Splintered Sunrise

And now it’s time to return to local news, with a few little vignettes from recent days illustrating life in Our Wee Pravince.

First up, I suppose, is the small riot at a meeting of Limavady council the other night, when PSF councillors were chivvied by a 70-strong loyalist mob who had turned up for the meeting. This sort of thing used to happen regularly at Belfast City Hall, but it hadn’t been heard of at council meetings in the recent past. What was going on here?

Well, apparently nationalist councillors had been questioning whether having things like pictures of the Royal Family adorning council property was quite in the spirit of equality that our New Dispensation is supposed to enshrine. I actually though the Fair Employment Act had dealt with those issues twenty-odd years ago, but maybe there’s a time lag out in the sticks. Similarly, demographic changes in the Leap of the Dog mean that the local council now has a nationalist majority, something Limavady Prods have a hard time accepting. At least the unionist councillors holding forth on the mob’s feeling that their identity was being taken away ran true to form.

Then we have Wallace Thompson. “Who he?” you may ask, and I confess I had never heard of the bloke either. But he popped up on the wireless representing something called the Evangelical Protestant Society, giving off about the Church of Ireland. Apparently the gift shop at the CoI cathedral in Armagh had been selling rosary beads, and to Mr Thompson this was an unacceptable concession to ecumenism and idolatrous popery. Mr Thompson went on to describe Pope Benny as the Antichrist, and promised to fight tooth and nail to prevent the mooted papal visit to the North.

To those of us who regularly listen to local radio, this is all pretty standard boilerplate. I mean to say, tune in to Talk Back for a week and you’ll quickly become inured to sectarian wingnuts. What caused a fuss, and catapulted the story onto the front page of the Telegraph, was the revelation that Mr Thompson is a special advisor to enterprise minister Nigel Dodds (DUP). And in fact his comments would have been more or less typical of DUP discourse a few years back. But just slightly embarrassing for a party attempting to shed its sectarian cornerboy image.

Meanwhile, the peelers were getting politically correct. Norn Iron’s cops have been instructed not to use derogatory terms like “fenian” or “hun”, as they may be perceived to be sectarian. So speaks the PSNI’s Directorate of the Bleeding Obvious.

And then we have the much-delayed appointment of the Victims’ Commissioner. Regular readers will recall that some time ago I suggested that, as nobody can agree who actually is a victim of the Troubles, our joint presidency of Big Ian and Marty should appoint two joint commissioners. Actually, it seems they will now be appointing not one, not two, but four commissioners with equal standing. Seeing how this is exactly the sort of harebrained scheme that UN diplomats in Phnom Penh or Sarajevo might cook up, I suppose it at least shows the Chuckle Brothers have assimilated modern theories of peacemaking.

Finally, there is Donald Trump. You’ll recall that, at the time of the Chuckle Brothers’ recent visit to the States, the Donald had suffered a brush-off from Aberdeenshire councillors who didn’t want his monstrous golf resort on their doorsteps. Never one to miss an opportunity, Papa Doc lobbied the Donald to build the resort in North Antrim instead. And so it has come to pass that the Donald’s representative, one George Sorial, has been in Norn Iron scouting out locations.

In fact, Mr Sorial was even received at Stormont by our devolved rulers. I was also intrigued by his comments to the effect that Trumpland might be built in partnership with a local developer. As luck would have it, I can think of a developer in North Antrim who might be interested in a piece of the action…

I suppose it’s possible, indeed likely, that most people here won’t be regular readers of The Tablet (subscription required). This would be a pity, because its news coverage is often quite excellent, and you get to hear what all is going on in the wacky world of international Catholicism. Why can’t we have a paper like this in Ireland?

Anyway, the 25 August issue has a fascinating article about one Fr Tadeusz Rydzyk. Fr Rydzyk, 62, is a Redemptorist media mogul, which in itself should raise an eyebrow, and boss of the popular station (upwards of 1.2m listeners) Radio Maryja. The station’s “Catholic patriotic” stance could best be described in terms of, well, imagine if Gerry McGeough was running a radio station with a mass audience. Radio Maryja’s populist campaigning around law and order, demands for the prosecution of members of the old socialist regime, and opposition to the European Union is combined with railing against Jews, gays, foreigners and Freemasons, but mostly Jews. It’s a familiar brand of Polish nationalism, but so virulent in form as to make the late Field Marshal Piłsudski appear like a soft liberal.

The Polish hierarchy have never been known as the most progressive bunch, but even they have found Rydzyk a bit rich for their blood. The former Primate, Cardinal Józef Glemp, condemned him as far back as 2002. The Tablet reports that the papal nuncio, Archbishop Józef Kowalczyk, has been canvassing the bishops to do something about Radio Maryja, and a significant number of clergy and lay Catholics have protested the station’s pervasive anti-Semitism. And yet, Rydzyk seems untouchable. He has a very close relationship with the Kaczyński brothers who run Poland’s hard-right government – although that hasn’t stopped him saying that the president’s wife, Maria Kaczyńska, is a “witch” who should be “put down” because she supports legal abortion for rape victims. The Redemptorist order, either in Poland or internationally, has shown no concern over Rydzyk’s activities. Indeed, a few weeks back Fr Zdzisław Klafka, Poland’s Redemptorist provincial, took Rydzyk with him to an audience with Pope Benny. Benny himself, following in the footsteps of the late JP2, has been keen to distance himself from traditional Catholic anti-Semitism, so here’s a bit of a test for him.

Rud eile: While on the subject of mad Catholics, the August issue of the Hibernian (“For Fascism and Our Lady”) doesn’t quite live up to the paper’s usual bonkers standards. But there is a piece on the significance of Benny’s rehabilitation of the Latin Mass, and Gerry McGeough continues his survey of great counter-revolutionary movements of the past with a major piece on the Vendée revolt, when God-fearing Catholic peasants rose up against the Masonic Jacobin dictatorship.

It’s been gratifying to see Mr Tony Blair’s extended farewell tour come a cropper at its very climax, with the outgoing prime minister meeting Pope Benny in the Vatican. This had been spun as hugely significant, with Mr Tony widely expected to announce his conversion to Catholicism, and even speculation that he’d be fast-tracked to deaconhood. However, since the official diplomatic communiqué reported a “frank exchange of views” – code for a blazing row – it seems likely that the meeting went something like this:

Mr Tony: Your Holiness, I’d like to become a Catholic.

Pope Benny: Think on, matey.

It is further reported that Benny got stuck in over the Iraq war, abortion, stem cell research, gay adoption and generally Mr Tony leading the most anti-Catholic government since Victorian times.

Though I disagree with him about most things, I have a lot of time for Benny, who’s a top intellectual and one of the most interesting theologians of our time – if you haven’t read his new book on Jesus, it’s well worth a look. Mr Tony, on the other hand, is a brilliant salesman who has never given the impression of being very thoughtful. This is a problem for the potential convert. While Mrs Tony, as a cradle Catholic, has more latitude to get away with flouting Catholic doctrine, the prospective convert is expected to show some interest in said doctrine. And, while there have been acres of newsprint about Mr Tony’s intention to convert, nobody seems to know why, except for the convenience of his wife and kids, he might want to do so.

With that sort of woolly outlook, maybe it’s better if he stays in the C of E. And high fives all round to Benny.

You know what I miss on the TV these days? Really rigorous intellectual debates. There is a particular one I remember, where Butt-Head, who was obviously a follower of Nietzsche, argued cogently that stuff that sucks is necessary if one is to appreciate stuff that’s cool. (Beavis seemed unconvinced, but then Beavis always struck me as more of a Kierkegaardian.) It is in that spirit that your humble correspondent approaches the regular task of reading the political press. It’s only grinding your teeth through the latest Socialist Worker and snoring through The Socialist that can put you in the right frame of mind to enjoy Gerry McGeough’s monthly organ, The Hibernian (“For Fascism and Our Lady”).

And enjoy it I do. I think it’s a pity that more people on the left don’t read The Hibernian, because in many ways it’s the most compulsive political journal in the country. Lively writing, an eclectic selection of topics and some truly hair-raising opinions combine to make it a real pleasure to read, as long as you don’t take anything in it remotely seriously. It’s like having an Irish equivalent of the Weekly World News. Where else can you read trenchant commentaries on the morality of the nation, tributes to republican martyrs, conspiracy theories and bizarre pseudo-science all between two covers?

To read The Hibernian is to enter into a whole new world of perception, and it’s a treat if you’ve ever read a book on Irish history and been struck by tantalising footnotes about Ailtirí na hAiséirighe or Maria Duce. For the uninitiated, Ailtirí na hAiséirighe (“Architects of the Resurrection”) was a small and eccentric political sect existing in the early 1940s, which mingled Gaelic revivalism with a philosophy of “Christian corporatism” derived from Salazar’s Portugal, and a virulent hostility to the Jewmen and Masons who were doing Ireland down. Maria Duce was a movement that turned up a little while later, campaigning for Jesus Christ to be proclaimed King of Ireland. These groups are remembered today, if at all, for their formative influence on Seán Sabhat, of Wolfe Tones rebel song fame. Most republicans who know of this background are a little embarrassed by it, but not Gerry McGeough, who seems to be single-handedly trying to revive this milieu.

Anyway, on opening this month’s Hibernian magazine you will first be confronted with Gerry’s editorial, which berates the debauched Southern electorate for failing to support the Christian Solidarity Party, and gives a plug to the magazine’s National Rosary Crusade. But this is all par for the course. What I’m interested in is the big article at the back critiquing Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Well, nobody ever said The Hibernian was first with the news.

Right, so we start with the proposition that lots of idealistic young people are alienated by the effects of globalisation. I don’t share the premise that globalisation, and in particular the satanic European Union, are part of a nefarious conspiracy by the Illuminati, but let’s leave that aside. Our author is worried that alienated young people will be seduced by the arguments of No Logo. However, Klein provides a false alternative in that she merely operates as a cuddly and unthreatening front for godless communism, which itself is just another manifestation of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. By heck, these Illuminati are clever chaps.

But there is a real alternative on offer! So what contemporary thinker sets out this alternative? Er, GK Chesterton. Now this I find rather puzzling. Not puzzling because Chesterton and Belloc’s Distributism is one of those intellectual fads, like Guild Socialism, that one might have expected to have died out about a century ago. The Hibernian has never been shy in promoting unfashionable ideas. What puzzles me is that Chesterton and Belloc were so quintessentially Sasanach – if they hadn’t existed then Somerset Maugham would have surely invented them – that they sit a little uneasily amongst the Irish Irelandism of The Hibernian.

Trouble is, I suppose, that Irish social thinkers are exceedingly thin on the ground, even in the specialised terrain of Catholic corporatism. I know Gerry has been banging the drum for the socio-political philosophy of Fr Denis Fahey, but then Fr Fahey is a bit esoteric if you want to try and derive a programme from him. Chesterbelloc, on the other hand, have the great advantage of Anglo-Saxon practicality. But still – Chesterton?! The mind boggles. Come on Gerry, let’s have some really interesting thinkers brought into your illustrious pages. I’d love to see how d’Annunzio speaks to the needs of modern Ireland. And, if I may put in another request, some in-depth coverage of the Bilderberg conference.

This week marks the beginning of the Clonard Novena, Belfast’s hugely popular annual manifestation of folk Catholicism. Therefore it seems fitting that we resume our series on things about Ireland that the Irish left don’t get, with a brief look at religion. Here too we see a congruence between the Anglocentric Irish left and the South Dublin neo-democrats, really on the level of Britain being taken as normative and those aspects of Irish society that are deemed un-British, as symptoms of Irish backwardness. Which is sometimes true, but you can’t put together an analysis of Irish society on that basis.

First, let us take the separation of church and state. This is a demand you often hear, and you’re as likely to read it in the Irish Times as the Socialist Worker. Trouble is, this betrays a deep constitutional illiteracy. Under the 1937 Bunreacht, there is in fact already a separation between church and state, which is why the Vatican withheld its endorsement at the time. Article 44 asserts that “The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.” Bearing in mind the intellectual climate in 1937, this is rather minimalist, and bears comparison with the Free State constitution of 1922 as enacted by the British parliament. The original sections 2 and 3 of the article, deleted by the Fifth Amendment in 1973, went on to recognise the various Protestant and Jewish denominations by name and to give a special nod to the Catholic Church as the denomination embracing the large majority of citizens.

The reader will note, and I believe the Supreme Court will bear me out on this, that the Church has no role in the direction of the State, nor vice versa. Both are kept to their particular spheres. And, although I would happily delete all religious references, nor does the religious flummery in the Preamble or the presidential oath of office have any administrative importance – we know this because we know from experience that there can be a Protestant president. Admittedly, this isn’t nearly as good as the succinct provision in the US constitution’s First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

It is, however, better than the situation in the metropolis, where both England and Scotland (though not Wales) have established churches. Actually, the Banana Republic is somewhat unusual amongst European states in not having a constitutional link between church and state, such as exists in Spain or the Scandinavian countries. One would have thought that, to be logically consistent, our Anglophiles would be demanding a constitutional link. After all, D4’s grand project for the 26 counties is to turn it into a sort of expanded version of the Isle of Man, with all that that implies. Only maybe without the Manxmen’s ornery sense of independence.

The demand for separation of church and state is actually a misnomer, the same way that Irish bien-pensants say “pluralism” when they mean “secularism”, because they fear they couldn’t get support for secularism. When we hear the demand for separation of church and state, what’s usually involved is the wish that the churches, and specifically the Catholic Church, should be turfed out of the education system. I actually agree with that, it’s just that I wish the advocates of that perspective would say so.

A similar misnomer is in the frequent call for the Catholic bishops to “stay out of politics”. If memory serves, the last time the bishops entered party politics in a serious way was during the Civil War, when they came down firmly on the Treatyite side. Since then, interventions on referenda or specific bits of legislation have pretty much been restricted to issues touching on Catholic moral teaching, and specifically sexual morality. It really shouldn’t be surprising that Catholic bishops would speak out on issues of Catholic morality – one suspects that our bien-pensants are more pained by the tendency of lay Catholics to follow Catholic doctrine.

In fact, as far as D4 goes, there is a large dollop of hypocrisy here. The neo-democrats have been more than happy in the past for Catholic clergy to speak out on the correct issues, as for instance condemning armed struggle in the North, in contradiction to Catholic “just war” doctrine. The more thinking elements are also aware of the Catholic Church’s history of adaptation to power, including the imperial power (the Church’s leading role in the abandonment of the Irish language in favour of English springs to mind). Our leftist burger-flippers have the merit of being less hypocritical: they just want the Church to shut up and go away. Again, I’d be quite sympathetic to that if at least they would state their case openly.

The point here, I think, is that England, except for a few marginal areas, is basically a post-religious society while Ireland is not. Weekly church attendance is well under 10% in England, while even in Dublin you would be talking about 50-60%, and more like 80-90% in rural areas. Nobody really takes the Church of England seriously, while Irish people – and not just Catholics – do have a tendency to take their religion extremely seriously. There is a reason beyond style why Father Ted has a sharp satirical edge, at least to the Irish eye, while The Vicar of Dibley is just light joshing.

Not that this holds back our historical materialists. For decades now Swiss Toni has been proclaiming that the Catholic Church is finished as a force in Irish society, the wish being father to the thought. The corollary of that is that Catholicism is in all circumstances a reactionary force. I’m not sure that is true even in the historical sense – the major ideological challenge to McQuaidism back in the day came not from the tiny Communist movement nor from whatever was the analogue to the Irish Humanist Association, but from the Social Justice Thomists. Even today, most of the reports on poverty and inequality in the Celtic Tiger emanate not from the left, nor from trendy NGOs, but from the religious orders. I believe Swiss has been modulating his line of late, but that derives not from an improved understanding of Ireland, but from the pro-Islamic line of the parent company in London. Hence Richard Boyd Barrett, at Marxism a couple of years back, arguing that there were “positive aspects” to Islamic fundamentalism – can you imagine him claiming positive aspects for Catholic fundamentalism?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not by any means a defender of the Catholic Church. But it’s worth remarking that a fair slice of our body politic, not to mention the radical movement, have attitudes to Catholicism that closely parallel Paisleyism. Except they don’t have Big Ian’s theological justifications to fall back on.

I’d almost forgotten to do the Watch, but our Gail tackles religion in this week’s column. In particular, Ballycastle boy Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Pope Benny’s Caledonian satrap, and his threat to publicly excommunicate Scottish Catholic politicians who don’t vote the way he wants on abortion. Okay, Keith isn’t calling it excommunication, but that’s what he means. With the loopier fringe of the antis talking of “outing” MPs who take communion and vote against Keith’s wishes, this has rather more substance to it than Keith just blowing steam. See Red Squirrel for sharp commentary on the issue.

But Gail uses this as the starting point for an excursus on ingrained anti-Catholicism in British politics, which she extends to a bigotry against all believing Christians, in the tyranny exercised by the “liberal élite” who have apparently been ruling Britain for 30 years. Aye right. And she cites jibes at Mr Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly (the Opus Dei member appointed by Mr Tony to take charge of gays and Muslims) as examples of this tyranny. Ooh, those poor defenceless Cabinet ministers, innocently getting on with running the country, having to suffer the Stalinist oppression of columns by Polly Toynbee and Johann Hari. More of this please Gail.

Gail also ventures into the world of fashion – not saucy schoolgirls unfortunately, but the well-known Lower Falls Tracksuit. This is the phenomenon of working-class women going to the shops in their pyjamas and slippers. Gail has become cognisant of some mums in Short Strand leaving their kids off to school thusly attired, which proves it isn’t an urban myth. Of course it isn’t, on most working-class estates you can see the Lower Falls Tracksuit daily. Angry Steve has been talking about little else on the wireless for the past couple of weeks. But instead of asking why working-class women wear comfortable clothes, might it not be an idea to ask why fashion demands women wear uncomfortable clothes? Just a thought.