Feb
21
The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world, a debate held by Intelligence2 on 19 Oct 2009
Stephen Fry speaks about the Catholic Church, the Pope, Abuse and other issues. Well worth listening to and watching the video.
Chair Zeinab Badawi introduces the motion ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.’
Use the chapter bar on the right-hand side of the page to view each of the panelists’ speeches.
The link to the full debate is here.
If you want to skip directly to Stephen Fry, the link is here but the full debate is worth watching if you’ve time.
Initial Vote: 678 For, 1102 Against, Undecided 346
Final Vote: 268 For, 1876 Against, Undecided 34
Feb
21
What is a Real V.I.P ?
Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 9 Comments
What is a Real V.I.P ?
Do we have the balls to go to that party?
Or would we rather dance with vanity? Tell me now what’s a real V.I.P?
Who are we to give that name to us?
When we don’t know the lives of others.
When we can barely raise a finger.
to help our own sisters and brothers.
Wasn’t it in history.
The artists always spoke their people’s needs?
Now we’re gorged upon what devils feed
In the shallow form of M.T.V
Telling the youth to worship futile dreams.
And long for bling and for material things.
I tell you what a really real V.I.P is..
A face that never was nor will be kissed.
To whom exactly are we giving hope?
When we stand behind the velvet rope.
Getting our pictures taken with the pope
Like some sick April fool kind of joke.
Who is the real V.I.P?
The true and the most conquering king
Who looks around at everything?
And knows exactly what we’ve been.
His is the face that never was nor will be kissed.
Do we think we’ll be down on his guest list?
When we’re standing at the gate.
After being fashionably late.
There’ll be no make-up and there’ll be no film crew.
No vuitton bags and no manolo shoes.
When he’s presiding over you.
Asking you did you love only you.
Or did you stand for something else.
Besides the hankering for fame and famousness.
The one who always was and always is
Will show you what a real V.I.P is.
The fatherless.
The motherless.
The ravaged child at home
who cried to you.
You will be asked to say
what did you do.
What is behind his velvet curtain?
Don’t know but I can say for certain
The face that never was nor will be kissed
Will tell you what a real V.I.P is.
Sinead O’Connor. February 20th 2010
Feb
11
Andrew Madden: Mary Kenny says I am to be pitied? Give me strength
Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 22 Comments
By Andrew Madden
Thursday February 11 2010
IN her column in this newspaper last Saturday, Mary Kenny chose to make reference to my spiritual life. She pitied me for having no spiritual element in my life, assuming it consisted only of the material and was therefore bland and unimaginative.
Mary Kenny has, of course, never met me, never phoned me, never asked for a meeting or an interview over coffee, never tried to contact me in any way to ask me about anything. Until now I have made little or no reference in public to what spiritual life I do have, so she had absolutely no information on which to base her opinion. What she did have was the most contemptible arrogance to assume to know enough to write about it anyway. A more ignorant, condescending pouring out of sanctimonious drivel I have not read in a long time.
All Kenny knew was that I had completed the formal process of defecting from the Catholic Church, and from that one single fact she assumed to know everything else. Next week she’ll probably preach to us all she knows about humility. Thousands of others have chosen to leave the Catholic Church too but, unlike Kenny, I don’t assume to know all of their reasons.
I have been a Catholic in name only for many years, but after all I have seen of the church in recent times, I decided I did not want that organisation in my life anymore, not even in name only. To assume, as Kenny does, that I therefore have no spirituality in my life is truly reprehensible. I am crossing a line here I haven’t crossed before, but Kenny’s nonsense last Saturday cannot go unchecked. Almost 13 years ago I tried to stop drinking, having tried twice before and failed. I had been an active alcoholic for 14 years by then and was quite a mess at the end of it all. Anything I did, in all those years I was drinking, was done with a drink in my hand. I lived at about 10pc of what I was capable of and I struggled to do even that.
When I stopped drinking I had to learn how to live without it. I had to learn how to be. How to get through a whole day without getting drunk. How to pass an evening. How to enjoy music. How to conduct friendships properly. How to relax at the end of a day’s work. How to socialise and meet people sober.
I also learned that I could not do all of this by myself. I had friends who themselves had crossed the bridge from addiction to normal living, but more was needed. Over time, as I slowly became happy and confident, I accepted that I was receiving more help than that of friends. I came to believe in a power greater than myself and came to believe that that power was helping me stay sober and helping me learn to live happily. I chose to call that power the “Spirit of Recovery”. It didn’t come easy or natural for me to start believing in any such power, but as time in recovery passed, my belief in a power greater than myself grew. Instead of believing that a higher power was just helping me stay sober, I believed that it was helping me in all areas of my life. As a friend of mine says: “He’s looking after all of it, or none of it.” I see my higher power as a loving, caring essence in my life that wants me to live a good life.
Today I try to hand my will and my life over to the care of that higher power every morning before I leave the house in order that my actions and thoughts might be guided by my higher power’s will for me. At night I review my day and thank my higher power for everything, including the fact that I didn’t drink. I ask my higher power to look after other people too, just like I used to ask God to do when I was a little boy lying in bed thinking I would one day be a priest.
But of course, I don’t need to be a priest to believe in a power greater than myself, spirituality is not the preserve of practising Catholics. And having a sense of oneself that extends beyond the physical and the material is not an understanding exclusive to the obnoxious Mary Kenny.
And the next time she chooses to write about other people she should afford them the courtesy of getting her facts right first, and keep her patronising pity to herself.
Andrew Madden’s best-selling book ‘Altar Boy’ helped expose abuse in the Catholic Church
- Andrew Madden
Irish Independent
Dec
31
Magdalene girl: ‘I cried for weeks and weeks. I was nobody. I was 16’
Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 11 Comments
Thursday, December 31, 2009 – Irish Examiner.
CLAIMING that the new “information wasn’t available” when he rejected a distinct redress scheme for Magdalene survivors, Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe’s response rings hollow (Irish Examiner, December 17). It is important, moreover, to emphasise that evidence of state complicity rests not only with the materials laid before the Department of Justice on December 14.
Indeed, the Department of Education must also acknowledge its own complicity in this matter.
Had officials from the department attended the scheduled meeting with Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), I would have pointed to the department’s awareness of children being placed in Magdalene laundries as late as 1970 (beyond those transferred from state residential institutions).
This awareness never led to direct corrective action or intervention. Indeed it is still unacknowledged. As such, it calls into question the department’s commitment to “cherish all of the children of the nation equally”.
The Reformatory and Industrial School Systems Report 1970 (ie, the Kennedy Report), commissioned by the Department of Education, documents two distinct populations of children so confined. In a discussion of children placed in “religious convents” by “parents, relatives, social workers, welfare officers, clergy or garda”, the report states that “the committee is satisfied that there are at least 70 girls between the ages of 13 and 19 confined in this way who should properly be dealt with under the reformatory schools’ system”.
Likewise, in a table attempting to capture the “total number of children in care”, the report asserts that there were 617 children resident in “voluntary homes which have not applied for approval”. As the department can affirm, these “voluntary homes” were typically Magdalene laundries and other “religious convents”.
The report’s two figures – 70 and 617 – offer a snapshot for the scale of the problem in 1968/’69. My questions to the officials from the Department of Education, again if they had attended, would have been the following:
1. Given the department’s awareness, and the moral and constitutional obligations to protect children and provide a basic minimum education, can the minister now account for each of these children?
2. Given its awareness that children were being “cared” for in these institutions, did the department ever visit, inspect or license these “religious homes”?
I ask these two questions in light of the Ryan report offering a window into what life was like for children transferred to the laundries from a residential institution.
We are told the regime was “like a prison”, that doors were locked all the time … working conditions were harsh, “constantly washing laundry in cold water and using heavy irons for many hours”. One survivor remembers her child labour: “I did collars; you had to keep ironing them until they became real stiff. There was a little wooden thing you could stand on.”
Oct
26
Letters to the Editor, Irish Independent. Friday 23rd October 2009
The proposed €500,000 “memorial to victims of child abuse” (Aine Kerr, Letters, October 19) bearing the words of Mr Bertie Ahern’s 1999 “apology” to Ireland’s former child prisoners is an expensive and offensive political gesture.
The planned structure is not a memorial to the victims; it is a monument to Mr Ahern, a former Taoiseach whose utterances few take seriously now.
Readers may remember that in 1999 Mr Ahern (then Taoiseach) issued the following statement, which is now to appear on the memorial:
“On behalf of the State and all the citizens of the State, the Government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue”.
That statement is not an apology but a denial and a deception. It is simply not true to say that the State failed to detect the pain being suffered by the child prisoners. Time and again that pain was reported to the State and the politicians each time dismissed the reports and tried to discredit the messenger.
Even Fr Flanagan, an Irish American priest who in 1946, drew attention to the ill-treatment of the child prisoners was dismissed as a liar by the Minister for Education, Sean Moylan in the Dail.
Besides, the State’s reformatory rules, which were published for all to read, authorised the infliction of pain upon the inmates.
Naked flogging of the child prisoners was approved and condoned by successive Ministers for Education and their inspectors into the 1990s.
Only in Ahern logic can you authorise violence and then deny all knowledge of it.
A memorial bearing Mr Ahern’s fake apology will be a permanent reminder of Ireland’s denial and a standing offence to its former child prisoners.
The Ryan Report on Ireland’s child prisons (May, 2009) recommended the construction of the memorial and claimed, with Ahern-type logic, that the structure would somehow “alleviate … the effects of abuse on those who suffered”!
But Justice Sean Ryan failed to explain how Bertie’s denial carved in stone would work its magic on the former child prisoners.
I escaped from Artane prison and from Ireland in 1963. I am one of many thousands of child prison refugees. Ireland denies me the simple justice I request, namely, the recision of the illegal detention order that put me in Artane.
Consequently, I shall renounce Irish nationality and never set foot in Ireland again. I will therefore, thankfully, never experience the memorial’s miraculous healing powers.
The memorial is a political stunt. It has nothing whatever to do with alleviating the suffering of the victims. It has to do with salving the collective conscience of a nation racked by unacknowledged guilt for the mass-persecution of its children in the post-independence era. It is a monumental insult to Ireland’s former child prisoners.
JIM BERESFORD
FORMER ARTANE CHILD PRISONER 14262
SALENDINE NOOK, HUDDERSFIELD
Aug
25
Living and surviving abuse
Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 18 Comments
Living and surviving abuse
My Name is Derek Power and I am a victim and active survivor of clerical childhood sexual abuse.
I first arrived at the Waterford Rape Crises Centre in the summer of 1995 having been referred by a relative. At this point in time I was 25 years of age. I had been raped and abused as a child by a member of the Christian Brothers in the late 1970’s over a two year period when I was of a tender age while a student at a primary school in Waterford City.
In October of 1993 I made my statement to Gardai in Dublin where I lived at that time. My statement to detail the circumstances of my abuse and rape at the hands of this man took over two hours. I spent the following 18 months alone and with the memories and torture of that experience while an investigation was being carried out. In this period I had started to develop anxiety and suffer from depression. I truly felt alone and desperate. I felt I had a voice with no volume.
On visiting the Rape Crises Centre I encountered Ms Sheila Vereker and began my sessions of counselling. From my first day I began to feel an immediate sense of relief for the first time. My relief was given to me by being allowed to talk to someone for the first time about exactly what had occurred to me. This was a service that dealt with my main problem, my childhood abuse. To be able to speak to a person about how I felt about this and its effect on my life. I had encountered psychiatric services around this time but I now had a place and friends where the sole concern was to deal with facing the future as a victim and survivor.
Aug
20
Humbert Summer School – Award to Survivors of abuse in State Institutions
Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | Leave a Comment
We have recently learnt that the Humbert Summer School in Co. Mayo is to honour victims of clerical abuse.
The Humbert Summer School will also give commemorative awards to journalist Mary Raftery who doesn’t figure in our book, and Sean Ryan who headed the long – running inquiry into church and state run schools and reformatories who at the present is in the Comptroller and Auditor General Report 2009 in relation to its cost to the taxpayer over several years.
It appears that John Cooney, Director of Humbert Summer School said “the honour will mark contributions of the Commission, the long hard campaign of survivors to have their testimonies believed”.
We would like to point out that my wife’s testimony has been edited in the Ryan Commissions Report.
We are dismayed and appalled that the Ryan Commissions Report concerning such serious matters, some of which may contain implicit allegations of abuse, could contain so many inaccuracies and misleading passages.
It is submitted that no conclusions could safely be drawn for any purposes in relation to the aforementioned and on the material on the Ryan Commissions Report.
When one looks at the present position in relation to the State and the Religious Orders including the Redress Board, the Ryan Commission and its Report and the Labour Party’s Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009.
It soon becomes clear that the Fianna Fail/Green Party Government who voted down the Labour Party’s Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009 has shown it is dominated by the Civil Service, has no political imagination or courage of its own and just drifting without direction.
Furthermore, the Fianna Fail/Green Party Government and the Religious Orders and the aforementioned overlook their failure to understand that they should be supporting the Labour Party’s Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009 on behalf of thousands of victims of institutional child abuse instead of patting each other on the back with the aforementioned awards.
Jul
30
When one looks at the present position in relation to the Irish State and the Religious Orders including the Redress Board and the Ryan Commission Report and the cost to the taxpayer over the last 10 years.
It soon becomes clear that the Government has shown it is dominated by the Civil Service, has no political imagination or courage of its own and just drifting without direction.
Therefore, it’s quite clear that victims of institutional child abuse and their representatives should fully support the Labour Party’s Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009.
The Bill sets out to deal with the following main areas.
· Expanding the definitions of ‘child’ and ‘institution’ so that no victim of abuse is denied justice through the Redress Board.
A small but substantial number of people were previously excluded from the Redress Board because of the wording in the 2002 Act. This change ensures that is no longer the case.
· The expanded definitions of ‘child’ and ‘institution’ in the Bill will necessitate a new time period for new applications to the Redress Board.
This recognises that victims of abuse who either lived abroad, or for whatever reason, were not aware of the Redress Board’s work, will have a second chance to apply. We propose that there will be a 3 year period for new applications once the Bill is passed.
Jul
25
‘I put my faith in Bertie Ahern . . . I couldn’t have been more wrong’
Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 4 Comments
Andrew Madden — the bestselling author of ‘Altar Boy’ — anxiously waits to see what comes of this week’s report into Church sex abuse in Dublin . . . and wonders will his years of patience be justified
By ANDREW MADDEN
Saturday July 25 2009
Back in early 1998 I naively thought that all I needed to do was write to then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern pointing out that there was by then enough information in the public domain to justify an inquiry into the practice within the Catholic Church of moving paedophile priests onto new parishes in Dublin.
I couldn’t have been more wrong — Taoiseach Ahern was not in the slightest bit interested, telling me that the Church was not an organisation that the State could investigate and that the State could only have inquiries into matters of urgent public concern.
I remember being so disappointed that our relatively young new Taoiseach could have such a backward out-of-date reaction to an issue I was sure would never go away until it was properly addressed. Once I had gone public about my experiences as a child and had also told everyone in Ireland that I had been compensated, surely others would come forward to reveal similar experiences and demand similar redress — I wasn’t wrong about that.
I wrote to everyone I could think of then, the INTO, Amnesty International, the Rape Crisis Centre, to name but a few, asking them to write to the Taoiseach supporting my call for an inquiry. I felt, then, that as a child I had not stood up for myself, defended myself against a grown man who had abused me and his position, and as an adult I had just about enough of taking bullshit from people.
Turning things around had begun in 1991 when I found a solicitor to represent me in seeking compensation from Father Ivan Payne. This was the first step in saying that what had happened to me as a child was not okay and I was going to do something about it.
In 1994 I started to move information about my case into the public domain because I was concerned that Fr Payne was still a priest in Sutton and I also felt that other people who may have been abused by him or others were entitled to know that a precedent had been set.
That was a big step but I was becoming stronger as a person albeit starting from a very low point. Even as an adult I hadn’t been great at standing up for myself in work situations, for example, and being an active alcoholic didn’t help — it further robbed me of the ability to develop good interpersonal skills and develop and mature properly as an adult.
But I was finding the strength somewhere and I liked it. In 1997 I went into recovery for my alcoholism and haven’t had an alcoholic drink since.
Jun
28
Re: The Report of the The Commission To Inquire Into Child Abuse
Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 13 Comments
What the Irish People and State could do now to enable healing and restitution
Introduction
I was born in 1955 and was brought up in a psychologically and emotionally abusive environment – my father was a bullying, dominating, angry and uncaring alcoholic who had the ‘benefit’ of a Christian Brothers education. Luckily we were not poor and my father was not physically violent, but, nevertheless four of my five other siblings have had, and still have, serious lifelong psychological problems (four have spent various periods in Psychiatric hospitals). I was lucky to attend a ‘better class’ of single-sex Catholic school but, nevertheless, have spent the first 50 years of my life trying to cope with the damaging effects of childhood fear, uncertainty, guilt, self-doubt and loathing and feelings of being unlovable. Having grappled with the very deceptive, but soothing, effects on the tortured psyche of that all-pervasive drug in our society – alcohol , I can only now, with healing, leave it behind and begin to relax and trust life again (having found a really loving partnership).
So, like many in our tortured land, I am very distressed and angry to think that while many of us kids were suffering our own various hells in Catholic day schools and abusive home environments, many other, less fortunate, kids were suffering a nightmarish hell of tortures, incarcerated in religious-run gulags. Now I am feeling guilty at a lifetime of ‘whinging’ about my upbringing when other kids suffered far worse fates.
Catholic Church control of the State’s education system
Worse still is the dread realisation that the organisation which laid the foundation for the ethical and moral ‘standards’ which pervaded Irish society for at least the last century (and much further back than that) is still in control of the ethical and moral formation of 95% of the nation’s children. How can we allow this to continue?
To this day a huge proportion of Irish children, of very young and tender age, are being taught that they carry ‘original sin’ and are forced to go to confession to celibate priests who have had, all their lives, to suppress their natural, God-given, sexual desires. It is my firm belief that we do a grave injustice to the Nation’s children if we allow men, who are suppressing their own sex drives, to teach (or cause other young teachers to teach) these same children precepts that are almost certainly not true (original sin, purgatory, hell, heaven etc..) and that will most certainly cause them guilt, fear and confusion about sin, sex, and their own bodies.
Only truth should be taught in our schools – is this not a basic, moral standard on which we should insist in our education system? I would concede that some (patently invented) myths – Santa Claus, Sinbad the Sailor, The Fairies, etc are harmless and should continue to be taught, but the stories inculcated in children by the major religions are mainly about worship, judgementalism, fear and differentiation from others. Children are taught that these stories are very, very serious and are vastly more important than anything else they will learn from their teachers, their parents or their families. How can Irish parents allow this to happen to their children? The answer is: because, in most cases, they have no choice but to allow this to be done to their children. The only alternative is to have their children ostracised and singled out at school as ‘different’, if they don’t undergo the same strange and unsettling process as their peers.
It angers me to hear people say that we should be thankful to the Catholic Church for ‘giving’ us an education. The suggestion is that we would have had no education system if the Church hadn’t set it all up and controlled it. Of course, this is nonsense! Every country in the world has an education system and all in Europe (many being much poorer than Ireland) have had very comprehensive systems – many to a far superior standard to ours. The Catholic Church wrested control of the education system from the British government in the 19th century and has jealously guarded it ever since. The system was paid for in toto by the Irish people, either through their taxes, subsequently handed over to the Church, or directly, by contributions to Church coffers. The Vatican, where the ultimate responsibility for all this lies, did not contribute, but was a net beneficiary of donations to the Church.
The only way for us, as a society, to heal these wounds to our individual and collective psyche, and to show respect to the memory of generations of child victims, is to sweep away all the secrecy, open all the Vatican and Church archives, stop the teaching of religion in all State schools and cut all ties between Church and State – no more religious control of any hospital, school or care institution which is wholly or partially funded by the taxpayer. Of course, religious people will continue to work in all these institutions but they should not control them or form their ethical and moral ethos.
The moral position is, surely, that the bishops, priests, nuns and brothers do not own all these institutions; they hold them in trust for the Irish people who paid for them. The State must now wrest ownership and control of all Schools from the Catholic Church. If this requires a constitutional amendment, then so be it. No-one would suggest that the religious should be left homeless or destitute – they should be furnished with decent living accommodation, chapels, halls etc, sufficient to their reasonable needs. In fact some orders of religious (mostly nuns) have voluntarily taken these steps by divesting themselves of their large holdings of land and buildings, and giving them to worthy causes and communities.
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