Month: April 2017

I have a cousin to whom I had been explaining how Roman Catholicism in Ireland is going through a crisis. The hypocrisy that underlay Bishop Casey’s love affair and then the problem he had in fully acknowledging and supporting his son may have been a starting point for many on this green island.

The protection of paedophile priests by the clergy up to the level of Abbot Kevin Smith and Cardinal Desmond O’Connell and the lack of support for their victims was another huge saga that alienated more and more of both the faithful and the secular in Ireland.

Another huge scandal that has become more and more apparent is how “Industrial Schools” and “Mother and Baby Homes” run by religious orders of Nuns operated both before and then for the most part of the 20th Century. The fire in Cavan that killed 35 girls and one adult in 1943 was bad enough in itself but the truth about how the children lived from day to day and the circumstances of their deaths was suppressed for a very long time.

The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland became an object of review in 1993 when a mass grave containing 155 corpses was uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. In the past 20 years or so it has become abundantly clear that the “fallen women” kept in these institutions were mistreated and used as slave labour. The last of these institutions was only closed in 1996.

The latest scandal is that of the Mother and Baby home in Tuam, where “significant numbers” of infant corpses (from premature to 3 years old) have been found following research by a historian who found a
discrepancy between approximately 800 death certificates issued and the number of official burials in the town. The investigation into this is on-going. There will also be a review of all the other similar homes that operated in Ireland with some saying thousands of bodies are yet to be discovered in the country as a whole.

After I had related some of the above to my cousin, she retorted “it is lies; it is fake news”. I was simply astounded to hear this but I looked up ‘Tuam Fake News’ on Google to discover the almost certain source as the American president of the Catholic League. I am sorely afraid that it his statement that is fake. Respectable politicians, the mainstream press and the public in Ireland do not doubt that some very disturbing things happened in association with these homes and that it relates to a very sad and scandalous episode that has been kept largely hidden from the public view for too long.

In this day and age of social media and information technology it may be ironic that it is so hard to tell fact from fiction, real from virtual and lies from truth. Whatever the truth about the actual numbers interred in Tuam, what is quite clear from interviews with living survivors (both children and mothers) was that to be kept in such “caring” institutions was an almost complete misery. The death rates were much higher than the national average; the children were marched to school, en bloc, and kept segregated from the other children before being marched back to the home again; the mothers were encouraged to have the children adopted and even encouraged to give them names that would be most attractive to potential adopters.

The general attitude towards such  mothers was made clear to me by a story recently told to me by a close friend. Her aunt had had a neighbour who was not the most intelligent of girls but who, after she became pregnant, asked her if she could live with her along with her new born child and that in return she would work for her for nothing. The parish priest heard of this and said it was impossible and that she must go into one of these homes. Subsequently, after the birth of the baby, the young mother wrote to my friend’s aunt asking again if she and her baby could live with her. The aunt was quite happy to do so but again the priest intervened. He was furious saying that it would be a complete scandal to have such a woman and her baby living in the parish. In the end the girl came home but never saw her child again. This was not a million years ago but it is just one real case that I know about personally and that shows the total lack of humanity and the total abuse of power of such clerics.

For sure, something is rotten in the current state of Catholicism in both Ireland and the Vatican. Pope Francis set up a “Commission into the Protection of Minors” to which one of the victims, Marie Collins, was appointed. The inaction by this commission has resulted in her resignation from it in protest. It seems that even the Pope cannot overcome the entrenched, retrograde and reactionary position taken by the Vatican elite.

The title of this essay is taken from a face to face interview with the philosopher Bertrand Russel after he was asked what message he would offer to people living a thousand years hence. It is of an additional relevance to me because just before my cousin told me that Tuam was false news she had stated that “God is Love” and I had added Bertrand Russel’s statement that “Love is Wise”. His full reply goes like this:

I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral:

The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Last year a really huge dragonfly flew in through a window in the car giving everyone inside a fright. I made a mental note that seeing an animal like that had become a rarity and this followed a winter when all my honey bees, those stoical workers in their seven hives, had perished.

The main thrust of an article by Anthony King (“The altered flight of the humble bee” Irish Times 2nd March 2017) was aimed at the neonicotinoid insecticides. His article made me remember DDT because it took far too long before the invidious effects of its widespread use as an insecticide became apparent. The poor birds of prey at the top of the food chain, which had fed on birds and rodents, which had fed on insects poisoned by DDT, trying to hatch eggs so soft that they would collapse. So perhaps it should be no surprise that another substance with zoocidal properties released into the environment in substantial amounts might be at the heart of the ongoing threat to the insect pollinators and to many other insects and arthropods, as well as to those animals that feed on them. It is, for example, now postulated that the massive decline in the once ubiquitous and cheeky house sparrow may have resulted from the lack of insects needed in the diet of the hatchlings during their first few days of life. Indeed so common and widespread were they that one of the collective terms to describe the group was the very word ‘ubiquity’.

When I was a child growing-up in the fifties I remember how, at our family home in County Leitrim, crickets and grasshoppers, many varieties of butterflies and moths, dragonflies, earwigs and pissmires (both the walking and flying varieties) were all commonplace. The sometimes sultry summers were punctuated by much bird and insect noise and the buzz of a humble bumble bee searching to escape through a window or tangled in a spider’s web was a signature sound of a sunny day. The same countryside nowadays seems so sterile and the rivers, once so full of fish, also much diminished in life.

Something really rotten is going on. Perhaps it really is too late for many species but repeated comprehensive audits of the insect world would seem to be a useful prognostic tool for measuring the future health of both the environment and ourselves, just as a miner’s canary warns of impending asphyxia or an explosion. The global threats to large land mammals are much easier to transmit to the public than threats to the relatively inconspicuous insect world but the destruction of the latter may have much more serious consequences for us all. We are the inheritors of the Garden of Eden and even though the mortal taste of its forbidden fruit is supposed to have opened our eyes to the knowledge of good and evil our eyes seem almost totally blinkered to the ongoing and almost wilful desecration of that inheritance.

There are other threats of course but it is perhaps corporate and individual greed that ultimately are changing not only the environment but also rural society so much. Just a half a century ago milk would have cream on the top of it in the morning and usually came from hand-milked cows, which had come in from flowery pastures and which was distributed through small farmer-owned cooperatives, where neighbours met each day. Now there is a move towards zero-grazing of cows, which seldom leave their sheds, fed from monoculture prairies, milked automatically and distributed centrally, even internationally, and onto the supermarket shelves as a watered-down and homogenised product in plastic containers. “Every little counts”. Really? Every little insect does however count.

I would love to be able to wander through wild flower meadows down to the lake’s edge, once again, in the certain knowledge of catching some perch or a pike for supper. Watching rabbits hopping into their burrows and rising snipe, curlew and lapwing on the way there. To watch cranes and coots and moorhens busy themselves at the mouth of the river, while my float, made from a cork from a bottle of Guinness and a match stick, bobbed up and down on the rippling waters of Dunaweel Lough. But, alas, all I have now are these little pearls of distant memories. I ponder can suchlike ever return, just as I mourn the almost complete loss of the jarring corncrake’s call, the twit-twooing of barn owls flying, like white-faced ghosts, past a window and even the terror caused by a bat circling round my candlelit bedroom not unlike what that dragonfly did, in the daytime, last summer as I was driving leisurely through the lakelands of Ireland.