USA 1994: Disillusioned in Dublin

Ireland’s victory against Estonia in the football last week has taken me back to one of the formative experiences in my adult life, and with all the talk this week of strikes and days of action, it’s a story I’d like to share.

Pubs were different then...

Years ago, before I became a teacher, I worked in a pub in Dublin, doing four or five nights a week and often working in the daytime too, at least on holidays and over weekends. I worked there for about five years all told, and then in subsequent years would often help out on the odd night or during the holidays. A typical suburban local, the pub was built on a generous scale: it had three lounges, each of which could hold well over three hundred customers, and a public bar, capable of squeezing in more than another hundred, and a function room, which could itself take the best part of a hundred too. Despite its size it wasn’t a pub many of my university friends knew; the nondescript suburbs of west Dublin were a world apart for the one they’d grown up in.

In the summer of 1994, I wasn’t yet a barman. I was, technically, a loungeboy. Loungeboys and loungegirls were the footsoldiers of our system. Paid the magnificent sum of £2.10 an hour, we mainly worked on the floor of the lounges and the bar, serving customers by taking their orders, paying the barmen, and bringing drinks and cigarettes and whatever back to the customers. The core of the job was saving customers the hassle of breaking their conversations with their mates by going to the bar and queuing for them. Loungestaff cleared tables too, of course, and kept the floor tidy, and checked the toilets were okay, and did loads of other jobs, the lads especially helping out in the storerooms and cellar. There were usually around thirty-five of us. Our roster filled a lined A4 page, each of us having a line to ourselves, save for newer ones who might have to share a line, their names written in cramped letters, separated by biro-ruled lines.

I rarely worked on the floor. I did what was later referred to on a reference as ‘counter support work’, working behind the bar with the barmen, making it possible for them to do their jobs. The likes of me were the unheralded hinges of the system, making sure the shelves were always full, that kegs and gas cylinders were speedily replaced, that the till always had change, and that there was always a constant supply of clean, cold glasses. And, on top of that, we tended to serve the customers directly.

It started innocuously enough, with a request to pass a customer a Coke or to make a Dressed Orange – don’t ask – and then progressed to making Irish coffees at last orders, because they took time and time was one thing barmen didn’t have when the customers were four deep at the bar and they were juggling half a dozen orders. Eventually we’d be asked to hold a pint at the tap when the barman grabbed something else, and then we’d be allowed pull our own. And then a time would come when we would be allowed to use the till.

By that point we’d basically made the leap from being loungestaff to being supplementary barstaff. Promotion wasn’t always on the cards, though. This was Ireland in the early 1990s, after all. The Celtic Tiger hadn’t happened, unemployment was still really high, and job mobility was unheard of. So you did your time, and you waited.

Italia 1990 Redux?

The summer of 1994 saw Ireland in the World Cup Finals for the second time. We’d been in the 1990 finals in Italy, and it had been an absolute bonanza for the pub, such that everyone was geared up with excitement. The older loungestaff all looked back on Italia 1990 as the best time ever working there, and we were all sure this was to be great craic, even if we were underwhelmed by the rubbish official World Cup T-shirts we were all given.

(To get a handle on what Italia 1990 was like, you should read The Van, Roddy Doyle’s brilliant conclusion to his so-called 'Barrytown Trilogy'. You could watch the film too, of course, but just as The Van’s the best of the original three Barrytown books, so The Van’s the weakest of the three films by some way.)

When most Irish people think of the 1994 World Cup, they think mainly of the first glorious win against Italy and a campaign that ran out of steam. They think of Steve Staunton struggling in the heat, Jack Charlton rowing with a linesman and throwing bottles of water on to the pitch for the lads, Jason McAteer nutmegging the greatest footballer in the world, and they probably don’t remember a lot else. Sporting nerds may cherish memories of Ireland having been in the only World Cup group ever where all teams ended up on the same points. Anyone who was away might read Joe O’Connor’s The Irish Male at Home and Abroad to revive memories of the experience of being in America with the team, but for those at home it sticks in the mind mainly as the beginning of the end of the Charlton Era.

But for me the 1994 World Cup is memorable for just one thing. The Strike.

Time is Relative...

In the early nineties it was common practice for pubs not to pay their staff for all the hours they worked. In our pub, for instance, we were paid up to thirty minutes after last orders, and that was it. The thinking, I suppose, is that the customers were meant to have gone home by then. In practice, of course, we were still serving fifteen or twenty – sometimes even twenty-five or more – minutes after the bar supposedly shut, such that ‘last orders’ was a ritual that could last for half an hour, and the customers wouldn’t go home once they’d stocked up. No, if last orders was notionally at half eleven, you’d be very lucky to get the place clear by one o'clock. You certainly wouldn’t be finished cleaning and locking up by twelve, which is when you’d stop being paid.

This must have irked the barstaff no end; it certainly bothered those of us on the floor, and in early 1994 a big group of us decided that we’d have to look into joining the union. I’m not sure why I was the man who did the legwork, but into town I went, up to Parnell Square to meet Jim Moloney, who was then the main man for whatever the barmen’s union was called at the time. I don’t think it was ‘Mandate’ at that point. We talked, and he gave me lots of paperwork, and I came back, and people got nervous, and a handful backed out when they realised we weren’t just talking, and so it all came to nothing.

On the eve of the World Cup, barmen across Dublin realised they had a huge opportunity to press home their demands, and so they began to agitate for a better deal on pay and conditions. We on the floor didn’t think they’d go ahead with a strike, so we didn’t pay a lot of attention, though we all knew on the day the World Cup was due to start – with the champions Germany playing Bolivia in Chicago – there was to be a ballot. The more level-headed of our barmen assured us there’d not be a strike. Nobody would be that stupid. There was too much at stake. A deal would be struck.


Friday 17 June
I’d stayed up late drawing into the early hours on the Thursday night, so I woke late on Friday and quickly showered, dressed, and ran, slowing down as I reached the pub and saw the lads all standing outside.
‘You didn’t...?’ I said to a couple of the younger barmen, friends who I’d go out for drinks with once or twice a week.
They looked down at their feet.
‘We did.’

Some of the other loungestaff had already arrived, and so we clustered together, worrying and wondering. What had happened? Why had they voted to go out? What should we do? The lads told us that we should go across the road, to the pizza place in the shopping centre: some of the others were already there, having gathered in advance at the house of one of the girls, and we could figure things out with them. Before we went, though, they stopped us.
‘Youse have to go in. You’re not in the Union. You’re not protected. Don’t go losing your jobs for our sake.’

Over the road the others talked of what’d happened. ‘Pumped up young lads’ were behind it, they said they’d been told. One story was that the deal had been recommended and then a young barman from a neighbouring pub – a cousin of one of our loungegirls – had leapt up on the stage and shouted that the deal was crap, and that they should strike. We didn’t know. It all seemed crazy. We talked and argued for maybe half an hour. In the end we decided that the lads were right, and that we had no real choice. None of us wanted to break their line, but the fact was that they were telling us to do so. As it happened, it was those who’d spoken up most loudly in favour of our joining the Union – including me – who were most pragmatic about our having to go in.

With bleak faces we headed back over the road, and before we went in we stopped and talked to our friends on the line. I pulled back the other staff – both girls – who did counter support work like me.
‘There’s one thing, though,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘We can’t serve.’
‘What?’
‘We can’t serve. Us three. We know how to serve behind the bar. We’ve done it for ages. But we can’t do it now. It’s one thing us going in to do our job, but that’s not really our job – we’re not paid to pull pints – and it’d not be fair on the lads out here.’
One nodded immediately, and the other frowned, and then said, ‘Yeah. Okay.’

And we went in.

It was horrible.

There were hardly any customers, for starters, as it was daytime, and in a solidly working-class area, crossing a picket line was anathema. We ghostwalked through our jobs, filling the ice buckets, checking the cream machines, gathering fresh cloths, setting tables, all too embarrassed even to look at each other. The manager and his brothers – the owner’s family, basically – didn’t say a word of criticism about us all being nearly an hour late. This was horrible for everyone, and they knew it. Besides, they’d phone calls to make. They needed to find barmen, somehow. Our regular part-time barmen, though not part of the Union, obviously weren’t going to cross the line.

Going out the back to get a clean mop bucket, I came across one of my friends wiping tears from her face, and another trying to comfort her. Her boyfriend – a good friend of mine – was one of our apprentice barmen, and she’d had to walk past a picket he was on. She shook her head and looked at me with red eyes. ‘This is shit,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I grimaced.

Back inside, and seeing the manager away from the phone for the first time, I asked could I have a word.
‘Of course,’ he said, walking into the little kitchen that doubled as an informal office from time to time, ‘what’s up?’
‘Conor,’ I said, and paused. ‘I’ve spoken to Lucy and Niamh, and although we’ve come in, we’re not happy about serving behind the bar. It’s not really our job, after all, and we only do it –’
‘That’s alright,’ he said, ‘I understand. We wouldn’t ask you to. And we’re grateful you’ve come in.’
This surprised me.
‘Thank you,’ I paused again. ‘Will this get fixed, do you think?’
He looked away.
'I hope so,' he said. 'We’re trying.'

As the day wore on more loungestaff arrived, appearing in dribs and drabs, the girls all dressed in shorts and our special World Cup T-shirts. The longest-serving of us wasn’t among them. Like a mother to us, she was older than most of the barmen, and there was no way she’d pass their line.
‘She hasn’t come in,’ said one of the other lounge girls. ‘Maybe we should have stayed out too?’
‘Nah,’ said another, ‘she’s here too long. They’d never sack her. We’re different. They could replace us tomorrow.’

Barstaff started to appear too. We had no idea who they were, but they came in, and pulled on bright yellow polo shirts given them by management. They were hardly in the door before we called them Yellow-packers, after the Quinnsworth cheap range, muttering about them when they were out of earshot. Upstairs we had a podgy one named Jim serving us, squeezed into his bright yellow shirt. ‘Slim Jim’, we called him. It seemed inevitable.

In truth, it was obvious that we hardly needed the yellow-packers, just as we’d hardly needed the manager’s assurance that the likes of myself wouldn’t be asked to pull pints. Hardly any customers came in.

I went home for my break, and when I came back up the road it was obvious from what was going on outside that something had happened. There’d been a meeting, I learned, during which the pub’s owners had broken away from their own organization, the Licensed Vintner’s Association, in order to offer the barstaff a better deal and get the show back on the road. The barstaff had gotten together and decided that they’d take a vote, but that it had to be unanimous. If even one person wanted to stay with the Union, then they’d all with it and would remain on strike.

Only one person had done so. They were still on strike.

I’m not clear now on the sequence of events – memory fades, after all – but as far as I can remember it was that night, while Germany played Bolivia and Spain played South Korea, that our head barman finally quit, walking away after decades of working for the same people. He wouldn’t let the others down by breaking the line, but he felt he was letting his employers down by striking in such a situation. I think it was that night too that four of the barstaff decided that they too weren’t going to remain on strike, and that they were going to come in.

Saturday 18 June

In the morning I cleaned shelves and restocked them with Mark, the senior barman from upstairs, and someone who I’d worked with for years. We worked in silence for a while, and then I stopped.
‘Mark, can I ask you a question?’
‘Go on.’
‘Why did you come in?’
He frowned.
‘I know it’s not really my business,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. I understand why Rob came in, because he was worried about the cellars getting out of hand without him to look after them, and Susan was probably worried about not getting kept on after her apprenticeship, but I don’t understand why Bernie and you came in.’
‘No, it’s a fair question,’ he said. ‘There were a few reasons, really. Rob and I got talking last night, because we weren’t happy about how the meeting with Conor had gone. That was stupid. He’d gone out on a limb, and made a decent offer, and we should have taken it. The thing is, the strike makes no sense. It’s mainly over two things, and we shouldn’t be taking advantage of our employers like this.’
‘One of them’s not being paid for cleaning up?’
‘Yeah, and that’s obviously bollix, but that’ll get sorted at the Labour Court one way or another. You can’t have people working for nothing in this day and age. We don’t need to strike to fix that.’
‘And the other thing?’
‘More money, really. But we can’t strike for that. There’s a national wage agreement that we’ve signed up to. And everybody needs to stick to that. It’s the only way to get the country on its feet. This strike? It’s stupid. It’s cutting off our nose to spite our face.’

Ireland was due to play Italy on the Saturday night, a fitting rematch really, given how Italy had knocked us out of the last World Cup at the quarter final stage. It should have been the biggest day of the year, Christmas and New Year’s Eves, St Stephen’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, and the Blessing of the Graves all rolled into one. Instead the place was like a cemetery. Only a handful of regulars had come in, and what few customers we had were almost all people we’d never seen before, or people who’d have been turned away in the past.

It didn’t look to be getting any busier when I went home for my dinner, chatting on the way home with some of our regulars who I bumped into the street – people who’d stayed away, and decided to watch the match at their own houses.
‘This is important,’ they’d said. ‘You know about Larkin and Connolly. Ordinary people like us – we have to stick together. If we don’t, who’ll look out for us?’

'I know, but –'

'There's no "but". You'd have nothing if your father and his father hadn't stood up with their mates for their rights. It's the same thing.'

Things didn’t look that much busier that night, when I returned to be on hand for the Ireland match. A few of the other loungegirls had turned up with a flask of soup and some sandwiches for the lads outside, and I stopped to talk. There was a bitterness there this time – not towards us, as we’d just done as they’d said, but towards their co-workers who’d gone in. It was obvious they felt betrayed, and though I could understand why the four who’d come in had done so, I didn’t blame the ones who stayed out for feeling the way they did.

It was a quiet night for the few of us working upstairs – Mark, Slim Jim, me, and Louise and a couple of other loungegirls – but the reality is that there wasn’t a whole lot of work being done. We’d a few regulars in one end of the lounge, while the rest was empty. We could have taken three hundred with ease, and we’d fewer than thirty customers. Fewer than twenty, probably, now I think of it.

Downstairs was a different matter, though, as people had come from miles away, unwilling to cross the lines at their own pub, but happy to do so elsewhere. Our cabaret lounge, with its big screen, had a respectable crowd. It wasn’t what the owners would have hoped for, but there was a bit of a buzz there.

Those of us upstairs chatted most of the night away together, sitting at the far end, down by the toilets, watching the match on a small screen, and occasionally strolling down to see if anyone wanted a drink, or getting up whenever we heard a distant cough.

Ireland won. 1-0. Houghton’s goal was a bit of a out of nowhere, but the result wasn’t, as we’d been the dominant team throughout. It was one of our best ever performances – certainly one of the best two or three of the Charlton era, even if the one moment that really sticks in the mind about the match, though, was that comedy instant when Jason McAteer nutmegged Roberto Baggio.

Endgame and Aftermath

Things kind of petered out after that, as the strike’s momentum was broken. The LVA carried on haggling with the Union, and eventually a deal was struck on Monday or Tuesday, and the lads came back in to work.

It wasn’t nice. The ones who’d stayed out couldn’t forgive the ones who’d gone in, and things got worse in the following weeks, as it seemed the ones who’d came in were treated better than others. The apprentice who came in was kept on when her time was up, as we’d expected she would, but one who stayed outside – a fine barman by any standard – was let go. The Union, most importantly, was broken: with a third of the permanent barstaff no longer being members, it was only a matter of time before the whole thing faded out. It’s still there, as far as I know, but it’s a shadow of what it was. And sometimes, to this day, I hear of those who stepped off the lines and came in being referred to as scabs.

You’ll be glad to know that the loungestaff were rewarded for their loyalty. We were told we’d be paid for a further quarter of an hour’s cleaning up. 55p a night, that worked out at. Enough for a bag of crisps and a dash of lemonade.

A year later I became a part-time barman myself; Lucy and Niamh followed me within a week or so.

I think this sort of thing happened in pubs across Dublin, such that the old structured system of apprenticeships – the system that made Irish barmen so remarkably good – is a thing of the past. In the long run, I don’t think anyone gained from this.

So...?

What’s my point? I’m not sure I have one, really, save that I’ve often thought about the rights and wrongs of this over the years. If it taught me anything it’s that strikes are horrible, and that unions are vitally important, but they need to believe sensibly. They are important, after all: they’re often the only way ordinary people can protect themselves and their families from being exploited, and they can play a crucial role in building a successful society, as the German economic model shows us.

This is one of the reasons I get annoyed when people talk of how disgraceful it is that Labour – in the UK – is so heavily influenced by the Unions. Yeah, they are. They receive funding from unions, each union representing hundreds of thousands of members. The unions ballot their members every few years to see if they still want to contribute to support the Labour party, and even if the majority decide to arrange to support Labour financially, individual members are always free to withhold that part of their subscription. Collectively, this means that millions of ordinary people contribute towards the Labour party – and I’m always intrigued by the agenda of anybody who holds that those millions of ordinary people should be blocked from financially supporting their political party of choice.

Anyway, as you’ll know, Britain’s unions have called a national day of strike action on 30 November. In a nutshell, it’s over changes to pension arrangements that have already been agreed, and that the Government wants to renege on. Yes, I know there’s more to it than that, and that the Government’s in a nasty place financially, but that’s at the core of things: the Government’s trying to change things so that teachers and nurses and binmen and all manner of other people who dedicate their lives to serving the public will have less money to retire on in their old age than had previously been agreed on.

A friend of mine has, with other members of the TUC, just put out a single under the banner of ‘The Workers’. It’s in solidarity with all those involved in 30 November’s Day of Action for Pension Justice. The video’s fun to watch – and not just because of the pretty blonde gazing wistfully at the 2:45 mark – and the single’s certainly worth the downloading. It’s for a good cause, after all.

It's All About The Jumpers

I was reminded, in the aftermath of last week’s disagreement between the Vatican and Benetton, and thinking about Benetton’s absurd ‘Unhate’ posters, of a Stewart Lee routine from his 41st Best Stand-Up Ever show. 

Discussing 2007’s Celebrity Big Brother racism row, Lee let rip at what he saw as the naked hypocrisy of the show’s sponsor, the Carphone Warehouse.

'This is a genuine press statement from the Carphone Warhouse: "Racism is entirely at odds with the values of the Carphone Warhouse". Entirely at odds. I don't know about you, Glasgow, but I was was hugely relieved to read that press statement, because prior to reading that press statement , I had suspected that the [falsetto Irish] Carphone Warehouse was in fact a front for a white supremacist organization. And I have in my hand a piece of paper bearing the true values of the [falsetto Irish] Carphone Warehouse, the true values of the [falsetto Irish] Carphone Warehouse.

1. Sell phones.
2. Sell more phones.
3. Deny the Holocaust.
4. Sell more phones.
5. Deny the Holocaust again, this time by texting your mates.
6. Lobby for the return of the Golliwog and the Black and White Minstrel Show.
7. Sell phones, sell phones to cars, sell as many phones as... quickly, sell phones, sell the phones, sell...!

The values of the Carphone Warehouse. The sheer transparent naked hypocrisy of even imagining for a moment that such things exist as the values of the Carphone Warehouse. Do you follow the values of Jesus or Buddha or Marx? No, I follow the values of the Carphone Warehouse, committed as they have been these past twenty years to fighting racism through the unusual medium of discount phone retail, a sure method which for so long eluded the ANC and the Rock Against Racism movement. The values of the Carphone Warehouse.’

The Point Being?

There is, of course, a profound irony in a company such as Benetton, whose exploitative labour practices have been called into question more than once over the years, whose sweatshops in North Africa and the Far East are hardly something of which they can be proud, daring to stand and tell anyone else how they ought to behave, but I suppose hypocrisy has always involved vice paying some kind of tribute to virtue. The fact is, of course, that Benetton is a company far better known for its advertising campaigns than for its clothes. That they’re in the news seems to be yet another disturbing example of how the eighties, somehow, are back.

On the face of it, the Benetton campaign is just silly. ‘Unhate’ say its posters, festooned with digitally created images of the Pope kissing the highest authority of Sunni Islam, Mohammed Ahmed al-Tayeb, Grand Sheikh of Cairo’s al-Azhar Mosque, or of Nikolas Sarkozy kissing Angela Merkel, or Barack Obama kissing Hu Jintao. It’s clearly nonsense: Merkel and Sarkozy don’t need to be told to ‘unhate’ each other; they’re working almost as a unit trying to figure out a way out of the mess that may yet shatter the Union, and the global economic system with it. Given the first amendment to the American Constitution, I can’t imagine President Obama getting upset -- at least publicly -- about how his image has been used by Benetton, and I’m pretty sure this advertising campaign isn’t being run in China.

So it’s silly. Fine. Is that grounds for the Vatican being annoyed? Can’t it take a joke?

Well, the first thing I’d say is that I can’t imagine that the British government would have been happy if Benetton had plastered half of London’s billboards and Tube stations with a giant photoshopped mash-up of the Queen snogging the face off Robert Mugabe. I think they’d be miffed, and rightly so, and that some sort of action would be taken against Benetton. What’s more, I think you can imagine British papers calling on British people to boycott Benetton. We all know this would happen, so please, don’t be tempted to ask why the Vatican doesn’t have a sense of humour. And let’s face it, if Benetton really wanted to make a meaningful point with these posters, they’d be using them in Egypt, wouldn’t they?

But they’re not doing that, for two very sensible reasons:  they wouldn’t go down at all well there, and  Egypt’s hardly their most lucrative market. This isn’t about changing minds, no matter what Benetton may say. It’s about selling jumpers and it’s about selling brightly-coloured jeans of the sort only children’s TV presenters can wear with any sense of propriety. I use that word loosely.

That said, I don’t fancy the Vatican’s chances in trying to restrict the offending image’s circulation: it’s already on countless newspaper sites and blogs, and I even know somebody who’s using it as his Facebook profile picture, even though he looks like neither gentleman. Now that it's out there it'll be unstoppable. That's the nature of modern imagery; as an old friend of mine used to say, digital photographs are 'pictures that never die'.

To be frank, this whole affair bothers me, and not because I think it's insulting towards the Pope and implicitly towards all Christians in communion with him. Rather, I think it’s a problem because it’s deeply dishonest, and arguably quite dangerous.

Why is it dishonest? 

Well, bearing as it does the exhortation to ‘unhate’ the poster indicates that the Pope hates al-Tayeb, and quite probably Muslims in general. If anything, the opposite is the case. Inter-faith dialogue has been one of the great themes of Benedict’s Papacy, and Benedict has worked hard to build a healthy dialogue with our Muslim brothers and sisters. 

One need but think of his praying in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Mosque – the famous ‘Blue Mosque’ – in November 2006, his role in establishing the Catholic-Muslim Forum, the first summit of which took place in November 2008, his visit to Amman’s Hussein bin-Talal Mosque in May 2009 and his addressing of Muslims in the cause of religious freedom and in opposition to religious extremism,  his widely praised meeting in September with leaders of Germany’s Muslim community where he spoke on the possibility of building religiously-rooted political systems which nonetheless protected religious pluralism, and of the fact that at last month’s inter-religious meeting at Assisi, there were more Muslim leaders present than there were high-ranking Catholics!

There’s a case to be made that the Pope is doing at least as much as anyone else in the world to calm Huntingdon’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’. He’s certainly doing more than Benetton, at any rate!

And dangerous?

Well, yes. There is indeed tension between the Pope and Ahmed al-Tayeb, and it relates to a great tragedy which has been happening on Europe’s doorstep and which we’ve basically ignored. 

As you’ll remember,  on 1 January of this year a car bomb outside the Coptic church of St Mark and Pope Peter in Alexandria killed 23 Copts, with a further 97 people being injured. This brought decades of persecution of the Copts to a head, and public protests by the Copts were brutally suppressed. The Pope condemned the attack in his New Year address, appealing for religious freedom and tolerance, and exhorting governments to protect their minorities.

In response, the Grand Sheikh spoke out against Benedict’s intervention, describing the Pope’s appeal for civil authorities in the Middle East to protect their Christian minorities as an ‘unacceptable interference in Egyptian affairs’ and dismissing his observations as biased and inappropriate.  

The Vatican responded by stressing that the Pope has constantly condemned violence against all people, not merely Christians, and insisting that we need to work together if we are to live together in peace, stressing that ‘The Pope’s invitation to Assisi for this coming October demonstrates his desire to repeat the message that no war may be waged in God’s name, but only peace.’ Tayeb rejected this invitation, saying that such gatherings as that at Assisi did nothing for Muslims and serve only to help the West.

Since then, of course, we’ve seen the Arab Spring, and in the aftermath of the first phase of the Egyptian revolution, more than 90,000 Copts have been forced to flee their ancient ancestral homeland in the face of incessant violence and persecution.

It’s in this context that there’s tension between Rome and Cairo’s Grand Sheikh. Benetton’s puerile advert doesn’t merely insult and misrepresent the Pope: it trivialises the plight of thousands upon thousands of people being persecuted on Europe’s doorstep, and it does this to sell jumpers.

More Questions

A long time ago, in the early days of this blog -- posts predating September 2007 have been adopted from my old blog into the prehistory of this one -- I wrote about how I'd learned something of the truth about a story I'd once assumed was an urban myth, a kind of local ghost story.

One of my childhood friends used to tell me a story, heard from his older brothers, of how years earlier a little boy who lived up near the church in Palmerstown had been murdered by his teenage next-door neighbour, crucified in an attic as a Satanic ritual. I believed this as a child, and dismissed it in my teens, and then in my late teens discovered that the story had basically been true. A few years ago, a brief window of access to the Irish Times archive enabled me to find out how the story had been reported at the time: how little John Horgan’s death had initially been reported as accidental, and how hardly any details were revealed in the court reports, with the murderer's name – Lorcan Bale – being withheld, and the facts of the case not being reported.

I was watching Criminal Minds one day last week -- yes, I know, but there was a brief novelty value in the telly suddenly working and having an abundance of channels -- with the gang investigating what appeared to be a Satanist murder, when it was pointed out that despite popular belief there have never been any Satanic murders in America. This got me thinking, of course, and so I went a-googling, as I do about once a year on the subject in the vain hope that I'll discover something.

This time was different. A book had just come out on the subject, and there were articles scattered here and there, and the names of both victim and murderer were everywhere, and if you're inclined to listen to Joe Duffy, well, there was a show just for you.

Ghoulish though the subject is, and broke though I surely was, years of curiosity won out over poverty and propriety and moments had scarcely passed before I'd ordered the book, with it arriving a couple of days later. In a nowadays atypically efficient burst of reading I ploughed through the whole book on Friday, before falling ill the following morning. I've been pondering it since.

If I had to sum up my thoughts, though, I'd just say it's not very good. It's not wholly worthless, as some information is better than no information, but it's certainly not worth shelling out on.

The Devil's in the Details

There's a section in his Histories where Polybius, the second-century BC Greek historian of the rise of Rome, discusses other historians and says something which offers a fine principle for evaluating any books which claim to be factual.

'As the proverb tells us that a single drop from the largest vessel suffices to tell us the nature of the whole contents, so we should regard the subject under discussion. When we find one or two false statements in a book and they prove to be deliberate ones, it is evident that not a word written by such an author is any longer certain and reliable.' (12.25a.1-2)

I think this works in a broader sense: it's not just that we should be wary of authors who get things wrong deliberately, but that we should watch those who make sloppy little errors. Those who are not to be trusted in little things are not entitled to our trust when it comes to big things.

The first indication for me that something wasn't right with the book came with a little bit of creative writing in the first chapter.

'A highly educated Irish speaker from Kerry, Father O'Keefe was well-respected, and known for his pulpit oratory, but his was no liberal message of live and let live -- his voice thundered on the dangers of sin, the fires of hell, and the temptations of the devil; for the believer, he spoke of the path to redemption. This was unusual for a Catholic priest; such fire-and-brimstone messages are more characteristic of the low churches, and evangelical Protestantism.

That late spring morning, as he passed the shrine to the Virgin Mary overlooking the murky fish-pond, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The priest unlocked the front door and entered the porch. The vials of holy water were untouched, as were the notices advocating the conservative group for laity, the Legion of Mary. And yet the cleric sensed immediately that something was wrong.'

He wasn't the only one. As he passed the shrine to the Virgin Mary? In 1973? The shrine that wasn't constructed until at least the late 1980s? That one? I had to check this with my brother, as I thought maybe I was remembering things wrong, but no, the shrine definitely wasn't there in the 1970s. Sure, doesn't it block the route that he and his mates used to use when running through the church grounds to go and play in the quarry full of rusting machinery? The priest back in the day used to chase kids off to stop them running there, and he'd hardly have needed to do so if the shrine had been there to block their way.

That's bad enough, but then just a couple of pages later we read:

'John Horgan would have been excited leaving Mount Sackville Convent School in nearby Clondalkin that Thursday afternoon.'

Now, you might argue about whether Mount Sackville, only about a mile across the Liffey as the crow flies from John Horgan's house, should be regarded as being in Chapelizod or Castleknock, but you certainly can't say it's in Clondalkin, three miles south.

It’s hard to believe, reading this, that the book’s author, David Malone, was born in Dublin and lives there now. The book gets even sloppier, really, with the second chapter opening with a description of local geography that makes it seem as though the local bank is on the same street as several other shops, as opposed to sitting isolated on another street -- what was once the main road to Galway -- a couple of hundred metres away. It’s as though Malone didn’t get to know the area at all, something that seems to be supported by things I’ve heard from people from that part of Palmerstown about him getting loads of things wrong. Certainly, he missed a trick in his summary of Palmerstown’s history by not mention how Lord Palmerston, the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister and political realist par excellence, took his title from this otherwise obscure west Dublin village; the Temples were Irish peers, though I don’t think Palmerston himself ever set foot in the place.

And then there are Bigger Problems...

If little errors and omissions such as these would cause one to approach the meat of the text with care, more substantial matters don’t inspire more confidence. Malone offers two wholly incompatible accounts of how John Horgan’s body was found, one coming from the then Detective Sergeant Jim Noonan and one from another Garda, a Seán O’Laughlin: Noonan describes how he’d worked out that something was amiss with the teenage Lorcan Bale’s story and how he and two other Guards had told the murderer they’d search the house from top to bottom, such that he cracked and admitted John’s body was in the attic. O’Laughlin, on the other hand, describes how he’d spotted broken plasterboard pieces in the bottom of Lorcan’s otherwise empty wardrobe, looked up, seen the secret hatch into the attic, and then entered the attic the conventional way, only to see the little boy’s body tied spread-eagled to the rafters; both men claimed that on finding John’s body they checked him for signs of life.

It’s pretty obvious from reading the two accounts, a convenient fifty or so pages apart, that Noonan’s account is by far the more likely to reflect what happened: it’s a team effort, less dramatic than O’Laughlin’s, rooted in sensible steady policework, and is corroborated by other people. 

O’Laughlin’s, on the other hand, looks patently false: all the work appears to have been his own, for starters, without any cooperation with anybody else, and he seems to have been sparked in his thoughts by hearing from the victim’s father that ‘that weird bastard next door’ had a Ouija Board. It seems unlikely that this would have been known and that the teenager wouldn’t have been a speedy object of suspicion – although Malone returns to the statement later to speculate on whether Lorcan Bale’s father had also been aware of this.

O’Laughlin describes the teenage Bale getting nervous in response to questions and glancing upstairs, and then says O'Laughlin asked Bale’s father whether he could go into the boy’s locked bedroom; where Lorcan himself was when this conversation took place isn’t clear, and nothing’s said of his reactions, which seems odd as according to this story he was clearly present when O’Laughlin searched his room.

Even the description of the cupboard is odd; elsewhere in the book the tidiness of the bedroom Lorcan Bale shared with his brother is noted, but according to O’Laughlin there were broken bits of plasterboard all over the base of the otherwise empty built-in wardrobe, the chippings scattered there from the hatch above – an elaborate hatch with a rope and pulley system that had been made months earlier. Is it really likely that Lorcan Bale wouldn’t have made some effort to clean away his handiwork, to hide it from the brother with whom he shared his room?

Indeed, is it even plausible that a built-in wardrobe in a shared room in a family home would have been entirely empty, or that Lorcan wouldn't have relied upon the wardrobe being full to hide his secret route to the attic? His old school friend Lorcan Conroy, one of Malone's main sources, told Malone that there were indeed clothes in the wardrobe, and that they needed to be pushed back on their rail in order to afford access to the attic hatches.

How does Malone resolve these difficulties? In practice he doesn’t; he divides Noonan’s account into two parts, so that the breakthrough is described early in the book and the aftermath is described much later, after O’Laughlin’s account, which Malone refers to when he wants to discuss details later on. Malone seems hardly troubled by the Noonan's and O'Laughlin's accounts being at odds with each other:

‘Other records of the events of that day differ very slightly in the detail, but the substance of the search and subsequent discovery of the body remains consistent. A slightly differing version, which I’ve recounted in detail in Chapter One, is Detective Sergeant Noonan’s account, supplemented by other witnesses. [...] The discrepancies between the two policemen’s accounts can easily be explained away by the passage of time. But common to both is seeing the body and immediately checking for any signs of life.’

This, of course, is nonsense. Nobody’s disputing that the boy was killed, or that he was found, or that the policeman who found him immediately checked to see if he was alive. The two stories don’t just differ slightly: they differ in serious and profound ways, and it’s surely the case that anybody on hearing and thinking through these stories should have thought to doubt O’Laughlin’s version of events. It's pretty clear, really, that O'Laughlin was just spinning Malone a yarn, but unfortunately, rather than doing his job as a journalist and trying to get his facts right, Malone just throws out every bit of data he's got and leaves it up to us to decide. 

The reality is that he hasn’t got a lot else to use, and has to include every trivial claim and counter-claim he’s ever heard on the subject simply to fill the book out. Tangents and speculation are an irritating feature of the book, padding out what is, in truth, an insubstantial piece of work. Much of this has to do with Malone’s lack of data: Lorcan Bale, long freed from custody and settled in society, wouldn’t tell him anything, the Horgans wouldn’t deal with him and didn’t welcome the book being written at all, and crucial information was simply inaccessible, hidden away by the demands of doctor-patient confidentiality. Malone’s been forced to bulk up what could, in itself, be a very good magazine feature in the right kind of magazine. It’s not a book, not as it stands.

Little Virtues

It’s not all bad, of course. There’s useful and interesting information there, and it was a strange relief to hear that John Horgan’s death was swift, rather than the agonised torture I’d always assumed: he wasn’t crucified, but was clubbed to death in the field behind his home, before being smuggled upstairs and into the attic, there to lashed to the rafters in Lorcan Bale’s black mass. Malone raises interesting questions about how Bale had ever got involved in Satanism, and wonders about the possibility of there having been a coven of some sort in Meath, but though he raises questions, he can offer no answers. 

Malone makes a real effort to get across a sense of place in the book, and he doesn’t wholly fail in this, in that I recognise his descriptions of the Palmerstown of 1973 as a lot closer to the Palmerstown of my childhood than to the Palmerstown of today. It was far smaller, for starters, with perhaps less than half the population, and mostly fields, cliche though that is. It’s a huge shame he doesn’t include maps showing how it’s changed, and photographs from Palmerstown back then, as there must be some around.

Now and Then, more or less

Although some names have been changed it’s oddly chilling to see familiar names cropping up, whether of people I’ve known such as the parish priest Father Kevin Daly, the local builder – and publican – Frank Towey, and Dr T.B. Sherry, or prominent national figures such as Maureen Gaffney. All this, and the fact that I know intimately all the places mentioned in the book makes reading it a disturbing experience. There’s something horrifying in reading of something so terrible taking place somewhere so ordinary, so familiar.

At the same time, though, the places where we grow up are never just mundane, are they? They’re invested with a profound – almost a mythic – sense of reality, where bushes and pillars stand as markers of stories we’ve heard and things we’ve done, monuments to a world which to an outsider is insignificant, but which means everything to those who live there. I made the Iliad from such a local row, wrote Patrick Kavanagh back in the day.

In Short...

These, however, are the book’s very few virtues, and more than anything it comes across as a missed opportunity. It offered a chance to say important things about Ireland in the 1970s – and it does at least hint at one thing, which was that back then Irish people simply didn’t share knowledge of bad things they’d heard of, such that wicked things might have been heard of but just weren’t discussed – but rather than delving into them, nothing is dealt with in anything more than a superficial level.

A couple of years back one of my oldest friends asked whether I’d be interested in doing the work on this myself, on finding out just what had happened, knowing my interest in this. I paused, and said no. Doing so, I thought, would be intrusive. It’s obvious that the two families wanted to leave the past behind them, and they should be left in peace. Sure, people would be interested to learn of this, but did they need to know about it?

Having read Malone’s work, I’m far from convinced that this story needed to be told. It may have satisfied my curiosity, to some degree, but I could have lived without that. More than anything it felt like an exercise in voyeurism.

The End of an Era: Squandering Our Influence for a Million Euro

I don't think I'll ever vote for Fine Gael again. Despite having long supported them at home, even having joined Young Fine Gael when in university -- though busy as I was, spending three hours every day bussing my way across Dublin not to mention working five nights a week in a local pub, I could hardly be described as every having been an active member -- their words and deeds in government have left me regretting how I voted before returning to England this spring.

The current government's been in office less than nine months, during which time its arrogance, mendacity, and stupidity have disheartened and disgusted me on an all too frequent basis. It seems that Fine Gael is no more encumbered by principles than Fianna Fáil was, and that the only real difference is that it pretends to be. Hypocrisy, as they say, is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

Time and again, I've been left dejected...

• By Enda Kenny's broken promises to the people of Roscommon, his dishonest denial of having made such promises, and his condemnation of those who challenged him for having lied... 
• By the Taoiseach's lying to the Dail and misrepresenting the Cloyne Report, attacking the Vatican on spurious grounds rather than focusing on real problems at home...
• By the Government's failure to take any action to challenge the vast majority of child abuse and neglect in Ireland -- almost all of which takes place in the family circle -- and by its undermining of child protection in real terms through the slashing of funding for child and family support charities...
• By the Government's eventual dismissal as legalistic pedantry of the Vatican's refutation of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste's false allegations...
• By the introduction of clumsy legislation that appears to criminalise anyone who has ever failed to report knowledge of even the most trivial theft...
• By the attempt to rush through constitutional amendments without any national debate as though they were of pressing urgency, and sneering ad hominem attacks on those who'd questioned the wisdom of the way those amendments had been worded...
• By the whipping of the Fine Gael party in the Seanad to amend a motion condemning how millions of girls are routinely aborted in China and India because they're female, in favour of instead condemning an undefined and general concept of infanticide...
• By the decision just this week to pay €700 million to bondholders of Anglo-Irish Bank to whom the state was neither morally nor legally beholden, as the current minister for Finance had admitted last December little more than two months before assuming office...

It's almost enough to make me lose faith in Irish politics altogether.


It's not just the Economy, Stupid!

And then, yesterday, the Government announced that it's going to close our third-oldest embassy, that being our embassy to the Holy See, which we've had since 1929.

(Yes I know we didn't call it an embassy then, since we didn't call any of our diplomatic representatives ambassadors until 1950. You know what I mean.)

Doing so, it appears, will save us a million euro or so, and we just can't afford that nowadays, especially at a time when we're choosing to pay several hundred times that amount to bondholders to whom we're not beholden. ''While the Embassy to the Holy See is one of Ireland’s oldest missions,' says the Government, 'it yields no economic return.'

Now. The Embassy's own website -- and I think we can assume that as an embassy it's speaking for the Government -- says the following:

'The Embassy of Ireland to the Holy See is the official channel of communication between the Irish Government and the Holy See: such communications cover a range of international political, economic, developmental and human rights issues.

The Embassy maintains contact with the many Irish Roman Catholic religious living and working in Rome. It has contact also with the representatives of other faith communities, Christian and non-Christian, that are in dialogue with the Holy See.'

You'll note two things there. Firstly, it seems the Embassy to the Holy See is an official channel of communications on economic issues, which rather seems to contradict the idea that the Embassy yields no economic return. Secondly, it does lots of other things too, as indeed do all our diplomatic missions.

We have quite a few diplomatic missions that hardly have economic returns as their priority, after all. In France, for instance, we've a permanent delegate in Paris to the United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organization, and an ambassador in Strasbourg who acts as a permanent representative to the Council of Europe. We've two ambassadors to the United Nations, these being in New York and Geneva. Our delegation in Brussels to Partnership for Peace and our permanent mission in Vienna to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe are both headed by ambassadors. The reason why we have such missions and delegations is very simple: our national interests are not exclusively economic.

Paddy Power is Soft Power

Ireland's a small country, and one almost wholly lacking in what's called 'hard power'. We may have a trade surplus second only to Germany in the EU, but I think we all know that if we got into an economic war with anyone we'd lose. And that's just economic war; can you imagine how we'd do in a real one? Our army isn't capable of protecting the national territory, our air force isn't even tasked with protecting our national airspace, and there's no conceivable way the eight patrol boats in our tiny navy could protect our territorial waters, much less protect our exclusive economic zone or prevent an invasion. We spend a smaller proportion of our GDP on defence than any other EU country bar Malta. Incapable of defending even ourselves, we couldn't even dream of using force projection to achieve our foreign policy aims.

We rely wholly on soft power to achieve our international aims. We talk to people. We get things done in meetings, but even more so we get things done in corridors and over drinks. And we've always been very good at this. We don't throw our measly weight around. We rely on informal networking, haggling, and chat, and we're extraordinarily good at it. To take an obvious example from European politics, Jason O'Mahony expressed the reality of the situation superbly in his excellent and hilarious Spoofers Guide to the Lisbon Treaty:

'Fact: Ireland does not rely on the size of its population to negotiate what we need within the EU. How the hell do you think a country with 0.8% of the population negotiated €30 billion in aid? '

Catholic stuff aside, I fear the Government's decision after 82 years of continual diplomatic networking to shut the designated embassy to the Holy See shall prove hugely detrimental to our national interests. We rely on informal networking to achieve our national objectives, after all, and even if we'd save a million or so euro by shutting our embassy to the Holy See, this saving would come at a price, as Paddy Agnew wrote in the Irish Times back in July:

'Not only would it strain relations with the Holy See, but Ireland would be cutting itself off from one of the world’s best "listening posts", given that the Vatican has an unparalleled worldwide network of contacts, intelligence and information.'

Networks and Nodes

A groundless fear? Hardly. Hell, anyone who's watched the West Wing episode 'Inauguration, Part I' will remember a few exchanges relevant to civil war in a -- fictional -- African country, notably where one Bob Slattery, the National Security Advisor, says: 'Intelligence is thin outside Bitanga. In fact, the Archbishop's network of clerics is probably as good as it gets.'

Startled, the President replies, 'The Catholic Church has better intelligence than we do?'

'It's a very small embassy, maybe ten people,' says the embarrassed Bob, 'And no Agency presence.'

Contrary to popular belief and myth-mongering, the Catholic Church isn't a neat organisation. It's not even close to being a pyramid with the Pope at the top, and with each country run by an archbishop or a cardinal or a bishops' conference. The Irish Church, for instance, has more than 180 interlinked and identifiable parts many of which aren't even theoretically answerable to the Archbishop of Armagh. A bit like the Church of England, the Church isn't a corporation so much as it is a huge network of overlapping and often largely autonomous clusters, but within this network there are certain nodal points, the most important of which is Rome. If local dioceses, churches, bishops, priests, charities, institutions, schools, hospitals, or ordinary laypeople want to, they can pass information along to these points, and that information can spread. It's messy and uneven and often deeply inefficient, but it can work very well. 

The simple fact of the matter is that with institutional Catholic presences in almost every country in the world, the Church has access to information to situations on the ground that no other organization can rival.

Anyone who thinks that this sort of informal information is redundant in an era of modern telecommunications needs to sit down and start reading some American foreign policy, strategy, and intelligence papers from a decade back. In the aftermath of 9-11, it was recognised that major failings in American intelligence had enabled the attacks, and that chief among these failings was a fetishization of technology that led the American intelligence agencies to divert resources from traditional human intelligence; since then the Americans have been working very hard and investing huge amounts of money to make up lost ground. They've learned in a horrifying way something they should have known all along just based on their own lives: that there's no substitute for personal contact.

What's more, there are Irish people throughout the world, often engaged in charity and development work; it makes sense for the Irish State to maintain close and cordial diplomatic and personal ties with Rome's diplomats, given that the Church is often better equipped and positioned than the Irish State to help Irish people far from home.

Caution from an Unexpected Corner

Even the Irish Times, which has long made it its mission to challenge the Church in Ireland, warned a couple of months back against the Government reducing our diplomatic clout by ceasing to accredit an ambassador to the Holy See:

'... there has been and continues to be a national interest in maintaining a close relationship and dialogue with the Catholic Church at an international level. It articulates the faith of the majority of our citizens and its representatives play a crucial daily role not only in the spiritual guidance of our people, but in the education of our children and our health services.

In 2009, the McCarthy report on public spending recommended that the State’s network of embassies and consulates be reduced from 76 to 55. The scale of that cull was rejected by the department but a review is under way. It would be a mistake, however, if cost considerations tipped the argument, inflamed as it is by the current controversy, in favour of closing the Villa Spada.'

All very well, you might think, but in what areas might the Irish State want to haggle and network with people who work in the Vatican or who have connections with the Holy See in one way or another? This is, after all, the twenty-first century.

A Soft Power Superpower

Just to think in terms of our national strategic interests, I talked about this to some degree in connection with the Papal visit to Britain last year. Quoting myself to save on typing:

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

The same principles are at work in the case of Ireland. The Church is the second-largest international development body and the second-largest humanitarian organization in the world, and its help is not contingent on people signing up to Catholic dogma. As the current Pope put it in his 2006 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est,

'Charity, furthermore, cannot be used as a means of engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism. Love is free; it is not practised as a way of achieving other ends. [...]  Those who practise charity in the Church's name will never seek to impose the Church's faith upon others. They realize that a pure and generous love is the best witness to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak.'

Sure, I've no doubt that there are plenty of Catholics throughout the world who disregard this. That's what happens: people are individuals, and they're not controlled by Rome. Nonetheless, throughout the world, millions upon millions of Catholics act in harmony with the Church's teaching and in communion with the Pope, working to help people because they themselves are Catholic, not because they people they're helping are.

I'd recommend you to take a look at how the monks in Of Gods and Men help their Muslim neighbours to get some idea of how and why this works, but just to take some examples to give a broad view...

Catholic bodies run a quarter of all African hospitals and arguably do more to fight HIV-AIDS than any other organization in the world. The Church plays a huge role internationally in conflict resolution, disarmament negotiations, and hostage releases, not to mention campaigning against the death penalty, the international arms trade, and specific wars such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  The Church has long been a leading advocate of financial and other aid for the developing world, an ardent proponent of debt cancellation for the poorest of countries, and one of the driving forces behind the Millennium Development Goals.

Have we placed a new Ideology over our National Interests?

Put simply, if Ireland cares about international development, world peace, health and education in the developing world, or any of the other things I've mentioned -- and I believe it does* -- then it needs to work closely with the Holy See. And if it cares about the interests of Irish people scattered across the world, then it makes sense to work closely with the Holy Sea. Having bankrupted ourselves, we're weaker now as a country than we've been in decades, and we need all the friends we can get right now. 

It's madness to weaken ourselves still further by turning our back on the most important player in global civil society.

___________________________________________________________________________

* I'd include the Environment on the list too, as Rome's worked hard and spoken out often on that issue as well, seeing us as having responsibilities as stewards of the world in which we live, but it appears that the Government's now decided that climate change isn't really something we need to worry about. And so, as though one were needed, Phil Hogan supplies a tenth obvious reason to give up on Fine Gael.

Nugent's Nonsense: Spilt Ink in the Irish Times, Part 5

I'm glad to say that Michael Nugent's abysmal series in the Irish Times has finally ground to a halt. A classic example of how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, the series as a whole has been a wanton waste of ink, paper, and bandwidth, being ill-informed and ill-considered throughout, such that it should embarrass any knowledgeable and thoughtful atheists.

Today's may just be the worst piece yet, not least because it seems to contradict itself in a spectacular way; I'm not quite sure that it does, as I'm getting a headache trying to decipher what Mr Nugent's talking about, but there seems to be a blatant contradiction squatting at the heart of his confusion. Nugent confidently states that the Pauline letters are the earliest books of the New Testament and that these testify to a Christian belief in the Resurrection, but also states that at the time Mark's Gospel was written Jesus was merely regarded as an apocalyptic preacher, with Resurrection stories not appearing until the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Now I could be reading it wrong, but that certainly seems to be what Mr Nugent says. I can't help wondering whether the editorial team of the Irish Times even bothered to throw their eyes across this. It really looks as though they didn't.

Not a bad idea, but some caveats...

Nugent's thesis is that it makes sense to read the New Testament books in the order they were written, rather than in their conventional order; I think there's a huge amount be said for this idea as long as we bear a few things in mind, none of which come across in Mr Nugent's article.

• Nobody is certain of the exact order in which the books were written, though the generally accepted order is more-or-less as follows: Pauline letters, Synoptic Gospels, Acts, other letters and Revelation, and John.
• While many Pauline letters can be dated with a high degree of confidence, the dating of other books is a matter of serious dispute, and there's a strong case that all three Synoptic Gospels were in circulation by 65 AD.
• Although modern scholars typically argue that Mark was the earliest of the Synoptic Gospels, it has been believed since at least early in the second century that Matthew was written first, albeit perhaps in an earlier Aramaic incarnation.
• It cannot be stressed enough that the books of the New Testament arose within the Church, and that it was not the case that the Church was founded upon the New Testamant books.
• The evidence provided by Acts for the experiences, beliefs, and practices of the Church in its first three decades should not be ignored.
• The Church was born in the era of Cicero, Lucretius, Augustus, Virgil, Ovid,  Seneca, and Tacitus. The ancients had brains every bit as good as ours.

Now, bearing these points in mind, let's see if Mr Nugent's thesis holds up. Nugent says that a study of the New Testament books ensures that:

'You will see how a human Jewish preacher evolved into part of a newly invented Christian god. You will also see how his relationship with the main Christian god gradually started earlier and earlier as time went on: from his resurrection in the letters of Paul, to his baptism in the Gospel called Mark, to his conception in the Gospels called Matthew and Luke, to the start of time in the Gospel called John.'

Let's try to avoid getting too hung up on the whole 'god (small "g")' thing this week, shall we? It's obvious Michael doesn't understand what he's saying on that front. And yes, for the sake of convenience let's gloss over how he seems to think the Bible presents God the Father and God the Son as separate -- if connected -- gods. He really doesn't seem to understand the principle that if you're going to attack an argument or a belief you have to engage with it on its own terms, as otherwise you prove nothing.


Falling at the First Hurdle, Michael...
Instead let's just look at this point: Nugent claims that the Pauline letters show that the Christian community at first only saw Jesus as related to the Father through his Resurrection, and that it was only decades later, when John came to be written, that the relationship between Jesus and the Father was understood as dating to the beginning of time.

Now, Paul's letters include certain stylistically distinctive passages such as this one from Paul's Letter to the Philippians 2:5-11:

'Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.'

Widely regarded as a Christian hymn that predates Paul's inclusion of it in this letter, it is at the very least evidence of a high Christology in Christian thought by 62 AD, which is when Philippians is generally thought to have been written, though some date the letter to several years earlier. Look at what Paul says here: that Jesus had the form of God and that he deliberately emptied himself to become born as a man and die on a cross, being exalted afterwards. This utterly refutes the idea that in Pauline thought Jesus' relationship with the Father was seen only to have begun with the Resurrection; it's clear from this that Paul believed it predated his conception.

There are those who dispute whether the Letter to the Colossians was written by Paul, arguing instead that it dates from the 80s, but even if we accept that, we'd surely have to concede that the 80s precedes the 90s, which is when Mr Nugent claims John was written, putting forward for the first time -- he says -- the idea that the relationship between Jesus and the Father existed at the beginning of time. Well, Colossians 1:15-20 features a Christological hymn too:

'He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities -- all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross'

Look at that. Before John put pen to papyrus, there's Paul or someone writing in his name testifying to the Christian belief that all creation was created in, through, and for Jesus.

And for what it's worth, Michael could do a lot worse than taking a look at the Letter to the Hebrews too. It's not Pauline, but it's more than likely that it dates to the 60s, to judge by what it says and what it fails to say, given its subject matter. It certainly predates John by some distance, and yet look at how it begins:

'In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.'

Again there we see the idea of the world having been created through Jesus, who upholds the Universe. There's a lot more of this sort of stuff in Hebrews, and though I'm not saying I don't expect Michael Nugent to find this crazy, I do think it inappropriate that he should gloss over this stuff as though it's irrelevant to his thesis. Such cherry-picking of evidence to create false impressions raises questions about whether he's actually read the Bible, as he so exhorts others to do, but perhaps it's churlish to suggest that he's either lying or incredibly unobservant.


Let's take a look at Acts...
It would, of course, be foolhardy to dismiss Nugent's thesis as being wholly without merit. Indeed, a study of Acts indicates a real development in Christian thought in its earliest years. The sermons therein tend to follow a predictable pattern, or at least to centre on particular themes, notably that Jesus' relationship with the Father -- and indeed with us -- is defined by the Resurrection. On the face of it, this might seem to give some support to Mr Nugent's broad argument, in that the Christological understanding of the early Church developed over time -- something I think all informed Christians would accept -- but in fact it undermines his argument further.

Luke was a disciple of Paul, and seems to have written Acts by 64 AD -- others would dispute this point, claiming that it's a later work, but it's incredibly difficult otherwise to explain why Acts excludes such crucial events in early Christian history as the Great Fire of Rome, the Neronian Persecution including the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, and the Jewish War with particular reference to the destruction of the Temple. What's striking about the sermons in Acts is that they reveal a deeply un-Pauline Christology, a Christology that knows nothing of our having been saved by Jesus' death, seeing Jesus' death merely as a necessary evil, something that had to happen so that the Resurrection could take place.

It was common practice among ancient historians to compose speeches and place them in the mouths of historical figures. It seems unlikely, however, that a Pauline Christian such as Luke would have attributed such un-Pauline sentiments to Peter, Stephen, and indeed Paul unless he either knew that such things had been said by them, or, at the very least, unless he knew that that sort of thing had been said by them. In other words, Luke seems to have had reason to believe that the Christology of the Church of the 30s was not so developed as that of the Church in his own day.

Do you see where this is going? The Church of the 30s and 40s was clearly a real thing, a real historical phenomenon, and one which Luke described in what seems to have been a historically honest way, not glossing over how rudimentary its Christology must have seemed to him. Had he simply been writing propaganda he could have polished and updated the sermons, but he didn't do so. As such they stand as simple testimonies to a Church that had witnessed the risen Christ and that was still trying to come to terms with what it had experienced.

Any discussion of the historicity of Jesus and the Church's understanding of him that doesn't even attempt to grapple with the picture of the early Church as revealed in Acts should be regarded as lazy, inept, ignorant, or dishonest, if not all four. One can disagree with what Acts tells us, but it takes some nerve to pretend that it tells us nothing.


What of Evidence for the Resurrection?
'The physical resurrection of Jesus is the central tenet of Christianity,' says Mr Nugent, 'but the evidence for this extraordinary claim is nonexistent outside the Bible, and contradictory within it.'

I'm not sure the evidence for the Resurrection outside the Bible is really non-existent, though I suppose it depends on what you'd consider to be evidence. Certainly, there are later non-canonical Gospels, and there's a passage of Josephus' Jewish Antiquities that many think was doctored by later Christian scribes, and there are Christian writings from the late first and early second centuries which speak of the Resurrection. More importantly, though, there's the existence of the Church itself, which from the 30s onwards was a missionary movement that was willing to brave persecution and death in order to spread the Good News of -- what?

Because that's the key question that needs to be answered in dealing with this subject. As N.T. Wright puts it in The Resurrection of the Son of God, 'at the end of the day, the historian can and must ask why Christianity began, and why it took the shape it did. Since the universal early Christian answer to that question had to do with Jesus and the resurrection, the historian is forced to ask further questions...'


The Earliest Evidence?
In the earliest written Biblical reference to the Resurrection, says Mr Nugent, 'Paul says the risen Jesus appeared to more than 500 people at one time,' except this isn't true. The detail of the 500 witnesses is to be found in 1 Corinthians 15.6, as part of the following passage:

'For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.'

It is an enormously important passage, but written though it was in the mid-50s and evidently based at least in part on rather earlier creedal statements, it's clearly not the earliest written Biblical reference to the Resurrection, that surely being  1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, which says:

'For they themselves report concerning us what a welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.'

Universally dated to between 48 and 50 AD, 1 Thessalonians is regarded as the earliest book of the New Testament to have been written, and it's a book which speaks not merely of the Resurrection but also addresses the reality that Christians had died and that more would die before Jesus should come again. This is important, as it shows that even in Paul's early writings he didn't really see Jesus as having been somebody who believed the world would end within the lifetimes of his immediate audience.

Of course, that shouldn't surprise us, as the first Petrine sermon in Acts implicitly makes a similar point, with Peter saying 'For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to him.' That Peter said Jesus' promise was made not merely to his audience but to their children, not to mention those in far off lands, rather challenges the view that Jesus message was for the Jews of his own generation, and that the world would end within their lifetimes.


Contradictions?
Is it problematic that 1 Corinthians mentions the risen Jesus having appeared to five hundred people but that the extant original text of Mark seems not to have described Jesus appearing to anyone at all? Surely not: leaving aside the probability that the current ending for Mark replaces a lost ending, even in truncated form Mark features an indication that Jesus would meet Peter and the disciples in Galilee.

Indeed, it's quite easy to reconcile into one straightforward narrative all encounters with the risen Christ reported in the Bible. We hear of an encounter with Mary Magdalene and other women, an encounter with Peter which is twice referred to but never described, an encounter with two disciples on the road to Emmaus, at least five -- probably rather more -- encounters with the Apostles as a group, an appearance to five hundred of Jesus' followers at the same time, an appearance to his kinsman James, a final appearance to the Apostles, and then an encounter with Paul on the road to Damascus. Given how the New Testament texts were written for different audiences and in different contexts, it's hardly surprising that they don't habitually reel off the same comprehensive list of encounters.

As I've said, it's easy to pull these together into one narrative; I'm not going to say there aren't bumps in it, but they're tiny ones by the standards of ancient history. For example, was Bocchus I of Mauretania the son-in-law of the Numidian king Jugurtha, as per Plutarch's Marius 10, or was he his father-in-law, as per Plutarch's Sulla 3? Did Caesar meet up with Pompey and Crassus at Luca in 56 as Plutarch says? Cicero,  who notes that Caesar had already met with Crassus at Ravenna, seems to be aware only of a meeting with Pompey, while Cassius Dio gives no obvious indication that any conference took place. I could go on, but that example from the decade of ancient history for which we have the best evidence surely makes my point sufficiently well: evaluating this stuff is always tricky. If it was easy, anybody could do it.



Not a Nice Guy?
One of the things Nugent wants to do in this piece is to argue that the Biblical Jesus is hardly a moral exemplar, but clearly under pressure for space he barely manages a couple of jabs on this, so slight as to appear to have come out of the blue.

'Nor is the biblical Jesus exclusively peaceful, or even just. In the Gospel called Luke, before the Garden of Gethsemane incident, he instructs his disciples to buy swords. In the Book of Revelation, he threatens to kill the children of Jezebel for the sins of their mother.'

I like the idea of 'The Gethsamane Incident'. It sounds like a Ludlum novel. That aside, though, I almost agree with Nugent on this, in that if we start ripping lines and episodes from the Bible out of context, as he does in this instance, then we're bound to reach some troubling conclusions very quickly. As I said weeks ago, the Bible needs to be read in its entirety and it needs to be read within the Church.


And with that, Michael wraps up, cluelessly referring to 'more primitive times', and summing up by repeating things he's said in earlier articles. What he doesn't do, however, is say what kind of evidence he'd deem sufficient for him to be convinced of God's existence. Remember that? His first piece, back in the day, was headed 'We atheists will change our minds if evidence shows we are wrong'. Five articles he's written, squandering a lot of valuable ink along the way, and he still never said what kind of evidence it would take to change his mind.

Do you think he's ever seriously considered that question?

Ah well.

Reasonable Faith: A Dialogue of the Deaf, Part 4

And so, finally, after two statements and a series of responses, the debate was brought to an end. It had been decided that there wouldn't be a vote to see which speaker the audience believed had won -- which I thought was wise, given the partisan nature of the crowd and the fact that it was pretty unlikely than anybody had changed their mind in response to the arguments they'd heard.

Instead there was a short informal discussion chaired by one Peter S. Williams, during which Atkins made it clear that he regarded atheism as the normative state of human belief, such that it didn't really need arguments to justify it, and continued to hold to the line that Craig's arguments were wholly faith-based. He felt Craig was placing anecdotes over evidence -- despite his own Independent aside and in determined scorning of Craig's references to Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin's work -- and condescendingly claimed that Craig's arguments would have gone down a storm a thousand years ago.

Nonsense, of course; Craig's argument would have been impossible a thousand years ago, not least because the Aristotelian revolution as led by the likes of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas didn't happen until the thirteenth century. Yes, the same Aristotelian revolution that gave the scientific method its theoretical and first practical underpinnings, because western science only became possible when Aristotelian thinking was tied with the Christian belief that God had made the Universe in a way that was reliable, and that nature would therefore act in accordance with natural laws.

Anyway, when quizzed on where he stood on philosophy in general, Atkins dismissed it out of hand, calling it  'a complete waste of time'. He conceded that moral philosophy has its uses -- he could hardly do otherwise, given how he'd argued that morality is something we work out ourselves -- but insisted that philosophy in general was just idle speculation.

He didn't seem aware of just how bizarre, not to mention ironic, that claim was coming from the mouth of someone who'd quoted Voltaire, cited Zeno, and argued against miracles on the basis of David Hume's philosophy, but then, he didn't seem a particular thoughtful sort. He seemed blissfully unaware of how the scientific method itself is wholly dependent on a series of philosophical presuppositions, and was scathing when Craig pointed this out to him.

On then to morality, with Atkins equating morality with usefulness -- an attitude that quite a few philosophers, starting with Socrates, would have had cause to question -- and saying that he believed it immoral to intervene in anyone's life. Well, not quite anyone, he explained. If he could intervene in Hitler's life, he would.

I'm not sure what he meant by that. Did he mean if he could go back in time to stop Hitler he would do so? Does he mean that he'd intervene in the life of a modern Hitler? Was he saying he'd go back in time to kill Hitler if he could? Your guess, frankly, is as good as mine.

The only thing I was left certain of, at 21:33 on Wednesday 26 October 2011, Peter Atkins blinked first, being the first person in the evening to mention Nazis. 

And so, with Godwin's Law finally having been fulfilled, it was time to call the evening to a close.

We'd a good chat in the pub afterwards, mind.