an open letter to father thaddeus doyle editor of the curates diary

Dear Father.

I have read The Curate's Diary off and on for a few decades.

I seem to remember finding copies years ago in my grandparents house.
So I reckon I was in nearly at the beginning.

Your faith and insight are always enlightning.

Some of your guidance on sexual matters is profound.

You also occasionally write about near death experiences, citing people who claim to have clinically died and to have experienced the after life before being revived.

I find these accounts fascinating although of uneven quality.

Not all the testimonies are credible.
But they're always engaging, sometimes challenging, and usually well told.

Anyway.

Having read The Curate's Diary for so long and generally admired what you are doing, it came as a bit of a shock to read your editorial last month.

You wrote about a newly released British enquiry into events in Derry City in the early 1970's where British soldiers shot some rioters.

These events have come to be called Bloody Sunday, a term first devised by the IRA to impute guilt to the British soldiers.

In writing about Bloody Sunday, you felt it necessary to point out that you personally didn't come from a left wing extremist pro IRA family.

Famous last words.

They all say that.

In any case, it was as per usual an interesting editorial.

You will have guessed by now that I disagreed with virtually everything you said in it which was a new experience for me having previously been one of your fans.

You described the rioters in Derry City as peaceful protestors.

No.

They weren't peaceful anyway.

They were IRA supporters endeavouring to make Northern Ireland ungovernable.

And they rioted with rabid infantile psychopathic rage.

At no point were they peaceful.

You accepted absolutely, the conclusions of this latest Bloody Sunday report which exonerates the rioters and implies the British soldiers were guilty of murder.

I do not accept this report.

It is a report contrived by smug socialist left wingers insulated from reality and from the practicalities of having to defend the streets and their country from the IRA.

It was compiled by rarified pseudo academics whose sympathies are clearly with the IRA and its supporters.

Interestingly, only days after publication of the new report, IRA elements began a new bombing campaign in Northern Ireland.

Appeasement doesn't work.

In truth, none of us on this island or in Britain can afford to see the British army being casually criminalised through the attribution of retrospective guilt.

We still need them.

That's the unpalatable truth.

When I do the maths on paper, it seems to me that they're really all that's standing between Western Europe and the Caliphate.

The present generation of woolly leftist liberals who seem so keen to condemn the British army for its actions thirty years ago, may yet discover that dealing with terrorists isn't quite as easy as their tendentious delusional Bloody Sunday report suggests.

You yourself excoriated the compilers of a previous report on Bloody Sunday which had exonerated the soldiers.

You suggested that the compiler of that report Mr Widgery might have trouble in facing God in the afterlife, apparently because his conclusions about Bloody Sunday were different to your own.

That's a rum one for me.

Since I concurred with the previous report.

In any case perhaps everything I've said is wrong and at the end of it all you are right.

But let me tell you what I think.

I think if the British army hadn't fought the IRA to a standstill in Northern Ireland from 1970 onward, then the IRA would have initiated nationwide revolutionary warfare on the island of Ireland and handed us over, lock, stock and two smoking barrels, to Communist Russia.

Certainly my source in the IRA has been quite frank in asserting that during this period the IRA was taking orders from Moscow.

My source has named names, including Gerry Adams, Frank McGuinness, and a southern Irish politician once known as Frank Ross, now styled Proinsias De Rossa and waxing fat on his vastly inflated salary as a member of the Irish parliament.

Reds under the bed.

Only they weren't under the bed.

They were rioting in the streets.

With Moscow pulling the puppet strings.

And you know what.

Communist Russia wasn't just running the IRA as a means to subvert Ireland.

Communist Russia was trying precisely the same thing at precisely the same time all across Europe through its sponsorship and control of the Baader Meinhof group in Germany, the student revolutionaries in France, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Eta Basque Separatists in Spain, and the November 17 organisation in Greece.

All these organisations specialised in riots, or what you call peaceful demonstrations.

All these organisations came with a body count.

All these organisations revelled in provoking police and soldiers, and then labelling police and soldiers as criminals.

Remember the people of Northern Ireland welcomed the British army when it first came onto the streets in the late 1960's.

It was IRA strategy to alienate the public from the soldiers by continually staging riots, the same riots you say were being conducted by peaceful protestors.

If my IRA source is telling the truth, if my analysis of what the IRA was trying to do in seeking to alienate the general public in Derry from the British army is correct, if there was indeed a Soviet plot to conquer the whole island of Ireland using the IRA, why then you, me, and every Irishman who values freedom, owe the British army not just an apology but our heartiest thanks.

Your editorial went on ascribing guilt to the British soldiers and to Mr Widgery for some time.

I found it all quite wearisome.

Because I think you were so wrong.

That's all I have to say about the matter.

But as you rose from excoriating the British, you turned your attention to the Israelis.

Another of my hobby horses.

I think the Israelis are the chosen people of God and have been brought back to the holy land by God's will after 2000 years wandering the earth.

I doubt very much that any of the rat bag Muslim terror armies and dictatorships which permeate the region will be permitted by God to overthrow them.

Your editorial now asserted that the Israelis had committed a terrible deed recently in stopping a convoy of ships bringing supplies to the Islamist controlled Gaza Strip.

I disagree with you completely here too.

The convoy to Gaza was orchestrated by Turkish and Arab Islamists and their goonish atheistic liberal left wing supporters in our own countries.

The convoy was bringing supplies to an organisation called Hamas, which is a proxy terror army run by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Some of the Muslims in the convoy attempted to beat to death Israeli soldiers boarding their vessel.

The Israeli soldiers fought them off, killing nine of them.

The Israelis acted with decency, courage, restraint and honour.

This is my assessment of what happened.

Your editorial didn't finish there however.

You went on to turn your attention to no less a subject than the religious divide, known to some as The Reformation, which five hundred years ago resulted in the demarcating divisions between Catholics and Protestants.

You suggested that it was time for Protestant Christians to think about all the hurt they have caused to Catholics over the centuries.

Let me be clear.

I think the Catholic church was commissioned by the messiah to serve himself in human history.

But I also think your statement about it being time for Protestants to consider how much hurt they've caused us was wrong.

There has been ample hurt on both sides.

We are still one family.
One more thing.
Please forgive my boorish churlishness and unctious presumptuousness in attempting to address your points in such a confrontational way.
It is the closest thing I've got to a House Style at the Heelers Diaries.

James Healy