the way we live now

Wandered into the Cafe Des Beaux Parvenus in the Newbridge Silverware building.
The place was packed.
Glancing to my left I espied Pheonicia Lincolnshire sitting with some friends at a table near the aisle.
Our eyes met.
Being a pleasant open hearted youth, I went over and said hello.
"Oh hello James," she said airily. "Now off with you. We've finished all the food. There's nothing for you here."
It was said jovially but with intent.
I smiled and moved on.
That was rum, I thought to myself. Why on earth did she say that?
I'm telling you folks.
I'm likeable.
That woman normally loves me.
A thought struck me.
Recently Pheonicia Lincolnshire had emailed me inviting me to a fundraiser for the homeless.
And knowing that she was a local party organiser for Ireland's governing party Fine Gael, the most virulently anti Catholic political organisation in Europe, I had emailed back in high good humour the single sentence:
"Get your f--king hands off my f--king Church you fart filled f--king Fine Gael Nazi cee words."
Surely she couldn't have held that against me?
If you had been in the Newbridge Silverware cafe on this fine wintery afternoon you might have seen an exceptionally handsome poet picking his way between the tables.
Not for the first time his gentle pre-raphaelite features bore an expression of mild bemusement.

sov staat irl

Coffee with Baines.
"But James," he says, "when all this is over the Catholic Church will have the best child protection procedures in the world."
"When this is over?" I exclaim incredulously. "But don't you see? This doesn't end. This doesn't end until the Church is gone. That's the game that's being played here. These people aren't reformers. They're usurpers. The people attacking the church from the shadows of the Civil Service, the Judiciary, and Parliament, the people using the Media to conduct their showtrials, these people don't care about sex abuse. It's only a tool for them. This is about power. While aping to care about sex abuse victims they deliberately ignore any victims who are of no use to them in their culture war against Christianity. They ignore the 99.99 percent of victims of the most serious abuse who are abused, tortured, debased and often murdered in the wider community, in the schools, hospitals, sports clubs, family homes, and health boards by non Catholic people, and at the same time they wantonly, despicably, mendaciously and maliciously insist that the worst cases of sex abuse occur in the Church. Their investigations into the Church are a massive fraud. They are a pretext. Those who despise the Church are seeking to remove it as a platform for public influence in the Republic of Ireland. Then there will be no one to oppose their own power brokerage. Oh at the moment, the media and the judges pretend that if we only surrendered a few ageing Bishops to them, then the Church would be left alone. I gotta tell you. No tyrant in history ever stopped a persecution because people gave in to him. With the Church gone, our democracy will be gone. This is a persecution. Mark my words. At the moment they're still by and large only murdering reputations. Soon the real murders will follow. And then more. And more. And more. Ireland will be a dictatorship. And no communist or atheist or leftist dictator has ever ruled without unleashing mass murder. This will be a Soviet Republic of Ireland as barbarous as anything Stalin ever dreamed. It's happening before our eyes. It's happening now."

to a wild rabbit

(prince of the fields)
***

words are mine
no words take from his eyes
the breeze blown beauty of the woodlands
nor the silver scented sight of evening glories

manhood mine
a prince of the fields is he
even in the terror of flight
a strange high ecstacy spirits to delight

age is mine
he will not grow old
nor fear the passing of his world
the bitterness of friends becoming foes

durance vile

As the anti Catholic media groups of the Republic of Ireland struggled to feign outrage over the false child rape and paternity accusations levelled by the broadcaster RTE against an innocent priest, only the Daily Mail had the sleazoid temerity to break ranks, show its true colours, and blatently attempt to diminish RTE's crime by suggesting the Catholic Church had done worse.
The Daily Mail responded to the exposure of RTE's criminal vilification of an innocent man by running the following headline:
"RTE MADE A MISTAKE BUT AT LEAST RTE NEVER RAPED CHILDREN OR CONCEALED CHILD ABUSE."
Ahem.
Where to begin.
This one really is a doozy.
The sheer scale of the lie which the Daily Mail is telling, almost beggars the possibility of the Daily Mail being justly held to account.
For the Daily Mail has compressed multiple mendacities into just one crass, manipulative, vilificatory headline.
Let me try.
Three points.
(1) The Daily Mail's headline begins by attempting to reduce RTE's deliberate assault upon an aged priest to the level of a mistake. A mistake. There was no mistake. RTE deliberately gave the priest no chance to refute the lies RTE were about to broadcast to the nation. His denials were disregarded. Urgent communications from his lawyer were deflected. He was informed of the broadcast only shortly before air time so that he had nearly no opportunity to prevent RTE's assault upon his character, his career, his life and his person. Oh, this was no mistake. RTE's camera crew ambushing him at a church ceremony involving children was no mistake. RTE refusing to allow him to take a paternity test prior to their broadcast was no mistake. RTE's failure to take account of the refutation of RTE's deliberate lies by the innocent priest's Bishop and colleagues was no mistake. RTE's failure to notify the priest or his lawyers that the girl RTE was alleging he'd abused was now refusing to take a paternity test, was no mistake. RTE's leak of the results of the paternity test which RTE claims the girl eventually took twice, and which RTE says exonerated the priest, RTE's leak of this supposed paternity test to the Sunday Independent, yes they leaked it rather than informing the priest or his lawyers, this policy by RTE of leaking information to anti Catholic media allies, can never be construed as a mistake. RTE's subsequent and continuing leaks to the Daily Mail wherein, without attribution, RTE attempted to sow in the public mind via the Daily Mail, the still unsubstantiated claim that the innocent priest's accuser was another priest, these leaks, egregious as the others and still going on, can in no way or by any stretch of the imagination be characterised a mistake. All these leaks, all these attempts to ruin an innocent man, all these trahesions of due process, all of them were deliberate. And all of them amounted to criminal behaviour of the most disgraceful sort.
(2) The reference to a "mistake" is only the first part of the Daily Mail's malicious falsehood laden headline. The Daily Mail compounds its hate speech lie by claiming that RTE never raped any children. The intended implication by the Daily Mail is that the Catholic Church itself may be deemed a child rapist. This lie is too invidious for words. The Daily Mail published it anonymously of course. Of course they did. We'll know who wrote it on Judgement Day. So let me tell you all one thing gentle readers. One thing I do know. RTE has indeed raped children. RTE has raped children in the sense that RTE employees have committed child abuse and RTE has failed to report that child abuse to the general public. Here is the news. No organisation, institution, no newspaper, no government department, no sports club, no hospital, no school, no family, in the land has been untouched by child abuse. This is an age of massive sexual dysfunction. The Daily Mail and its ilk wish to pretend that only the Catholic Church has been affected. Worse. The Daily Mail wishes to pretend that RTE employees are completely untouched by the scourge of paedophilia. Worse still, the Daily Mail apes to believe that the causality for sex abuse stems from Christian culture rather than from the atheistic pornographic sleaze culture which through the Daily Mail and its ilk and its putative ally RTE, has disrupted and debauched a generation. I'm telling you folks. RTE has raped children in exactly the same sense that any other organisation may be said by the Dail Mail to have raped children. The only difference is that RTE employees committing child abuse have of course received negligible reportage. As has the Irish Times journalist recently discovered raping children whom he'd groomed through his work as a volunteer coach at Dublin sports clubs. The Irish Times journalist's child abuse activities remain largely unreported. They also remain largely uninvestigated. The excuse being that every time the police so much as look at him, he attempts suicide. Clever, eh? One police officer dismissed public concerns about the matter by asserting: "It looks like the sex was consensual." This in spite of the fact that in Irish law, any sexual activity with minors is considered rape. Still one law for Irish Times child rapists and another for members of the Catholic Church accused of the same crime. Those of us who know about the existence of child rapists in RTE, know about them only through what you might call back channels. Most of us wouldn't claim that RTE itself is responsbile when one of its presenters or producers or programme contributors, rapes a child. But the Daily Mail has invented a new standard solely to be used for slandering the Catholic Church. According to the Daily Mail's reasoning, if one of your employees rapes a child, then your entire organisation raped the child. That is if you're the Catholic Church. Otherwise don't worry about it. I say it again. By the Daily Mail's own lights, RTE has indeed raped children. But believe you me, the Daily Mail has no intention of applying this standard to the child abusers within RTE. It is a standard and a sneer solely devised with the intention of fostering public hatred against the Catholic Church. Listen. No institution rapes children. Children are raped by individuals who commit child rape. The Daily Mail is attempting in its headline to suggest that the Catholic Church as an institution is responsible for any rapes that are carried out by any person calling themselves Catholic. Yet the Daily Mail's incitement to hatred hinges on perpetrating a different standard for RTE, the Health Boards, the Irish Times, the hospitals, etc, than for the Catholic Church. The Daily Mail asserts that abuse committed by a churchman makes the whole church guilty. In the same breath the Daily Mail insists that abuse committed by RTE employees, health board employees, teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, judges, et al, is to be deemed individual abuse without any guilt accruing to the friends of the Daily Mail who run those organisations which the Daily Mail wishes to protect. The wheel is rigged and it's the only game in town.
(3) The final part of the Daily Mail's classically invidious agit prop headline asserts that RTE has never concealed sex abuse. Again the deliberate and false implication is that RTE's behaviour has been impeccable while the Catholic Church by trying to handle such cases discreetly or through lawyers, was somehow concealing them. By the Daily Mail standard everybody in the land who has been confided in by a sex abuse victim with the express instruction that no further action was to be taken, every one of us I say, would be guilty of concealing sex abuse. But of course the Daily Mail and its allies aren't seeking to destroy every one of us. They only wish to destroy the Catholic Church. I'll have to ask for a reality check on this one. RTE has given negligible reportage to the broad mass of sex abuse cases arising among general public. RTE has certainly never focussed on the cases arising within the journalistic and media fraternities. RTE has never pointed out that 99.99 percent of sex abuse cases, including the most serious ones, the ones involving ritual torture and murder, arise outside the Catholic Church. RTE has never so much as dropped a hint that the vast preponderance of sex abuse cases occur primarily in the family home at the hands of near relatives. RTE's failure to communicate the true nature and extent of sex abuse is surely tantamount to the most grotesque concealment of it. The Daily Mail's pretence that RTE has never concealed sex abuse is utterly false.

a winter storm at kilcullen

the evening concerto has begun
sweeping through twilight from the fields
a masterwork of music at random
rain drums on windowsill and eaves
its off note lyric rhapsody in grey
as squalls gust lustily in sprays
a bullock bells forlorn out of sight
light sound shadow harmonise
at once a dreary monotone of night
at once a heady gloriole of praise
that says it all about this place
its torn me in my love and hate for it
village prison earthly paradise
small town insensate to my spirit
oh universe in me and i in it

paradise regained

Maud Gonne sat at a discreet corner table in a little known pub in heaven.
Presently she felt a song coming on.
She reached for the handheld microphone which she'd left on the table in front of her.
The microphone trailed fifty meteres of electric cable across the stage.
She switched on the microphone.
From somewhere just off stage there came the sound of a small explosion followed by popping and fizzing sounds as Maud Gonne's microphone power box short circuited.
For long moments Maud Gonne could be seen franticly tapping the head of her microphone hoping against hope that it might still be working.
Beside her the ghost of a smile touched the regal features of WB Yeats.

archie redivivus

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has called for resignations at Ireland's national broadcaster RTE over RTE's attempt to ruin a priest by broadcasting false allegations about him, to wit that the priest had raped a child and fathered a child with the child he raped.
Archie belatedly wants to be linked with those speaking out for the wrongly accused priest.
Archie says that for gross wrongdoing like that perpetrated by RTE a Bishop would be expected to resign.
Well, duhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Archie's attempts to associate himself with the public outrage towards RTE are fooling no one.
He's arriving a little late at this party.
And as for the current expectation he refers to, that Bishops and priests should resign when accused (often wrongly) of an egregious crime, and as for the purely contrived presumption of guilt under which religious people now are judged in each and every circumstance, and as for the new vastly unjust process of law whereby an unproven unverified accusation from an unidentified accuser is enough to force a priest from office, why Archie himself more than anyone else in our society has done the most to promulgate these injustices from within the Catholic Church.
You Archie.
You.
You more than anyone else within the ancient Church have helped a dark alliance among Ireland's atheistic Media, Parliamentarians and Judiciary, foster their invidiously Stalinist presumption of guilt for priests and those Bishops whom the same Media and associated shadowy elements at the apex of our society wish to destroy.
Do you remember how you sought to compel an entire generation of Bishops to resign without the right to speak for themselves because you claimed you considered their attempts at handling sex abuse cases amounted to concealment?
Do you remember how you sought to appoint a generation of Bishops who would be created in your own craven image? (Graven image surely - Ed note.)
Do you remember Archie?
Will you ever forget?
I won't.

an open letter to john waters of the irish times

Dear John Waters.
Forgive my various pejorative remarks about your convenient and supposed Catholic conversion.
No insult was intended.
I merely wanted to inspire you to greater efforts.
Today I'd like to talk about something else.
You wrote recently about internet businesses which claim to advise people about investment opportunities to be gained from the approaching collapse of the European currency.
You made some erudite and apposite points in your meditations on the morality of such businesses.
One of your analogies interested me particularly.
You said that the internet advert advising people on how they might profit from the collapse of the Euro amounted to shouting "Fire," in a crowded theatre.
You averred that every journalist learns on day one that shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre is beyond the protections envisaged under our Free Speech traditions.
Yes Mr Waters.
But there is one instance when shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre is perfectly acceptable.
Every journalist learns this on day two.
At least they do if they talk to me.
A person is perfectly entitled, indeed obligated, to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre, if there is in fact a fire engulfing the theatre.
The Euro is going down alright.
But you were correct in your scathing assessment of those trying to profit from its demise.
Such profiteers are attempting to trade off the citizenry's gullibility as they have always done.
"Listen to us," they cry. "We'll show you how to make money while your neighbours starve."
Yes.
Your analogy about the fire was most illuminating though as I've said, not perfect.
A closer analogy to the behaviour of these faux businessmen (faux because most of them have never done a day's work in their lives) who are purporting to advise people on how to profit from the recession, would be to envisage the same businessmen in the same crowded theatre, which is of course as per usual burning down, only this time the businessmen are blocking the aisles and offering to sell people maps showing the shortest route to the exits.
Or maybe even closer to the mark would be if we imagined the same internet businessmen, now standing in the doorway of the theatre, blocking the last best escape route, and seeking to charge people to get out.
Or finally, closest of all to the perfect analogy for those scoundrels advertising their expertise in how to profit from the collapse of our currency, closest of all I say, we might envision the businessmen as the bankers who have bankrupted Ireland, by making us all liable for their gambling losses, and we might once more conceive of ourselves as sharing a theatre with these bankers, and once more we might listen as the bankers are simultaneously blocking the exits and claiming to own the theatre which is clearly burning to the ground around us.
And as the blaze becomes an inferno, the bankers are still standing blocking the aisles and the exits.
Only now at last they're insisting that we the people guarantee to buy limitless numbers of tickets off them... FOR THEIR NEXT UNSPECIFIED THEATRE PRODUCTIONS WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT TAKE PLACE IN THE UNSPECIFIED FUTURE WHEN THIS HELLFIRE ENGULFED THEATRE WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT BELONG TO THEM, MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE BEEN REBUILT.
That Mr Waters is the analogy that fits both the internet sharks looking to hoover up some gulls on your computer, and the banking gangsters who have first corrupted now hijacked our nation.
James Healy

paradise lost

*GREAT MOMENTS IN IRISH THEATRE*
Maud Gonne MacBride, the famed Irish rebel beauty walked into a discreet pub in heaven like she was walking onto a yacht.
The ghost of WB Yeats, sitting at a corner table, looked up from the book he was reading.
His pale watery blue eyes became a bit more watery.
Maud was toting a hand held microphone.
Not a chordless microphone either.
From the rear of this microphone about fifty feet of electric cable protruded.
In forty previous productions of the play, Maud had never before pulled this particular stunt.
She paused to get her bearings, then dragged the cable ethereally across the stage and sat with WB Yeats.
WB Yeats looked at her.
In a soft voice, too low to be heard in the seats at the back of the theatre, but loud enough for the front row, he enunciated:
"I'm gonna f--king kill you."

obitcheries

Eithne Kenny is dead.
She is the mother of Enda Kenny, a vacuous, vacant, vapid hairstyle of a man, who is also Ireland's Prime Minister and chief of the most anti Catholic government in Europe.
Enda Kenny is famous for lying most foully and egregiously to the Irish parliament when he claimed recently in a pathetic misplaced attempt to please the mob, that the Vatican had obstructed child abuse enquiries in Ireland.
Enda Kenny was unable to substantiate his false and malicious claim when challenged.
Enda Kenny finally issued a statement through a spokesperson asserting that he hadn't been talking about any specific case, merely representing the anger of the Irish people.
Yet he had told a very specific very bigoted lie.
Enda Kenny is head of the government which includes his Fine Gael party chairman Charlie Flanagan.
Charlie Flanagan recently called for the expulsion of the Vatican ambassador.
Enda Kenny is head of the government which last week closed down Ireland's embassy in the Vatican.
Enda Kenny is head of the government whose Minister for Justice Alan Shatter is pushing through Stalinist legislation to force priests to reveal to Alan Shatter what is said to them in the Confession Box.
Enda Kenny is head of the government whose Minister for Justice Alan Shatter instructed the Irish police force to investigate Father Kevin Reynolds after the Irish national broadcaster RTE attempted to ruin Father Reynolds by falsely accusing him of child abuse, child rape, and fathering a child with a child.
Alan Shatter has yet to instruct the police force to investigate the RTE personalities responsible for this attempt to murder Father Kevin Reynolds' reputation and that of his family and that of his church.
Enda Kenny is head of the government which under Education Minister Ruairi Quinn is attempting to seize Catholic Church run schools.
Enda Kenny is head of the government that a month ago permitted Irish pharmacies to begin disseminating abortion pills.
Enda Kenny has overseen the introduction of abortion in a pill to Ireland for the first time in our history.
Enda Kenny has acquiesced in the pharmacies distribution abortion pills to children, teenagers and adults.
Enda Kenny inherited his parliamentary seat from his own father who died in 1975.
Classy, eh.
Enda Kenny's mother will shortly enjoy a funeral service in a Catholic Church where tame traitor priests will eulogise her, while making no remarks whatsoever about the pious hypocrasy of the assembled congregation of atheists, whore masters, bigots, racists, stalinists and kleptocrats.
Afterwards the white washed sepulchres of Ireland's anti Catholic government will emerge from the Catholic Church where the funeral service has been held, congratulating themselves on how spiritual they are.
Little do they know how close they are... to the end.