The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Location: Kilcullen (Phone 087 7790766), County Kildare, Ireland

Friday, May 05, 2017

an open letter by an irish citizen to the irish police force about the death of malak thawley in an irish hospital

Malak Thawley died during surgery at the National Maternity Hospital, Hollis Street, Dublin on the 8th of May 2016.
She was in hospital for a routine operation to remove an ectopic pregnancy (an innocuous keyhole surgery procedure which does not involve an abortion.)
During the operation her aorta was severed.
Malak Thawley was Syrian and married to an American.
Did you investigate the death of Malak Thawley?
How exactly have you established that the severing of her aorta was accidental?
Have you identified the individual who severed her aorta?
Have you investigated the possibility that Malak Thawley was murdered on the operating table in the National Maternity Hospital, Hollis Street, Dublin?
Do your duty.
James Healy

Thursday, May 04, 2017

about animals

It seems to me that animals have a dignity and goodness and beauty to them which points at every moment to their creator.
Everything he makes he makes well.
More.
What he makes has an eternal quality.
Certainly as near as scientists can presently conceive, the energy and matter in the universe cannot be destroyed, only converted from one form to another.
Scientists have also rather presumptively suggested that matter and energy cannot be created when what they mean is we cannot create them.
If even scientists postulate that matter and energy have an eternal quality, I am suggesting that creatures and the spirits of creatures may also have such a quality.
I mean when God makes something, it is intrinsically touched with a quality of the eternal.
Okay.
Why else do I think animals go to heaven?
Well I want them to.
The Christian understanding of heaven comprises in part a notion that God made it for us to rejoice in.
He actually cares about what we want.
He understands our wants.
Remember he designed us.
If you've ever found animals a source of rejoicing, harbingers of joy, bringers of healing, a testimony to God's goodness and love for you here on earth, as I have, then we might conceive together that God in his graciousness will grant that the animals will be with us in heaven too.
Then there's the notion that heaven is much closer than we think.
Jesus, whom Christians say is God, is reported by his followers to have said: "The kingdom of heaven does not admit of observation. For look. The kingdom of heaven is in your midst,"
This saying is endlessly beautiful.
In some mystical sense, it implies that heaven is here now already if we know how to look for it.
It hints perhaps that where Jesus is, heaven is, even in our hearts.
The writer CS Lewis suggested that once you believe in Jesus you are in a strange way already partly in heaven.
He added an odd speculation that the grace of belief in Jesus works retrospectively back in time as well as forward into your future, and that the more you believe in Jesus, the more you will realise that in spite of your worst sufferings you have always somehow been in heaven.
Jesus' saying to the apostles that the kingdom of heaven is in your midst (or "at hand" or "upon you") might on these lines imply that heaven is somehow this place on earth, transformed by his presence.
Heaven might be simply a version of where we are now but made perfect.
Or something very close to this world, but just with all the evils we now see, absolutely defeated.
In that case the animals in their perfected spiritual souls might be a perfectly natural part of a perfect heaven.
What else is Jesus supposed to have said about animals?
There was a line: "Behold the sparrows in the market place. You can get five for a penny. Yet not one of them is unknown to the Father."
He also said something like: "You see the birds flying south for the winter. Not one of them drops from the sky without your Father in heaven knowing."
If God knows every sparrow on earth, there might just be a reason for it.
I think there is.

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

a bigot war too far

(The attempted annexation by liberal left wing abortionist  pseudo elites of the running of Ireland's hospitals)

1. Last year after repeated requests from the Irish government, the nuns of the Sisters of Charity agreed to allow the National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street to move its facilities to a hospital owned by the nuns and famous to generations of Irish people as Saint Vincent's hospital. The nuns were facilitating the government in this matter, not vice versa.

2. Saint Vincent's hospital is renowned world wide for the excellence and compassion of the care it provides. It is in the news this week because government Health Minister Simon Harris has bowed to an orchestrated media campaign from Board members at the National Maternity Hospital, casting aspersions on the ethics and ethos of Saint Vincent's Hospital as run by the Sisters of Charity. Harris has stated that when Saint Vincent's allows the National Maternity Hospital to move to its campus, the nuns will not have any say in the ethos of the hospital which they have allowed to join their campus.

3, The reputation of the grandly named National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street is less assured than that of Saint Vincent's Hospital. The National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street has shall we say fallen on lean times reputationally. Board members at Hollis Street, particularly Doctor Rhona Mahony who styles herself Master Of The Maternity Hospital, have a reputation for pro abortion advocacy and for their acquiescence to procedures such as sterilisation and the increasingly discredited sex change procedure. Doctor Mahony and her cadre are also shameless promoters of test tube baby procedure whereby sterile parents gamble on the possibilty that a sperm and egg fertilised in a test tube may be brought to term. The procedure is obejectionable on several grounds. It is objectionable because parents are routinely lied to when doctors tell them the procedure usually works. It usually fails. And it often results in miscarriages. It is most objectionable howerver because whenever Rhona Mahony or her ilk generate a life in a test tube, they generate nine more that they discard, ie they kill them, bringing to term only that life they deem most viable. It is a further objectionable procedure because the Irish people have never been given a choice as to whether Rhona Mahony and her fellow profiteers should be allowed to set themselves up as Frankensteins in our country. I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns. But these are my objections to the test tube baby procedure. Rhona Mahony as well as being Master of the Maternity hospital Hollis Street is a board member of a company providing test tube baby services. Futhermore there have been repeated concerns over several years re the amount of money she was being paid at Hollis Street with suggestions that her remuneration was vastly exceeding government guidelines for Health Service pay, and yet more concerns about the manner in which she was receiving extra payments which have never been fully explained. Rhona Mahony is listed as a member of the Finance Committee at the National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street. The Finance Committee overseas remuneration at the hospital to staff members including Rhona Mahony.

4. A further cloud over the National Maternity Hospital relates to the death there last year of a Syrian woman called Malak Thawley. The woman entered the hospital for a routine operation to remove an ectopic pregancy. This procedure is not an abortion. It is a routine and safe procedure to remove an egg that has implanted outside the womb and is not viable. At some stage during the operation Malak Thawley sustained an injury to her aorta. This has never been satisfactorily explained. My concern is that a Syrian woman, married to an American, may have been murdered in an Irish hospital on the operating table. The excuse offered for her death are risible. The published sections of an enquiry into her death do not allay public concerns as to what happened in that operating room. Rhona Mahony as Master of the Maternity Hospital Hollis Street where Malak Thawley met her untimely death, has a duty in this matter. The libel laws prevent me from saying more.

5. I would note that the National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street has as titular head of its Board, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin whose bona fides I have expressed concerns about elsewhere. Needless to say there is no Catholic ethos at the Hollis Street facility.Archie has allowed authority at the National Maternity Hospital to reside with Rhona Mahony. She is styled Master of the hospital. For me, I would say Archie and Rhona Mahony are both much of a muchness ethos wise. I have no expectations of either of them and I am never disappointed.

6. It is ironic then that for two weeks a media pogrom has been orchestrated in the Irish Times, Independent Newspapers and RTE against the nuns who run the respected hospital Saint Vincents.

7. Rhona Mahony's brother in law Doctor Peter Boylan, also a Board member at the National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street, was the Trojan horse quoted in media reports warning that the nuns must not control the ethos of his hospital when the Maternity Hospital moved to the nuns hospital campus at Saint Vincent's. Boylan was the flag bearer for the overt act, the staged aggression which allowed Independent Newspapers to pretend there were public concerns about nuns running hospitals.

8. I am suggesting that this utterly invidious media campaign, (wherein people with no ethos, no principles, no morality, maligned the nuns and Saint Vincent's hospital for an ethos revering the sanctity of life and the dignity of the person), a campaign orchestrated in the Irish Times, Independent Newspapers and RTE by Rhona Mahony's brother in law Peter Boylan and latterly by other pro abortion pro sex change pro sterilisation pro death in test tube doctors from the National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street, I am suggesting I say, that this campaign represents an attempted hostile takeover by the anti Catholic anti life, abortionists of Rhona Mahony's disgracefully run and operated National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street where every unexplained death is explained with obscure references to a lack of resources, a hostile takeover no less by ethical and intellectual charlatans, of the much respected and trusted and humanitarian and venerable  Christian hospital run for generations on the highest medical and moral principles by the nuns of the Sisters of Charity at Saint Vincent's hospital Dublin. 

9. Attempting to up the ante, Peter Boylan has resigned from the Board of the National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street, saying he still fears the "ethos" of the Sisters of Charity will prevail when the Hollis Street hospital moves to the nuns' Saint Vincent's hospital campus. A man with no values at all will of course have many fears. The libel laws and my hope someday to be a Christian prevent me from saying more about Peter Boylan and his endless quest for an ethos that agrees with his anti life bigotries..

10. Peter Boylan now claims that his sister in law Rhona Mahony put him up to his present media campaign against the Sisters of Charity. He says Rhona Mahony explicitly asked him to lobby the government against the ethos of the Sisters of Charity.

11. Rhona Mahony denies inciting Peter Boylan to his present role in the media campaign against the Sisters of Charity.

12. Alone among the bankrupt liberal atheistic anti Catholic abortionist media groups in Ireland, the Irish Times has gotten scared with regard to the ramifications of the incitement to hatred its staff have helped unleash this week against the Christian faith in general  and against the Sisters Of Charity in particular. They are scared... perhaps a little by the lies they have told, perhaps a bit more by the reputations they have destroyed, and perhaps most of all by the sheer breadth of the inversion of truth that they have perpetrated on the peasantry. They are scared too because they're losing readers and because the whole campaign against the nuns was built on such a blatant travesty of reason; The risible notion that Peter Boylan and Rhona Mahony and the board of master abortionists at Archbishop Diarmuid Martin's charnel house of a hospital, might collude with the most anti Catholic media groups in Europe to displace the Christian ethos from Saint Vincent's, a hospital that's actually held in high regard all over the world and has been for a hundred years, is beyond crass.. It does not stand up to scrutiny that these incompetent amoral hounds, abortionist doctors and hedonistic media, should cast aspersions on anybody else's ethics or ethos. Desperately trying to cover themselves, Irish Times articles have rowed back from the more vitriolic elements of their part of the campaign. Amid their usual sea of tendentious propaganda, I spotted one article noting that the nuns have a right to their consciences too. It is too little and it is too late.

13. The ongoing smear campaign against the Sisters of Mercy has been crowned with reports in national newspapers that a hundred thousand people have signed a petition against the nuns retaining control of their own hospital. How strange that liberal left wing abortionist atheists always want to seize Catholic Church run hospitals. Just once I'd like to see a few liberal left wing abortionist atheists set up a hospital of their own and let's see if anyone ever goes to it let alone tries to seize it. Most media reports have not bothered to make clear that the unaudited unsupervised petition is an internet website which claims to have had a hundred thousand visitors. All of us who are involved in internet publishing, from the Irish Times to Independent Newspapers to my old employers at the Johnston Press to me, all of us know how a hundred thousand visitors are achieved on a website. You just press the Refresh Bar on your computer a hundred thousand times. That by the way, is why advertisers won't pay newspapers for advertising on their internet editions. Because there's nobody there. The preponderance of probability is that the much touted petition against the nuns was bogus. That is to say, it's not worth the paper its printed on. The signatures on the supposed petition are entirely unaudited. The bona fides of the compilers of the petition have not been subject to the merest scrutiny. I am suggesting that this is a typical internet put up job. The unaudited, unverified and unverifiable signatures merely represent the repeated pressing of refresh bars on a few activists' computers. There is absolutely no reason to believe the compilers of this petition possessed an even basic integrity in their attempt to manipulate public opinion by claiming to have obtained a hundred thousand signatures. These signatures are phantoms. In any case, the other five million people in Ireland have certainly not signed this or any other petition against the nuns whom we trust and love, having a say over the running of their own hospital.

14. The IRA's proxy parliamentary political party, styled Sinn Fein, have today secured the passage of a Motion in the Irish parliament calling for the Sisters of Mercy to be prevented from having control over the ethos at their hospital at Saint Vincent's. You heard me correctly. The murderous rackateers of the IRA have the gall to impugn the nuns' value system. And our eratz main stream politicians are supporting the IRA in this inversion of reality. You couldn't make this up. Let's be clear. The drug dealing, people trafficking, child abusing IRA mafia says it won't accept a Catholic ethos at a hospital established by the Catholic Church. And the conformist quisling parliamentarians of Ireland go along with it. These are dark days for Ireland.

15. Well gentle readers. That's all I got. Wait till you see the sort of hospitals the IRA will run if they ever manage finally to drive out the Christians. It will be just like our law courts, our trade unions, our media and our banks which the IRA infiltrated a generation ago. Hell will follow with them.

16. You do all realise we could stop this.

Tuesday, May 02, 2017

from the heelers emails

From James Healy (by letter post)
To: David Manly, Family And Life group

Mr Manly.
I've received a letter from Family And Life which purports to be raising money to rescue women from their perceived necessity of having an abortion.
Your letter looks like a scam to me.
In my opinion anyone using the sanctity of life issue as a cash cow racket would be committing a crime close to abortion.
Best wishes.
James Healy



----- Forwarded Message ----- (by email)
From: David Manly <dmanly@fandl.iol.ie>
To: jameshealy50@eircom.net
Sent: Tue, 02 May 2017 14:48:52 +0100 (IST)
Subject: F & L

Dear Mr Healy,

I received your note of "April 2017" today.

Family & Life started in 1996, and in the past 21 years has worked to defend the family and the unborn child.

No, we are not operating a racket, as you ask. From the beginning, our annual accounts are lodged with the Companies Registration Office in Parnell Square, so they are available to public scrutiny. Please desist from phoning the office and annoying the secretary.

I notice that your blog appears to defend the Church from unfounded slurs and accusations. Maybe you might enquire how Amnesty International and the IFPA received large amounts of money from George Soros, with SIPO's acquiescence.

Regards, David Manly





From: James
To: Family And Life

Morning David.
I have never phoned your office or made any attempt to contact you or your employees other than the letter you received last week in answer to your appeal for funds.
No one on my behalf has every phoned your office or made any attempt to contact you or your employees.
Best.
James



From David Manly
Sorry James, it's a case of mistaken identity and my fault. Apologies to you.
David



From James
To: Family And Life
No pain no foul.
And you were entitled to answer my letter robustly.
James h

Monday, May 01, 2017

review

O'CASEY'S PLOUGH AND THE STARS AT KILCULLEN THEATRE

"Wirra Wirra and Musha Now, it's a new drama production, and we'll all be kilt shurely sorr before the noight is out, begorrah and bejabers," throught I when I heard of plans to bring Sean O'Casey's perennially wearisome greatest hit The Plough And The Stars to our dulcet hometown.
The Plough And The Stars is a sort of melodramatic comawlya set during the 1916 Rising and written in a stodgey stagey oirishness that like this review would be easier to understand if it had been writtten in ancient Egyptian.
Awful drekkkkk.
I mean I don't want to go casting no apsoyshuns.
An attempt to purchase the rights last year had floundered to my delight when the owners of the play refused to release it to our amateur drama group for the whole of 2016 in case it might detract from some appalling professional production elsewhere.
Unfortunately Director Mischa Fekete and his cohorts are made of stern stuff. They championed the project into this year and made it happen in spite of nay sayers like me, or to be more precise, in spite of for crying out loud have mercy please please please don't sayers like me.
The play is in a way a spectacle piece and presents many challenges for the modern producer, not the least of which is the difficulty of creating visual awe during the revolution scenes for an audience that is accustomed to million dollar cinematic special effects.
How does one move an audience that has been overdosed on sensation by atheism, drugs, porno and the internet?
Mr Fekete as director tackled the task of bringing O'Casey's version of the Easter Rising alive for a modern audience with the twin strategies of recruiting an all star cast and then pitching them at us from the middle of an extraordinarily complex and distinctively designed set.
Attention to detail is one of his hallmarks.
Nothing was left to chance.
Even minor characters like the splendidly apparelled looters played by Annie Shiffer and Caitriona Poufong, both clearly revelling in the mischievous opportunism of their roles, were woven seamlessly and precisely like jewels into the overall narrative. 
The effect of the set was to give many of the scenes an unusual poetic resonance just in visual terms alone.
I admit it grudgingly.
The set as much as the acting was a wizardly work of art.
At times it was like looking at beautiful sepia tinted photographs, with the interior scenes capturing the ghostly feel of a tavern from a hundred years ago and the exteriors managing to suggest the compressed tension of a tenement street in Dublin with the broad shabby cluttered mystic sweep of the city behind it.
Mr Fekete knows his actors and appears to have gone to great lengths to create a an almost mellifluous integration in their playing.
To my mind he had put as much work into the casting as he had into the set and the rehearsal schedule. In any play, initial casting is half the battle.
Esther Reddy gave a dynamic evocation of all the moods of the character Mrs Gogan, the gregarious tenament dweller who takes us from knockabout farce to brawling oaf to tragedy over the course of the drama.
Newcomer Wayne Donohue had a formidable job to do, as his character is juxtaposed continuously between characters played by veterans Maurice O'Mahony and Bernard Berney.
Let me put it this way.
Asking Wayne Donohue to play between those two would be like asking me to star in a film with Clint Eastwood and Michael Caine. Incidentally I think I would give Clint and Michael a run for their money and a few surprises besides.
Those who have seen Wayne Donohue's promising earlier performances with Eilis Philips' Junior Drama Group will not be so surprised that he managed to more than hold his own in his bouts of badinage with Mr O'Mahony and Mr Berney.
Not only that, I think he may have shown all of us a theatrical thing or two as his youthful precocious talent is morphing into skill before our eyes. He will go from strength to strength on the evidence of this outing.
Philip Cummins and Letitia Hanratty overcame much of my hostility towards the playwright's script by generating moments of powerful romanticism in their depictions.
I was concerned that Mr Cummins performance when the couple argue might become much too aggressive. He can play aggressivity as well as he plays congeniality. On the night I saw them play it, I was simply stunned by their artistry.
There are risks for the actors in some of the scripting. For instance at the height of the rebellion Mr Cummins and Ms Hanratty are reunited amid the rubble of a blazing city and their characters have a fraught, sometimes passionate, sometimes violent encounter, while a soldier appears to be bleeding to death behind them.
This in the wrong hands could become high farce. They made it work, under the rigorous eyes of their director no doubt, but work it did.
Mr Cummins early in the play sings to Ms Hanratty's character the song Nora, and provides in that moment of sensual togetherness the underlying dynamic which made the rest of the play compelling.
If an audience cares intensely about two central characters and believes in them, they will care about everything and follow you anywhere.
With regard to playwright O'Casey's penchant for pathos, you again won't know whether to laugh or cry when Brid Hernon Hoey's character is gut shot through a window, and takes about five minutes to expire. We are in dangerous dramatic territory in this scene. The character spends her last five minutes on earth complaining by the way. A modern cynical audience containing a few critics like myself, could burst out laughing as easily as they might feel the grief of it.
Brid Hernon Hoey though had somehow made us her own. Another piece of Fekete genius, this casting. Brid Hernon Hoey knows her Dubs. She knows how they talk, how they move, even how they breathe.
Before her untimely and lengthy demise she had a rather engaging fight scene in the pub with Esther Reddy, good girly action fighting whoarr, and the thing was a little masterpiece.
My only reservation aside from her double barelled second name which complicates my review and my life unnecessarily, was that Ms Hernon Hoey held an apparent bite on Ms Reddy's arm for rather a long time during the fight. I thought she'd have the arm off in another moment.
Later in the play Ms Hernon Hoey produced more superbly dramatic moments, her character evincing the most improbable and dangerous pro British sympathies with near devilish glee, repeatedly chanting "Choke the chicken," as the rebels are being wiped out in the ruins of a blazing city. I couldn't help feeling that some warm hearted humanitarian Rahman would have shot her in the first five minutes of the Rising. But realism is not Sean O'Casey's strong point. I wonder had he ever even met a Rah man.
Dick Dunphy as the bar tender was a gem. I watched him even when he had nothing to say. Ye olde compelling stage presence. He's never lost it.
John Martin as the street orator who may or may not be Padraic Pearse, inserted a fevered passion of the real into an evocation that was utterly striking.
"It is good for the world that such things should be done," proclaims Mr Martin's character speaking of World War One. "The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields."
This was one of the moments when I completely forgot my historical negative prejudice against the play as a whole.
I was swept away by the passion, the power of the invocation and the poignancy of what was being suggested.
And it all happened because of the inspired manner in which Mr Fekete had devised the presentation of the scenes with his street orator.
For we never actually see a plain view of the actor John Martin playing him.
We see only his shadow through a misted plate glass window.
Throughout the play, he remains plainly ever present and yet a mystery.
The shadow gestures and gesticulates while calling the city and the country to revolution.
The scenes with the orator are much discussed in any production of The Plough And The Stars. No one knows what to do with them. Every amateur and professional group stages them differently. The Abbey Theatre in Dublin in a recent version, had the orator's voice coming from a giant radio and we never saw anything of their actor playing him at all.
Mischa Fekete found a way to present the orator, and John Martin to play him, which provided a mesmeric poetic evocation of... I don't know... something... the phantoms of war I suppose... fame, fortune, glory, pipe dreams and destruction... it was all there in that shadow.
Sublime visual poetry.
The scene also contained an odd little resonance, an echo, an imagistic rhyme, with one of O'Casey's other plays which is actually called The Shadow Of They Gunman.
Was this deliberate or a happy accident?
I could have watched the shadow orate forever. In fact at the end of the show I muttered, not entirely in jest, to a friend: "I think they should have found a way to give that shadow a few more scenes."
The charismatic Roy Thompson and the newcomer Peter Roynane as two British soldiers, achieved an authentic, troubling, yet respectful and paradoxically sympathetic representation of their characters.
There was another of director Fekete's trademark visual poetry moments at the end of the play courtesy of these two, when Mr Thompson and Mr Roynane sat quietly in a room of the tenament building lately visited by death at their hands. I thought: Oh hold that moment forever, it's perfect. But Mr Thompson began to stir and shortly thereafter removed his army cap. I was frustrated by this action as I thought, ah they didn't want to waste the guy who's normally the leading man, so they have to show us Roy's face and now we lose the poetry.
But no. Director Fekete had more up his sleeve. Mr Thompson's character in a perfectly fluid and effortlessly achieved move, placed his cap over the muzzle of his gun and the two men began to sing a gentle sad song at twilight.
Tears would have flowed from a stone. Tears did flow. It was a magnificent moment.
Kevin O'Kelly played an efficient Citizen's Army Captain with ease and assurance.
Another find of the evening, possibly of the season, was twenty something youngster Susan Byrne who like Brid Hernon Hoey knows everything there is to know about the way true Dubliners speak, feel and act.
Her scenes with Bernard Berney charmed the audience and lifted the action from representationalism into reality.
There were some who said she was too pretty to play a prostitute but I did not agree. The whole notion of a girl who grows up in squalor and is somehow a rose among the thorns, is poignant and true, and this actress made it believable. When I saw her character, I thought of the Italian singer Fabrizio Di Andre's line: "Nothing grows in diamonds, but flowers grow in the mud." Then again I thought of the concept in British literature of the Venus De Mile End, an evocation of a beautiful girl who lives this sordid lifestyle and is still somehow plaintively exquisite.
That was Susan Byrne's playing in The Plough And The Stars. Plaintively exquisite.
Aisling Finnegan and Rebecca Walsh took turns playing the part of a child dying from consumption. Their playing was sensitive, natural, and assured.
I couldn't help thinking that the consumptive death visited on the children's character was that which the modern day scoundrels of Independent Newspapers, the Irish Times, RTE, and their allies in the atheistic, political and legal pseudo elites of what passes for high society in modern Ireland, are endeavouring to recycle and reinterpret a hundred years later in our own era as an indictment of the Catholic Church. I ask you.
Iarlaith Behan gave a good solid convincing performance as an Irish Volunteer in the heat of battle dealing with the looming spectre of the death of a comrade. He kept the drama real at what might otherwise have been a mawkishly sentimental moment. (O'Casey has at least five of them in the play and the actors have to negotiate them like trip wires.)
Another gem like performance came late in the action from Philomena Breslin as the eponymous Woman From Rathmines who expects the rebels to abandon their fighting to help her get home.
I'm almost afraid to mention Maurice O'Mahony. This is after all a drama group that shoots back. I regret to inform you gentle readers that I liked him.
Maurice O'Mahony's layered playing gave us a quirky spirited depiction of the picaresque Uncle Peter. The actor had come out of his comfort zone and presented an interpretation unlike anything he's ever done before. Hence my unabashed enthusiasm. Mr O'Mahony gave his performance a wry richness combining the curious nostalgic romanticism of an Irish Don Quixote with the neurotic waspishness of an atypical crusty old Dublin curmudgeon. I think Sean O'Casey himself if he had seen Mr O'Mahony's playing might have been moved to remark: "There! That's it! That guy understands what I was trying to do!"
Bernard Berney was a merry compatriot in much Mr O'Mahony's capers and managed to do plenty of capering of his own in the role of Fluther.
The capering was neatly offset with his thoughtful, indeed artful, evocation of a character who is at once gregarious, silly, sly, vain and heroic.
Mr Berney as Fluther carried us into the world of 1916 and made it live for us.
He was not the best actor on stage. But I had the distinct impression that without him there would not have been anyone else there to see the show.
Genius lies in gaining the consent of an audience to imagine.
Or in casting someone who can gain that consent.
Which brings me back to director Mischa Fekete.
In a most rare and strange way, I sensed his presence as director everywhere in this play. For me he brooded like a spectre above the set pieces, the vignettes and the action.  In the poetic visuals. In the pathos. in the tragedy. In the comedy. In the selection of the actors and technical crew. In the way in which the actors had been let find their own equilibrium. In the wonderfully choreographed set changes. In the sets themselves.
The Plough And The Stars was Mischa Fekete's baby.
The brick bats and the kudos... are his.
Now my own confession.
Writing theatre reviews for the Bridge can be pressured business. Word has gotten out that I am an interesting fellow and truth be told, it does not come easy to me. I have to strive to be interesting. Normally I'm more like Sean Landers the magazine's travelogue correspondent who files copy from Taiwan. The real me is like Landers on one of his off days. Think brackish. Think ditch water. Think interminable. Think a tepid cup of tea. And then there's the constant expectation from my public to keep them guessing. Why, only last week former Drama Group Chairman John Coleman expressed himself thusly about my work: "Ah Heelers, you've chickened out. You're afraid to say anything about anyone anymore."
His remark seemed to refer to a brief storm in a tea cup two years ago when another of my reviews had provoked another of the Drama Group's now former Chairmen Eilis Phillips into a rhetorical letter writing canniptian over my critical parsing of actor Maurice O'Mahony's ineluctable modalities or some such thing.
Anyhoo.
John Coleman is of course as wrong about all this as he is about everything else. I wish he'd act in something again so I could show him how wrong. Left ham of the devil indeed.
Keep well gentle readers.
Someday we shall laugh again.

orchestrations of scandal

Two weeks ago Simon Harris, Minister for Health in Ireland's minority Fine Gael government announced to reporters that a proposed new National Maternity Hospital would not be run with "a Catholic ethos."
Some background.
The Sisters of Charity Order are the owners of another hospital Saint Vincent's which has served the people of Ireland for generations and is one of the best ie safest and most humane, hospitals in Europe.
The nuns had agreed to allow the government and its Health Board to transfer the much less safe and seismically less Christian, National Maternity Hospital from Hollis Street to the Saint Vincent's campus.
Now it seems, a reverse take over was underway.
For in giving his assurance, Mr Harris pretended to be allaying public concerns.
But the concerns were solely those of anti Catholic media groups.
And of a coterie of anti Catholic doctors who have risen to prominence at the National Maternity Hospital.
In raising the question of ethos, and in condeming the Christian ethos promoted by the nuns and their staff, the National Maternity Hospital ringers were seaking to insinuate a dark ethos of their own into the running of the new merged services at Saint Vincent's.
In his statement, Mr Harris had allowed anti Catholic media groups, the Irish Times, Independent Newspapers and RTE, as well as the coterie of activists to which I am referring, to advance the utterly false notion that the general public did not wish to have a Catholic ethos at the new hospital.
Some 78 percent of the Irish people describe themselves as Catholic in the recent census.
Many more of whatever background or faith, struggle tooth and nail to get their kids into Catholic Church run schools and hospitals.
The bankrupt near defunct Independent Newspapers, Irish Times and RTE, do not speak for any of us.
Independent Newspapers in particular has long sought to cloak its own propaganda manipulations against the Catholic Church under a veneer of so called public concerns.
More specifically in this instance Independent Newspapers falsely and without evidence suggested that the public was somehow eager to ensure that test tube baby in vitro fertilisation procedures (which involve creating and destroying up to a dozen embryos every time) would be carried out and that life would therefore be created and destroyed at the hospital for profit without the intervention of Catholic consciences.
There has never been any substantial public demand in Ireland for in vitro fertilisation services.
These services have been promoted by private businesses which are very anxious to foster the false notion that the public wants them and is entitled to have them, because once that notion is fostered our successively suggestible and corrupt governments will start funding them.
The in vitro procedure involves generating life in test tubes.
Each time the procedure is carried out several babies are created.
Most are then destroyed as the doctors bring what they deem a viable one to term.
They kill nine for every one they let live.
That's test tube babies.
That's in vitro fertilisation.
And that's why the Frankensteins behind it, want to remove any Christian influence from the running of the new hospital.
If in vitro fertilisation is practiced at the National Maternity Hospital, then the government will provide funding for it as a citizen's right, and the Frankensteins who generate and destroy life in test tubes for profit will be able to write themselves a blank checque in perpetuity.
There's more.
Someone called Doctor Rhona Mahony is styled Master of the National Maternity Hospital Hollis Street.
She is a board member at the Hollis Street hospital.
Tellingly she is also a Board member for one of the in vitro fertilisation service providers who now claim they will be included as an integral part of the proposed hospital.
It is not clear who gave the in vitro service providers the assurances they are now claiming to have that they will be part of the set up at the new hospital.
We should note in passing that Rhona Mahony was also a prominent pro abortion voice during recent media orchestrated campaigns to legalise abortion in Ireland.
Fine Gael and their former government partners the Labour Party legalised abortion in Ireland during that media orchestrated campaign, and are now seeking to legalise more of it. The Fine Gael party had explicitly promised not to legalise abortion before they went ahead and legalised it anyway.
In any case Rhona Mahoney's abortion advocacy has not hindered her status as Master of the National Maternity Hospital, whether the hospital is owned by Catholic nuns or not
Go figure.
And like I said, Rhona Mahony is also a Board member with an in vitro fertilisation company which purports to have an agreement to site itself at the proposed new National Maternity Hospital facility.
And there's more.
This week Independent Newspapers gave a face to their false claims about there being public demand for in vitro services at the new hospital, by quoting another board member at the National Maternity Hospital, a character styled Doctor Peter Boylan.
Boylan has spent the week being feted in Independent Newspapers while warning about what he piously referred to as the dangers of a Catholic ethos at the hospital.
Apparently nuns bit him on the bawls when he was a kid or something.
Like a new age Penelope Pitstop he oolagowned against the evil Dick Dastardly Christians who keep setting up hospitals and running them on sanctity of life principles.
Gotta stop dem evil Catholics, eh Peter?
I wonder why there are no liberal atheistic or Marxian hospitals for you to take over.
I mean where are they?
You all have such ambitions to hijack Catholic Church run hospitals and schools, why is there no tradition in Ireland or anywhere else of a successful respected trusted hospital or school being set up by liberal left wing atheistic abortionists?
It's most amazing.
Eventually Peter Boylan staged a hand wringing resignation from the Board.
And now he claims Rhona Mahony put him up it.
Peter Boylan says it was Rhona Mahony who asked him to lobby the government against nuns controlling the hospital.
Rhona Mahony denies every having asked Peter Boylan to make any such representations against the nuns owning or controlling the hospital.
And get this.
Rhona Mahony is his sister in law.
Well folks.
Independent Newspaper ran up a billion dollars in debt during their forty year culture war against the Catholic Church.
And they're still at it.
And they and Rhona Mahony and Peter Boylan are the people promoting abortion and promoting test tube baby procedures that involve nine abortions every life they bring to term, they are the ones I say, warning you against a Catholic Church ethos in our hospitals.
The irony is screaming.
Thank you for your time gentle readers.
I have delighted you long enough.

Sunday, April 30, 2017

a modest proposal

science
is a field of endeavour
an exploration of reality
like
trekking up the zambezi
or
squinting into the sun
or
learning french
or
meditating
or
studying old texts to postulate a history
or
sitting beside this year's girl in bewleys cafe westmoreland street
it is
one exploration among many
as well as being a field of endeavour
it is also
a method of digging in that field
a method
some of whose practitioners
or adherents
or exponents
believe their
locally defined
version of which
to be
the absolute crowning glory of humanity
the summa theologica of understanding
the ruling delineator
philosophically
morally
and rationally
of all other endeavours
it isn't
science is merely the fruit
of the literacy numeracy humanitarianism and culture
which came from the bible
wherever christians made the bible available
education discourse engineering historiography geography debate charity
the transliteration of languages
literature
poetry
music
good deeds
law
hospitals
schools
society itself
and science
followed with it
without the bible
there is no augustine no joan of arc no erasmus no shakespeare no mozart no carravaggio no thomas moore no newton no blake no goethe no george washington no abe lincoln no einstein no william wilberforce no thomas edison no mother teresa no pope john paul the great no james healy
and no science