said the man.

Tuesday began as it was destined to continue, with tea, and then the Brother set off, carrying on towards Enniscrone, stopping for potato cakes within sight of Nephin and Killala Bay in Sligo, his fifteenth county. Along the Sligo coast he cycled, past Dunmoran, and stopping for some purchases and another fine exchange.

-- Do you want a bag for those?
-- No thanks, I have my bike outside.
-- Petrol or diesel?
-- Legs. 

He carried on towards his destination, eventually reaching Sligo town, there to imbibe some tea*, to have a wander along the beach, and to watch the sun set.

Yesterday began with an improbably blue sky, and was a day for plotting, with the brother giving serious thought to the feasibility of a few of his planned counties. Without any hosts thus far, Leitrim, Roscommon, Fermanagh, Donegal, and Tyrone were all looking tricky, so lots of thinking was on the cards.

Not just thinking, though; the application of colour to canvas took place as you'd expect, with tea and potato cakes to keep the Brother going, and Ben Bulben away off in the background, as he sat painting and talking on Dunmoran Strand. It wasn't as warm as it might have been, though, and he regretted having left his jumper behind. Of course, the tide started to rise, impatient of the Brother's wishes, that being its wont, and him remembering difficulties at Cork's Garryvoe Beach, he withdrew to higher ground to watch the birds.

As for today? Well, he's been cycling round about, and taken a trip to Rosses Point, where a statue called 'Waiting on Shore' stands in memory of all those roundabout who've lost loved ones at sea; seemingly people have been known to rest trays full of biscuits in her hands. As the evening wore on, the Brother was nuzzled by a friendly Alsatian**, before being taken on a drive out to Innisfree, there to ponder, one presumes, just how simply he could live with bees and beans. And brushes, of course.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow

With the evening drawing to a close, he unveiled his plan for the next few days, an ambitious loop through five counties in five days. Roscommon's on the cards for tomorrow, and he's nowhere there to lay his head just yet, so if anyone's interested, please let him know.

Indeed, if you think there's any chance at all the Brother might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live, especially if you're in the likes of Roscommon, Leitrim, Fermanagh, Donegal, or Tyrone, and if you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, do get in touch with him. He's a man of simpler wants than Yeats's islander: somewhere to lay his head, food to eat, limitless tea, and to know where you are.

You can follow the last three weeks of the Painting Tour on the Brother's blog and especially on Twitter, using the hashtag  #paintingtour. His Facebook account's worth a shout too, but Twitter's where most of the real action is. Don't be afraid to give Ireland's first digital nomad™ a shout -- the tour's about social media in Ireland as much as it is art and the Irish countryside, after all.

* Barry's, of course.
** No, not Arsene Wenger, Alsatian though he is and doubtless well-disposed to Evertonians today. A German Shepherd. A dog. Keep up.

Pearls Before Swine

With, of course, one or two possible exceptions, I’ve long thought the finest cartoon I’ve ever seen on the internet is XKCD’s classic ‘Duty Calls’ gag. It’s just far too true, and I found myself living it yesterday and earlier today.

Notes to self: Don’t do this. Don’t feed the trolls. Don’t argue with people who are incapable of taking new information on board. Don’t try to teach pigs to sing: it wastes your time and leaves you feeling dirty, while the pigs are left grunting in the muck at the end, still incapable of singing, and probably rather put out too.

So yes, what happened?

Well, as you’ll probably know, the rather minor amendment to UK abortion law that Nadine Dorries and Frank Fields are proposing has led to an awful lot of shouting. Pro-life people have made vastly exaggerated claims for what the amendment might achieve, and Pro-choice ones have been screaming about a sinister Pro-life conspiracy. The reality is that the proposal is very minor, and even if it passes, which it probably won’t, it’s unlikely to make a huge amount of difference.

UK abortion law is not, in principal, particularly liberal; in the main it theoretically only allows for abortion when two doctors sincerely believe that the continuation of a pregnancy would pose a risk to the health of a woman or her existing children. In practice, however, its application has become so loose that the UK effectively has abortion on demand up to a foetal age of 24 weeks, at which point the foetus magically becomes a person. Or something. Anyway, so many British people now widely regard abortion as a basic right that when the Lancet saw fit to comment on the many millions of females being aborted in China, it did so on the simple utilitarian grounds that its unwise to have a society in which for every 100 boys who are born, fewer than 85 girls see daylight.

Yes, that’s the Lancet’s line: it’s not sinful to kill millions of human beings because they’re female. It’s not evil to do so. It’s not immoral to do so. It’s not wrong to do so. It’s just imprudent.

When people fight, it's usually because they're trying to protect what they love...
... rather than because they're trying to destroy what they hate.

To say this is a highly polarised debate is putting it mildly, and I don’t think the situation’s helped by so many people on both sides shouting at each other, unwilling to concede the fact that their opponents are acting from good motives.

The Pro-choice crowd sincerely believe that a woman should have control over her own body, and that she shouldn’t be compelled to bring to term any child within her: they see it as a straightforward matter of women’s rights, and of privacy, as who is anyone else to tell a woman what she should do with her own body? This, I think, makes perfect sense, as long as you’re absolutely certain that the child within her isn’t a human being.

The Pro-life crowd, on the other hand -- and I count myself among them, naturally enough -- tend either to believe that the child in the womb is a human being, or that it might be one, and that it’s wrong to kill something which might be human. Sometimes they have religious reasons for this and sometimes they don't, but what they tend to have in common is a shared belief that one wouldn’t set a house on fire if one thought there was even a possibility that there might be someone inside. In the main, contrary to what a lot of Pro-choice people say, Pro-life people are not out to limit or destroy women’s rights; they just don’t believe that women’s rights trump the universal human right to life. Putting it another way, they don’t think it’s possible for anybody to have a right to choose anything, unless that person is first able to exercise their right to life.

As far as I can see, the discussion isn’t primarily about the rights of the mother. It’s really about two more fundamental things.

• The first is whether human foetuses, embryos, blastocysts, and zygotes are indeed human. Not whether they’re persons, because personhood is obviously a subjective quality, and not whether they can feel pain, as otherwise it’d be okay to kill anybody as long as one first took steps to ensure that they’d not suffer; just whether or not they’re human. 
• The second is whether human life is somehow more special than, say, bovine or algal life. 

I happen to think that the second question goes without saying, which is why I was more bothered by the fact that almost 3,000 human beings were killed in America in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks than I was by 10,000,000 cattle and sheep having been culled in Britain during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Outbreak. Granted, I appreciate that I may feel this way just because I am human, but I strongly suspect that we’re the only animals that can have this discussion.

Certainly, my housemates’ cat seems to have no interest in the topic.


Credit where it's due: to His Grace, for a change
Anyway, in the huge war of words that broke out over the topic, two bloggers struck me as being particularly reasonable. One was the pseudonymous Cranmer, whose blog I usually think is worth reading, but with whom I almost always disagree, often profoundly, and who I think I probably wouldn’t like at all in person. Writing on the topic, he noted how ironic and peculiar it was that all the most vocal and prominent objections to the Dorries-Field proposal were directed at Nadine Dorries, with Frank Field’s involvement being wholly sidelined:

‘But it is to be observed that these proposed amendments to the Health Bill also have the support of Labour’s Frank Field MP. He is backing the change, and explains: “I’m anxious that taxpayers’ money is used so that people can have a choice – we are paying for independent counselling and that’s what should be provided.”

But Messrs Harris, Green and Bryant ignore him, and all aim for the woman. It is a despicable Lib-Lab strategy to attack the easy target, because Frank Field is male and enormously respected on all sides of the House. His Grace asked Chris Bryant last night why he was focusing on the fairer sex, but reply came there none. Their attack is sexist; a reaction against conservative feminism which seeks nothing but the right to education. Shame on them.

All across Europe, there is legislation requiring informed consent, and these countries have significantly lower abortion rates. In the UK, there is no requirement in law for women to be informed about the abortion procedure or the alternatives. If you want evidence of the present ‘conveyer belt’ approach to abortion, read this report in the Telegraph, and then thank God there are people like Nadine Dorries and Frank Field in Parliament with the conviction to confront this systematic state slaughter of our children. Oh, and they're both Anglican, by the way.’

He’s absolutely right, and should be commended for having pointed this out. It’s not even that opponents of the Dorries-Field amendment are engaging in ad hominem attacks. They’re engaging in an ad feminem one.


And then there's Blondpidge
The other blogger who’s done impressive work on this topic has been Caroline Farrow, who unlike Cranmer and like me is a Catholic, and therefore, apparently, incapable of thinking for herself.

Or so you would think to judge from the deluge of abuse she’s been subjected to on Twitter over recent days, with a pack of brutes haranguing her in the presumed misconception that R.C. stands for ‘remote-controlled’. I won’t repeat what’s been said to her, other than that at one stage she seemed to have been engaged in simultaneous debates on whether Jesus actually existed, on whether Jesus’ ideas were more important Jesus himself, on whether Catholic teaching allows Catholics to support abortion, on Ireland’s maternal death rate, and on God killing babies in Africa. The language that’s been used towards her has been -- aside from anatomically problematic -- viciously offensive, to a degree that's prompted at least one person to consider giving up on Twitter altogether.

Why has this happened? Well, Caroline initially wrote a blog post in which she sensibly opined that the proposed amendment was unlikely to change things to any significant degree. Contrary to the rhetoric from the loudest voices in the abortion debate, the amendment does not propose a major shake-up to UK abortion law. It merely proposes that if any person considering an abortion decides they would like counselling while thinking the matter over, then there should be a legal obligation on the counsellor, whoever it might be, to be financially independent of the abortion provider. That’s all. As things stand, with counselling provided by Britain’s major abortion providers – though ultimately funded by the taxpayer – the counsellors are by definition subject to a conflict of interest, in that the abortion providers are only paid for abortions which take place, rather than ones which women choose not to have.

As she straightforwardly put it:

‘Before pro-lifers and pro-choicers get over-excited, a little word to the wise. Sorry to disappoint you all, but nothing has changed. The abortion laws and/or access to abortion is not being altered and neither is the time-limit. Mandatory counselling is not being introduced. All that is being suggested is that if a woman requests counselling prior to an abortion, then the counselling should not be provided by someone with a vested financial interest in the outcome of the counselling, but an independent provider. That.is.all.’

Somewhere along the way, in the aftermath of that, and while watching a decidedly disingenuous interview with Evan Harris, who was launching ad feminem attacks at Nadine Dorries and illogically trying to maintain that absence of evidence is identical to evidence of absence, she tweeted a description of Harris as ‘the smiling face of evil’. This, frankly, was an error, and one for which she subsequently apologised, with Harris eventually accepting her apology. Her point was that she regarded abortion as an objectively evil act – not that those who have abortions or indeed who provide them are themselves evil – and that by seeming to defend abortion in the way he was doing, Harris was in fact acting as an apologist for evil.

There’s a separate debate about Harris was defending as a good thing abortion or access to abortion, and about whether there’s any meaningful distinction between the two positions. That’s for another day.

Anyway, in the aftermath of that ill-judged – if theologically and philosophically precise – tweet, the swarm roused, and online nastiness became the order of the day.


Sometimes it's hard to let egregious error go unchallenged...
And eventually I got involved, intruding with uncharacteristic gallantry into a debate about whether or not Jesus historically existed, with one fellow ridiculing Caroline, saying that, ‘There is no contemporary evidence to suggest JC even existed as a human being, whilst there is lots of evidence to suggest that he was/is nothing more than a fictional character.’

Caroline, who’d previously taken the somewhat shakier approach of contrasting what we know of Jesus Christ with what we know of Julius Caesar, and thoroughly fed up with this nonsense, pointed out that there’s a far better historical case for Jesus’ existence than for that of, say, Carthage’s most famous son.

‘Actually, there is lots of contemporary evidence that Hannibal existed,’ sneered her ignorant gadfly, ironically adding, ‘Your grasp of history seems to be lacking. There are Roman writings at the time about Hannibal. Difficult for archeological evidence seeing as the Romans completely wiped Carthage off of the face of the earth as a warning to other states that may challenge them. Contemporary evidence from the Greek historian Silenus, & also from Sosylus of Lacedaemon who wrote a seven volume history...’

‘Years after his death & that is fragmentary,’ retorted Caroline, correctly. ‘Earliest full account is a patriotic one 200 years later. Now goodbye.’

‘You've read this from forums about trying to prove Jesus was real. It's the same old argument that "people believe in Hannibal despite there not being a vast weight of contemporary evidence, so then why not Jesus?" - Well there are huge differences. Not least that there are no claims that Hannibal was anything more than a mortal man and a great general. Not the son of a god.’


I'd like to teach the pigs to sing...
Now, annoyed at how this fellow was already starting to shift his ground from the actual discussion -- whether Jesus had existed, not whether he was divine – in the face of Caroline showing that she had a better handle on the question of Jesus’ historicity than he did, and disgusted at his swaggeringly erroneous claims about our sources for Hannibal's exploits, I weighed in.

‘Earliest complete accounts are those of Livy and Cornelius Nepos, c200 years after invasion,’ I said. ‘No archaeological evidence of even one camp, siege, or battle in Italy despite fifteen-year occupation. No numismatic evidence either despite his father and brother-in-law having minted coins in Spain.'

‘Wrong,’ said the Ignoramus, ‘As well as the sources mentioned, there are also the contemporary writings of Polybius. However, it is only correct to examine the evidence, & even be sceptical about aspects of it. As any good historian should. This in turn also applies to the argument of the existence of Jesus (either as a man or a son of a god) and let's face it, the evidence is poor to say the least.’

I was a bit reassured that he seemed to be willing to stay with the topic of Jesus’ basic historical existence, so felt it might not be a complete waste of time to carry on, by pointing out the partial nature of our earliest source*, who was rather less a contemporary of Hannibal than, well, Paul was of Jesus. ‘None of the sources you mentioned exist now,’ I pointed out. ‘They've all been lost since Antiquity. Polybius started writing his history in the mid-160s and was still writing it in the mid-140s, and most of it is lost. Only the first five of his 40 books are intact, the rest existing to a greater or lesser degree in fragmentary form. Putting it bluntly, the ONLY intact part of Polybius about Hannibal deals with events prior to 216BC and was written more than fifty years afterwards. And for what it's worth, he's a really good source.’

‘You Iffy [sic] have missed that you're actually proving my point for me. I'm not saying that Hannibal did exist as described,’ the Cretin countered, while nonetheless not disputing Hannibal’s basic historicity, ‘I'm well aware of the murky history & political advantages of creating such a monster for a man such as Cato (whose records were later to be accepted by some as fact). Only that the history of these historical figures is sketchy at best. Especially that of Jesus (back to the crux, finally). The evidence for his so called existence, as either a man or a son of (a) god, both being very poor.’

‘No, not especially that of Jesus,’ I insisted. ‘Evidence of Jesus is better than for most people in Antiquity.’

Well, The conversation got longer and longer, and more and more convoluted, and at times I got very condescending, infuriated as I was by this fellow’s flaunting of historical factoids and flouting of historical reality and the historical method. It wasn’t among my better moments.

‘Did you really just suggest that no credible historian refutes that Jesus (a man) existed?’, he continued, somewhere along the way. ‘Given the whole Hannibal chat that went on...? There are numerous writings which dispute Jesus having existed as a man. There is no contemporary evidence (we've been over this). And even if a man called Jesus did exist & was crucified by Pilot [sic], then there is nothing to suggest he was in any way the man we have come to *accept* as Jesus. It could have merely been Jesus Smith who lived down the other end of the street.’


Back in the sty...
And that was all yesterday. Today, in my folly, I returned to the fray, vainly hoping to make this fellow see sense. I wasn’t trying to maintain that Jesus was God, or that his miracles were real, or that every single detail in the Gospels can be taken as historically accurate. I was just trying to make the case that the basic structural facts of Jesus’ public life are as historically sound as pretty much anything we know about the ancient world.

‘Ok then, so what is this indisputable evidence that JC did exist in ancient history?’ he asked. ‘Seeing as the earliest written works referring to him were written years after his death, & the gospels which do speak of him all have differing accounts of his lineage, birth, life, etc... All written of course with a pretty obvious agenda.’

I thought it best to direct him to this very old blog post of mine, adopted from my old blog. It deliberately keeps miracles, prophecies, and the whole issue of divinity off the table, simply showing why I believe that the historical evidence is very solid that during the reign of Tiberius an itinerant Jewish preacher by the name of Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem under the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

Before my antagonist read it, he wanted to know whether I was a creationist. I had to press him several times before he would explain why he wanted to know this, with him eventually saying that he felt it was important to know how literally I take my religion. This despite the fact that creationism isn’t in any sense doctrinal in Catholicism, and how you can, if you so wish, look back at Augustine more than 1,600 years ago explaining that there’s no need to read the Genesis creation accounts as being historically literal. And there's the fact that even were I a creationist, I’m still not sure what bearing it would have had on the argument.

And, of course, he wanted to know whether I’m religious, or a Christian in any sense. I am, I said. I wasn’t always, and indeed I was once an ardent atheist, but historical training and a phenomenal amount of reading and thinking compelled me to change my mind.


A Casebook Bigot
Having dismissed what I’d written, both on the historicity of Jesus and on the impact of Constantine on Christianity, as biased by my religious views, he sneered at the idea that I was ever other than a crypto-theist. ‘For such a *learned* man,’ he opined, ‘I doubt that you were ever a staunch atheist. One cannot look beyond the sheer ridiculousness of religion, all religions, and the evidence, both historical & scientific against such religions.’

And there you see what is, pretty much, the definition of bigotry: not the belief that you are right, but the belief that there is no conceivable way that you could be wrong, or that views contrary to your own could honestly be held by any sane person equipped with intelligence, integrity, and information. At this point I really should have patted this bigoted oaf on the head and walked away, but instead I basically went nuts and started pulling rank in the pettiest of ways. It really wasn’t a good moment, and I am rather embarrassed about it.

‘The fact remains,’ said the vociferous buffoon, ‘despite you looking to attack me & change the subject, that you believe in the super-natural.’

My belief in God had never been the subject of the debate, and so I pointed out that I had never sought to change the subject, linking to the original posts where I’d intervened, saying that I had only ever been arguing that the basic historical evidence for the existence of Jesus was something that’s as demonstrable as anything in ancient history. If anyone had tried to change the subject, it had been himself.

‘The point being,’ he said, shamelessly ignoring how I’d shown him as being guilty of that very thing of which he’d accused me, ‘the only evidence you have given are the gospels, which I'm sorry but cannot be taken as accurately reliable historical sources. The fact that you state that you are a Catholic, albeit one who picks & chooses the specific parts of his religion in which to believe, shows that despite your self-confessed credentials, your bias shall always lean towards trying to prove in the affirmative.’

‘If you make fantastical claims,’ he added, ‘you'd better have some bloody good proof.’

‘My claim is that a man existed,' I said, thinking that wasn't a particularly fantastical claim. ‘That's all I've been arguing for. Miracles etc are a separate debate.’

And then we were off again, with him saying, ‘And it is in your interests to try & prove the man existed. Again, with the only real evidence you have put forward being the gospels. Those bastardised, plagiarised, contradictionry [sic] gospels...’

It wasn’t long after that that I gave up, and I think the other fellow’s done so too. What’s annoying me most about the discussion at this stage is the complete failure to engage with the main aspects of my blog post on the historicity of Jesus. It was most certainly was not the case, despite my antagonist having said so twice, that the only real evidence I had put forward had been the Gospels.


It's worth applying Occam's Razor to this...
The Gospels do have historical value, and they really weren’t written that long after the Crucifixion; even if they were written around 70 AD, and I think they predate that by five to fifteen years, that’d still mean they were no further removed from the Crucifixion than we are from Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.

More importantly, though, the key structural facts of Jesus’ public life are all referred to in Paul’s letters, the earliest of which was written, in all probability, within sixteen to eighteen years of the Crucifixion. To put that into context, remember the mid-nineties? John Major was Prime Minister, John Bruton was Taoiseach, Bill Clinton was President, Boris Yeltsin was drunk, Toy Story was in the cinema, Brian Cox was playing keyboard in a not particularly good band, and a rash of young Manchester United players were starting to replace the stalwarts of an English team that had failed to qualify for the World Cup. The Pauline letters – not the Gospels -- are the earliest documentary testimony we have to Jesus’ existence. Any attempt to discuss the matter of Jesus’ historicity without engaging with this fact must be recognised as ignorant, foolish, or dishonest.

What’s more, Paul’s letters are addressed to people who are already aware of the basic facts of Jesus’ life, and evidently more besides. Indeed, it’s clear from the letters that lots of people had been aware of these basic facts since at least the mid-thirties, when Paul was persecuting Christians. This introduces the second important set of data that points to Jesus having existed, this being the wide-ranging testimony to the existence of the Church, this Church clearly dating back to the immediate aftermath of the Crucifixion. It’s disingenuous to claim to be engaging with the question of Jesus’ existence if you’re not willing and able to argue a plausible alternative case, allowing for all the evidence, for where the Church came from.

Finally you have the fact of people other than Christians testifying to the existence of the Church during its early history, these including such opponents of Christianity as: Josephus, a Jewish aristocrat and rebel leader who became a historian in Rome; Tacitus, a Roman senator and historian; Suetonius, a Roman imperial official who served as director of the imperial archives and as secretary to the emperor; Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor; Trajan, a Roman emperor; and Celsus, a Greek philosopher who wrote the earliest known polemic against Christianity.

Not one of these seems to have disputed for one moment that Jesus was a Jew who had been crucified in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, and whose followers took to worshipping him as a god. Given how at least some of these would have had access to records of executions enacted in the name of Rome, I think it’s safe to say that had Jesus not existed, it would have been very easy for his existence to have been contested. And yet as far as we can see, that never happened.

Any attempt to argue that Jesus didn't exist has to explain away documents about him written within twenty years of the Crucifixion for an audience that was clearly familiar with his story, the existence of a Christian Church from the mid-thirties onwards under the leadership of people who were willing to die for things they claimed to have witnessed, and the fact that none of the opponents of this Church ever seems to have argued that Jesus had indeed been a real person.

I'm not saying that Jesus was God. I believe that too, of course, but that's a separate debate. I'm just saying, here, that he was Man. Nobody in Antiquity ever seems to have challenged this. It's only modern fools who do that.

__________________________________________________________________
* For the record, we have enough of Polybius' Histories to fill six volumes of the Loeb series of Classical texts. He talks about a lot of stuff -- wars in Greece and a whole series of Roman wars around the Mediterranean. What he says about Hannibal is scattered through the first four volumes of the series. The intact book III, in volume two of the set, takes Hannibal as far as his greatest victory, that being at Cannae. Beyond that, however, the text starts to fall apart, such that whereas volumes one and two of the set contain two full books on the Histories each, volume three contains a full book and three fragmentary books, and volume four -- the Hannibalic content of which takes us as far as Hannibal's defeat at Zama -- contains seven fragmentary books.

Polybius seems to have started writing in the mid-160s BC, about seventeen years after Hannibal's death in obscurity in Bithynia on the shores of the Black Sea. This, curiously enough,  is pretty much exactly the same length of time that transpired between the Crucifixion of Jesus and Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians.

Some Thoughts on Raphoe

While I'm generally averse to conspiracy theories, and am usually reluctant to ascribe to malice that which is more easily explained by incompetence, there are times when I think the mainstream media's coverage of child abuse -- with particular reference to the Church in Ireland -- is so wrong-headed that it might as well be conducted through malice as through ignorance and incompetence. The effects could hardly be worse.

The constant focus on clerical abuse perpetuates a double injustice.

The obvious injustice is against the Church and ordinary Catholics, with lies, half-truths, and prejudice being the norm, and with facts being ignored; while this is blatantly unfair, there is, however, a level at which Catholics should expect this, with the Church being expected to continue the sufferings Christ experienced on the Cross.

The less obvious injustice, however, and one which should worry even even those ill-disposed towards the Church and not remotely bothered by a sense of fairness, is that against the many hundreds of thousands of Irish people who were abused in the past by people who weren't clergy, and the doubtless many many thousands of Irish children who are being abused today. Our constant focus on clerical abuse distracts people from the fact that the 2002 SAVI Study showed that for every victim of clerical abuse in Ireland, there were sixty other victims of child sexual abuse. We hardly ever talk about them. We make people think the problem is out there. It's not. The real danger is far closer.

Take a look at this piece in today's Guardian. In principle it's about clerical and non-clerical abuse, but it's written in such a way as to make non-clerical abuse seem an aspect of clerical abuse.

The springboard for the article is the impending publication of the Irish Church's own child-protection agency's audit of Raphoe Diocese. The purpose of the audit is to examine to what extent the Diocese is complying with the Church's own child-protection policies and procedures. It is, essentially, the same sort of internal investigation as that which led to the removal of John Magee as bishop of Cloyne in 2009.

You'd not think that, though, would you, to read the opening paragraphs of the Guardian article.

'County Donegal in Ireland is about to have its bucolic image shattered by a report into how paedophiles, both clergy and laity, abused children for decades.

An investigation into clerical sex abuse in the Catholic diocese of Raphoe in County Donegal is about to report its findings, which are expected to be damning. '

Leaving aside how Martin Ridge's 2008 book Breaking the Silence rendered impossible the maintenance of idlyllic delusions about Raphoe, the audit isn't an investigation into clerical sex abuse; it's an investigation into how the Diocese has over recent years dealt with allegations of abuse, whether proven or otherwise. These are not the same thing.

The bulk of the story, then, concerns a gentleman who says was abused by an man in the neighbourhood when he was a child between 1965 and 1972. The article introduces this as follows:

'Speaking for the first time about his abuse as a child and the subsequent cover-up, John O'Donnell revealed that he had been abused since he was nine by a lay member of a local church choir.'

The article says the abuse took place in the man's home and the shop he ran; it gives no reason to believe that this alleged abuse was in any way connected with the fact that the abuser sang in the church choir. That fact may well have been revelant to the alleged abuse, but at least based on the evidence presented, his role in the Church seems to have been wholly incidental to what's alleged to have happened.

What of the cover-up? Well, it seems Mr O'Donnell first approached the Guards about this in 1973, when he was sixteen, and that the Guard he spoke to didn't believe him:

'A local guard was outraged that I was naming such a fine upstanding member of the community as a child rapist. The officer slapped me on the face and told me to get out. He said to me that I was adopted and not worth anything. From that day on I never fully trusted a member of the Garda Síochána.'

Now, I'm not saying for a moment that if this happened it wasn't reprehensible, but if anything it sounds more like scandalised disbelief rather than a determined cover-up.

On the story goes, to say how after the various clerical abuse stories that had broken through the 1990s, Mr O'Donnell tried to raise the issue again, with the Guards tackling it this time and questioning the man. He says that in 2005 he approached the Parish Priest as well, because the man was still singing in the choir and thereby working with young people, but that the priest refused to discuss the matter with him. This may well have been not ideal, pastorally speaking, and there's a very high chance that this was contrary to the Irish Church's published child-protection policies, but it's hardly a cover-up: the matter was already in the hands of the Guards, after all.

The article doesn't say what the upshot of the Garda investigation O'Donnell's allegations was; it does say the alleged abuser has since died, but it's unclear whether his death had precluded a prosecution. Certainly there's no suggestion that the alleged abuser was ever found guilty of the alleged abuse; the fact that he's not named is telling.

He may well have been guilty, but that's a separate issue. On the issue of Garda collusion, the article reports:

'Two years ago the Murphy report into widespread clerical abuse of children in Dublin, Ireland's largest Catholic diocese, found that senior Garda officers colluded with four archbishops and top clerics in covering up the sex crimes of priests on a massive scale in the city.'

Quite bluntly, this simply isn't true. The Murphy Report said no such thing. 

One of the most astonishing features of the Murphy Report is how clearly it demonstrates the ingrained clericalism of Irish society in the 1970s and 1980s. Where the Murphy Report criticises the Guards, and it does so on  a few occasions occasions, it generally does so either for a haphazard approach to investigations of for what seems to have been a sincere -- if deeply and disastrously misguided -- conviction that complaints against priests were somehow outside their remit.

With the possible exception of Bishop Kavanagh and Chief Superintendent O'Connor's dealings in connection with how Bill Carney was tried in 1983, the Report in no way suggests that there was any collusion between high level police or clerics with the intention of covering up abuse: on those occasions when Gardaí passed on complaints to clergy, rather than doing their job and dealing with it themselves, it seems to have been in the genuine belief that the Church would deal with the matter.

As we know, it regularly failed to do so, but that's another story.

I'm not looking forward to the audit of Raphoe coming out, but I don't think we need to worry about the Diocese failing to publish stuff that'll make it look bad. Ian Elliot's done a fine job as head of the Church's National Board for Child Protection, and it was his clashes with Magee and O'Callaghan in Cloyne that led to Magee being removed from position there. I think we can be pretty confident that if there should be any attempt in Raphoe to block Elliot's findings we'll hear about it very quickly.  In the meantime, I don't see that there's anything to gain by publicising rumours or what we imagine the audit might cover.

We'll find out soon enough.