Visiting the Front Line

I'd never watched Pat Kenny's show Frontline until this evening, catching up on last night's programme after hearing from a couple of friends that it was definitely worth watching. The topic was mandatory reporting of abuse, and in large part it focused on the question of how such legislation could relate to the seal of Confession. I'm glad I was advised to watch it, as I was pleasantly surprised by how even-handed it was and by how much sense was talked in it.

Curiously, Frances Fitzgerald kept returning to Alan Shatter's recent refrain, that being that the whole issue of Confession is a side issue in this debate, something that's hardly relevant to the discussion. Early on she said:

'What's interesting, Pat, is that if you look at legislation that's been passed already, if you take the Offences Against the State -- for example -- legislation, you have the same requirement on everybody. Nobody's raised the issue of Confession in relation to that. If you look at the recent Criminal Justice legislation, the same applies, that if you have information -- as in Minister Shatter's bill which he will be introducing -- if you have information which is relevant to an offence as it's outline in the legislation, and you don't tell the Gardaí about it, then you are liable under the legislation. That applies in quite a number of pieces of legislation.'

This is all true as far as it goes: a requirement to report knowledge of crimes is mandatory, unless one has 'reasonable excuse' for doing otherwise, in at least three pieces of legislation, these being the Criminal Law Act 1997, the Offences Against the State Act 1998, and the Criminal Justice Act 2011. As I said about six weeks back, if the seal of Confession is threatened by Irish law, it's been threatened for a long time.

To be fair, Ministers, you started this

The problem with the line currently being taken by Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald, which basically consists of smiling and accusing Catholics of reacting in a hysterical way to something that's never really been suggested, is that the integrity of the Seal was explicitly threatened on the day they announced their planned legislation. The Irish Times reported the following about Minister Shatter on the very day that the Cloyne Report was released:

'The Minister said that there would be no "legal grey areas" when it came to the implementation of this legislation, adding that the laws would also apply to the likes of doctors and priests, even in the case of the latter where this information is revealed in the confessional.'

There's no trace of such a claim in his official statement of that day, so I can only assume that he made this comment in response to a question, along with his saying that victims of abuse would be safeguarded so that they could not be prosecuted under the legislation. Wouldn't things have been simpler if the Minister had deflected any questions then about Confession by saying that that was a bogus issue, and had no real bearing on the situation? No, he went for the cheap anti-Catholic soundbite.

Since then, of course, we've had the Taoiseach blustering about how 'the law of the land should not be stopped by a collar or a crozier,' standing up in the Dáil and casting all manner of aspersions on the Vatican, and then getting huffy with the rest of the Government when the Vatican refuted the Government's charges. Is it any wonder that people don't trust the Government on this?

Disingenuous Posturing

In a manner staggering for its outright hypocrisy, the whole debate has been plagued by mock outrage on the part of the Government and media.

They've responded with fury -- as though this was news to them -- to the fact that the Vatican responded with caution in 1997 to the Irish Church's child-protection guidelines, despite the fact that the letter that warned the Irish bishops had been quoted from in the 2009 Dublin Report (7.13), with nobody getting angry about it then.

They've responded with fury -- again, as though this were a new development -- to the Vatican's 1997 insistence that the Church's child protection guidelines should be in harmony with canon law, despite the fact that that very injunction was quoted in the 2009 Dublin Report (7.13) and the principle was clearly stated more than once in the 1996 Framework Document itself!

They've responded with fury -- yet again, as though they had been unaware of this -- to the reservations the Vatican expressed in 1997 about mandatory reporting, despite these reservations having been quoted in the 2009 Dublin Report (7.13) and having been shared by the Government of the day, which itself chose in 1997 not to legislate to introduce mandatory reporting. That Government, as we all know, included several members of the current cabinet.

They've also thrown around a lot of baseless allegations, something which aside from being immoral strikes me as very unwise, especially given that they're coming from a small bankrupt country with no hard power and with far fewer  friends than it used to have.

Trying to have it both ways

A huge part of the problem now is that the Government is talking out both sides of its mouth in an attempt to look tough while knowing that if it looks barrel-chested that's due not so much to muscle as to hot air. On the one hand, having postured about there being no exceptions, not even in the case of confession, the Government's now trying to convince people that even though Confession won't be explicitly mentioned in the coming legislation, it will be covered by it. This seems to be delighting opponents of the Church in Ireland, and worrying its defenders.

The reality's pretty simple. 

Confession can't be mentioned in the legislation, as any such law almost certainly wouldn't withstand a Constitutional challenge. This is why it won't be singled out, and we'll have a vague statement to the effect that where an individual has material information that would assist the gardaí in the investigation of a given sexual crime, that they provide that information to the Gardaí, unless there is an undefined 'reasonable excuse' not to do so.

That means the definition of 'reasonable excuse' will be in the hands of the courts. It makes no sense to claim that the seal of Confession is in any way threatened by this. In interpreting the law, the courts will rule based on what the law says, not what its framers claim it says. The framers of laws can say what they like, but their intentions won't be factored into any subsequent legal decisions. Given the centrality of the sacraments to Catholicism, the Constitutional protection of religion, the existing common law protection of priest-penitent privilege, and the need for law to be consistent, there's no way that a court would ever convict a priest for failing to report information received while hearing Confession.

Bluffers

I find it all very depressing, to be honest with you.

I've become increasingly convinced that the Irish Government isn't in any way serious about tackling abuse in Ireland. Part of me doesn't blame it. A serious State-led attack on the problem would require a functioning HSE and an army of social workers and therapists,  and the reality is that the Government can't afford them. The country's broke. Instead, then, the Government's falling back on demagoguery and sabre-rattling.

Faced with the reality of abuse in the Irish Church, the Taoiseach saw fit to blame Irish problems on people almost 1200 miles away. In his speech on Cloyne he never once mentioned the key facts that the Cloyne Report revealed: that two Irish clergy had failed to apply Irish Church guidelines but had broken no laws, and that in failing to apply those guidelines they had potentially endangered children but that no children had been harmed because of them.

For all their talk of tackling abuse, Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald keep banging on about abuse in organisations -- most especially the Church -- despite the fact that hardly any abuse takes place in organisations, with the overwhelming majority of it taking place in the family circle, in and around the home. Talk of the Church is particularly specious, as it's like grumbling about a tree when you're standing in a forest. Even when clerical abuse was at it's worst, for every child who was abused by a priest in Ireland, fifty-nine were abused by other people; nowadays, the difference would be even more stark. Abuse in Ireland is above all a family matter. I've yet to hear one concrete proposal for dealing with this.

Talk of a 'Sarah's Law' for sex offenders is nonsense, given how few abusers have ever been convicted compared to how many haven't. Remember what the 2002 SAVI Study indicated, that a decade ago, only one abuse survivor in two hundred had seen their abusers found or plead guilty in court. In other words, for every sex offender labelled as such by a Sarah's Law, 199 others will walk free.

Cheering on the Government when it shouts about the Church doesn't help; the reality is that if you're attacking the Church, you're not attacking the problem. I'm tired of the Government trying to make political hay from children having been abused. We have serious problems. We need serious solutions.

A Surprise in the Framework Document

It struck me this morning that, to my shame, and despite all I've written about the Cloyne Report, I'd not read the Church's Framework Document which effectively underlies the report, which says (C1.15):

'The Commission’s main task was to consider whether the response of the Church and State authorities to complaints and allegations of clerical child sexual abuse was “adequate or appropriate” and to establish the response to suspicions and concerns about clerical child sexual abuse. In assessing how the diocesan and other Church authorities dealt with complaints, the Commission has judged them by the standards set in their own documents – the Framework Document and Our Children, Our Church. The Framework Document was issued in 1996. Our Children, Our Church was issued in 2005. It did not significantly change the procedures set out in the Framework Document, in particular, there was no significant change in respect of reporting to the State authorities'

I'd taken the Commission at its word whenever it referred to the Framework Document, but having just read the guidelines, I'm really not sure I should have been doing that. It seems that the Commission believed the  guidelines ought to have been applied not in the strictest possible way, but in the crudest and most thoughtless possible way. Take, for example, the case of Father Moray, about whom a complaint was entered in 1997, six years after he had died. The Report says (13.10):

'Monsignor O’Callaghan told the Commission that the practice of notifying the Gardaí of complaints involving deceased priests did not exist until, at the initiative of the Child Protection Office of the Irish Bishops’ Conference in May 2003, a meeting was sought with the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Investigating Unit (see Chapter 5) to ascertain its recommendations on good practice. The Commission does not accept that the practice did not exist prior to 2003. It was standard practice in the Archdiocese of Dublin from 1996. The Framework Document requires that all complaints be reported to the Gardaí – it does not specify different arrangements for deceased priests.'

This, frankly, is absurd. I don't dispute for a moment that O'Callaghan had a low opinion of the Framework Document and made no attempt to implement its guidelines, but in this connection with this the Commission's criticisms strike me as profoundly unfair.


On first viewing Cloyne through the Framework Document
Section 2.2.1 of the Framework Document seems very clear:

'In all instances where it is known or suspected that a child has been, or is being, sexually abused by a priest or religious the matter should be reported to the civil authorities. Where the suspicion or knowledge results from the complaint of an adult of abuse during his or her childhood, this should also be reported to the civil authorities.'

This is  in line with the third of the eight guiding principles outlined in the Framework Document for the handling of complaints of abuse, or of situations where it was suspected that a child had been abused. In connection with this, the Cloyne Report says (C1.22):

'The greatest failure by the Diocese of Cloyne was its failure to report all complaints to the Gardaí. Between 1996 and 2005, there were 15 complaints which very clearly should have been reported by the diocese to the Gardaí. This figure of 15 does not include concerns and does not include cases where the allegations were already known to the Gardaí (although some of these also ought to have been reported). Of these 15, nine were not reported.'

The thing is, though, that this really isn't that simple. For starters, I'm not sure which the fifteen complaints are that should have been reported. There were complaints made about nineteen different clerics, so does the Commission mean that the Diocese should have reported the complaints made about fifteen of these to the Gardaí? Alternatively, the Report says the Commission is aware of some 40 people who may have been affected by abuse in Cloyne; is it saying that the Diocese ought to have reported complaints from fifteen people, but not from others?

I'm not being picky. I started trying to work this out, got confused and tired, and then decided I'd better get back to my own work. At most I can see that there were twenty-five or so complaints, but without spending all night on it, I'm not sure which are duplicates or which fall within the remit of the investigation. It's very hard to wade through the report. Some kind of a table would help enormously.


But looking more closely...
Anyway, without getting bogged down in the detail, it's clear that several times the Document states, in one way or another, that:

'The safety and welfare of children should be the first and paramount consideration following an allegation of child sexual abuse.' 

This, I hope we'd all agree, is absolutely correct: the main priority should always be the protection of children. Indeed the recommendations on how to handle complaints of abuse are expressly stated at 2.2.6 as having been made in light of how the protection of children must be the primary consideration in these matters.

There are, however, other factors the Document says should be considered, such as the emotional and spiritual well-being of abuse victims and their families, and the basic rights under natural justice of accused priests. It's a fundamental principle of natural justice that everybody should be allowed to defend themselves against charges.

The Framework Document was never envisaged as something to be implemented in a uniform way across all of Ireland's dioceses and orders. In particular, section 3.4 recognises that 'the uniqueness of each complaint demands that judgement and discretion should be carefully exercised in the implementation of each phase of the protocol'. It's crucial to understand this, especially in connection with Murphy's assumption that the practice of Dublin ought automatically to have been the practice of Cloyne.


What are the protocols when children aren't in danger?
Now, without denying the fact that there were certainly some cases which most definitely ought to have been brought to the Gardaí, I think there were quite a few cases dealt with in the Cloyne Report where O'Callaghan's failure to report is, at least, defensible.  I'm not saying that I wouldn't have reported them to the Gardaí -- as I can imagine there being pastoral arguments for doing so -- or that Monsignors Stenson and Dolan in Dublin wouldn't have done so, but I can at least see why O'Callaghan didn't.

Father Moray had been six years dead when a compaint was entered about him in 1997 (C13), Father Rion had been twenty-nine years dead when a complaint was entered about him in 2005 (C20), and Father Kelven had been fourteen years dead when a complaint was entered about him in 2002 (C24); it's inconceivable that there were any child protection issues where these dead priests were concerned, and thus there would have been no great need to report them to the guards.

On the other hand, the principles of natural justice would have meant that these men were entitled to be able to defend themselves and protect their good name; being dead, they could hardly do that. Formally reporting them for crimes which they might never have committed and which could never be tested in court might well have struck Denis O'Callaghan as unfair attacks on people who could not defend themselves.*

A similar principle was surely in play in the case of the unknown priest who was complained of in 2003 by a man in a nursing home (C19); given the probability that the priest was long dead, or was, if not long dead, at least in his nineties, there can hardly have been any child protection concerns.

Likewise, one might wonder whether the cases of Father Darian, who died in 1997 after a complaint in 1996 (C11) or Father Tarin, who died in 2003 after a complaint in 2002 (C16) were really instances where the safety of children was at stake, given how both priests were old, retired, and basically at death's door when the complaints were made. It doesn't seem that either of us them could credibly have defended themselves, and it's clear that given their circumstances the Gardaí would certainly not have pressed charges. It's hard to see what would have been achieved in relation with the primary purpose of the Framework Document had Denis O'Callaghan reported these matters to the authorities.


In short
Again, I'm not saying that Denis O'Callaghan handled things well, or that it might not have been pastorally useful for him to have reported unprovable allegations to the Gardaí. It's obvious that he handled things terribly, through a combination of clericalism, arrogance, and misguided compassion. All I am saying is that some of the criticism in the Cloyne Report is, I think, misplaced.

And, as I've said before, there's no suggestion in the Cloyne Report that he ever broke the law, or that any child was ever harmed owing to anything he did or failed to do.

There's more than one surprise in the Framework Document. I'll come back to this.


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* Yes, I know. How ironic. I'm not saying I agree. I'm just saying I think this is plausible.

Ending Violence: A Deluded Fantasy

I realise that given the day that's in it it's probably obligatory to say what I was doing when I first heard of the 9/11 attacks ten years ago. Well, if you're interested, I was in a pub.

I wasn't drinking, mind; I was working, serving drinks and soup and sandwiches to a crowd who'd come in from a funeral. Edel, the loungegirl who was working with me, had asked if she could turn on the telly, down at the far end of the counter where she was washing glasses and crockery, and I'd said no. I could hear customers murmuring and muttering about plane crashes, but I carried on with my work.

My phone rang, to my surprise, as I never had the phone on during work. I have no idea why I'd forgotten to turn it off. It was Heinrich, a German friend of mine, calling from Greece, where he was living at the time.

-- Have you heard the news?

-- No, I said, did a plane crash or something? I've heard some of the customers talking...

-- Worse than that.

-- Have two planes crashed?

-- Two plans have crashed into the World Trade Centre.

-- Do they think it's terrorism?

-- Well, it's hardly an accident.

And after a minute or more of chatting I hung up, and turned around.

-- Edel, I called. Turn the telly on.

And the towers fell.

It's weird to think that for so many people I know and love, this must have been the defining world moment of their adolescence and early adulthood. I remember the Hungarians allowing people to cross the Iron Curtain into the West, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela, and the prospect of the world getting better.

A History of Violence

Of course, there are people out there who still think the world is getting better. I read an absurd article by Stephen Pinker this evening, entitled 'A History of Violence', in which he argues that:

'Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.'

The whole argument is historically ignorant, reliant on cavalier speculation and colossal assumptions, devoid of any meaningful evidence whatsoever and taking no account of so much that we do know. It is, frankly, a heroic demonstration of why for some people it is best to stick to the knitting. Or maybe to learn to knit.

Words from the Wise

I came across the article after seeing it linked to, with contempt, on the Twitter feed of one Benjamin Gray, a barrister who'd previously studied war studies. Describing it as the 'biggest pile of nonsense I've read in a long time', Benjamin went on to challenge Pinker's claims in a serious of thirteen points and a closing observation.

1. Violence is cyclical, shifting between cataclysmic conflicts and minor imperial tussles.
2. Violence has obviously declined since 1945 as that was the most lethal war in history.
3. Criminal punishments have become less "sadistic" as we've been able to replace them with graded forms of imprisonment and state justice.
4. Interstate warfare has declined in a significant part because the great powers have military power so great it can obliterate everyone.
5. Pinker's writing on Biblical massacres betrays his prejudices. Most of them didn't happen but were later literary inventions written in times of immense persecution (if the Bible were written in Auschwitz you can bet it would prescribe the genocide of Germans).
6. Modernity, starting with the French Revolution, unleashed the most violent, cataclysmic and destructive wars mankind has ever seen; the wars of the medieval and classical eras were much less bloody.
7. The Church and Christian military ethics were significant restraining factors in continental warfare (if not the Crusades).
8. Soldiers today are considerably more violent than in earlier eras. In WWII around 40% of infantrymen would shoot to hit people, now it's around 90%.
9. In every era some academic twit proclaims the decline of violence, and they are always proved wrong.
10. If it happens that this trend continues, it will only be because we are now so well-armed that we can extinguish ourselves
11. We may not burn cats, but we hunt foxes, gore bulls, and fight cocks, dogs etc.
12. Some of the main reasons fewer people die in war is because we have better armour, we fight at longer ranges and and medicine can now save people who only 20 years ago would have been T4s.
13. While we may not torture so many people, we are still horrifically exploitative of the third world. We just inflict our suffering through indifference, consumerism and selfishness.

At any rate, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with MidEast in turmoil, upcoming Palestine vote, borderline-nuclear Iran w/ regional ambitions, eurozone crisis, nuclear North Korea, nuclear Pakistan sliding to civil war, global economic downturn and American decline I find the idea that we are in a uniquely non-violent era a massively naïve hostage to fortune.

While I'd quibble with some of these, the general thrust of the analysis is absolutely spot-on. Pinker is talking complete gibberish, and it doesn't take a genius to work out where and why he's wrong. 

A Fundamental Ignorance of the Facts

He starts with a description of the torturing of cats in sixteenth-century France, says we'd never do this now, and argues that this is just one example of what he calls 'the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga', this being the decline of violence. Aside from the fact that I don't think there's been any such trend, I think this is merely an example of a heightened respect for animals, at least in the West. If that's seriously to be taken as evidence that we're less violent than we were, I think it needs to be held in sharp contrast with our increased willingness to kill humans who've not yet been born.

A false distinction? I don't think so. I'm not sure there's any sense in saying -- as we would surely do -- that it was violent of, say, the ancient Spartans to expose babies who looked frail or deformed, or of the wealthy Carthaginians to kill their babies -- assuming they really did so -- in the belief that doing so would make their lives better, but that it's not violent of us to kill our babies before they can see daylight, just because they're weak or inconvenient or girls. At the very least we must surely at least recognise that we'd need to agree on a definition of 'violence' before engaging seriously in this discussion. Me, I think 'deliberately killing other human beings' surely falls into any reasonable definition of such.

Admitting that it may seem crazy to claim that violence has been declining, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq and the century -- not shortly after the century, Stephen -- of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, Pinker insists that these are the facts:

'Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.'

This, frankly, is preposterous, flaunting an ignorance of both recent and less-than-recent history. 

Was human sacrifice to appease superstition ever an unexceptional feature of life in human history? Look at what we know of European history: the Greeks didn't do it at all, the Romans seem to have done it just a couple of times, and it never happened in the Christian era; yes, it seems the Vikings and others did do it, but we simply don't have the data to say how often they did so. There's not a lot of archaeological evidence -- certainly not enough to make any statistical claims -- and what we know about them seems to have been written either long later or by their enemies. It's crucial to understand that: it's a common trope of historical and anthropological writing to accuse one's enemies of human sacrifice, cannibalism, incest, and so forth.

As for the rest, and leaving aside the absurdity of trying to maintain that the Second World War was an eternity ago, rather than, in general historical terms, yesterday, it strikes me as staggering that claims such as these could be made less than a decade after the end of the Great African War and within twenty years of the Rwandan Genocide and the Bosnian War.

Particular obscene is Pinker's claim that the notion of rape as one of the spoils of war is something that's rare to nonexistent in the West and infrequent and concealed elsewhere: try telling that to the two million or so German victims of the Red Army, who'd replied to the Nazi atrocities in a manner wholly condoned by Stalin;  try telling that to the 500 or so girls raped each week by the American forces liberating France and occupying Germany; try telling that to those who claim that rape was all too often, in effect, standard operating procedure among GI's in Vietnam; try telling that to the victims of the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia.

And that's just the West, where Pinker seems to think rape is allegedly rare or non-existent in wartime, and where mass rape was one of the signature features of the biggest western war since the Second World War; it's not even getting into the use of rape as a weapon in the Great African War, something that was neither infrequent nor concealed.

The Thirty Years' War happened in the Age of Reason? Really?

Pinker's thesis is that the Rousseauist fantasy of the noble savage is wrong, not because it blinds itself to the reality of human nature, but because it gets things the wrong way round:

'But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.'

He gives a nod to the problems in our evidence, admitting that we simply have no evidence at all for huge chunks of human history and across vast expanses of the planet, but it's a shockingly inadequate nod and one that doesn't stop him maintaining that a picture can be discerned, with a decline of violence being visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years, the leading edge in this having been in England and the Netherlands, and with the tipping point having been the onset of the so-called 'Age of Reason' in the early seventeenth century.

This, as Benjamin Gray had pointed out, is balderdash, and not least because nobody in their right mind defines the 'Age of Reason' as beginning in the early seventeenth century. Indeed, the Enlightenment basically happened in reaction to the phenomenal levels of bloodshed during the first half of the seventeenth century, epitomised by the Thirty Years War and Cromwell's massacres in Ireland. 

The carnage of the first half of the seventeenth century, it needs to be stressed, was highly unusual. European warfare during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had been constrained by all manner of limitations, both those imposed by the Catholic Church through Just War theory and the Peace of God and Truce of God movements, and those imposed by economic and social realities. The so-called wars of religion, epitomised by the Thirty Years War, represented a vast escalation of slaughter, fuelled by new economic models and the breakdown of the Christian consensus, and were precisely what Pinker should recognise as a 'spike of horrific bloodletting'. 

If we flatten out the spike, as Pinker holds that we should, the general pattern of European warfare consists of several centuries of relatively low levels of military bloodshed up to the late eighteenth century, when everything changes as the French Revolution heralds the intertwined era of mass armies and mass democracy, this being amplified by the mechanisation of warfare, as railways and machine guns made carnage possible on a level hitherto unimaginable, and as whole economies were enlisted into war efforts in such a way that civilians became legitimate targets in a way they never would have been before.

And such a naive handling of evidence...

Insofar as Pinker wants to talk of warfare before his new age of peace, he throws science and basic statistical principles out the window by talking of how the proportion of prehistoric skeletons we have showing evidence of trauma caused by violence is such as to suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. Leaving aside the question of how there are hardly enough such skeletons to be deemed statistically representative, he ignores the fact that members of warrior elites and those who die in battle are often buried in special ways, such that their graves are more easily discovered than the graves of those who died less violently, thus massively skewing the sample.

Onward then he cruises to claim that:

'It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.'

Well, this is obviously true, because all tribes everywhere are and have always been the same, because no tribal societies have ever been stratified so as to restrict combat to warrior elites, because tribal societies have never tried to limit casualties through champion combat or symbolic warfare. Ridiculous. Just as an example, here's John Keegan, for instance, talking in his A History of Warfare of how the Zulus fought before Shaka and the lads changed everything:

'Battles tended to be ritualised, conducted under the gaze of old and young, begun with an exchange of insults and finished when casualties were inflicted. There were natural as well as customary limitations on the level of violence: because metals were scarce, weapons were made of fire-hardened wood, thrown rather than used hand-to-hand; and should a warrior happen to kill an opponent, he was obliged at once to leave the field and undergo purification, since the spirit of his victim would certainly otherwise bring fatal illness to him and his family,'

I'm not saying tribal warfare was always like this, just that to describe it as always like anything is historically naive to a dazzling degree. But if that weren't bad enough, on Pinker goes to say this:

'Political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people's conception of violence in early civilizations—namely, those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God, slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one's parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.'

It's hard to decide where to start with this, save to point out that Benjamin Gray hits the nail on the head in saying that Pinker betrays his prejudices here. The celebrations of genocide, so damned by the likes of Steven Pinker, are clearly literary creations written centuries after the events they describe supposedly happened. And no, this doesn't mean I'm denying Biblical inspiration in any sense -- I'm just pointing out that the Bible is a library, rather than a book, and that individual books represent distinct literary genres.

Until the Greek invention of history as a discipline, the ancients seem to have felt free to emboider, embellish, and even fabricate their histories in order to make what they regarded as deeper truths.* That was the nature of the genre. Indeed, this tendency never quite went away, even after Herodotus changed the game and Thucydides changed the rules. Hellenistic, Roman, and especially medieval writers all had a tendency to treat numbers, for instance, in a rather symbolic way. Pinker shows no awareness of this fact, and treats Biblical claims of massacres as though they're historically accurate accounts of historical events. The fact that nobody's found corroborative evidence for those events, and there seems to be no evidence of massacres inspired by the Biblical 'celebrations of violence' should be a clue that the ancient Hebrews weren't particularly violent at all.

There's something deeply disingenuous about Pinker's admission that the Hebrews, who he clearly regards as deeply violent, were 'no more murderous than other tribes'; he compares them with the Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, as well as with the Chinese, none of which could ever be described accurately as 'tribes'. Talk of the early histories of the Muslims seems particularly misplaced, given how long after the Muslim wars of conquest they were written, such that the evidence as we have it was written in a relatively peaceful era, romanticising the 'heroic' deeds of their ancestors.

So what is his point?

The subtext of the whole article is sharply revealed by this paragraph: people used to be savage and religious, but then along came the Age of Reason, and violence went into a sharp decline with the English and the Dutch leading the way. 

If anything, of course, the opposite seems to have been the case. The French Revolution was the child of the Age of Reason; it fetishised Reason, setting it up on one throne and Madame Guillotine on another as it unleashed an era of mass armies that ravaged the world until the middle of the twentieth century, when a war people claimed would end all wars was succeeded by the greatest slaughter mankind had ever seen, this being unleashed by those who that maintained that 'God is dead' and those who held among other things that it was necessary to work to abolish the opiate of the masses they believed religion to be.

Have things been quieter since the Second World War? In a sense, yes, but that's the natural of statistical outliers. They're the kind of spikes that Pinker thinks we should smooth out. Things aren't going to be quite as bad as that again until the nukes start flying and our mutual destruction is assured. Please God, that'll be a long way off.

In the meantime, we conduct our wars from afar, we kill our enemies from afar, we engage in slavery from afar, and we kill our children before we can look at them or they can look at us.

We haven't got more kind. We've just got more squeamish.

_________________________________________________________________________

* As indeed do some moderns, unfortunately.

Update: Sadly, there have been no shortage of people lauding Pinker's work, though I'm having trouble finding many with any historical training who've done so. In a way, this is hardly surprising, since it's clear that Pinker's historical research on this has been extraordinarily shallow. A book as large as this, with a thesis as comprehensive as this, is the kind of book that really only happens as a the fruit of decades of historical work, rather than, well, a year or so.

Just as sad, but fully understandable, is the fact that many would-be critics simply don't want to waste time writing about the book, or even reading it. It's clear from the points Pinker makes in his articles summarising and flogging the book that his methodology is as risible as his knowledge is shallow.

Of those who've challenged Pinker's thesis on the basis of his articles, one on Crooked Timber by Chris Bertram taking issue with Pinker's methodology raises a crucial point. It's beyond ludicrous for Pinker to contrast the roughly 1300-year-long “Middle East slave trade” with the six-year-long “Second World War” on a "scale of evil", with the former "event" being classed as worse than the latter. It shouldn't take a serious statistical thinker to see that Pinker's not comparing like with like here.

Of those who have grappled with this book and then written about it, it's worth reading John Gray, David Bentley Hart, and Ben Laws.

An Uncharacteristically Gentle Vincent Brown...

It's a weird feeling, being referred to in the Irish Times and not being able to tell people because it's as 'Thirsty Gargoyle', rather than my actual name. Not an unpleasant one, just a weird one -- last time I didn't have this problem! It's nice to be cited too in connection with one of my favourite Stewart Lee routines, embedded as my quote from it was in the middle of my long Q&A post on Cloyne.

So, there was something about Thursday's Tonight with Vincent Brown that's niggled at me since yesterday, so I watched it again this morning. I've finally figured out what it was.

You'll remember how yesterday I pointed out how flimsy Alan Shatter's explanation of the Taoiseach's most notorious allegation about the Vatican was; well, it turns out that its absurdity was demonstrated later in the programme.

As we've already seen, the basic problem with the plausibility of Shatter's explanation is that it's fundamentally at odds with that ventured by the office of the Taoiseach in July; back then it was said that the Taoiseach hadn't had any particular incident in mind and was speaking of a cumulative effect, whereas now it's maintained that he did have, above all, one very particular incident in mind.

Without seeing the full unadulterated texts of the letter sent in 2009 to the Nunciature by the Murphy Commission and the Nunciature's reply, it's wrong to insist -- as Minister Shatter does -- that the Commission wrote to the Nunciature as an expression of the Vatican, rather than as an entity in its own right, or that it sought all documents or merely those it wouldn't be getting from the Diocese. In fact, section 2.11 of the Cloyne Report at least suggests that the Commission dealt with the Nunciature as a discreet entity, rather than as an arm of Rome, and makes it very clear that the Nunciature expected the Diocese to co-operate fully with the Commission, as indeed it did.

Why did the bishops claim that the Framework Document was official policy?

Amidst all the fog and confusion, Marie Collins raised a very good question, and one which I think Vincent Twomey failed to address adequately. He tried, but in fairness to him, it's hard to correct Mrs Collins' misconceptions or even answer them properly without coming across as someone who cares more about ideas than about people. Somehow accuracy comes across as cold, just as following procedures can come across as unsympathetic. Given that Marie Collins is obviously a very decent person who has in the past suffered terribly through the actions of Irish clergy, the danger is you wind up looking heartless, even when you're nothing of the sort. Marie Collins' question was as follows:

'Why then did the bishops lie to us for ten years, and tell us that that framework document was set in stone, it would be implemented in every diocese, that they were implementing mandatory reporting, and bragged about the fact that their guidelines -- their policies -- were stronger than the civil law, when in fact they didn't even consider it an official document? And the Vatican says, in its response, that the letter didn't affect anything, that the Government hasn't proved that it affected anything. And I'd like to quote something from the Murphy Report that the Government commissioned, and it's Monsignor Dolan who was a civil lawyer and administrator of the Dublin Diocese, and he told the Commission:

"Monsignor Dolan went on to say that understanding behind the Framework Document, was that each diocese or religious institute would enact its own particular protocol for dealing with complaints," this was after it was published. He said, "This in fact never took place because of the response of Rome to the Framework Document."

Because of the letter! Now, that is concrete proof that that letter did have an effect.'

That Monsignor Dolan says the bishops felt hamstrung by the 1997 letter is an important point, and one certainly worth digging into. It doesn't prove by any means that opponents of the Framework Document took solace from the letter, but it does at least suggest that it didn't make life any easier for the bishops. Of course, we know that. The Vatican is hardly a monolith, as John Allen spelled out very clearly in his fine 2004 talk on the 'Top Five Vatican Myths', and it seems clear that there must have been serious divisions in Rome during the 1990s on the how to handle the issue, these matters only being resolved -- in the main -- with the decision in 2001 to have all abuse allegations channelled through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. So, yes, while Monsignor Dolan's opinions aren't proof that he was right in his analysis, let alone that anybody took comfort from Rome's attitude to the Irish guidelines, they at least invite questions.

In Cloyne, of course, the problem wasn't that Magee and O'Callaghan didn't try to implement the guidelines as they feared Rome would later overturn disciplinary decisions; it was that O'Callaghan was opposed to dealing with things in a disciplinary and consistent way, and that Magee didn't care how O'Callaghan handled things. It's a bit like Chesterton's famous line about Christianity: it's not that the procedures were tried and found wanting, it's that they were found wanting and left untried.

As for Marie Collins' question, I think it's a good one, being both fair and understandable, and I think it deserves a decent answer.

The answer surely lies in the fact that irrespective of opinions expressed in 1997 by one Vatican department, the Irish bishops were still entirely free to implement guidelines on an individual basis within each individual diocese, and every single bishop indeed made a public commitment to act in accord with those guidelines, such that the guidelines were indeed official in each diocese.

It's a complete exaggeration to say that Vatican had forbidden the bishops from implement the guidelines. On the contrary, rather, one Vatican department had merely cautioned the bishops against implementing the guidelines in such a way as could conflict with canon law, thereby potentially leading to disciplinary measures against abusive priests being overturned on procedural grounds.

Were the guidelines followed? The answer is that we don't know. It appears they've been impeccably followed in Ferns. It seems they have been followed in Dublin, albeit with some difficulty. It's clear they weren't followed at all in Cloyne, despite the bishop of Cloyne having been publicly and officially committed to them.

Did the Nuncio withold the 1997 Letter from the Commission?

But anyway, here's the thing that brings it back to Shatter's nonsense. In connection with his claim that the Nuncio had been asked to furnish all information the Vatican had about the handling of abuse in Cloyne, he elaborated with reference to the 1997 letter, saying that when the Murphy Commission wrote to the Nuncio in 2009, the Nuncio could have responded by, among other things, furnishing the Commission with that letter. Well, all else aside, think for a moment about Marie Collins' question. She was quoting from section 7.13 of the Dublin Report, which itself quotes Dublin's Monsignor John Dolan quoting from the 1997 letter:

'Monsignor Dolan told the Commission that the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome had studied the document in detail and emphasised to the Irish bishops that it must conform to the canonical norms in force. The congregation indicated that "the text contains procedures and dispositions which are contrary to canonical discipline. In particular mandatory reporting gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature". Monsignor Dolan said that the congregation regarded the document as "merely a study document".

Now, Dolan's quotation, at least as recorded by the Commission, leaves out an important chunk of the 1997 text, notably the bit which explains why the Congregation for Clergy was concerned: that the application of the guidelines could potentially clash with canon law, such that bishops trying to stamp out abuse could subsequently have their efforts overturned on purely procedural grounds, which would be obviously be a bad thing (C4.21).

For all that people claimed in January that we'd had no knowledge of the 1997 letter before January of this year, it was cited in the Dublin Report, which was published in November 2009. The Commission had clearly been aware of the existence of the letter when conducting its first report. In light of how the Dublin Report covered the period 1975 to 2004, the letter would obviously have been very relevant to the work of the Commission, which began in 2006. Are we really to believe that it didn't take a look at it then? You know, before it approached the Nuncio in connection with the Cloyne Report? It was obviously important, and it would have been deeply remiss of the Commission to have overlooked it. No, it seems certain that if the Commission was doing its job properly, there would have been no need for the Nuncio to supply this letter, and the Nuncio would have known this. The Dublin Archdiocese must have had a copy, as the Cloyne one obviously did.

A Most Peculiar Programme

It was a strange show, all told, and not just because it featured a Government minister.

I don't think I've ever seen Vincent Brown treat his panellists with such respect. Alan Shatter was given a free platform to, in effect, make all the prepared statements he wanted, and Vincent Brown, who's spoken more of the SAVI study than any other Irish journalist than I can think of, never once challenged him as to whether or not the government is doing anything to protect the overwhelming majority of Irish victims of sexual abuse, these being those abused by people within the family circle. Marie Collins was, understandably enough, not challenged on anything by Vincent Brown, and given the obvious danger of seeming churlish, Vincent Twomey seems to have had some difficulty correcting misconceptions.

Having said that, he made good points. It was very clear from what he said that the problem at Cloyne didn't lie in the Church's procedures, but in the fact that the Cloyne authorities were unwilling to follow those procedures. The best procedures in the world mean nothing if the people whose job it is to implement them will not do so. It's pointless of Alan Shatter to claim that we've no evidence -- no assurance -- that everything's perfect in the Church today. It's simply impossible to tell. Nobody can ever give a confident and honest assurance that rules will not be broken or that crimes will not be committed.

In connection with this, Vincent Twomey's pointing to the Church having appointed a Presbyterian, Ian Elliott, to head the Church's own child-protection agency was important; leaving aside his professionalism and integrity, Elliott's Protestantism blocks him from any instinctive or otherwise ingrained tendencies towards clericalism, and I basically look forward to his coming reports on the dioceses. If things are being handled well, we can all start to breathe comfortably. If they're not, well, then we'll know we have to take action. 

I think the issue of who decides whether or not Elliott's reports should be published is a red herring; it would look staggeringly suspicious if any diocese refused to publish a report, and if any did so because it had something to hide, I'm confident that Elliott would resign in protest. Having said that, I'm glad Vincent Twomey said he believed that all the reports should be published, and I'm glad too that he said he thinks it would be best overall for the credibility of the Church if Cardinal Brady were to resign, simply because this could help the Church and the Country to progress.

Shattered Hope

Until I watched last night's Tonight with Vincent Brown I was reasonably happy with the de-escalation of the row between the Irish Government and the Vatican.  I was thinking that people were starting to talk sense, and that we might be able to move constructively to address the national scourge of child abuse. Things had looked so promising...

No Threat to the Integrity of the Sacrament of Confession

Despite earlier rhetoric, Alan Shatter, the Minister for Justice, had sought to play down claims that the proposed child protection legislation would endanger the seal of confession, dismissing this as a 'bogus side issue', and saying that:

'The focus of the Bill, the heads of which were published at the end of July, is to ensure that where there are what we describe as arrestable crimes, which include child sexual abuse committed against a child, and where an individual has material information that would assist the gardaí in the investigation of that crime, that they provide it to the gardaí, unless there is a reasonable excuse not to do so.'

I've been saying this for a while. Under the Criminal Law Act 1997 and the Offenses Against the State Act 1998, it's already an offense to withold knowledge of certain serious crimes, unless one has reasonable excuse for doing so. The Criminal Justice Act 2011 extended this principle to include theft, such that for the last month it's been a serious criminal offence for anyone -- without reasonable excuse -- to withold from the gardaí knowledge of any theft whatsoever.* All that's being proposed by the Government is that this principle that the reporting of crimes should be mandatory, save in instances where one has a reasonable excuse for not doing so, is to be extended beyond terrorism and theft to include child abuse and the abuse of vulnerable adults.

Does the seal of confession constitute a reasonable excuse? Probably, yes. It can hardly be specifically legislated against, as leaving aside how such a law would be unworkable, it would be struck down by the Supreme Court and challenged by the ECHR, as contravening protections on freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights; the sacrament of reconciliation is an essential aspect of the Catholic faith. Furthermore, the existing common law and constitutional recognitions of priest-penitent privilege would almost certainly preclude the courts against interpreting the seal as anything other than a reasonable excuse. Whatever the Government may say on this is just crowd-pleasing rhetoric; it won't affect the wording or the working of the law.

The Government's Response as a Face-Saving Exercise

I was happy enough with the Government's response to the Vatican's letter of last week too. Much of the letter was constructive enough, recognising how deeply the Vatican regretted the terrible sufferings that victims of abuse and their families had endured in Cloyne, and welcoming the Vatican's commitment to a constructive dialogue and cooperation with the Irish Government in battling abuse in Ireland. The rest was ridiculous, but I don't see that the Government could possibly have taken any other line, if it wanted to save any face at all.

See, for example, the sentence that says,

'Having considered carefully the Cloyne Report and the response of the Holy See, the Government of Ireland remains of the view that the content of the confidential letter in 1997 from the then Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Storero, to the Irish Bishops, regardless of whether or not it was intended to do so, provided a pretext for some members of the clergy to evade full cooperation with the Irish civil authorities in regard to the abuse of minors.'

That'd be fine if it said that the 1997 could have provided a pretext. I think it could have done. The fact remains, however, as the Vatican clearly showed in its letter last week, that there's not a jot of evidence in the Cloyne Report to support the Murphy Commission's finding that the letter had in fact provided such a pretext.

But what choice did the Government have but to take this line? To have admitted that the Vatican was right would have entailed their admitting that the Murphy Commission was wrong -- it would have effectively entailed the Government saying it did not accept the findings of the Murphy Commission. And then what? Would it have had to admit that the Murphy Commission was blatantly wrong in having claimed that the Irish bishops had sought recognition from Rome for the 1996 Framework Document? Would it have had to admit that the dates in chapters 15, 16, and 23 of the Cloyne Report simply don't tally? Would it then have been tempted to wonder whether there was such sloppiness in the Commission's Dublin Report? Would it have looked at chapter 20 of that report, say, and wondered why a priest who was clearly and correctly described by a Garda chief superintendent as having been a curate (20.92) is referred to by the Commission as having been a parish priest? And would it have wondered what other errors the Murphy Commission had made...

The Government reply didn't stop there, of course. In response to the Vatican's comprehensive refutations of allegations made about it in the aftermath of the Cloyne Report, the Government said:

'The Government of Ireland notes the comments in the Holy See’s response on the political debate which ensued in Ireland after the publication of the Cloyne Report and in particular the statements made by the Taoiseach and other political leaders. The Government of Ireland must point out that the comments made by the Taoiseach and other political leaders accurately reflect the public anger of the overwhelming majority of Irish people at the failure of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Holy See to deal adequately with clerical child sexual abuse and those who committed such appalling acts.'

Which seems to be code for, yes, well, whether or not we lied is hardly the point: we were angry, and you need to understand that. We were reflecting popular anger. This, of course, is something the Vatican had already acknowledged in its response, saying that it understood and shared the depth of public anger and frustration at the findings of the Cloyne Report, as expressed in Enda's speech. Still, it looked as though the Government wasn't defending Enda's lies, so much as saying that we was angry, and the Vatican should allow for crazy things said in a rage.

It really looked as though it'd be possible to move forward together.




Unfortunately, then Vincent Brown pressed Alan Shatter on the issue...
And Alan Shatter was only too happy to respond. In fact, I'd say he was delighted to do so. Government ministers don't face Vincent Brown all that often, so the fact that Shatter accepted the invitation to show up is a pretty clear sign that he wanted to say something. Vincent didn't beat about the bush, and opened by asking Shatter to explain what the Taoiseach had meant when he had told the Dáil that:

'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.'

As Archbishop Martin said the other day, 'this merits explanation'. And indeed it does, given the conflicting and blatantly false explanations offered thus far. Our Minister for Justice smiled calmly, and began to offer a very specific explanation, one that wholly belied the Taoiseach's own spokesman's admission last July that the allegation hadn't been made with any particular incident in mind:

'Very easily answered, Vincent, in the context of the Murphy Commission investigation into Cloyne. The Murphy Commission wrote to the Papal Nuncio -- the Papal Nuncio was written to as the Vatican's ambassador in Dublin -- to ask him, and I quote, "does he have any information about the matters under investigation by Cloyne." That request was asking him, as the Vatican's representative in Dublin to make available any information the Vatican had to assist it in its inquiry. The Commission got a very simple response, an entirely inappropriate response, and a response which was intended to frustrate the Commission's work. The response simply was that the Vatican does not determine the handling of cases of child abuse in Ireland, and is therefore unable to assist in the matter.'

Now, the first thing we should all pick up on here is that if this had been what the Taoiseach had been talking about when he made his speech, it would have been very easy for his spokespeople to have said so; it wouldn't have been necessary to witter about the Taoiseach having had no specific incident in mind. It also conflicts quite sharply with what Andrew Madden informed the Irish Examiner the Taoiseach's people had told him back in July. It's very obvious that this is something the Government has recently come up with in an attempt to deflect criticism of the fact that the Taoiseach defamed the Vatican and misled the Dáil.

The second is that the claim that the Nuncio 'intended to frustrate the Commission's work' is a very serious one, and one which I doubt the Minister for Justice would be able to substantiate in court; putting it another way, this almost certainly constitutes defamation.

Third, and this is a subtle but very important point, the Minister here is blatantly not quoting from the letter the Murphy Commission wrote to the Nuncio; it surely wasn't the case that the Murphy Commission addressed the Nuncio in the third person. Rather, he seems to have adapated a partial quotation from the Report. This matters, because if we look at the Dublin Report, which quotes from the Commission's February 2007 letter to the previous Nuncio, the Commission asked that Nuncio to supply all relevant documents 'which documents have not already been produced or will not be produced by Archbishop Martin'. That, of course, makes perfect sense, as the Commission would hardly have wanted to plough through heaps of duplicate documents in its investigation of how matters were handled in Dublin; it's difficult to believe that it was any more willing to do that in connection with Cloyne. You'll see the significance of this in a bit, if you haven't already guessed it.

Fourth, the Minister appears to be wrong when he says that the Nunciature claimed that the Vatican did not determine the handling of abuse cases in Ireland. At least according to the Cloyne Report, it claimed that the Nunciature itself does not determine the handling of abuse cases. The Report doesn't suggest for a moment that the Commission asked the Nunciature for any information held by the Vatican, or that the Nunciature was answering on behalf of the Holy See rather than on behalf of itself. This may have been the case, but unless the original letters are produced we can only go by what the Cloyne Report says, which belies the Minister's claims.


Sure while the waters are muddy, why not kick them up some more?
Anyway, the minister carried on:

'We know this isn't correct in a number of respects. For example, the notorious letter of 1997 -- I was going to say 2007 -- the notorious letter of 1997, that was sent by the Papal Nuncio's predecessor to the bishops in Dublin and the rest of the country. That made reference to what was called the Framework Document, a document in 1996 that the bishops published which set out guidelines they said they themselves were going to apply in addressing issues of child abuse, which guidelines included a commitment to make reports to the civil authorities. The letter which was distributed by the Papal Nuncio made it very clear that the Vatican didn't approve of those guidelines, a warning was issued that they were contrary to canon law, and quite clearly expressed substantial reservations with regard to the reporting to the civil authority.'

Let's leave aside the technical point that it wasn't the bishops, but an advisory group for the bishops, that published the Framework Document, and start by noting that the fact that the guidelines outlined in the Framework Document were, at least in principle, adopted as official policy in every diocese in Ireland, despite the reservations expressed in the 1997, conclusively demonstrates that it was not the Vatican -- much less the Nunciature itself -- that determined the handling of abuse cases in Ireland. It's worth stressing too that the 1997 letter by no means made it clear that the Vatican disapproved of the guidelines, which is hardly surprising given that it had had input into them. On the contrary, it merely indicated that one Vatican department had concerns about how the guidelines might be applied, not least because that one department felt they could be applied in a way contrary to canon law, such that they could lead to disciplinary decisions having to be overturned; the concern, in essence, was that the guidelines might lead to genuine abusers getting off the hook on procedural grounds.

Or, if you like, that they were potentially not strict enough.

It's again completely wrong to misrepresent the letter as having 'quite clearly expressed substantial reservations with regard to the reporting to the civil authority'. It expressed concerns about mandatory reporting, not reporting in general, and it was not alone in this. The Irish Government of 1997 was just as troubled by the idea of mandatory reporting, such that after a wide consultation process it decided against legislating for it. That government, it's important to note, included six people at its cabinet table who hold full ministries in the current government, these being Enda Kenny, Richard Bruton, Michael Noonan, Brendan Howlin, Ruairi Quinn, and Pat Rabbitte, who used to participate in cabinet meetings despite being a junior minister. Shatter's pot is calling the Vatican's kettle black on this one.


Because what need for truth, when there's political kudos to be won?
Alan continued:

'The Papal Nuncio, when receiving the request from the Murphy Commission, could have furnished that letter. The Papal Nuncio could have sought the assistance of the Vatican to provide to the Murphy Commission information it had about the abuse of children in Cloyne. It did none of that. And essentially, instead of co-operating, and assisting with the work of that commission, it frustrated its work, and that's the simple point the Taoiseach was making.'

Now, again, ask yourself this: what exactly did the Commission ask the Nunciature for? Did it ask it for everything, or did it ask for everything it hadn't already been given or wasn't going to be given by the Diocese? And if it did ask for everything, which I doubt, did it need duplicate copies of documents that already had or was due to receive from the diocese? Why should the Nuncio have passed over a letter which the Diocese -- as we know -- itself passed over? Why should the Nuncio have sought the assistance of the Vatican in providing for the Murphy Commission duplicates of documents connected with the five priests whose cases were passed on to Rome, documents the Commission openly acknowledges were all passed on to it by the Diocese?

Of these five cases, for what it's worth, it seems that only one of them was handled by Rome in any sense during the period covered by the Cloyne Report, that being the case of Father Caden, whose case was reported to Rome in 2005; the Vatican ruled that 'Father Caden' should be barred from ministry. The Commission notes how it has received all documentation on this matter, which, as it happens, is the only incident in Cloyne which has led to a conviction, this being an eighteen-month suspended sentence. The names of four other priests who had been risk-assessed were passed on to Rome in late January 2009, but it appears that no data was passed to Rome about them until February and March of 2009, a period beyond the Murphy Commission's remit. One of these was 'Father Ronat', who had been barred from ministry by the Diocese since 2005. It's worth noting that the State was for a long time incapable of pressing charges against him, and when he finally went to court, he was acquitted of the crime for which he was accused. If anything, it seems the Church has been rather more strict in these matters than has the State.


I don't think Vincent has ever gone so long without interrupting anyone...
Given his tendency to bully and hector his panellists, it was amazing to watch Vincent Brown actually listening, and waiting before following up. In a daring break with tradition, he allowed Shatter to finish what he was saying:

'But it isn't the most important issue. I mean, at the end of the day, what the Government is focused on, and what the Government's statement it issued this evening again emphasises,  is that our concern as a government is to protect the welfare of children, and what we want to ensure is that on the civil side -- in the context of action we take as a Government -- we put in place all of the extra provisions and protections that are necessary, but we also want to ensure that in the future those who become aware that children have been abused inform the Garda Síochána, they inform the HSE, and ultimately the new childcare protection authority that's going to be established, and that we're not in a position where abuse occurs and subsequently a report is made to someone, be it a member of the Church or indeed to another individual in any other organisation, and they don't act, they say nothing, and that abuser is left to continue to abuse again, either the same victim, or other victims.'

Now, it would be nice if all this were true, but I really don't believe it is. Shatter talks here as though most child sex abuse in Ireland were institutional -- and indeed, primarily clerical -- in nature. This simply isn't true. As the SAVI study showed, and as the Gardaí and the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland have said, almost all abuse in Ireland takes place within the family circle, being perpetuated by immediate and extended family, family friends, neighbours, and babysitters. By targetting the Church as the Government has done, it has directed the attention of the country away from where the real danger to Ireland's children is to be found. By doing so, it puts Ireland's children at risk, and it shows a deep contempt by the overwhelming majority of Ireland's abuse survivors.

Child abuse is far too important and heinous a thing to be exploited for political advantage by the Irish Government. We need a better solution that this, and not one that seeks to turn people far away into a scapegoat for our problems.

* Yes, that apparently means that if you ever witnessed a schoolmate shoplifting when you were a teenager yourself, and didn't report it, then you may well be a criminal. Best get yourself down to the Garda station before it's too late.

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.