" What about the homo's.....???"

"What about the homo's" indeed and it can only happen in Ireland, the last bastion of attempted democracy in the westernised world. Those words came from a nun, who is probably the last of her kind too on these lands. The nun, identified as Sister B, sat on a panel of a school a few weeks ago to decide whether a teacher was qualified for a promotion to head principal there.  To test the teachers suitability, despite eight years at the school as deputy principal, a masters degree in teaching and on the wrong side of 40 years old, the nun wanted to know what her views were on the ‘homo’s,  as well as the non - catholic children and the changing patronage of the school. The teacher failed the test and was passed over for a less qualified one.  When she prosecuted them for discrimination they all lied with lying eyes that the teacher was not telling the truth. Their version of the truth was not believed and cost them €54,000 and the teacher kept her old job. The question could be asked with it as well: Is Ireland a democracy at all? 

The short answer is NO for the reality is that the Catholic church here are bigger than Government. The facts around this power are this: the Catholic church in Ireland owns and run over 90% of all schools, universities and hospitals here, with monies from rents, leases and grants that pull in millions of euros every year from the government, private business and very many suspect charities. Their long and deep pockets are invested in every type of business there is from insurance to petrol. They hide in open view and more than that is hidden in complicated trusts out of reach and out of sight. In fact they are the single biggest business monopoly here and getting bigger.

The order of nuns that Sister B comes from are the fifth largest landowners in Ireland, and not a whole lot of charity going on with that land, and yet they are allowed to discriminate legally in this country despite discrimination being illegal. They can fire and hire teachers based on religious and sexual orientation grounds along with martial status despite getting those public monies. They can and do ask for baptism certs for children at their schools and demand that they be baptised whether they like it or not in order for them to be allowed to attend. For the parent there is little choice 90% plus of the time: It is either no education or a Catholic one.

In order to know the essence of a Catholic religion, the Irish version of it anyway, one has to acknowledge what they did to this country before and after the last of the children’s gulags and magdalene laundries were finally closed down in 1997, that had seen over 200,000 children pass through their prison gates since the foundation of the state; like the nazis, work did not set them free and the horrors that they endured stayed with them for the rest of their lives.  The God squads were highly paid for each child prisoner and the vacant real estate left behind made even more money that had been gifted to them by the state in the first place. Did they acknowledge this? Only when they had to and not a second before. What they have given in compensation to their victims is akin to looking for a few loose and grubby coins under the sofa and offer it up with barely concealed glee for the main horde is still firmly locked away.

The corpses of babies that they starved and neglected keep piling up today, the drip feed of the horrors that they inflicted on the most vulnerable of our society keeps dripping, and still they try to deny, mitigate and cover up. They roll out their public relations spokespeople, their lawyers to hold back the dam with David Quinn as cheer leader who is there to prop up the Father Trendies to try and show a humanistic face on the catalogue of horrors that they inflicted on a craven society and government, and where each description of that horror starts with the words ‘historical’ as if had all happened a century or two before. Its end only began eighteen years ago.

There is progress, if you could call it that. They don't call single mothers fallen women or whores here anymore, or their children bastards because we as a society find that unacceptable. When the religious grasped that nugget only then they changed. When we as a society found it unacceptable that you could lock up children and consign their single mothers to Magdalen laundries that moved the mindset of the religious as well. When children were locked up in their gulags and at their behest for imaginary crimes that changed too when this country finally grasped what had been happening to them. We as a society became the Catholic church’s conscious and not the reverse. They changed only when we did and not the other way around. 

That is the core reality of religion, any religion, for their survival was based on the marketing monopoly of what a conscience was and is. It was the people always that forced that meaning upon them for behind the imagery, pomp and ceremony of the Catholic church it was, and will continue to be, a corporation where the cardinals and bishops are the CEO’s and the useful idiots their employees. 

It is never good enough to say it was the times that was in it to justify wrong or right or crime itself. If we do that did then the Nazis become blameless along with their many supporters.  Times are always changing but right and wrong is timeless in and by itself, and to claim a defence by ignorance alone is always the badge for the conveniently ignorant. 

Barry Clifford