Answering the Grem: Part II

I know, I should really be talking about the six diocesan audits that came out today, but yesterday's post was too big and needed splitting, and I've been busy and rather poorly of late, so I've not had time to read them all properly yet -- insofar as I've had time, I've been too tired to plough through the documents. 

That said, just based on glancing and looking at the early reactions my general feeling about them is that if we resist the temptation to flatten out the timeline and instead look at trends, with a particular view to the question of whether the Irish dioceses have been following their own guidelines over the last fourteen years, we'll see an encouraging picture at last. It may well turn out to be the case that Cloyne was indeed by some distance the worst of the dioceses in this regard, that Ian Elliott was right to have so damned the handling of abuse in Cloyne in the so-called Elliott Report, the findings of which seem to have led to the last Papal Nuncio 'suggesting' that Magee resign.

I trust Ian Elliott on this stuff, and for all the fears that people have of whitewashes, I'm pretty sure he'd walk if his audits were interfered with or edited such that the final published versions in any real way diluted or concealed whatever he'd discovered.

That said, I'll try to talk about them in another day or two.

So, continued from yesterday...



2. Was there a Cover-Up, and if so was it locally- or centrally-directed?

I don't think it's right to speak of 'the Cover-Up' or even of 'a Cover-Up'. What there seems to have been was a tendency towards Cover-Up, and one that has manifested itself everywhere. In what was, I think, a flawed but hugely perceptive article in the Guardian in March of 2010, Andrew Brown wrote:

'Instead of one centrally ordered cover-up, there were hundreds of little local ones. They didn't require special regulations. They grew quite naturally out of the clerical culture. They worked by silence and omission rather than anything more obviously sinister. The scandal is going to be much worse as a result.'

This is terrifying, but I think Brown's right, and indeed it seems to be borne out by all the evidence we've seen, including the Irish reports. If we look at Yvonne Murphy's Dublin and Cloyne reports, for instance, we see hardly any dealings with Rome at all. Cases that manifestly ought to have been passed to Rome weren't passed there; it's not merely that the dioceses were hiding things from the State, they were hiding them from Rome too. 

What's more, when we look at the phenomenon of priests who'd been accused of abuse having been moved around in a manner akin to abusive school teachers in the American system, we find exactly the same practices at work. It tended to be the case that when abusive priests moved to a new diocese -- sometimes in other countries -- the authorities there were rarely told the truth about their new priest, and often parish priests weren't told things they ought to have been told about their new curates. There seems to have been a deep-seated culture of secrecy at work, such that information simply wasn't shared.

Why was this? I think a few factors were at work. The Dublin Report found that at least until the mid-1990s, the preoccupations of the Archdiocese of Dublin had been the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets. I think this is a fair summary, though these points need unpacking.

2 i: Unpacking Murphy's findings in the light of Irish society

I've talked in the past of how sexual abuse appears to be -- or at the very least to have been -- endemic within Irish society, such that it seems more than a quarter of Irish adults are survivors of abuse, and that almost half of those survivors had confided in people about their experiences, but not told the authorities. This means, of course, that it seems likely that hundreds of thousands of Irish people haven't reported instances of sexual abuse that they're aware of.  Back in the summer I wrote:

'Irish society does its damnedest to cover up the scourge of abuse in our country, but in most cases, I don't think it does this through malice or a cynical desire for self-preservation. I think that most people, on hearing of abuse -- especially abuse that happened long ago -- hope the problems have already been sorted out or will be sorted out, continue to trust people they've always trust, and hope that harm can be undone, sickness can be healed, and wickedness can be reformed. But of course, when we're wrong we allow abusers to continue in their wickedness, and doing so we allow them to continue ruining lives.

Mercy, hope, forgiveness, and love -- the very best qualities we have -- can actually facilitate further harm.'

Aside from how this works in families, it really shouldn't be hard to see how this would work in a clerical context:

• A conviction that the Church mattered and was crucial to the souls of the faithful would have made it imperative to suppress knowledge of terrible deeds committed by clergy, not out of a cynical sense of self-preservation, but out of a sense that the faithful in general had to be protected from things that could cause them to lose faith in the Church. In this sense it's absolutely correct to say that the bishops were obsessed with preventing scandal; scandal is something which leads another to do evil, and driving people from the Faith would be a grave instance of such.
• A loyal and close clerical culture that encourages priests to see each other as a 'band of brothers' could act to create a sense of denial, such that allegations weren't easily believed, or were rationalised away, or were regarded as having done minimal damage.
• A hope that problems with one child might have been anomalous would have encouraged bishops to give priests fresh starts elsewhere, especially after counselling and therapy, things the Church tended to put a lot of faith into during the 1970s and 1980s. 
• A belief that true forgiveness required people's records being unblemished, with people being entitled to their good name, such that information of prior offences simply wasn't shared with those who needed to know.
• A determination to be a true community of love may well have been the most decisive factor of all, as the Church in the era after the Council strove to shed its image as a rigid, authoritarian, disciplinarian body; the days of the Inquisition were to be left far in the past, and mercy was to be the watchword of the Church.

I really do think that in most cases the Irish bishops acted in ways that they thought was for the best and did so for what they believed to be the best possible reasons. And I also believe that they were terribly, tragically, devastatingly wrong, and that their virtues combined to form the most poisonous of cocktails. And, what's more, I think these factors would have existed everywhere. We don't need to envisage a grand conspiracy directed from Rome. The simplest explanation, which is that these problems arose naturally from clerical culture, seems to be the best.

After all, as I've said, this is what people do. People don't want to believe terrible things about their spouses, their brothers, their sons, their neighbours, or their co-workers. They make excuses, and they rationalise things, and they convince themselves that whatever harm has been done is trivial and will fade with time. They hope that the problem was an aberration, perhaps an unhealthy but unique obsession, and they hope that it'll pass, perhaps of its own accord over time, and perhaps following professional help.

Remember the facts. More than a quarter of Irish adults have been abused. Half of them have told people of their abuse, but hardly anybody has officially reported it. Many thousands of people walk among us who have sexually abused children, and hardly any of them are priests.

It won't wash to say 'this is different - those are individual cases, but the Church is an institution'. We've talked about this yesterday. The Church is not an institution. Even the Irish Church isn't an institution. It is, in fact, more than 180 institutions. 

2 ii: And what about Rome?

That said, Rome's involvement needs looking at. In looking at it we need to keep in mind a number of things not least the following five documents:

• Crimen Sollicitationis, a 1962 modification issued by Cardinal Ottaviani of a 1922 document. A badly-translated version of this appeared online in 2003, but a more accurate translation can be examined in the Holy See's own website. Primarily intended to deal with instances where priests might have used confession to solicit sex, article 73 of this -- in a section entitled 'the foulest crime' -- also covered instances where priests were accused of perpetrating gravely sinful obscene acts upon pre-adolescent children (impuberes). It's been mischaracterised by some elements in the media as proof that the Vatican directed bishops to cover-up abuse, but even Tom Doyle, one of the most outspoken critics of how abuse was handled within the Church, says it was no such thing.
• Sacramentorum  Sanctitatis Tutela, a 2001 apostolic letter from John Paul II, article 4.1 of which reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the authority to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct by priests with minors under the age of eighteen years.
• De Delictis Gravioribus, a 2001 letter from the then Cardinal Ratzinger, updated Crimen Sollicitationes in light of the 1983 Code of Canon Law and Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela. It recognised a ten-year statute of limitation on the sacramental abuses which the CDF could investigate, but in the case of people alleging abuse it extended that statute of limitation to ten years after the eighteenth birthday. The Pope subsequently in 2002 granted the CDF the power to derogate from this limitation period on a discretionary basis.
• Guide to understanding Basic CDF Procedures concening Sexual Abuse Allegations,  a 2010 guide, in layman's language, to how allegations are investigated at a local and a central level. It reflected not merely the rules established in 2001, but also broader and more fundamental principles of canon law.
• Normae de Gravioribus Delictis, a 2010 revised version of De Delictis Gravioribus, which among other things introduced measures to speed up disciplinary processes and extended the statute of limitations to twenty years after the eighteenth birthday with the possibility of further discretionary extensions.

So, given these, let's start by looking at the Grem's concerns, of which there seem to be four. One concerns the role of the CDF in things, one concerns sanctions for the likes of bishops who've failed in their duties, one concerns secrecy, and one concerns cooperation with the civil law.


2 iii: The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as we all know, is the Vatican dicastery which before 1965 was known as the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. Between 1981 and 2005 it was headed by the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who is of course now Pope.

The CDF deals primarily issues of belief; its role is the promotion and protection of Church doctrine on faith and morals, such that while its main concern seems to be ensuring that those who claim to teach on behalf of the Church actually reflect Church teaching, it also has duties regarding to things that threaten the Church in other ways, notably abuses of the sacraments of the Eucharist and Reconciliation, and the sexual abuse of minors, the youngest and most vulnerable members of the Church.

As we've seen, prior to 2001 Crimen Sollicitationis was at least theoretically in force, requiring bishops in certain situations to report the abuse of prepubescent children to the CDF; in 2001 the remit of the CDF was expanded greatly under Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, such that henceforth all vaguely credible abuse allegations in connection with adolescents up to the age of 18 were to be reported to Rome.

The problem, as anyone should see from this, is that the system was and indeed is wholly dependent on abuse being reported to it.  Until recently it seemed that this just didn't happen. Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who is Promoter of Justice at the CDF and possessor of the 'gimlet eyes' of which Enda Kenny so provocatively spoke in the summer, heads a team of nine people and acts as chief prosecutor whenever abuse cases are reported to Rome. He says that between 1975 and 1985 the CDF seems not to have received even one report of child abuse.

Lest we be inclined to doubt this, it's worth thinking of what the Dublin and Cloyne inquiries have revealed, bearing in mind that the Murphy Commission accepts that the Irish dioceses had cooperated fully with its investigations, handing over all relevant documentation including communications with Rome. The Dublin Report shows that that Rome was involved in four cases in total: two of these were responses to requests by priests that they be allowed leave the priesthood, and two were appeals against decisions made by the Dublin archdiocese; in other words not even one abuse complaint had been passed on to Rome prior to 2001. Likewise, if we look at the Cloyne Report, we'll see that although Cloyne sent four cases to Rome, none of these cases were submitted prior to the issuing of the new norms in 2001. It seems, putting it bluntly, that abuse was basically never reported to Rome. Everything was mishandled at a local level.

Whatever the motivations of the Irish bishops -- and I doubt they were radically different from the motives of most Irish people in such situations -- we can't get away from the fact that the failure to report or properly handle abuse was their fault. It won't do to blame Rome for the mishandling of stuff locally. The situation on the ground was hidden from Rome, and Rome was in no position to be sending out people to find out what was going on.


2 iv: Sanctions for Inadequate Bishops
The Grem raises an interesting and important question about the bishops when he asks :

'They have had for decades an instruction to report all cases of abuse directly to the CDF. Are they all guilty of ignoring those instructions and if so what sanctions have been imposed?'

Okay, so we know it's not true that the bishops have decades been obliged to report all cases of abuse to the CDF, as that's only been the case since 2001. Still, it certainly seems to have been the case for a long time that there's been an obligation to report some cases of abuse -- those of prepubescent children, and those occurring in connection with an abuse of the Sacrament of Reconciliation -- to Rome. It seems not to have been the case that such reports were expected to be submitted, in the main, with a view to Rome handling the matter: rather, most reports would have been for information purposes only, with it being expected that the crimes would have been dealt with locally. Decisions could be appealled to Rome, of course, and cases were to be referred to Rome if it proved impossible to deal with them locally.

We all know that most cases of clerical abuse were instances where the victims were adolescents; the John Jay Study, for instance, indicates that 67.4 per cent of abuse victims in America were aged twelve or older. The vast majority of these -- unless they'd specifically reported being abused in the context of confession -- would have been outside the remit of Crimen Sollicitationis, and thus something to have been dealt with locally.

Was abuse within confession a common phenomenon? I don't know, but just looking at the Dublin and Cloyne reports, it seems that it wasn't: the Dublin report covers 46 priests, just one of whom reportedly committed abuse in connection with confession, something he seems to have regularly done; the Cloyne report itself never mentions abuse in the context of confession save with reference to an alleged victim of one 'Father B', that being the Father Duane who's twice been tried and twice been acquitted of abuse.

Still, even if only a third of abuse cases ought to have been passed on to Rome, even just for information purposes, that still suggests a widespread tendency not to pass things on, doesn't it? A widespread tendency to ignore Rome, even?

Well, it does and it doesn't. It's worth taking a depressing look at sections 13.6-11 of the Dublin Report, which describes the reactions of Archbishop McQuaid and his auxiliary, Bishop Dunne, to the discovery in 1960 that a priest of the diocese had taken obscene photographs of young girls in his care.

'Archbishop McQuaid immediately referred the case to his auxiliary bishop, Bishop Dunne. It is clear that the Archbishop was using the procedures outlined in the 1922 instruction (see Chapter 4). Bishop Dunne expressed the view that a crimen pessimum (the worst crime, which includes child sexual abuse) had been committed.'

I'm still not entirely sure what this is doing in the Dublin Report, given that it predates the remit of the report by fifteen years, but still, not the important point: Murphy believes that McQuaid and his auxiliary had in 1960 followed what must have been the 1922 procedures, assuming they were essentially the same as their 1962 version. Murphy goes on to explain how McQuaid subsequently met with the priest, Paul McGennis, and received a risibly false explanation that McQuaid accepted.

'Archbishop McQuaid and Bishop Dunne then agreed that there was not an objective and subjective crime of the type envisaged in the 1922 instruction and consequently that there was no need to refer the matter to the Holy Office in Rome.'

Murphy takes the view that this was unreasonable and contrary to common sense, and I agree, but what's important in the context of the Grem's question is this: the directive to report cases of prepubescent abuse to Rome does not appear to have been ignored, but instead appears to have been considered and found not applicable. I suspect this happened all too often, for whatever reasons.

Making matters worse would have been, I think, a huge sense of confusion in the decades after the Second Vatican Council. Yes, Cardinal Ottaviani issued a directive in 1962 that basically restated the policy from 1922, but it seems that this document -- of which only 2,000 copies were ever printed -- to have quickly become forgotten and left to moulder in diocesan libraries, at least in most dioceses. It seems that in the turmoil of the 1960s, which so much changing in the Church, this one document from a Church body that was itself replaced in 1965 was effectively lost in all the goings-on of the era, such that when it was brought to light less than a decade ago, most canon lawyers said they'd never even heard of it.

In truth, canon law itself fell out of fashion in the years after the Council such that numerous seminaries ceased teaching it altogether; many felt that the Church should be a community of love, rather than one of law, and that rules hindered the Church in spreading its message. Meanwhile, it had been accepted in Rome that a new and comprehensive code of canon law was needed, and while work was being carried out on that, the practice of canon law fell apart everywhere; old rules seemed obsolete and nobody knew what the new rules would be. When the new code was issued in 1983, it failed to cover the areas dealt with by Crimen Sollicitationis, such that it was unclear which of the most serious crimes were reserved to the CDF.

It was only in 2001, as the scale of abuse in the likes of Ireland and American became clear, that this matter was clarified.

It seems, then, that bishops weren't, as a rule, ignoring directions from Rome. Many if not most had never been aware of the directions, others felt they were inapplicable, and others still were confused by the situation. I've no doubt there'll have been a handful of bishops who knew about the directions and just didn't care, but I wouldn't like to guess at which few they'd have been.

The nearest I can get to seeing an instance of a bishop who seems to have behaved in just such a nonchalant manner is John Magee in Cloyne, who was certainly aware both of the Irish bishops' own agreed guidelines, to which he supposedly subscribed and was supposedly implementing, and  of Rome's two guiding documents on the matter from 2001.

As we know, Ian Elliott's report on the handling of abuse in Cloyne was followed in the Irish Church by a dispute over whether Magee ought to step down, which he was clearly loath to do. During the course of this debate, Magee had a meeting with the then Papal Nuncio, after which he requested that he be relieved of duty.

It really doesn't take a genius to work out what happened there.


2 v: Secrecy
One of the things the Grem homes in on is how Church investigations were conducted in absolute secrecy. Child victims of abuse, he says, were bound by an oath of silence, the same oath signed by victims in different countries. It's worth quoting here the Vatican's own chief prosecutor on the subject:

'A poor English translation of that text has led people to think that the Holy See imposed secrecy in order to hide the facts. But it was not like that. Secrecy during the preliminary phase of the investigation served to protect the good name of all the people involved; first and foremost, the victims themselves, then the accused priests who have the right – as everyone does – to the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. The Church does not like showcase justice. The norms on sexual abuse were never understood as a ban on denouncing [the crimes] to the civil authorities.'

The secrecy required in these matters -- and still required, as far as I know -- was required in order to allow witnesses to speak freely, knowing they could do so in absolute confidence, in order to protect the good name of the accused, as it's a basic principle of natural justice that suspects should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, and to allow victims and other witnesses to come forward without exposing themselves to publicity.

It was certainly not the case that this requirement for secrecy was intended to ensure abuse wasn't tackled. On the contrary, Crimen Sollicitationis demands that victims of solicitation denounce the crime, with a failure to do so punishable by excommunication, and the oath of secrecy was only administered with regard to the trial process and not to the crime. Furthermore, the obligation to secrecy only kicked in once a case began; there was nothing to stop a bishop from reporting a crime before beginning a canonical investigation. The Church's secrecy requirement in no way blocked or blocks people from reporting crimes to civil authorities.

I would add, too, that I'm not convinced that a universal oath was required of those reporting abuse; while the 1962 Crimen Sollicitationis indeed gives the formulae for oaths to be sworn by those handling abuse cases, it does not detail what abuse victims should say.  It seems that the wording of oaths must have varied from place to place; in the case of the two teenagers whose testimony was taken by the then Father Sean Brady in 1975, they swore as follows:

'I ... hereby swear that I have told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that I will talk to no-one about this interview except authorised priests. So help me God, and these holy Gospels I touch.'

2 vi: Co-operation with Civil Law
This leaves the question of the extent to which canon law was required to be in harmony with civil law. In connection with this, the Grem writes as follows:

'The truth is best found following the publication in 2010 of the document Understanding CDF Procedure concerning sexual abuse allegations. It stated clearly "Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed."

The statement was welcomed worldwide (despite the fact that, made by any other institution, it would have been stating the obvious).

But as so often with the Vatican all was not as it seemed. The Vatican website which carried this "news" had no papal authority. All was revealed three months later when the Pope published the "New Norms" (de gravioribus delictus) which did not impose on Bishops any duty to report child sex abuse to civil authorities. Fr. Lombardi made clear that a duty to report had been discussed - and rejected. The media and thousands of ordinary Catholics had been misled and not for the first time.'

Now, I think it's worth looking at what exactly Father Lombardi, the Pope's spokesman, said on the matter:

'One point that remains untouched, though it has often been the subject of discussion in recent times, concerns collaboration with the civil authorities. It must be borne in mind that the Norms being published today are part of the penal code of canon law, which is complete in itself and entirely distinct from the law of States.

On this subject, however, it is important to take note of the Guide to Understanding Basic CDF Procedures concerning Sexual Abuse Allegations, as published on the Holy See website. In that Guide, the phrase "Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed" is contained in the section dedicated to "Preliminary Procedures". This means that in the practice suggested by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith it is necessary to comply with the requirements of law in the various countries, and to do so in good time, not during or subsequent to the canonical trial.'

In other words, although this wasn't officially stated in either the old or the new procedures, this was expected practice. Father Lombardi most certainly did not claim that a duty to report had been discussed and rejected. Canon law assumes that civil law should be followed save in cases where to do so would be gravely immoral, and just as that had been the case prior to the issuing of the new norms, so it remained the case afterwards. The Guide said that civil law should always be followed, and Father Lombardi said this was indeed the case: so it should.

One might ask why this is but a recommendation, rather than an absolute obligation. The answer's something I said back when I outlined my Rough Guide to the Cloyne Report:

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

The key issue here is that canon law is universal, and needs to be universally applicable. The Church can hardly rule that civil law must always be followed, wherever the Church might be. The Catholic Church, after all, is universal: it's found everywhere in the world. A hard and fast rule on complying with the law of the land in all circumstances might work well in modern Ireland or America, but could be profoundly dangerous for all Catholics in places where the Church is threatened, and there are no shortage of such places in the modern world.

As a simple example, imagine what would happen if a Muslim family in Iran had converted to Catholicism, and that it was later found that a Catholic priest had abused a member of the family. If this were reported to the priest's bishop, ought he to pass the matter onto the authorities, knowing that were he to do so he would endanger the whole family, notably the parents who could be executed for apostasy? Ponder that a while, because that's what an absolute requirement to comply with civil law would mean.


I'm going to leave that with you for now. This post has been a monster, so I'll wrap up the rest of the response tomorrow.

Answering the Grem: Part I

The other day, in connection with a post about Christine Buckley's recent letter to the Irish Times, I received the following comment:

'Sir, Did you actually listen to /Mr Kenny's speech. He was referring not to individual acts of abuse but to the collective cover up organised, directed and operated from Rome. The costs you refer too would have been saved if the Vatican and their representatives in Ireland had admitted their failings much earlier. 

Ireland, like Spain,Portugal and Italy (all in economic trouble) must decide how much influence the Vatican can be allowed in the future.' 

I responded with a series of questions, which you can look at yourself in the comment box, and which the commentator, the Grem, has now addressed on his own blog. He's made a sincere effort to address my questions, so it's only fair that I engage with them seriously here. I'm probably not going to make a habit of this sort of thing, given how things require lengthy explanations, but still, here goes...

1. Did Enda Kenny say Rome was responsible for a Cover-Up?

Where, I had asked, in Enda's 20 July 2009 speech to the Dáil, did he say that the Vatican had covered things up? The Grem quotes from the speech at some length, highlighting particular passages, but I don't think anything in the speech really says that.

Emotive language aside, Enda said that Yvonne Murphy's Cloyne Report showed that the Vatican's reaction to reports of abuse was to scrutinise those reports carefully. Leaving aside how the Cloyne Report gave details of only one allegation being passed on to Rome, the three allegations that were passed on in 2009 having been submitted too late for the Report to be able to say anything meaningful, all Enda can have been saying is that on the only occasion that it seems a complaint was passed to Rome prior to 2008, Rome analysed the evidence properly. Given that the result of this was that the accused priest was barred from ministry, I'm not sure why Enda thought this was a bad thing.

Enda also commented on the culture of the Vatican, at least as he perceived it, but said nothing about a cover-up, and then said that the Vatican had tried to frustrate an investigation by the Irish State at some point in the previous three years. That sounds as though he was talking of a cover-up, but as we've seen, it's very difficult to establish what he meant by this, as the story has changed on the matter. He can hardly have meant that the Report said the Nuncio's failure to supply the Murphy Commission with documentation was an attempt to frustrate the inquiry, as the Murphy Commission itself says no such thing and makes it clear that it received all relevant documentation from Cloyne, including duplicates of all documents sent to or received from Rome.

No, properly understood, Enda didn't actually accuse Rome of having attempted to cover things up. He made vague allegations that -- when tied with the facts revealed in the Cloyne Report -- don't amount to anything particularly potent.

Interlude: Before I Answer The Second Question

In terms of the popular conception of the Catholic Church, there's a very common and deeply important conceptual misunderstanding at work that most people, including most Catholics, don't seem to realise. This misunderstanding bedevils pretty much every attempt I've ever seen to discuss matters relating to the Church. It's this: in an administrative sense, rather than a sacramental or ecclesiological one, the Church hardly exists at all. There isn't really such a thing as an 'institutional Church', in the sense of the Church being a single institution like a modern corporation, a pyramid with the Pope on top, bishops as middle managers, and priests running local branches. It's not like that.

Interlude i: A Protestant's explanation

I used to think it was, until I learned of a speech given by Ian Elliott, the head of the Irish Catholic Church's National Board for Child Protection at a 2009 conference called 'Keeping Children Safe'. The former head of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Belfast, and a man who had reformed child protection services in the Northern Irish Department of Social Services, Elliott is a member of the Church of Ireland. This matters, as it's crucial to understand that Elliott is not a Catholic and in no way suffers from an ingrained sense of loyalty towards Catholic priests and bishops. In this 2009 speech, Elliott talked of how deeply he'd misunderstood the structure of the Catholic Church:

'Not being a member of the Church, when I took up my post I had only a very rudimentary understanding of the structure and culture of the Catholic Church. Naively, I believed that it was one large but single body with an overall head in charge here in Ireland. I had no appreciation of the complex and fragmented nature of the body that is referred to as the Catholic Church.

Although it is described as a single Church, it is more easily understood as a single communion with close to two hundred different constituent elements. There is no one person who is resident in Ireland and holds the authority to direct all the various parts of the body to act in a particular way. This separateness may in some respects be viewed as strength but in others it is a major obstacle. From a safeguarding children perspective, it is a challenging hurdle to be continually overcome…

The most difficult issues for the Church to overcome are those that arise from its structure. It is the largest membership organisation on the island of Ireland with over four and a quarter million members. There are 1366 parishes, 2646 churches, 5069 priests, 942 brothers, and 8093 sisters . By any scale, it is a very substantial organisation. However, it is not a single body but rather a number of quite separate ones that are linked. There are dioceses, religious congregations, orders, missionary societies, prelatures, and religious institutions. In all, there are 184 different parts to the Church in Ireland and each has its own head. Many have their own constitutions and relate to head quarters located in Italy, France, the United States, or some other part of the world.

The task of organizing and motivating the whole Church to adopt and implement a single approach to any issue should not be underestimated…'

Look at what he's saying: in practical administrative terms, the Church is not an institution. Rather, it's lots of institutions in communion with each other.


Interlude ii: The State's explanation
This, in effect, is exactly what the Ferns Report said, I later discovered. Chapter 3 of the Ferns Report has a very useful section on the institutional structure of the Church, showing just how decentralised the Church is and has always been:

'A Diocese is a portion of the faithful, normally but not exclusively in a given territory, which is entrusted to the pastoral and spiritual care of the Bishop, with the cooperation of his priests. The Bishop acts as a vicar of Christ in his diocese and not as a vicar of the Pope; he does not act as a delegate of a higher authority and he can exercise his power personally and directly for the benefit of the people entrusted to his care. A Bishop can make "particular law" for his subjects as long as this law is in harmony with the universal law of the Church and/or divine law.
[...]
There are 26 dioceses in Ireland and 33 bishops. These bishops meet as The Irish Episcopal Conference four times a year. Bishops are not bound in law or convention by decisions of tbe Episcopal Conference which cannot usurp the proper autbority of the bishop to govern his diocese. The bishops are bound only when the Episcopal Conference issues a norm in those cases where the Code of Canon law expressly gives the Conference the authority to do so or when it has been authorised by the Holy See.
[...]
The Inquiry has been advised by Canon lawyers that a bishop in his diocese is autonomous and every Bishop is accountable directly only to the Holy See. A Bishop makes a yearly report to Rome and every five years visits Rome to make an "Ad Limina" or "Quinquennial" report. Specific questions, confidential issues or problems are discussed with the relevant Congregation in Rome, such as, for example the Congregation of Clergy or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The quinquennial and annual statistical reports contain little information about tbe day to day running of a diocese and tbere is no overview of a Bishop's performance.

The supervisory role of an Archbishop (metropolitan) has been described by canon lawyers as "very very minor".
[...]
The Bishop is the proper pastor of the diocese as a whole; the parish priest is the proper pastor of the parish, under the authority of the Bishop. Although Canon law describes the parish priest as answerable to the Bishop, he is not simply his delegate but enjoys ordinary authority within his parish. [...] in the day to day running of his parish, a priest is not subject to either direct control or monitoring by his Bishop and this has been a crucial factor in the ability of certain priests to apparently continue sexually abusive behaviour undetected for many years.'

Interlude iii: The structure of the Church
The crucial thing to get from all of this is that the Catholic Church is hardly an institution at all, but is best understood as an enormous network of institutions, all in communion with each other and most especially with the Pope, who acts as a visible human point of unity for the Church. The Church is incredibly decentralised, and although they are appointed by Rome, bishops are not delegates or representatives of the Pope. Dioceses and orders are functionally autonomous in most respects, and insofar as bishops have authority over priests and popes have authority over bishops, this authority is wholly dependent on receipt of accurate information from below. As John Allen recently put it, the Catholic Church is top-down on doctrine, but is bottom-up on everything else, when it comes to administration, finances, personnel, and management.

This isn't a new phenomenon, and it isn't a scam Rome's set up to ensure it can't be held responsible for misconduct on the part of those who might be wrongly understood as acting on its behalf. On the contrary, aside from their being strong Ecclesiological reasons -- rooted in Christian tradition and Scripture -- for the Church being organised as it is, this structure can largely be explained through thinking about the practicalities of how the Church has grown through history.

As Peter Drucker, perhaps the twentieth century's greatest guru of management, has pointed out, the job description of Catholic bishops hasn't changed since canon law was first codified in the Middle Ages: the Church's structures reflect the reality of a age without modern telecommunications, that being almost its entire history. Do you think Rome could ever have kept an eye on what Palladius was up to in Ireland, Augustine in England, or Cyril and Methodius in Bulgaria? Could there have been any possible way that St Ignatius of Loyola knew how St Francis Xavier was carrying out his mission in Japan? That's not to say that these people didn't report back from time to time or didn't get the occasional bit of advice from popes or heads of orders -- one thinks of Mellitus' famous letter from Gregory the Great -- but in general they were trusted to act on their own authority.

Such a principle dates back, as one would expect, to the earliest days of the Church. The Gospels show the disciples going out to preach on their own, without Jesus constantly checking up on them, and  it's clear from Acts and the various New Testament letters that Paul's missionary activities weren't constantly monitored by Peter and the other Apostles. Indeed, it's evident from the text that neither Paul nor anybody else was regularly keeping an eye on the various local churches that had been set up -- what interventions he made, in, say, Corinth, were clearly in response to several reports he'd received asking for guidance. It seems that the basic principles guiding the modern Church are rooted in the Church of the Apostles: while teaching and direction may have come from above, such guidance was as a rule provided only in response to information offered from below, and in most respects local churches were trusted to run their own affairs in a faithful way.

Of course, people might argue that things could be tighter nowadays, but aside from that being a tacit recognition that if Rome's to blame it's for not being controlling enough rather than for being too controlling, I don't think that'd work. Leaving ecclesiology out of it, I very much doubt that the local churches would be willing to accept a massive practical expansion of Roman supervision and I'm sure such an expansion would destroy decades of patient ecumenical efforts to heal the thousand-year breach with the Orthodox, but even if these surely insuperable obstacles could be overcome, how would such an enormous expansion of Roman authority be funded or staffed?

Contrary to popular belief, the Vatican isn't rich, not least because what wealth it has tends to be of a sort that can't really be sold, like Saint Peter's itself. As things stands, the Holy See is surprisingly light on bureaucracy and runs a pretty tight ship, costwise. In 2010, for instance, it cost £213 million to run the Holy See, as opposed to, say, £224 million to run Manchester United, and unlike the Red Devils, Rome doesn't have much scope for expansion: last year its income was £9 million more than its expenditure, but the three previous years saw it firmly in the red.

I'm exhausted, and this is huge and taking ages, so I'd better stop. I'll answer the remaining questions tomorrow, I hope.

A Prayer We Don't Say During Advent

You'll be glad to know, I'm sure, that I made it to Pontefract in one piece yesterday, and back too, and that at no point did I suddenly fall over or veer into a hedge. I did sleep ten hours straight once I got back last night, but I think that's just my body saying it's not sick anymore, but it is pretty well drained. The wedding was lovely, anyhow. There are a handful of photos on Facebook. I didn't dance. No, not even to the Macarena, despite having been taught the dance a long time ago by two Mexicans in a supposedly Irish bar in Krakow.

(I say 'supposedly' as there was no indication that it was an Irish bar, and had there been any I'd have avoided it. It was some months later that I discovered it was supposedly such. This could explain the barmaid's blatantly suppressed grin as I haltingly tried to order in Polish, fumbling with the consonants in a rude Dublin accent.)

Game On

Mass was special yesterday, perhaps moreso than usual. There are Masses that stick in my mind, for whatever reason. A million people in the Phoenix Park... my first Holy Communion...  my sister's wedding...  carrying the coffin and reading at my cousin's funeral...  an accidental first Latin Mass... a wedding where the groom's mother, a Methodist minister, said the homily... a Mass where the homily was simplified and translated into Spanish as an impromptu response to our being joined by a tour group of Spanish schoolchildren...  a Mass lit by candles and little more, without even a homily, one Lenten night...  my first Easter Vigil... a makeshift altar in a hut in the Lake District... a friend's baptism and confirmation... praying in the conviction that the remains of St Paul were but metres away... communion by intinction at a Greek Catholic Mass said according to the Byzantine rite in Aleppo... being drawn by the rhythms of prayer to a moonlit Mass among the desert ruins of Palmyra... the beatification of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman in Birmingham... a Mass in memory of Newman a month later in Manchester's oratory-in-formation... being asked to bring up the gifts at an Easter Vigil further north than I've ever been... a priestly friend's homily at the funeral of his own mother... standing beside one of my dearest friends in Westminster Cathedral as for the first time we clumsily said, together, 'And with your spirit'...  having my breath taken away by the sheer theological profundity and force of the most animated crucifix I've ever seen...

Yesterday, for the first time, I heard the Mass properly translated into English.

I've heard it properly translated several times in the past. I've heard it in Czech when I visited Prague the first time. I've heard it in Italian in Siena and Florence and Rome. I've heard it in Greek in Athens, and in German in Frankfurt, and in Spanish in the Syrian desert. And I've heard it in Irish. But I've never heard it translated properly into English, in such a way that the Latin text was rendered properly, in such a way that the original Scriptures could be heard. 

For whatever reason, when the Mass was translated into the vernacular languages back in the early 1970s, the English-speaking countries decided to play a game of their own choosing, breaking from their brethren of other tongues by translating the Mass not with any sense of literal fidelity to the sacred texts themselves, but following a vaguely dynamic equivalence. Sometimes this worked, but sometimes, it really didn't. This really hit me a while back when I was jarred by reading the Gloria in Westminster Cathedral a couple of months back. It wasn't just that the words were different -- some of the phrases were wholly unfamiliar, and the prayer seemed jumbled up.

Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to people of good will.
We praise you,
we bless you,
we adore you,
we glorify you,
we give you thanks for your great glory,
Lord God, heavenly King,
O God, almighty Father.
Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son,
Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,
you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us;
you take away the sins of the world, receive our prayer.
you are seated at the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us.
For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High,
Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen

This wasn't the prayer as I knew it. I'd always known it as a simpler affair, several lines shorter:

Glory to God in the highest
and peace to his people on earth.
Lord God, heavenly King,
Almighty God and Father,
we worship you,
we give you thanks,
we praise you for your glory.
Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father,
Lord God, Lamb of God,
you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us;
You are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer.
For you alone are the Holy One,
you alone are the Lord,
you alone are the Most High,
Jesus Christ,
with the Holy Spirit,
in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

But then I looked at the Latin, and saw that the new translation was a far more accurate translation of the prayer that the whole Church prays. And I did some digging, and found that the new translation was very similar to the classic Anglican rendering of the prayer, and as it was translated in Catholic missals -- to accompany the Latin text -- until the 1970s. And, what's more, I found that the Irish translation of the prayer even up to this day -- which I would have stumbled through once or twice in my childhood and teens  -- is likewise a faithful translation of the Latin:

Glóir do Dhia sna harda
Agus ar talamh síocháin do lucht a pháirte.
Molaimid thú.
Móraimid thú.
Adhraimid thú.
Tugaimid glóir duit.
Gabhaimid buíochas leat as ucht do mhórghlóire.
A Thiarna Dia, a Rí na bhflaitheas,
A Dhia, a Athair uilechumhachtaigh,
A Thiarna, a Aon-Mhic, a Íosa Críost.
A Thiarna Dia, a Uain Dé, Mac an Athar.
Tusa, a thógann peacaí an domhain, déan trócaire orainn.
Tusa a thógann peacaí an domhain, glac lenár nguí.
Tusa atá i do shuí ar dheis an Athar, déan trócaire orainn.
Oir is tú amháin is naofa. Is tú amháin is Tiarna.
Is tú amháin is ró-ard, a Íosa Críost,
mar aon leis an Spiorad Naomh i nglóir Dé an tAthair. Ámén.

I don't know what was going on in Ireland that we should have wound up with two translations of the Mass in play simultaneously, embodying two radically different philosophies of translation. The Irish translation was not merely faithful to the tradition of the Church, it was translated in such a way that any visitor could fumble through the prayer even without knowing the language, as long as he or she knew the Mass in his or her own tongue; it expressed and aided the diachronic and geographic unity of the Church. But the English translation? Hardly a translation at all, it was a paraphrase, and one which ditched whole clauses for no reason that I can fathom.

And other English-speaking Christians followed us in this? What were they thinking?

We didn't say the Gloria yesterday, of course. It's Advent, and the Gloria is at its heart a Christmas hymn. Advent's about waiting, and doing so hopefully. It's not about rushing to Christmas, but about waiting for it in a spirit of hope and joy. For Christians there's a sense in which it is always Christmas every day, in that we never forget the Incarnation, but at Advent we remember the time when mankind waited in hope for the coming of Our Lord, and so we hold back until Christmas until we join the angels in proclaiming, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.'

Time to Start Charming Back the Luxury...

Today's not going quite to plan. Having overslept, my body clearly still trying to make up for the last week or so of illness, I missed morning Mass and have been trying to figure out the logistics of crossing the Pennines and getting to Pontefract for the afters of a dear friend's wedding, while still finding some way of attending Mass on this very special Sunday.

I have it worked out, I think. There's a train at half three, and another one just after four, and then one from Leeds at a quarter past five. I should have plenty of time to wander about Pontefract and find the church there in time for evening Mass before heading off to the hotel and arriving about an hour later than I'd like. Ambitious stuff for a man who's hardly been able to leave the couch since last Saturday morning and currently bearing eight or nine days' worth of stubble, but still. Needs must. Mass matters, as do friends.

Why is today so special? Well, because it's my friends' wedding day, of course, and because today's the first day that the corrected translation of the Mass shall be used in full, and because it's the first Sunday of Advent, after all, a time of hope and of joyful anticipation of Christmas. I always think of Advent as a profoundly English time of year, probably due to having read Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising and seen the BBC adaptation of The Box of Delights when I was a little boy, but the real heart of it, I increasingly think, was rather perfectly expressed by a fellow Irishman.

We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we'll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.

That was Patrick Kavanagh's 1942 poem 'Advent'. I've always liked Kavanagh, who was a great man for the wink-and-elbow language of delight, even though he lived his own life with his bank of youth having been burgled by Monaghan's stony grey soil.

I liked him when I was in school and though I'm sure I heard it then, it was many years later that I really discovered the sheer profundity of 'Epic'. Now there's a poem...

A Dangerously One-Eyed View

If Patsy McGarry isn’t sued after his performance on Tonight with Vincent Browne the other evening, he should consider himself a very lucky man.

I only got round to watching the whole programme a couple of days back, having caught the end of it on Tuesday night, and was astounded to see how it began. Early in a discussion on how RTE had came to defame Father Kevin Reynolds in so horrendous a fashion as it did in the summer, and on the consequences of this defamation for RTE, Vincent invited Breda O’Brien to chime in.

Breda is one of the Irish Times’ regular columnists and is with Vincent one of but a handful of people in the Irish media who have repeatedly tried to draw people’s attention to the massive extent to which childhood sexual abuse has been – and may still be – something akin to a national epidemic, having been experienced by more than a quarter of Irish adults. She raised the question of how has it come to pass that the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ seems not to apply whenever priests or nuns are accused of sexual abuse, and why it is that people seem to hugely overestimate the number of clergy who’ve committed sexual abuse; we needed to face the question of how such attitudes had arisen, and what had created this climate of assumed guilt.

It’s important to note that she didn’t shirk the fact of clerical abuse being a reality, or of the Church’s disastrous mishandling of abuse allegations; she agreed that Church authorities had been complicit in abuse through covering it up, and I think went too far in doing so, as the reality is that rather than there having been ‘a cover up’ there has been a tendency to cover up. She accepted Vincent’s point wholeheartedly, without any demurral, before pointing out that there had been no wider acknowledgement of how things had changed within the Church or how this problem is so widespread through Irish society. Indeed, she pointed out how even the likes of Maeve Lewis of One-in-Four have been largely ignored when she’s said that there’s a disproportionate amount of attention paid to clerical abuse, and that this disproportionate focus on clerical abuse is itself detrimental to the interests of the overwhelming majority of Irish abuse victims, being those who’d been abused by people other than clergy.

Essentially she was saying that there’s a double injustice at work, such that innocent priests such as Kevin Reynolds could be shameless accused of rape by the national broadcaster with the apparent approval of the Minister for Justice, and more importantly that the vast majority of sexual abuse in Ireland was being ignored, endangering thousands of Irish children. How this poisonous atmosphere had arisen was a question not just for RTE, but for the media in general, for civil society, and for all of us.


Let the Character Assassination Begin!
At that, the word 'media' acted like a dog whistle and Patsy McGarry, the Religious Affairs Correspondent of the Irish Times since 1997 or so, and a man who I suspect has depended more on clerical abuse stories for his bread and butter than anybody else in Irish life over the last fifteen years, leapt into action:

‘Can I point out also that Breda comes from the Provisional wing of the Catholic Church, and never resists an opportunity to have a go at the media and has been doing this for years, often to the detriment of the emergence of this tragedy.’

Breda pressed him to explain this, pointing out that it was a very serious allegation, and asked him to clarify it. Had Patsy really said that she had been a party that acted in a way that was detrimental to the revelation of abuse, that she had defended the Church in such a way that delayed the emergence of the story? Patsy responded to this by saying that this was indeed the case:

‘I was saying, Breda, that you and other people have found yourself in situations where you have defended the Church in contexts where things happened that were not defensible, that delayed the emergence of this story. [...]For instance, you cast doubt on people like Christine Buckley when she first came out about the abuse in Goldenbridge. There was doubt cast on -- I can't remember all the incidents...’

I’m not entirely sure that Breda did cast doubt on Christine Buckley and others, but assuming for the sake of argument that she did, surely there are two questions that need addressing.

• First, ought we to accept heinous allegations without recognising any possibility of doubt, or should we treat them with a healthy scepticism? As a historian, my instincts are to doubt and test everything. 
• Second, did Breda's supposed scepticism in any way hinder the emergence of the story? I think it’s pretty obvious from the figures that voices of caution have hardly held sway in this matter, such that any influence Breda might conceivably have had has been very slight. 

No, unless it can be shown that Breda’s actions had the effect of delaying the emergence of the story, this would have to be recognised as defamation on Patsy’s part; to me it looked like an outright ad hominem attack, designed to discredit somebody who was sitting right next to him and who was likely to take a line contrary to his own. It was, as Breda said, ‘a little bit of character assassination’, and the most perfect example of a phenomenon we now have in Ireland where ‘anybody who challenges the consensus on this and who says there is more than one side to this gets this treatment, gets called “people who have delayed the truth emerging”.’

Patsy accepted that most people vastly overestimate the amount of Irish clergy who are guilty of sexual abuse, attributing this to the fact that since 2005 we have had the Ryan Report into the industrial schools and into how abuse allegations were handled in Ferns, Dublin, and Cloyne. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘the media is responsible for the climate in which these awful things have happened! It’s not the media – it’s the abuse that caused this!’


Crunching the Numbers
That sounds very convincing, until you start looking at the figures dating well before 2005, and do so while keeping in mind how the only serious large-scale survey of abuse survivors in Ireland indicates that under 1.7 per cent of sexual abuse in Ireland was clerical. The SAVI Report which established that figure also cited an article which noted that between 1993 and 2000, the term ‘paedophile priest’ had been used 332 times in the Irish Times, while such terms as ‘paedophile teacher’ and  ‘paedophile journalist’ were nowhere to be seen. I’ve scoured the archive since then as best I can myself, and found that of all the articles, columns, and letters published between September 2000 and August 2011,

• More than 22 per cent of all pieces using the word ‘paedophile’ did so as part of the phrase ‘paedophile priest’. There were 295 uses of the phrase ‘paedophile priest', three uses of the phrase ‘paedophile teacher,’ and still not even one use of the phrase ‘paedophile journalist’.
• 46 per cent of all pieces that used the phrase ‘sex abuse’ did so as part of the phrases ‘clerical sex abuse’ or ‘clerical child sex abuse’.
• Almost 49 per cent of all pieces using the phrase ‘child sex abuse’ did so as part of the phrase ‘clerical child sex abuse’.
• At the time of my search, 89 of the hundred most recent pieces referring to abuse did so with reference to abuse committed or allegedly committed by office-holders in the Catholic Church.
• In the month prior to my survey, the Cloyne Report, which definitively revealed only that two men had not followed their own agreed policies but had broken no laws, had been mentioned 163 times, whereas the SAVI Report of 2002, which had revealed that 27 per cent of Irish adults had been abused in their childhood, with almost all of them being abused by people who were not Catholic clergy, had been mentioned just 63 times in nine years.

Is the Irish Church to blame for how it's currently viewed? Sure, but it's not the Church alone that's to blame. Are we really going to keep on pretending that the Irish media’s telling the truth on this? It’s not. I’m not saying it's biased, but in its pursuit of what’s probably been Ireland's biggest story in decades, it's developed tunnel vision, and has done so in such a way that innocent people are assumed guilty, the plight of hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens has gone ignored, and the real dangers posed to Irish children now and in the future are hardly mentioned.

Given how magnanimously she treated Patsy for the rest of the programme, and how resolutely she focused on the issues, notably the fact that were it not for the determination of the Association of Catholic Priests an innocent man would have gone to his grave branded as a rapist, I doubt Breda will make this story about herself. The fact remains, though: what Patsy McGarry said was defamation, pure and simple, and if he isn’t sued for this, he shouldn’t just consider himself lucky; he should be profoundly grateful for Breda’s charity and her willingness to forgive. 

Mister Gove's Wonderful Idea

Maisie Ward, in her 1942 biography of G.K. Chesterton, quoted Chesterton as being deeply troubled by the prospect of the Bible being taught simply as literature. He believed that an obligation to teach the Bible in such a way would put Christian teachers into impossible positions, and that the phenomenon itself raised very serious questions:

‘I should not mind children being told about Mohammed because I am not a Mohammedan. If I were a Mohammedan I should very much want to know what they were told about him.’ 

I thought about this earlier when I read how Michael Gove is planning on giving a special copy of the King James Bible to every school in England, each one prefaced by a brief foreword by his honourable self.

Gove has a habit of coming up with ideas that sound great on paper, but that come unstuck once one thinks them through properly; one might think of his laudable ambition that every eleven-year-old should be required to read fifty books a year, an ambition that’s rather undermined by how government cutbacks have threatened 600 of England’s libraries with closure. This one, I fear, is no different, and Christians and others should take no satisfaction in how this proposal has provoked disquiet from the most predictable of corners.

As you’d expect, the National Secular Society’s Terry Sanderson isn’t overflowing with joy at this idea; he’s asking whether Mr Gove is planning to issue copies of Darwin’s The Origin of Species to all schools, each copy similarly prefaced by the Secretary for Education. Such a proposal, says Mr Sanderson, would be in line with Mr Gove’s wish to promote science and evidence-based education. I’m not sure why Terry Sanderson thinks the Government should be promoting nineteenth-century scientific ideas when science has moved on, as science does, but there you have it. Richy Thompson of the British Humanist Association clearly feels such facetious proposals are below him, and has instead simply criticised what he sees as an unacceptable promotion of Christianity.

Is it that, though? Not to Mr Gove, it would seem. For him, the King James Bible is ‘one of the keystones of our shared culture,’ something that’s about Britishness far more so than it is about Christianity. An anachronistic notion of Britishness, of course, one infatuated with long-discredited Whiggish notions of historical progress and hung up on the idea of the Empire of which the King James Bible was a sort of ‘founding text’, but Britishness for all that.

Perhaps surprisingly, Richard Dawkins is sitting right next to Mr Gove in that Whiggish corner, singing the chauvinistic praises of this particular old-fashioned and inaccurate translation of the Bible, saying:

‘Warts and all, let's encourage our schools to bring this precious English heritage to all our children, whatever their background, not as history, not as science and not (oh, please not) as morality. But as literature.’

Yes, despite the protestations of his fellow travellers in the NSS and the BHA, Richard Dawkins is a huge fan of the King James Bible, which he evidently regards as something which is only incidentally related to Christianity or the Judaism he appears to despise. As he said to Frank Field earlier in the year,

‘I think it is important to make the case that the Bible is part of our heritage and it doesn’t have to be tied to religion. It’s of historic interest, it’s of literary interest, and it’s important that religion should not be allowed to hijack this cultural resource.’

Yep, there you have it. The King James Bible isn’t a religious work; it’s a literary work that just happens to have religious connections, and for it to be read in its proper context is a hijacking. Let that sit for a while.

Indeed, despite his open scorn for its purpose and substance, Richard Dawkins is one of the great public fetishists of the King James Bible, about which he makes some fairly grandiose claims:

‘You can’t appreciate English literature unless you know something about the Greek gods. You can’t appreciate Wagner unless you know something about the Norse gods. You can’t appreciate English literature unless you are to some extent at least steeped in the King James Bible. There are phrases that come from it – people don’t realise they come from it – proverbial phrases, phrases that make echoes in people’s mind, they haunt our minds because we are a Christian culture, we come from a Christian culture.’

If you flick through to chapter 9 of The God Delusion you’ll find a two-page list of idioms, phrases, and clichés that Professor Dawkins says occur commonly in literary and conversational English; given, however, that these include such proper nouns as ‘Shibboleth’ and ‘Philistine’, as well as simple phrases such as ‘burning bush’ and ‘lost sheep’, I think it’s safe to say that these terms aren’t exclusively the preserve of the King James Bible. For all that, in promoting the King James Bible, Professor Dawkins has been adamant:

‘And not to know the King James Bible is to be, in some small way, barbarian.’

Bad luck for the Germans, French, and Italians, so, not to mention all those English-speaking Catholics who would fail Richard’s culture test. By Dawkins’ definition, Anthony Burgess, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, and Hilaire Belloc, all of whom grew up familiar with the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible rather than the Anglican cadences of the King James Bible, were barbarians incapable of appreciating English literature.

It seems the Education Secretary is on the same page as Professor Dawkins on this matter. He may be an Anglican rather than an Atheist, but it can hardly be on confessional grounds that he proposes that Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and secular schools should have specifically Anglican versions of the Bible on their shelves. To him the King James Bible is a cultural resource around which all English people should be able to unite.

The problem, of course, is that despite what Mister Gove may think and what Professor Dawkins may claim, that’s not what the Bible’s for, and it should bother Christians to see any version of it being promoted as such. The King James Bible may well have supplied rhythms and metaphors for three centuries of English writers, but it was not created with such an end in mind, and it is profoundly disrespectful to the Bible to dragoon it into the service of a nostalgic nationalism or to reduce it to a mere piece of literature, no matter how beautiful.

There's an obvious parallel with late Imperial Rome, where Christian teachers of grammar and rhetoric used Classical Pagan literature such as the Iliad and the Aeneid as literary reservoirs, while constantly reminding their students that the Pagan gods were devils, fictions, or mere metaphorical forerunners of the truths they themselves cherished. It was hardly surprising that in 362 AD Julian the Apostate, Rome’s last Pagan Emperor, passed a school law designed to ban Christians from doing such things. His project of cultural renewal failed, cut short by his untimely death in battle, but it made sense: he realised that what he saw as the common good of the Roman people would be endangered by texts and tales central to Rome’s historical culture being taught as interesting and useful falsehoods.

If we care about the Bible, we should care about how it's taught. This is a bad idea.

Time To Look Within

I've met Christine Buckley many times, and though this probably won't endear me to quite a few of my fellow Catholics, I've always got on well with her. And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure she likes me too.

That said, I think her letter to today's Irish Times is completely off-kilter, and not just because she seems to think that money sent to Rome as part of the annual 'Peter's Pence' collection is morally and justifiably our money, rather than money which we gave away of our own choice to support an organization with an annual operating budget not much more than half that of UCD's.

At the core of her letter is this passage:

'Now the Vatican is not interested in our economic meltdown. Indeed it probably expects us to contribute substantially in terms of security and other supports for the Eucharistic Congress in 2012. So here is the deal: we’ll say yes to the embassy and the Congress – provided that the Vatican pays its share towards all the costs that Irish taxpayers have incurred in order to find out the truth about abuse. The Ryan report cost €126 million, The Redress Board to date €1.3 billion, The Ferns report €2.3 million, the Murphy report €3.6 million to date and the Cloyne report €1.9 million.'

The Vatican is most definitely interested in our economic meltdown. Indeed, given that the meltdown was caused by rampant greed and ridiculous exercises in financial plate-spinning, this shouldn't surprise us. We need but think of the Pope's criticism of unbridled capitalism in his third Papal encyclical, 2009's Caritas in Veritate, of how he touched on similar themes in this year's second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, and of how the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace recently issued a huge document criticising neo-liberal economics and proposing measures to help act against future financial crises.

The Vatican hasn't complained about the Irish decision to shut the embassy to the Holy See. Indeed, I don't think anybody's complained about that other than people who realise that it's against Ireland's national interests for us to have done so. It doesn't affect the Vatican one bit. Gilmore's decision to close our embassy to the Holy See is something that's a loss to us, not to Rome.

As for the issue of costs incurred by Irish taxpayers in finding out the truth about abuse? Well, Christine says that the State has spent something of the order of €134 million on enquiries, as well as €1.3 billion on the Redress Board. So it has, but the question, surely, is what does any of this have to do with the Vatican.

As I explained back in July, almost all the money the State has spent in these matters has related to abuse that took place in Ireland's industrial schools, all of which -- though run by religious orders -- were supervised by the Irish State and not by the Vatican in any sense. The Ryan Report is absolutely damning about the State's failure to monitor these schools which it had set up and funded, and for which it was responsible. It never raises the slightest suggestion that the Vatican was in any way responsible for what happens, and doesn't even allow for the possibility that it might have been worth asking the Vatican for information; it was clearly obvious to the Ryan Commission that the Vatican was wholly unaware of what was going on.

It is true that just under €8 million was spent by the State on the Ferns, Dublin, and Cloyne Reports, none of which investigated abuse, instead investigating how allegations of abuse and expressions of concern were handled, but again the question is whether Rome knew what was going on.

Contrary to what people tend to think, the Church isn't an institution; rather, it's a loose network made up of thousands of institutions, many of which are almost wholly autonomous. The Irish Church alone has more than 180 separate bodies, and Rome -- as a rule -- only knows what's going on based on what it's told by the various institutions that make up the Irish Church.

If you look at the Dublin Report, for instance, you'll see that of the 46 sample cases of alleged abuse reported between 1975 and 2004 that the Murphy Commission considered, only four cases were ever reported to Rome. Likewise, looking at the eighteen priests about whom complaints were made or concerns were expressed in Cloyne between 1996 and 2009, again only four cases were passed on to Rome, three of these not being passed on until 2009. In short, it seems that Irish dioceses habitually tried to deal with things 'in house', and made a point of keeping Rome out of the loop.

This is a major part of the problem caused by Enda's speech in the summer, and how it's been defended by the likes of Patsy McGarry: it presented falsehood as truth, and helped to create and drive the false impression that the problem in the Irish Church lay far away in Rome rather than being right here, among the Irish people.

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.