The Scourge of Abuse: Time to Face Facts

Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy, shown on ITV last Wednesday, will have horrified those for whom Jimmy Savile was a broadcasting institution. 

The programme alleged that the DJ and presenter of such shows as Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, famous for his eccentric lifestyle and having raised more than £40million for charity, was a sexual predator who regularly abused girls in their early teens. 

Savile, who died last October aged 84, obviously cannot defend himself against these allegations, but the programme’s presenter, former detective Mark Williams-Thomas, made a compelling case, interviewing a succession of middle-aged women who described how they’d been assaulted by Savile in their youth, as well as people who had witnessed Savile’s behaviour. 

Childline founder Esther Rantzen, a onetime BBC colleague of Savile, looked distraught as she said that she had no doubt that the women who had come forward to tell their stories were telling the truth. Admitting that people had blocked their ears to gossip about Savile, whose charity work had given him an almost saintly status, she said “In a funny way we all colluded in this… we in some way colluded with him as a child abuser.” 

BBC cover-up 

Some have been quick to speak of a BBC cover-up, and of a code of honour among ‘luvvies’, but neither gloating nor point-scoring will undo the harm that Savile did or prevent further abuse by others. 

The reality is that Savile hid in plain sight; colleagues, journalists, and even fans chose to turn a blind eye to his behaviour. 

His 1974 autobiography, As It Happens, describes how in the 1950s he had told a female police officer that if an attractive runaway from a remand home were to come to his club, he would return her to the police but only after keeping her overnight first as his ‘reward’. He did just that, and boasted that the officer’s colleagues had to dissuade her from bringing charges against him. 

Denial 

How could anybody have ignored this? Did they dismiss it as a laddish tall tale? It may simply have been that they didn’t want to believe it. Denial, sadly, is all too often our default response when faced with the reality of abuse. Our own history shows this all too bleakly. 

In 1930, W.T. Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government appointed a committee under William Carrigan K.C. to consider if the Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1880 and 1885 should be amended. The most shocking of the committee’s findings, submitted the following year, was that: 

“…there was an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under 10 years.” 

The police estimated that under 15pc of such cases were prosecuted, as it was difficult to establish guilt and parents felt it would be better for their children if such cases were kept secret. 

The Department of Justice recommended against the report’s publication, and Cosgrave’s government fell without having decided what to do; de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government set up an all-party committee to consider in confidence how to respond to the report’s findings, but nothing was done. 

It would be easy to dismiss the suppression of the Carrigan Report as emblematic of a less enlightened age, but things have scarcely improved over the last 80 years. Nowadays we don’t hide the truth; we just ignore it. 

In 2002 the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre published the findings of a massive study on sexual abuse and violence in Ireland. The SAVI Report found, among other things, that 27pc of Irish adults had been sexually abused as children, with half of these having never told anybody of their experiences. Of Ireland’s more than 780,000 adult survivors of childhood abuse, it seems that roughly 530,000 had experienced contact sexual abuse, about 120,000 having been raped. 

Family Circle 

SAVI also found that nearly 60pc of abuse survivors had been abused by people within the family circle including extended family, neighbours, and family friends, 4.6pc having been abused by their babysitters. Just under 1.7pc of abuse was committed by clergy, with a further 1.7pc by teachers who were members of religious orders. 

For every victim whose abuser had been convicted for their crimes, about 200 had never seen justice done. Almost two-thirds of abuse survivors had been abused while under twelve years old. 

So damning a report ought to have defined our national understanding of abuse, and shaped public policy for dealing with it, but instead SAVI’s impact has been negligible, Ireland’s media and politicians having averted their eyes from its findings. 

The current government has made loud noises about protecting children, but its actions have resembled those of generals fighting the last war. Much of the Children First Bill concentrates on abuse within organisations, when it seems that organisational abuse, while not a thing of the past, has already been greatly reduced. 

People generally recognise that most abuse takes place within the family circle, but few realise that relatively little contemporary abuse takes place elsewhere. In 2009 the Irish Times quoted a Garda Detective Sergeant fighting internet paedophiles with Interpol as saying that 85pc of child sexual abuse occurs within the family circle, and the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland revealed that 97pc of abuse survivors who had sought their help the previous year had been abused by people within their family circle. 

As much as a third of Ireland’s sexual abuse is committed by adolescents, but our popular narrative of abuse remains focused on the bogeyman figure of the ‘paedophile priest’, rather than on the teenage boy. 

People would rather believe that abusers are ‘out there’ rather than very close to home. Last September, Father Paddy Banville wrote in this paper that the problems of abuse and cover-up in the Irish Church reflected the problems of abuse and cover-up in Irish society; the ensuing furore was, in the words of the Irish Times critic at the time of the 1907 Playboy Riots, “as if a mirror were held up to our faces and we found ourselves hideous. We fear to face the thing.” 

It’s clear that people rationalise abusive behaviour,  believe that it’ll not happen again, play down the damage that was done, and say that whatever their loved ones may have done, they’re still their brothers, husbands, sons, or friends. Mercy, hope, loyalty, and trust conspire to drive our eyes from the crimes of those we love. 

We need to acknowledge this if we’re to have any hope of eradicating the scourge of abuse from Irish life. Addressing it in the Church has just been the beginning. It’s time to face facts. 

-- A version of this was originally published in The Irish Catholic, 11 October 2012.

Trivial Pursuit...

I’ve always liked my brother’s self-indulgent 101 facts about himself, and while looking for something earlier I thought it might be fun to bump up an old Facebook note -- one of those meme things -- into a blogpost. That said, it’s probably a post for me and masochists only.

And so, in emulation, here goes...

1. When I was a child I wanted to join the Household Cavalry, which can’t have been normal in 1980s Dublin. The Life Guards, to be precise. Part of me still wishes I could. Let’s face it: they look like knights, don’t they?

2. Mikhael Gorbachev once rubbed off me. Not in an inappropriate way, just while he was trying to get to his seat at Hampton Court Palace. He was clearly keen on hearing what Salman Rushdie and Quincy Jones had to say.

3. My first night on mainland Europe was spent in a twelfth-century castle overlooking the Rhine. I went back there on my third trip to Germany. The hundreds of steps up the hill seemed far less arduous as an adult.

4. Despite a weakness for toffee, caramel, millionaire shortbread, cheesecake, and Black Forest gateau (especially if made with morello cherries), I maintain that I do not have a sweet tooth. I do, however, have a freakishly long tongue. People stare when I unleash it. I’m never sure if they’re horrified, impressed, or intrigued.

5. Once, on Ash Wednesday, I was given ashes in the shape of the Batman symbol. I suspect this was not intentional.

6. Years ago I discovered a letter written by Thomas Hardy while rummaging in an old copy of his collected poems. I’m still not a fan of his books, though. Realism is one thing, but pessimism on that scale? The glass might be half empty, but at least there’s a glass, Tom.

7. After a day spent wandering about Krakow, going as far out as the camp in Schindler’s List, I was taught to dance the Macarena by Mexicans in a supposedly Irish bar where we drank 12 per cent strength beer until four in the morning; a few hours later I received the results of my final exams, learning that I’d topped my year for a third time running, and visited Auschwitz. It was an eventful 24 hours.

8. One hot summer day in Athens, I gave inaccurate directions to a flustered Dylan Moran and his family. Realising I’d sent them the wrong way I tracked them down and gave them proper directions to the street he wanted to go to. At no point did I indicate I had any idea who he was. I hope he appreciated that.

I later discovered that the museum he wanted to visit was on a different street, and was closed till September.

9. I once ended a statistics lecture by banging my desk, tearing off my jumper to reveal a lumberjack shirt, and singing Monty Python’s ‘Lumberjack Song’ to 300 bemused Commerce students.

10. The longest I have gone without a haircut was eight months. I shall try to refrain from repeating that error.

11. I once cut my own hair, just a couple of weeks before I sprained my wrist jumping off a roof; that was clearly a troubling summer for my parents. The hair cut was not a great success.

12. On the way to a wedding in the Lake District some years back, I was delayed for an hour on a train because workmen the previous night had conducted work on the line and forgotten to replace the tracks. I doubt I shall ever hear a better excuse.

13. I’m not much of a man for water, favouring tea in a big way, but I drank six litres of the stuff in under an hour when I climbed Masada at noon. There’s a reason why the Israeli army only go up it in the early hours, but I had a bus schedule to work around.

14. A comic strip drawn by me for my school magazine when I was fourteen was censored; one drawn for it when I was fifteen led to the school magazine being banned and never revived. The following year we had a yearbook, and the strip I drew for that, two pages of which you can see here, was – perhaps wisely – never published.

I appear to have drawn Brian Cowan in the final panel. And Roger Mellie.

15. I spent several years wanting to be a comic artist, and when Bryan Talbot and Steve Pugh looked at my work they told me I’d definitely make it if I kept at it. I’ve hardly drawn since.

16. I caught a burglar in the early hours of Easter Sunday, 2006. A Ryanair flight I was on arrived in Liverpool a few minutes early, and my luggage was first out; this enabled me to catch the Manchester bus an hour earlier than I had planned so that got home an hour ahead of schedule; being in the right place at the right time led to the burglar’s capture. The City of Manchester thanked me for this. The institution where the burglar had been operating did not. Quite the opposite, in fact.

17. My command of my ancestral tongue leaves a lot to be desired, but I prefer my name in its Irish form.

18. I read vast quantities of Enid Blyton books as a child, including all the 'Famous Five' books. Despite this, I never knew what smugglers were. Too lazy to use a dictionary, I always trusted that the meaning would become clear. It didn’t. They were obviously bad guys, though. Like thugs. And ruffians.

19. I only ever had one organised fight in school, fought to establish definitively who had won an impromptu fight the previous year. The outcome of the arranged fight was itself disputed. This episode clearly haunts me even now.

20. The Irish Independent once quoted me as a cultural authority, accusing Brian McFadden of jumping onto a ‘cool bandwagon of pain’. He was, too. It was to be a long time before the Irish Times quoted me, and then it was under my pseudonym. That said, I’d had a letter in the paper a few weeks earlier, under my real name.

21. I have fallen asleep standing up on at least three occasions, and have fallen asleep mid-sentence at least once.

22. The furthest north I have been is Dalmally, in Scotland, where I celebrated the Easter Vigil with one of my closest friends in 2011. On arrival there I quipped to her that this would be the first time in ages that I’d be at Mass and not be asked to do something; walking in the door we were promptly asked to bring up the bread and wine at the Offertory.

23. The country I’ve been closest to without setting foot in it was the Lebanon. I was a passenger in a Syrian taxi on a road that ran within two miles of the border; my driver was unable to use his rear-view mirror as he’d clipped a small television screen over it.

24. As a teenager I didn’t believe in God, but rather than saying so would dutifully disappear for an hour every Sunday, often spending the time daydreaming in the back of the church, walking around the neighbourhood, skiving in a snooker hall, or chatting with mates in a ruined pre-Norman church. I didn’t see any virtue in distressing my parents by kicking up a fuss. Converted as an adult by reading a lot, thinking very carefully, and engaging with a succession of Atheists, Agnostics, and Anglicans, I have prayed at the tombs of St Francis of Assisi, St Peter, St Paul, and Our Lord.

25. I have an unhealthy weakness for secondhand bookshops, where my greatest finds have been an 1895 leatherbound and gilt-edged collected Chaucer, a collection of GK Chesterton’s poems once owned by and still bearing the name of a teenage Eavan Boland, and a volume of Chesterton essays signed by the man himself.

26. I am still disappointed I never managed to meet Patrick Leigh Fermor before he died.

27. I have twice attended receptions in ambassador’s houses, and have been disappointed by a distinct absence of Ferrero Rocher on both occasions. At the first reception I was greeted at the door by Benazir Bhutto and spoke briefly to Olivia de Havilland; at the second reception, my host informed the ambassador that she was spoiling us.

28. When using my parents’ exercise bike I used to read while listening to the radio. I still feel this was impressive multitasking on my part; I must see if I can still do this.

29. I’ve twice attempted to visit an improbable battlefield, located on a Greek mountaintop. The first time, after I’d explained the nature of the route to my archaeological friend who was driving us, he stared and said “So we’re going to follow an impassable road to the possible site of a badly-described battle which may not have happened.”

We didn’t make it there, though we did manage to damage our already unreliable rental car in the process.

Three years later we made it to the top only to be chased down the hill by dogs.

30. I once played a clockwork mouse in a primary school play; the following year, in a clear attempt at preventing similar malarkey, I wrote the scene performed by my class, insisting on special effects and incidental music. Grieg, since you asked. The dragon’s head built at my request became a standard feature of school plays there for years afterwards, it being the only purpose-built prop they had. It was customised more than once.

31. I have narrowly avoided colliding with Seamus Heaney and Dara O’Briain when turning corners in Dublin; I wasn’t quick enough to avoid colliding with PJ Mara one night on Waterloo Road. He dropped his phone. It should be noted that he wasn’t quick enough to avoid colliding with me either.

32.  My most treasured possessions are an Edwardian swordstick, a policeman’s cape, a medieval human skull, a Carthaginian coin, a bullet and a shrapnel ball from the Great War, a fossilised trilobite, a painting of Dublin Bay, a linoprint of Brighton’s West Pier, two signed pages of original Sandman artwork, and the aforementioned collection of essays signed by G.K. Chesterton.

Some treasured trinkets

33. I would like to see every Vermeer in the world, and think this is a manageable ambition, there being only three dozen or so all told. I’ve seen five since deciding I wanted to do this. I think I’d seen eight others over the years in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, and Edinburgh but feel they need seeing afresh.

34. I was a very aggressive defensive end when I played American football as a twelve-year old, perhaps a bit too aggressive, even; I wasn’t picked for the Nerf flag football ad a few of my mates were in!

35. I have spent long journeys working out detailed advertising campaigns for Sure anti-perspirant, Werthers Originals, and Erdinger. Only the Sure one would ever stand a chance of seeing the light of day, the others lacking a certain historico-political sensitivity.

36. Over the years I have given four Claddagh rings, two of silver with little stones in, and two plain ones of white gold, all were as twenty-first birthday presents for very dear friends.

37. The furthest I’ve ever cycled in a day was 97 miles, going to Glendalough via Blessington and through the Wicklow Gap, and coming back by way of Bray and the centre of Dublin. That was my second cycle trip to Glendalough that summer, the first time having been via the Liffey Valley and the Sally Gap.

38. While driving back to Rome from Cannae, when making a BBC documentary in Italy, I used the line ‘After Cannae, Hannibal thought his plan was really coming together.’ It didn’t make the final cut.

39. Two childhood friends of mine and I once failed to dam a stream with rocks, but on finding a slab of lard in the stream dammed it successfully using the lard as mortar. Don’t ask what the lard was doing in the stream. Really, you don’t want to know.

40. The strangest thing I have eaten was a lamb’s brain. It was delicious.

41. The most unpleasant thing I have ever eaten was tripe boiled in milk with potatoes and onion. I’ve had tripe since, though, in Rome, and would have it cooked that way again. I might not pick it from a menu, but I’d eat it.

42. A resolute defender when playing football at school, I once volleyed a tennis ball the entire length of what counted as a football field for us. And scored. It was my only ever goal.

43. My first paid job was working at the Irish Open. I spent four days in a little hut, reading books, listening to a crackly walkie-talkie, peering through binoculars to see what other leaderboard operators had heard through the crackles, changing scores, and being shouted at by golfers because I was using a walkie-talkie. The entire experience thoroughly inoculated me against golf.

44. The two girls with whom I’ve been taken for the longest periods in my life shared a birthday, albeit a few years apart. Those who know me very well may be surprised to learn that only the latter of these was a redhead.

45. I may have been the only person in Palmerstown not to boast of having seen Julia Roberts when she hid out from the world press there. I did, however, see her when she returned a few years later.

46. Ever since I was a little boy, there have been four places I’ve wanted to visit more than anywhere else in the world: I visited Petra in 2000 and Krak des Chevaliers in 2010. I fear I’ll never visit Machu Picchu or Angkor.

Before going to find the Holy Grail

Oblivious to the tarantula sitting across the table from me

That said, maybe in 2020 and 2030...

47. The furthest south I have ever been is Aqaba, crossing into Jordan and leaving it. I’ve still not seen the town properly, and half wonder if the guns are still there, facing out to sea.

48. In September 1998 I dreamed that Akira Kurosawa died, and the following day he did. It has been pointed out to me that he was both rather old and very famous, and so there’s a good chance that on any given day somebody in the world was dreaming of his death. I've seen ten of his films in the cinema – more than by any other director – and my favourite film is still Seven Samurai: it’s elegiac, beautiful, exciting, funny, tragic, instructive, and thoughtful, without a wasted shot.

49. I have seen at least 281 films in the cinema, and have fallen asleep during at least eight of them: The Madness of King George, Three Colours Blue, Pulp Fiction, Seven, Shine, The Phantom Menace, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Two Towers. There was a fire in the Lighthouse when I went to see Farewell My Concubine. I still don’t know how it ends.

50. I once went to a very small theatre with a girl with whom I’d gone out the previous year, and was startled when one of the male leads stripped off in the second half and strutted about in front of us for several minutes. We did not speak of this until several weeks later. When I returned from the play and told the mutual friend with whom I was staying what had happened, she asked whether my ex had blushed during this. I didn’t know, I said; I had been too embarrassed to look.

51. The most disgusting experience I’ve ever had was when I stepped in the carcass of a dead dog. In my defence, it was a dark night. I only wish I hadn’t been wearing sandals.

52. Over the course of four trips to Greece I have sprained both ankles, smashed my head off a tree, been abandoned by a taxi driver after midnight, walked into a cloud of tear gas, watched a cockroach land on a friend during dinner, narrowly avoided two lethal motorbike accidents, and, as mentioned, stood in a dead dog. There is a reason why friends of mine use the term 'Greece Wins Again' when bad things happen there.

53. I have long joked about giving a pseudo-academic paper on the interlinked phenomena of GWAs, en taxei, and Hellenisation, drawing almost all examples from Greek myth and ancient history. Worried that I might upset Greek friends, I have resisted this temptation.

54. In a Paris park I bumped into a girl I knew from college, and a year and a half later in Killarney I met a customer I knew from work. Both these events seemed unusual at the time, but since then I’ve made a habit of such encounters, with me meeting so great a succession of friends and friends of friends in such diverse spots as London, Athens, Damascus, and Gallipoli that I’m now almost surprised when I don’t meet somebody I know, to a greater or lesser degree. The world can be a very small place.

55. The longest letter I have ever written ran to 236 pages. I got carried away.

56. My favourite song is ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’, and I was oddly pleased when, the only time I’ve seen the Pogues live, Shane messed it up. Drunk as he was, he sang the last verse too early in the song, and so wound up returning to it, treating it as a chorus. Has there ever been so fine a compliment as ‘You’re the measure of my dreams’?

57. I sat my university finals when I was twenty. Had I stayed the course as a teenage Commerce student, I’d have done so at nineteen. This strikes me as worryingly young. Life would have been rather different had I done that, of course.

58. I have spent two summers working on archaeological digs, both in the field and in the lab. On my first day on site I discovered an early Christian grave in a Hellenistic artillery tower, when I picked up a tiny shard and recognised it as a fragment of human cranium.

This was my first day on the dig. The weather improved. A lot.

59. People tend to think of me as well-travelled, but I’ve yet to spend even one night in fifteen of Ireland’s thirty-two traditional counties, and I’ve never so much as set foot in Antrim or Fermanagh.

60. I can’t help feeling a bit jealous of people who’ve been to Skellig Michael, Dun Aengus, and the Giant’s Causeway. That said, I realise that rather than being jealous, I should just figure out a way of going there.

61. The first time I was on television was during a documentary about the Phoenix Park: I was a little boy, sitting on the steps on the Wellington Monument, and the camera swept over me as I got up.

62. The first time I said a word on television, I was a talking head in a documentary about Hannibal. On the way to the studio in Ealing, both of my shoelaces broke. It was a troublesome walk.

63. I have twice seen pigeons getting the Tube in London. On both occasions I’ve had a camera handy.

64. Columns by Con Houlihan, clipped for me from the Evening Press by my father, taught me the importance of the Oxford comma. I get annoyed when people don’t use it.

65. Until I was twenty-one, I had never flown anywhere.

66. I was briefly nicknamed ‘Zanussi’ in school, having got 98pc in my Inter Cert science mock exam; Zanussi, lest you’ve forgotten, billed itself as ‘the Appliance of Science’. 

67. Some years ago, when picking up a friend’s husband from work at CERN, I asked what exactly he did, and whether he just sat round drinking tea and bouncing particles all day long. He laughed, and said he’d show me, taking me into the bowels of the earth to see the Large Electron-Positron Collider. Its control room looked like a hybrid of Homer Simpson’s office and the bridge of the original Enterprise.

68. I used to know all the words to ‘... Baby One More Time’. In German. Now I remember little more than the title: ‘Schlag Mich, Liebling, Noch Einmal’.

69. I used to go out with a girl who lived a couple of miles from the site of the Battle of Hastings; her grandparents lived on the site of the Battle of Edge Hill. Over the years I’ve visited the probable sites of the battles of the Ticinus, the Trebbia, Lake Trasimene, Cannae, Pylos, Mantinea, Plataea, Leuctra, Coronea, Chaeronea, Thermopylae, Marathon, Thyrea, Ypres, and Gallipoli. As you do.

70. I have, I think, 2824 books. Despite storage problems, this isn’t really that many – two thousand, after all, is the minimum anyone should have if they want to be taken seriously, though hardly something to be proud of. No, I’ve not read them all. I’ve read the vast majority of them, but not all. Give me time. 

71. Well over six hundred of my books are novels, and of those my favourite is The Man Who Was Thursday. If you’ve not read it, you should rectify that. My favourite edition, annoyingly, is out of print, but you can read most of the introduction here; if you’re tempted, then ABE and Amazon Marketplace may yet be your friends.

72. When I was a little boy I read most of Robinson Crusoe, but stopped a few pages from the end. As far as I’m concerned he’s still on that island.

73. The first time I went to a football match, it was to see Everton draw with Liverpool on Good Friday 2000. We scored a perfectly good – if impossibly flukey – goal with twenty seconds left on the clock, and the ref disallowed it, saying he’d blown the whistle, whereas he was clearly scared of a riot if the goal was allowed. Years later he admitted he’d been wrong. This, I’ve learned in the intervening years, is typical.

74. The furthest east I have ever been is Palmyra, where I hurried up a hill to watch the sun set and got up absurdly early to return to the same hill to see it rise, and watch the dawn light over the ruins.

Sunset over Palmyra

And Palmyra in the light of the rising sun - worth getting up for!

75. I was unreasonably excited to see my name in the acknowledgements of Jess Nevin’s Impossible Territories. I had written eight blogposts on Moore and O’Neill’s Black Dossier and thrown the encyclopaedic Jess a few lines, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but still. That said, I’ve yet to buy Jess’s book.

76. The first time I walked across a guarded border, there was a bomb scare; the second time I crossed over nervously, as I could overhear a furious man shouting in Arabic behind me, trying to persuade the soldiers there to stop me. I’ll tell you about it another time.

77. Somehow I’ve accumulated an absurd number of anecdotes as the years have gone by. I tend to forget which I’ve told, so have a habit of resorting to a rather small repertoire. The longest tale I tell I refer to as ‘The Paris Incident’, but I don’t think I’ve ever told it from egg to apple more than twenty times all told. It’s very good, but it’s a bit long for casual deployment.

78. I have played ‘... Baby One More Time’ on the ukulele. Sadly, it was a brief intensive lesson, and it’s not stuck, not least because I no longer have the tabs. Now I can barely manage ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’.

79. David Kelly and William Sessions have both sat beside me on buses. Not at once, I should point out. I talked more with the former FBI head; he recommended an interesting book to me.

80. I have attended Mass in at least 75 places, and heard it in nine languages, including Arabic and Czech.

81. I was a year into my research master’s before I realised that there was a general consensus that I was attempting something that couldn’t be done. Since my book’s publication, I think at least half a dozen other academics have done the same thing I did. Sometimes it pays off for fools to rush in where angels fear to tread. I'm not convinced I write ‘from an upper middle-class status’, though.

82. Whenever I see streams of bunting I think of underwear. I found the Jubilee very difficult.

83. Despite what the Oracle of Bacon thinks, I have a Bacon Rating of 3. The man who did the voiceover in my first Hannibal documentary, perhaps best known for playing Felix Leiter in the new Casino Royale, has a Bacon Rating of 2, having been in D-Tox with Rance Howard, who was in Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon. I reckon that gives me a 3.

84. A few years back, police asked if I could identify a murder victim from a photograph of his corpse. I couldn’t.

85. When playing Cluedo as a child I once had to accuse myself of committing murder. I found this so funny that I doubled over laughing and accidentally stabbed myself with my pencil. 

86. I have never travelled more frantically than in Malta, where in the space of thirteen hours I went on five bus journeys, hired three taxis, got the ferry twice, and hitch-hiked. It was exhausting, but it was worth it.

87. I’ve dabbled in karate and aikido over the years, but didn’t last with either; aikido, though wonderful, seemed less necessary than catching up on sleep, which could be done by retiring to the library and using a big old law book as a pillow. 

88. I have crossed a picket line, but only because the people on strike advised me to do so. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

89. I once stayed awake for four full days. I’m never doing that again.

90. Much as I loved Batman, Robin Hood, and the Knights of the Round Table, my childhood hero was indisputably Johnny Alpha. I copied the cover to 2000AD prog 339 innumerable times, like Simon Pegg’s character in Spaced I shed a tear when Johnny died, and the words ‘because I hate you’ still send a shiver down my spine.

I’ve a page of 'Strontium Dog' original art put away at home. I’ve never been able to afford the cost of framing it.

91. I once tried to play Gaelic football. Soloing was beyond me. It’s best not to talk about it.

92. I don’t think I have ever been further west than Kerry. I’m not sure, as I can’t remember where exactly in Kerry I’ve been, and there’s a chance that I may have been further west on one of my trips to the Mullet in Mayo. I’ll have to find out.

I don't know where this is. Other than Kerry, obviously.

93. Aside from a handful of books, the only things I’ve kept since my childhood are a box of dominoes from the Soviet Union which I bought for £1.75 when I was eleven or so, and a wooden cigar box I once found and filled with foreign coins. I’ve still got the coins, though I'll leave the story of how I got them for another day. It’s an unsystematic collection.

94. There are lots of ways of dividing people up, but for me the one that rings most true and tallies most deeply with experience and observation is that there are two types of people: those who are dogmatic and know it, and those who are dogmatic and don’t.

95. During the darkest month of my adult life, the happiest moments were spent on my birthday, standing under a tree while the rain poured down.

96. When at twelve years old I first read Douglas Adams I thought the Hitchhiker’s Guide was the cleverest and funniest book I’d ever read; rereading it a couple of years back I found it painfully forced and as dry as dust.

97. I once went to a concert with a student of mine – just a couple of years younger than me – and her dad. He kept leaving us alone, to give us space. Given that space wasn’t needed, it was a bit embarrassing. The concert was great, mind. 

98. At Christmas 2004, I think, I received a Christmas card so wonderful that I’ve kept it up ever since. It depicts a Nativity scene, made from sprouts. And I like this, because it’s funny, and because when you’re a Catholic, stuff matters. And sprouts count just as much as wood and wine and water and wardrobes do.

99. I prefer dogs to cats. I’m sorry, but there it is.

100. Despite having loads of family and friends with children, until this year I had never been asked to be a godfather. I’ve now been asked three times. I may joke that it’s like buses, but each time it’s been an honour and a delight. 

101. Few things annoy me quite as much as the ‘Too Long – Didn’t Read’ attitude that seems to define internet argument. It’s a lazy, stupid, and utterly counterproductive way of dealing with people with whom we differ when we’re talking about something that matters. We’re all in this together, one way or another; we should make a serious effort to listen to each other.

That said, it’s an entirely legitimate response to a list of personal trivia.

Choose Life. Choose Military History. Choose Counting.

A hundred or so years ago, the Prussian Hans Delbrück transformed military history when he sought to show how warfare and politics mirrored each other as social activities. Using his method of Sachkritik, he analysed historical battle narratives in the light of simple physical realities and what was known to have happened in other battles.

I used to enjoy explaining this to my students back in the day. Military history, as a lecturer on the American Civil War had pointed out to me once upon a time, doesn’t make much sense without maps, and as I said to my students, armies aren’t just dots on those maps. They take up space. People just tend not to realise how much space crowds can take up...

The figures of Herodotus, so-called father of history, had long been viewed askance by historians, but it took Delbrück to show just how ropey those figures were. Herodotus claimed that the Persian army that invaded Greece in 480 BC was made up of 2,641,610 soldiers, and an equal number of servants and camp followers. As an exercise, Delbrück imagined how much space such an army would have taken up had it followed the Prussian marching system:

“According to the German order of march, an army corps, that is 30,000 men, occupies about three miles, without the baggage trains. The marching column of the Persians would therefore have been 420 miles long and as the first troops were arriving before Thermopylae the last would have just marched out of Susa on the other side of the Tigris.”

These were German miles rather than the ones we know, and the Persians obviously didn’t march in the Prussian fashion, but still, Delbrück had made his point: Herodotus’ figures were ludicrous.

Delbrück didn’t stop at the soft target that was Herodotus, either; he went on to explain the impossibility of Atilla the Hun easily moving an army larger than the Prussian one of 1870 across an area that at that time lacked decent roads, and to show through issues of food supply how Julius Caesar’s figures for his Gallic opponents had been grotesquely inflated to superb propagandist effect.

When I was doing my master’s degree on Hannibal’s victory at Cannae, I spent an immense amount of time grinding numbers in a way that numbed the brains of my friends when I talked of them. Marching rates. Space per man. Unit depth. Legion width. Quantity of vegetation needed daily to feed an elephant. Close order formation. Open order formation. Manipular replacement. Javelin range. It went on.

All of this stuff may have sounded boring, but it was needed as the nuts and bolts of assembling a thesis on what exactly happened in the biggest and bloodiest battle the Romans ever fought and lost.

Who said this stuff isn't useful?

I’ve moved into a more conceptual area of ancient and military history now, but the whole battle reconstruction thing has given me some habits. On Saturday they came into play. There was a march in Dublin on Saturday, billed as a ‘March for Choice’, with an expected attendance, according to the organisers, of thousands from across the island of Ireland.

It turned out to be rather a damp squib, with a few hundred gathering on O’Connell Street, and accumulating numbers as they made their way over the Liffey towards Kildare Street and round to Merrion Square.

Shortly afterwards, under the headline declaring “Low turnout for pro-choice rally”, the Irish Times reported on the march as follows:

“Less than 1,000 people joined the ‘March for Choice’ in Dublin this afternoon in what had been billed as the first major mobilisation of pro-choice activists ahead of the publication of a major report examining how the Government should deal with the abortion issue.

Organisers had predicted that several thousand people would gather for the march which left the Spire in O’Connell Street at 2pm ahead of a gathering at Merrion Square.

Those behind the march claimed that between in excess of 2,000 people took part howver gardai at the Store St station said that closer to 500 people had showed up for the event.”

This report was at odds with what people associated with the march claimed; the Labour senator Ivana Bacik said on Twitter that 5,000 had attended, and one person who’d acted as a steward on the march wrote on Facebook that she had personally counted 3,200 people, with a Garda she spoke to having said that between 3,000 and 5,000 people had marched. Sinéad Redmond, one of the march organisers, rejoiced at how happy the 5- to 7,000 who she said had marched were.

Graham Linehan, ever the sentinel of the internet, declared on Twitter that “The Irish Times is a ****ing rag”, subsequently saying that Irish Times’ reporting was either prolife propaganda or sheer laziness; not for one moment does he appear to have entertained the possibility that it might have been right.

People connected with the march began appealing for pressure to be put on the Irish Times to change its story, and eventually it did so.

Why exactly did you change your story?

You can read the story of what happened elsewhere, but what’s significant is that after vocal public criticism of the paper, the Irish Times sought a different Garda source to that it had originally contacted and under the headline “Thousands attend pro-choice rally” declared:

“Several thousand people joined the ‘March for Choice’ in Dublin this afternoon in what was billed as the first major mobilisation of pro-choice activists ahead of the publication of a major report examining how the Government should deal with the abortion issue. Organisers had predicted that several thousand people would gather for the march which left the Spire in O’Connell Street at 2pm ahead of a gathering at Merrion Square. Several hundred people gathered for the start of the march, with their numbers swelling by the time it reached St Stephen’s Green.”

The final version of the story was much the same, save for apparently giving the lie to the headline:

“Their numbers swelled to several thousand by the time it reached St Stephen’s Green. The Garda Press Office, which earlier put the number of attendees at about 500, said this evening there ‘may have been in excess of 2,000 people involved’”.

So after repeated phone calls, the Guards shifted from saying that around 500 were involved to a claim that perhaps more than 2,000 participated, and after criticism from irate marchers and their sympathisers, the Irish Times went from reporting that fewer than 1,000 took part to claiming that several thousand marched.

The Journal reports that the Guards said about 2,500 were in the march. Even if true, this hardly merits the adjective ‘several’ the Irish Times is now talking of, it has to be said.

You see, it's all about the Personal Transferable Skills

Now, let’s think about numbers. I know, whether it’s right or not to end the life of another human being isn’t a numbers game, but we’re solely talking about reporting and how numbers can be used to propagandist effect.

As people argued on Saturday afternoon about the numbers attending, a common cry on the pro-choice side was to look at the video, as the video showed that there were thousands of people on the march, not just a few hundred.

It’s worth looking at the video, shot by Darragh Doyle just by the Shelbourne Hotel. It’s difficult to estimate numbers on it from a casual glance, as Darragh pans back and forth several times, giving the impression of a vast throng of people. The video lasts for just over two and a half minutes, and for the first minute and a half the marchers can be heard eagerly chanting – those bringing up the rear just amble along chatting to each other.

With some judicious use of the pause button, it’s easy enough to make a stab at numbers here, even with the extravagant camera movements. Easy, that is, unless you just stare and think “there are loads of people... there must be thousands!”

The marchers were marching in informal rows four, five, six, eight, maybe even ten across on the odd occasion. Most rows, for want of a better word, seem six or seven across. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the typical row is eight across, and then count the people who go by the camera, as though each is the end of a row. You won’t get an accurate figure, but you’ll get a ballpark one, something to give you a fairly decent feel for the size of the crowd. I tried it on Saturday, and made it about eighty rows, before what looked like an uncountable mass at the end. 640 marchers, plus maybe another 150, so. 790 people, allowing for error. How much error could I have made, though?  Could I have undercounted by more than one or two hundred?

I tried again earlier today with a different approach, thinking about how much space those marchers seemed to have covered, and bearing in mind how a friend on the march has said on Saturday that the marchers had been almost the full length of Kildare Street; he reckoned there’d been about 1,500 or so there.

Looking at Google Maps, it seems Kildare Street is about a thousand feet long, so let’s assume my friend was right – allowing for slight exaggeration – and that the march occupied more than three quarters of the street. 800 feet of marchers, so, on a street about 30 feet wide.  This would probably provide room for 960 Roman soldiers, give or take; more could have been fitted in, but only in a very packed formation. I could do the sums, but it’d take us off topic by some way.

The people in the march weren’t packed together. Their deployment, for want of a better word, was nothing like a Roman army in close formation. The rows, however wide, were fairly close together at the start, maybe three feet or so apart, but by the end the marchers – dawdlers in many cases – were well spaced out, some pushing buggies or even cycling! There was no comparison between the relatively close front rows, with their chanting and shouting, and the stragglers at the back, strolling along and having a natter. Given this disparity, it’d have been reckless to have counted, say, all the rows in the front hundred feet of the march and then multiplied it out, as is a fairly standard way of calculating the numbers involved in a march.

Now, in case you’re wondering, I was a teenage Commerce student, doing statistics and economics etc before changing subject and doing something more challenging the following academic year, so am reasonably clued in to how statistics work. I know that when moving crowds need to be counted, professional crowd counters use assigned counters to tally people passing points in given time periods and calculate upwards accordingly – indeed, I’ve had friends who’ve done this – but for a crowd this small that kind of thing is neither worthwhile nor necessary.

After all, during the two-and-a-half minutes’ filming, Darragh saw most of the march go past him; if he’d hung on for another minute, maybe 90 seconds, he’d have seen the last stragglers dawdle by. Four minutes. That’s not worth sampling.

It’s clear that there were no such counters present, in any case, and we don’t have high quality aerial footage of the march. We just have several foreshortened shots of the crowd, statements from marchers who – vested interests aside – were in the march and thus not really in a position to observe and count the marchers, widely differing guesses from the Guards, and a YouTube video that doesn’t even try to convey the march size in an accurate sense.

As such, flawed though it is, we can really only go by the YouTube video which shows that the marchers, even in the front ranks, were generally rather more than an arm’s width apart, and that towards the rear of the march the crowd density was a lot thinner than in the van. This wasn’t even a reasonably compact crowd.

Given how the spacing seemed to work, I couldn’t help but think the Roman figure gave a useful guideline for an educated guess. It looked about right, recognising just how spread out the march was. And it wasn’t that far off my first estimate. Again, it was only a ballpark figure, but it was one that suggested that the march probably wasn’t more than a thousand strong.

Or Counting. That’s good too. I learned that in primary school. 

Still, as discussion about this carried on today, I gritted my teeth and decided to count people in the video as best I could. Given the relatively small size of the crowd, this was going to be a manageable task, even if it was bound to be a tedious one.

I worked through the video, pausing and taking screenshots as I went, using banners and distinctive people in the crowd as markers for when I scrolled forward or to be returned to after Darragh had finished his latest bout of panning.

And then I worked through the shots, marking people with red spots. I decided to estimate upwards, such that anything I thought might possibly be a marcher would be counted as such. The handful of pedestrians walking past at a normal speed, rather faster than ‘marching’ pace, had to be discounted, of course.

I made it 850 marchers, more or less. 

Not a thousand. Not two thousand. Not five thousand, Ivana Bacik. Not seven thousand, Sinéad Redmond. Not a lazily non-specific several thousand, Irish Times.

Because even if I undercounted, and I suspect I'll have missed a few at the marker points each time, I didn’t undercount by that much. Don’t believe me? Well, why should you? Please try it yourself. It doesn’t take that long. We shouldn’t even need to have this discussion.

The rights and wrongs of abortion aren’t a matter of numbers, so I don’t see why those involved in Saturday's march have been so determined to exaggerate their numbers so egregiously. Still, if Saturday’s march tells us anything, at the very least it shows us that there’s no great democratic demand for abortion in Ireland.

850. The Irish Times was right the first time.

Surveying the Faith

Last week Red C Research published the findings of WIN-Gallup’s ‘Global Index of Religions and Atheism’, suggesting that Ireland was abandoning religion faster than almost any other country. The papers weren’t slow to regurgitate claims that whereas 69pc of Irish people were religious in 2005, only 47pc were in 2011. 

That’s not what the poll says, however. Contrary to Red C’s press release, the WIN-Gallup poll doesn’t find that Ireland is one of the least religious countries in the world; it finds that Ireland is one of the countries in which people are most reluctant to describe themselves as religious. This is a very different thing, not least as the word ‘religious’ means different things to different people. 

This was made very clear to me a couple of years ago at an Anglican church in Manchester, where I used to go so I could learn how evangelical friends lived their faith on their own terms, rather than relying on how my fellow Catholics described them. 

The curate spoke at length about how Christians shouldn’t be religious, because religious people are hypocrites. We’re called to love God, not to be religious, he said. Christianity, after all, isn’t a religion: it’s a relationship. 

I agreed with him up to a point. It’s a cliché that Christianity is a relationship rather than a religion, but it’s only a cliché because it’s largely true; the very word ‘Christian’ suggests that. 

Rather than meaning ‘follower of Christ’, it literally means someone who belongs to Christ as a member of his household. Romans 8:14-17 says that we’re brothers and sisters of Christ, God’s children rather than his slaves, and as 1 Corinthians 12:13 says, it’s baptism that adopts us into this family. 

Talking about this in the pub later, some of the regular congregation said they felt that the curate’s core point was sound but that he’d expressed himself poorly. Religious people can be hypocritical, but ‘religion’ shouldn’t be dismissed as mere lip service. 

Methodology

When discussing polls, it pays to look at the question and methodology. Ireland was one of the few countries in which this poll was conducted online; it’s difficult to see why Red C did this, as their website boasts of the accuracy of their telephone polling and warns that online polls are of questionable reliability in Ireland, where the over 55’s are inadequately represented in online panels and at least a third of adults lack internet access.

Red C's press release is adapted from WIN-Gallup's international press release, which conspicuously excludes Irish data from any tables showing how things have changed since 2005. Ireland, which Red C reports has experienced the second-largest decline in religiosity since 2005, is absent from the table of ‘ten countries experiencing notable decline in religiosity since 2005’, and from the two tables showing trends in religiosity and atheism in 39 countries surveyed in both waves.

It’s almost as though WIN-Gallup doesn’t regard the new data on Ireland as comparable with the 2005 data.

Allowing that the poll should be treated with caution, it’s hardly surprising that it found that the number of Irish claiming to be atheists seemingly has risen from 3pc to 10pc since 2005; the 2011 census figures and recent polls should have led us to expect as much. 

I doubt this figure will rise much further without government interference. If graphs in the official census highlights are remotely accurate, those most likely to deny a religious affiliation in Ireland are aged between 25 and 29, and even then only about 9.5pc of those do so. Denial of religious affiliation seems to drop back to 8pc among younger adults. 

Rather than rushing to embrace atheism, it seems Irish people are slipping into an ill-defined quasi-Catholicism, and it’s here that the question’s wording is all-important: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?” 

The number of people willing to describe themselves as religious seems to have plummeted from 69pc to 47pc, whereas those rejecting atheism while saying they’re not religious seems to have risen from 25pc to 44pc. 

It’s difficult to tell what exactly this means, not least because the survey question – which confuses religious practice with atheistic belief – explicitly allows people who attend places of worship to say they don’t consider themselves religious. Red C thus observes that globally, “Most of the shift is not drifting from their faith, but claiming to be ‘not religious’ while remaining within the faith.” 

Judged purely on an Irish basis, this seems a fair judgement. The census found that 84pc of us still claim to be Catholic, even after the horrors of the Ryan and Murphy reports, but it’s clear that many of us have drifted from the teaching and precepts of the Church. 

Only about a third of us attend Mass every week, according to this year’s ACP and Irish Times surveys, while the Irish Times poll seemingly found a widespread rejection of basic Christian doctrines. For example, 15pc of those who’d call themselves Catholics don’t regard Jesus as the son of God, and 62pc believe that the Eucharistic elements merely represent Christ’s body and blood. 

Many who scorn atheism but wouldn’t call themselves religious would be among these; they’d probably consider themselves ‘spiritual’ rather than religious, or say that they have faith but disagree with organised religion. Others, though, would surely be ordinary Catholics, wary of boasting about their faith. 

Connotations

The word ‘religious’ carries uncomfortable connotations for a lot of us. A priest friend of mine once admitted that he found it hard to like a lot of religious people. “Some of the coldest, hardest, most unforgiving people I’ve ever met,” he said, “have been some of the most religious.” 

Outward Practice

‘Religious’, for him, clearly wasn’t a word to be crudely equated with ‘Catholic’ or ‘Christian’. It was, instead, something relating to outward practice rather than inward devotion; he’d found that people could be punctilious about their religious observance while being devoid of a spiritual inner life, or a simple love for other people. 

That’s not to say our external practice and attitudes don’t matter; on the contrary, they play a vital role in expressing and supporting our inner life. As Pope Benedict pointed out last week with reference to St Dominic: “… to kneel, to stand before the Lord, to fix our gaze on the Crucifix, to pause and gather ourselves in silence, is not a secondary act, but helps to us to place ourselves, our whole person, in relation to God.” 

Internal Realities

The problem, alas, is that too often our external and internal realities are at odds. Jesus made this unforgettably clear in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in directing us to fast, pray, and give alms in secret, and in condemning as pedantic and hypocritical the ostentatious religiosity of the Pharisees. 

Familiar as we are with such admonitions, and increasingly suspicious of public displays of piety, it’s hardly surprising that for many of us the word ‘religious’ is a term we’ve become loath to apply to ourselves. Who wants to be seen as a ‘Holy Joe’, especially nowadays? Who dares to call themselves devout?


-- A version of this appeared in The Irish Catholic, 23 August 2012.

Primitive Dubbing Techniques

A friend of mine -- perhaps my closest friend, really -- had a little baby girl last night, all tiny and pink and perfect. I mentioned to an expectant friend today that the newcomer has a very pretty nose, which surprised me, as I tend to think of newborn babies as looking uncomfortably like Winston Churchill.

Oh yes.

She responded by pointing out that I'd not seen any of hers as newborns, and that my pretty nose comment reminded her of Asterix and Cleopatra. Rightly so, I'd say, but that in turn reminded me of this.

That third panel always strikes me as one of the finest comic panels I've ever seen -- it's utterly dependent on the incongruity of picture and words -- and possibly my favourite joke ever on a comic page.

The Dark Knight Rises: Hope does not Disappoint

Superhero films offer us a “faithless, modern mythology”, according to Tom Hiddleston, who played the renegade Norse god Loki in this summer’s Avengers Assemble. Writing in the Guardian this April, he observed that “In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.”

He’s almost right. Superhero films offer a modern mythology, but there’s nothing faithless about them. Modern morality plays, they’re expressions of a world built by Judaeo-Christian tradition, and embody not merely explicitly Christian ideas but also those universal images that J.R.R. Tolkien described in 1931 as having prefigured Christian truth: “The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there,” he said, “while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

The Norse myths Tolkien so loved, for instance, pointed to Christianity through such images as Odin hanging on the World Ash, or Baldr, the dying god, but it remained for Christianity to fulfil the truths to which they pointed.

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow makes a very modern mistake in Avengers Assemble when she says of Thor and Loki, “These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.”
“There’s only one God, ma’am,” replies Chris Evans’s Captain America, a recently revived relic of the 1940s, “and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”

This isn’t simple religious chauvinism; rather, having some idea of what the word ‘God’ means, Captain America recognises Thor and Loki as mere men writ large.  The ancient Vikings would have understood what he meant; they knew that their gods and the God of the Christians were different not merely in degree but in kind.

Avengers Assemble develops this idea when Loki attacks a crowd of people in Germany and demands they kneel before him, embracing what he sees as their natural state. “In the end,” he says, “you will always kneel”.
“Not to men like you,” says an old man, willing to kneel before the right person but recognising that Loki is as mortal as he is.
“There are no men like me,” replies Loki.
“There are always men like you,” answers the old man, clearly recalling his youth, when so many of his countrymen showed themselves willing to prostrate themselves before the false gods of Hitler, the German state, and the earthly paradise the Nazi regime promised.

It might seem odd for an avowed atheist like Joss Whedon, writer-director of Avengers Assemble, to make such meaningful theological points, but Judaeo-Christian tradition has so formed our world that modern secularism and even atheism stand on Christian foundations. The light of Christian truth, if there is any truth at all in our art, must inevitably shine through.

Interesting though Whedon’s theological asides are, Avengers Assemble is ultimately a light – albeit immensely entertaining – piece of work. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, on the other hand, is far weightier fare, and one which repays repeated viewings.

2005’s Batman Begins shows the young Bruce Wayne falling down a covered well, crashing to the bottom and being terrified by the bats that launch themselves at him. “Why do we fall, Bruce?” his father asks after rescuing him, before answering his own question with the words that define the trilogy: “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The motif of fall and rise pervades Nolan’s trilogy, reflecting its themes of sacrifice and resurrection and embodying an idea that has been central to the western mind for millennia. The Apostles, in the earliest sermons recorded in Acts, cast the Crucifixion as a prelude to the Resurrection, while Paul, in Romans 5, explained that the price we pay for the Fall is nothing compared to the grace we receive through the Incarnation, a mystery distilled by the Easter Exsultet into the seemingly paradoxical cry, “O truly necessary sin of Adam... O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”

Few mythic figures are more iconic than the scapegoat who bears the price of others’ sins, and as Michael Caine’s Alfred says in Nolan’s second Batman film, 2008’s The Dark Knight, it’s a role for which the Batman is supremely well-suited. “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make – the right choice.”

The Dark Knight concluded with the Batman apparently guaranteeing Gotham City’s future by becoming a scapegoat for murders committed by the city’s deranged district attorney, Harvey Dent. The Batman’s sacrifice enabled others to build a new era of law and order upon Dent’s supposedly pristine reputation, but as this year’s The Dark Knight Rises makes clear, a victory built on a lie – no matter how noble – is a false victory.

Eight years after The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon is haunted by the lie which empowered him to clean up Gotham’s streets, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a broken recluse, haunted by the death of his childhood love. The Batman is but a memory while the dead district attorney is idolised by a city unaware of his dreadful crimes. Gotham may be peaceful but the city's prosperity rests on rotten foundations, and it seems discontent is ready to boil over among the city’s poorest.

When the city’s underclass erupts from its sewers, it becomes clear that the Batman will have to face his greatest challenge, one that drives him to the darkest pit of despair and forces him to face the question of whether his city is worth saving.

The Dark Knight had answered that positively, but The Dark Knight Rises is more ambivalent; Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman points out that ‘innocent’ is a strong word to use for Gotham’s citizens, who seem to have revelled – or at best cowered – in the anarchy unleashed by Tom Hardy’s Bane. “You don’t owe these people any more!,” she says, “You’ve given them everything!”

“Not everything,” replies Batman, determined to save Gotham regardless of whether its people deserve it or not. A more convincing Christ-figure than at the end of The Dark Knight, the Batman is willing to go to his death for the guilty as much as for the innocent.

“Suffering produces endurance,” writes Paul in Romans 5, “and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Batman has always been an adolescent revenge fantasy, but Nolan’s Batman suffers and endures until he learns to hope, transcending his self-imposed mask as an angel of vengeance, and is redeemed. The Dark Knight rises.

– from The Irish Catholic, 2 August 2012

The Freedom of the Press

Well, the Irish Times is on form today. 

The Freedom to Have an Opinion

Here's Fintan O'Toole, for instance, talking about Seán Quinn:

'Fr Brian D'Arcy, who is supposed to be in the morality business, addressed the Ballyconnell rally and essentially credited Quinn with the creation of peace in our time: “He brought peace to the country by creating thousands of jobs.” 

Senior GAA figures such as Mickey Harte, Jarlath Burns, Seán Boylan and Colm O’Rourke threw that organisation’s considerable authority behind Quinn’s outright defiance of the courts and determination to hang on to public money. Thus, a formidable if unofficial nexus of Sinn Féin, the GAA and the church is giving Quinn comfort. 

 This desire to kiss the rod inflicting the pain is surely rooted in something older than the current fad for designer masochism – some twisted notion of ethnic and religious solidarity in which Quinn has to be protected because he’s one of us – a Catholic, nationalist, GAA man.'

This is after lots of valid stuff, it should be said, but still. Is it really right to say Brian D'Arcy supports Seán Quinn, therefore the Church is part of an unofficial triumvirate of forces supporting Quinn? Brian D'Arcy?

Remember what Fintan said about Brian D'Arcy a few months ago, when he took the view that D'Arcy having -- at his own discretion -- to have a fellow priest glance over his writings to make sure they weren't completely off the wall was the worst thing that had ever happened?

Fintan saw D'Arcy as being part a powerless priest, being sadistically humiliated -- no, really -- by a heartless and clueless hierarchy.  D'Arcy, more to Fintan's point perhaps, was a decent and admirable man, somebody who stood apart from the institutional Church.

But now? Well, now that D'Arcy's saying something that Fintan (rightly) disagrees with, he's been elevated in Fintan's eyes to an official spokesman for the Church. This is the kind of inconsistent, hypocritical nonsense that's rendering the Irish Times less relevant by the day.

The Freedom to Disturb Religious Ceremonies

It seems only fitting that it's sitting in an edition of the paper where an editorial begins by absurdly saying that a clear instance of disturbing the peace wouldn't be considered an offence in modern Ireland if it took place in a church, since we've all moved on from that auld religion hogwash now, thank God:

'It's likely that if three young women in balaclavas marched up uninvited to the altar of the ProCathedral to then perform a crude punk ballad lambasting the church and the Virgin Mary there would be calls for their prosecution. Disturbing the peace, blasphemy . . . Such appeals might well have prevailed a couple of decades ago. Not so, one hopes, today. We have as a society developed an understanding that the sometimes-uncomfortable price of democracy and free speech is the tolerance of speech of which we may disapprove, which may offend, which may be blasphemous – we’re even thinking of removing the offence from the Constitution.'

Yes, the Irish Times editorial line now seems to be that it would be okay to do this. I'm not saying that the Russian Orthodox Church's reaction to Pussy Riot's actions in a Moscow cathedral isn't a tad over the top, but really, is it really okay to interrupt a religious ceremony in this fashion? Does freedom of speech really mean a freedom to interrupt other's worship? Does the Irish Times believe that freedom of religion so irrelevant that people should be allowed to interfere with it whenever they want?

The Freedom to Drive Out Jews

Oh, and then there's another piece about circumcision, which describes one of the defining Jewish and Muslim practices as barbaric, wonders whether Germany should hold a referendum on children's rights, and insists that in a secular society the rights of children -- as the author sees them -- should always trump religious freedom.

He's basically saying that the right of a child to retain its foreskin is more important than the right of a child to be Jewish.

I'm not sure what thought he's given to what Jews and Muslims should do in any country where children cannot be circumcised. Sure, there's much more to Judaism, say, than circumcision, but then there's more to bread than flour; it's still an essential ingredient. Maybe he'd just rather there were no more Jews. 

I do wonder if the author, the Thailand-based Kenneth Houston, is aware that Germany doesn't do referendums, mainly because of Germany's bad experiences with Nazi demagoguery using them to steer the mob. Or maybe he just doesn't care. 

That said, I'd be curious to see some serious large-scale surveys asking people, simply, whether they'd been circumcised, and whether infant circumcision should be illegal. I've a very strong feeling that the vast majority of those who'd been circumcised would have no problem whatsoever with the practice continuing, while those opposing it would probably be, in the main, people who've merely heard about it.

As for those who'd ban it, what do they think Jews should do in a country where infant circumcision is illegal? Leave altogether? Engage in circumcision tourism, ensuring their children are born in countries where infant circumcision is practiced? Arrange for backstreet circumcisions? Or just abandon their ancestral faith?

(Illustrations, for what it's worth, are from the anti-circumcision, anti-semitic, and deeply improbable comic Foreskin Man. He's a bit of an advert for Aryan supremacy, really. He's also neither well-written nor well-drawn. Offensive on so many levels...)