December 1st 2015

We have reached Advent. Advent is the time period when people traditionally prepare for the ‘Coming’ of Christmas and all that entails. This Advent will be the most significant for me in more than 50 years, if the Bishop is a man of his word, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. I will need to outline the background, which is not simple.

It all began with ‘Safepark 2014’. This was the name given to a voluntary group of concerned parents and others about the total absence of any car or bus parking facilities at any of the three schools in Ballymahon.

After securing meetings with all concerned parties including teachers, parents, Gardaí, bus drivers, the Local Authority, The Dept. of Education, Traders, the so-called representatives of the Parish Pastoral Council and the Bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, we devised a logical plan of action and set about securing a car park to be sited on Parish lands adjacent to the new primary school.

The Bishop requested that we commission a feasibility study and confirmed that if this site was deemed the optimum location then the Diocese could not ignore this. He further suggested that we consult with the local Parish Priest to advise him of our plans. We knew that this move was a waste of time as the local PP was totally opposed to the transfer of any parish land from which he was generating an annual income for himself which was completely unethical and illegal.

The PP was visited by various members of our committee and all were rounded upon and abused. He was supported by the principal of the Primary School for obvious reasons, and the self-appointed chairman of the Parish Council. Outside of this the entire community was hugely supportive and we got support from all quarters.

The Bishop being new in the job and not being familiar with the local politics of the situation was in a difficult position as while he supported our intentions and our overall project he couldn’t very well undermine his PP who had been in Ballymahon for a lengthy period of years. Having said this he was still the boss and undue consideration for his local clerical underling could not be used as a method of indefinite procrastination.

The most disappointing aspect of all this business was the deliberate directives of the two second level school principals who instructed their respective staff members not to get involved as they wanted no issue with the local clergy and it was ‘none of their business’.

The Prodigal was Honourary Secretary of the ‘Safepark Committee’ and as such was responsible for all correspondence. After months of frustration and exasperation I wrote the following epistle to the Bishop on July 21^st 2014;

 Bishop Francis,

In an article in the Irish Catholic on September 6^th 2013, Pope Francis stated;

“The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The Bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience”.

On the date of you own elevation you yourself stated;
“People are the life blood of every parish”.

However the reality of your actions and attitude on the issue of the use of parish lands in Ballymahon is a long way from the laudable aspiration expressed in your sentiment. Your blind support for the self-interested stance taken by the local priest is, putting it at its lowest, most unfortunate. It appears that you have forgotten that all Diocesan Trust held property was procured by the pennies and penances of the ordinary parishioners.

Against that backdrop, for a parish priest to put his own comfort, income and self-interest before the physical safety and well-being of 1100 students, their parents, mentors, teachers and bus drivers is very far removed from any Christian ethic. For you to support the perpetuation of a claim that a Parish Council exists is to compound a truth that lies somewhere between the Third Secret of Fatima and The DaVinci Code.

 The local PP is currently setting up a ‘new’ Parish Council in order;

      (1)      To fill the void, and
      (2)  To give the (misleading) impression that a Parish Council is currently in existence.

However, any new Council will amount to nothing more than a simulacrum of something which, even if it had recently existed, represented nothing more than the PP’s alter ego.

You know that no Parish Council exists at present nor does any Parish Finance Committee. For you to repeatedly suggest that a local organisation (SafePark 2014) correspond with non-existent committees through the local PP beggars belief!

As you well know, at a meeting with yourself and the Diocesan Secretary you proposed that a feasibility study be carried out.

The minute meeting records;

“Having confirmed that the issue was a serious one, the Bishop recommended that if a parking/traffic feasibility study was carried out which was acceptable to the Diocese and the Local Authority, its conclusions would be very compelling and if the Diocesan land was identified as the optimum solution this could not be ignored. It was further recommended that we should correspond with the Parish Finance Committee as this was the body that made recommendations to the pastor on the use of Diocesan property including land”.

The deputation voiced its reluctance to write to this eminent (but elusive) body as we could not establish a paper trail of any such correspondence.

At your recommendation, a feasibility study (costing €2000) was carried out. That study identified the course proposed by the deputation as not only the optimal, but the only, solution to the problem. However, when faced with these findings, you simply chose to ignore them. We could speculate as to the reasons for your conduct. I may be yet another example of a senior man of the cloth condoning or covering-up the sins of a more junior servant of God. Only God knows!

In any event, the putting at risk of the physical safety of Ballymahon’s children to the advantage of the local parish priest is nothing short of child neglect! But then the Church hasn’t always covered itself in glory where the welfare of children is concerned.

Last week Pope Francis was making headlines again as the result of comments in yet another interview. This time about clerical celibacy and the child-abuse scandals. The Pope spoke of child-abuse as;

“A leprosy in our house” and announced his intention face the issue;
“with the severity it requires”.

In this regard you will be aware of the revelations concerning Cardinal Sean Brady’s involvement in a 1975 canonical inquiry into Father Brendan Smyth’s abuse of Brendan Boland. Having considered this and other relevant issues such as the new ‘Whistle-Blower’ legislation I have decided to raise the issue of one of the Ballymahon predecessors of the present incumbent of the priest’s house. Father Brendan Hynds was a well-known practising paedophile for over twenty years.

I am just one of a multitude of victims who suffered at his evil hands.

Father Hynds usually sourced his victims from the altar boy ranks and was known to abuse boys up until Intermediate Certificate level. Alas, his activities did not cease when he left Ballymahon and anecdotal evidence suggests that upon being transferred to Cloghan in County Offaly he continued his horrific practises for many years-

It was a massacre of the innocents!

I am now formally calling on you to initiate an investigation into this monster and to provide some comfort to his victims, most of whom are still living. Lest you suggest that this is some sort of figment of my imagination I can confirm that all of these details were given to the Diocesan court jester (Fr. Bannon) many years ago.

Should you choose to ignore this matter and turn a blind eye to even more of your parishioners then I will deal with the matter myself.

I await your expedient response,

P.J.Walsh.
On July 28^th the following reply was sent by Bishop Francis.

“Dear Mr Walsh,

Thank you for your letter of 21^ST July. I am sorry to read of your suffering at the hands of Fr. Brendan Hynds. I have read the file and note that you spoke with Fr. Michael Bannon about Fr. Hynds in 2005.

Your complaint was reported to the Gardaí at that time and in accordance with your wishes then, you were not identified. It was also reported to the HSE. Now that you wish to have an investigation into the activities of Fr. Hynds I urge you to report the matter to the Gardaí. After receiving your letter last week this matter will be reported to the Gardaí and the HSE. As Fr. Hynds activities were criminal it is the Gardaí who investigate these matters; the Diocese will cooperate with such an investigation.

I am willing to meet you and the Diocesan Designated Officer, Mr Sean Leydon, to hear your story at first hand. I also wish to offer you support from ‘Towards Healing’ a counselling agency for those who are survivors of abuse perpetrated by clergy”.

Yours sincerely

Francis Duffy.

 

November 30 2015

Trust; that’s the central issue in this entire debacle.

It reminds me of a slightly smutty story when I schooled at the Convent of Mercy. The story goes that a trainee nun spent nine months as a postulant and then celebrated the next step on her holy way towards being a novitiate by having a harmless fling with the local Parish Priest. The inevitable happened and she was filled with more than the Holy Spirit.

A country girl, she was resourceful and succeeded in keeping her condition secret by virtue of her expansive garb right up to the time of delivery.

On the night of the delivery she crept along the corridor and laid the babe on the cot beside the reverend mother. When the mother woke up next morning and saw the mite beside her the first words were “you can’t trust your own finger these days”.

Who can any of us trust in this existence? The obvious first assessment must be self. We all believe we can at least trust ourselves totally. But can we? Until we are sorely tried or tempted we will hardly know. Would we lie, steal, assault or even kill? Surely not. Yet men have been engaged in these activities since the beginning of time as we know it.

Necessity often overrules lofty principle. If your children were starving might you not steal a loaf of bread to keep them alive or if someone insulted your mother would you not deliver a slap in the puss or a boot in the dangles? Think about it. Trust is generally a matter for the future often based on past experience. My mother used to say; “you can trust a thief but you can’t trust a liar”.

When one party is confident that he is prepared and willing to rely on the future actions of another that stance could be defined as trust. It has the obvious drawback that one party is ceding control in a given situation to another party over which the first party has no control. As a result the trusting one cannot be certain about the expected behaviour of the one to be trusted.

As Hemingway said;

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them”

Certain societal types have traditionally been given the benefit of the doubt in this matter usually because of the position they hold in society. Doctors, solicitors, priests and nuns, teachers, policemen and others have historically been trusted to a ridiculous degree in the past and experience has taught us that the person in the most trusted position is the one who can inflict the most damage when they take unlawful or deceitful advantage of that trust.

To my detriment I am a living example of this phenomenon.

November 29 2015

Herein under are outlined the reasons in summary why the plundering of the River Shannon constitutes such a massive mistake.

The reasons why Dublin’s proposed plundering of the Shannon should be strongly opposed are as follows:

 

Ø The entire plan remains in absolute contravention of the EU Water Framework Directive because of a total lack of public consultation and because of the project promoter’s failure to address the many adverse effects of the proposed abstraction. This is despite the fact that the consultants to the project identified some 62 adverse effects. In eight years, neither Dublin City Council, RPS consultants or Irish Water have called a meeting to which the general public has been invited to make submissions. This level of consultation is an absolute requirement of the EU Water Framework Directive.

 

Ø In the publication “Water Matters”, published by the Department of the Environment in 2007, all of the stakeholder counties on the River Shannon are designated and identified. None of the four Dublin Local Authorities were included, and neither was Wicklow or Kildare. Furthermore, in all publications on the Shannon River Basin District, the stakeholder counties are clearly identified and these do not include the Dublin Local Authorities.

 

Ø The Shannon River Basin District includes a portion of County Fermanagh in the North of Ireland which drains underground to the Shannon Pot, and the Rivers Shannon and Erne are also linked by the Shannon-Erne Canal. Any major diversion of the River Shannon’s waters will inevitably have consequences for water systems in County Fermanagh and in the Erne River Basin. Despite this obvious link, Dublin City Council and The Irish Water Board have continuously and arrogantly denied any requirement to discuss their plans with the appropriate authorities in the North – an attitude which conflicts with the policy and practice of developing and maintaining cross-border relationships.

 

Ø Large scale water abstraction increases the incidence of blue-green algal blooms, a known carcinogen, which has been conveniently ignored by Irish Water and its consultants. In the summer of 2009, an algal bloom killed 10,000 birds in Washington and Oregon. Do we need to increase the risk of cancer incidence in the Midlands, South and Southwest to accommodate Dublin City Council’s greed?

 

Ø Our environmental scientist, Jack O’Sullivan, and our hydrologist, Dr. Paul Johnson have both concluded in a major study, which has been updated three times, that the project is totally unsustainable.

 

Ø Any significant fall in water levels throughout the Shannon catchment area will bring about the swift, total, and irreversible decline of tourism, leisure activities, angling, agriculture, hotel and accommodation interests, and the Shannon’s fragile ecology will be damaged to such an extent that it will never recover, even if the water abstraction were to be discontinued!

 

Ø Small feeder streams, and shallow reed beds which are the spawning grounds for nearly all fish life, will be dry in a matter of months.

 

Ø There is no fall-back strategy in existence, should our worst fears be realized, as they inevitably will. The Irish Water Board and Dublin City Council, as the lead authorities promoting the water abstraction scheme, have refused to concede a shutdown of the pipeline if the damage to the River Shannon becomes apparent. (How can you cut off the water supply to one million people?).

 

Ø Both Dublin City Council and An Bord Uisce have failed to address the daily loss of more than 300 million litres of water from its own water supply and distribution network, an amount which is almost equivalent to what it intends to plunder from the Shannon for Dublin’s own use.

 

Ø If this ludicrous plan were to proceed, it would signal the end of all development in the towns and villages located on the Shannon; e.g., Carrick-on-Shannon, Rooskey, Lanesboro, Dromod, Glasson, Athlone, Limerick, etc.; and would further compromise water supplies into the future for all of these villages, towns and cities.

 

Ø Irish Water has decided on the Lower Lough Derg (Parteen Basin) option on the grounds of costs and minimal damage to the environment but has not factored in the cost of the destruction that will be suffered by the one million people resident in the Shannon Catchment Area.

 

Ø In Lough Derg, there is the added risk of destroying the value and interest of its Special Area of Conservation, its Natural Heritage Areas and its Special Protection Areas, designated at national and European levels.

 

Ø On-going climate change, which is predicted to greatly affect the security of water supplies into the future, will not be confined to the east coast; and the agencies which control water supplies will become all-powerful, a reality of which Bord Uisce and Dublin City Council are very well aware!

 

Ø Our consultants are quite correct in stating that the Irish Water Board has gratuitously ignored the exploration of all other options for providing water into the future and went for the soft option jugular of commandeering the Shannon for its own private use and that of its client, Dublin City Council.

 

Ø Domestic water-metering will eventually become a reality; and, if we are not careful, we will find ourselves paying Irish Water or the privatized water company or their agents for water which doesn’t belong to them.

 

Ø Cork gets 90% of its water supply from groundwater, and in Dublin North and Fingal there is a high yielding aquifer stretching over four counties; but Irish Water and Dublin City Council have completely ignored this source in its Strategic Environmental Assessment.

 

Ø Based on British and European water pricing statistics, the commercial value of the amount of water that An Bord Uisce intends to abstract from the Shannon is calculated at €255 million every year. If we discovered gold, platinum, diamonds or oil in the Shannon Basin, would we permit the Dublin City lobbyists/ bureaucrats to come and take it off our hands? What we have in the River Shannon is far more precious than these:

 

Ø The precious commodity of pure water is the scarcest and now the most valuable commodity on earth. At any event we in the Shannon Protection Alliance do not regard the River Shannon as a commodity for sale nor do we have any right to dispose of our future generations’ inheritance.

 

CONCLUSIONS:

 

Dublin City Council via its agent Irish Water, in its arrogance, has presumed itself to be more important than the rest of the country, and that its interests should take precedence over all other considerations. We in the Shannon Protection Alliance did not agree, nor do we stand in awe of Irish Water, Dublin City Council, that arsehole Alan Kelly or any other entity.

The Shannon and its tributaries have been the source of life to countless billions of life forms since the last ice-age. The onus is on us to preserve, protect and enhance our majestic river for ourselves and future generations. In this endeavour we need the leadership and commitment of our democratically elected politicians, such as we have in the Shannonside Counties at present.

The political landscape is forever changing. We are due a general election in the spring. Six months ago the odds against a Fianna Fail/ Fine Gael coalition stood at 8/1. Now the bookies have revised their odds to evens on the prospect of such an alliance. The bookies seldom get it wrong, the British General Election being a notable exception.

Labour in Ireland is fucked and finished and shag the much loss. Every other political party or alliance is committed publicly to scrapping Irish Water and the entire madcap plan will have to go back to the drawing board in its entirety.

Politicians are not to be trusted in Ireland and the urge for power nearly always overrules and overrides the common good. Now, more than ever, vigilance must be the byword.

November 28 2015

Irish Water; such a shower of wasters. Today they announced for the umpteenth time their ambition to divert a major portion of the River Shannon to supplement the water shortage in the Capital. It has been pointed out to them on numerous occasions that over twenty years they have destroyed their own water supply and now they want to steal the Shannon to compensate the Dubliners for their executive and planning mistakes.

They originally targeted Lough Ree as their preferred option for an alternative source of a major water supply for Dublin. The locals got organised and ran them off with their ambitions in tatters. The Prodigal was the national Public Relations Officer in the resistance and performed admirably in this role. We established the Shannon Protection Alliance in Athlone in The Green Olive Pub in April 2007. This was in response to;

Dublin City Council’s Water Abstraction Project –

On 31 May 2006, Dublin City Council produced a Strategic Environmental Assessment of the Greater Dublin Water Supply (Major Source Development).

The City Council’s consultants (RPS) recommended water abstraction on a huge, unsustainable scale (600 million litres per day) from the River Shannon as the chosen option, despite identifying almost 60 adverse effects on the Great River and its lakes.

It is curious, that in the exact same time frame, the consultancy company working most closely with RPS (Veolia Water) recommended to Thames Water, the privatised agency which supplies water to the Greater London Area, as well as to the British Government and to the Australian Government that desalination for both London and Melbourne was the answer to maintaining water supplies for these cities into the future. Why would the same consultants recommend massive abstraction from the River Shannon to achieve the same objective? The answer to me was and still remains obvious.

The Dublin Local Authorities desired the commandeering of the Great River to solve a major problem of their own creation, eventually privatise the entire water supply business in Ireland and sell the water back to its rightful riparian owners. Some fucking neck.

At any rate under the presidency of one Mary O’Rourke we took them on, on all fronts and eventually sent them scuttling back to the taxpayer-funded drawing board. That was round one and wasn’t as simple as I have described.


Majestic River Shannon at Dusk

For reasons never yet explained, the consultants identified and designated all of the Greater Dublin Area local Authorities (Dublin City Council, South Dublin County Council, Fingal County Council and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council) as primary, major stakeholders on the Shannon. In addition, Wicklow, Kildare and Meath County Councils were added to the stakeholder list.

This was an act of incredible arrogance, and it would make as much sense for Cavan, Clare, Leitrim, Longford and Tipperary to decree themselves to be major stakeholders on the Liffey. The Dublin City Authorities never had any traditional, legal, moral or riparian right to claim any jurisdiction over the River Shannon.

The Shannon Protection Alliance (SPA) was established to oppose this ludicrous proposal. We recruited two of Ireland’s foremost experts on hydrology and ecosystems to research the proposed project on our behalf. Financing of our reports was provided by public donations, sponsorship and fundraising; while the multiple millions spent by Dublin City Council and its consultants fell as a burden on the Irish Taxpayer, without his or her knowledge or consent. We found it curious, that despite requesting the CV’s of the experts who worked on behalf of Dublin City Council, they consistently refused, neglected or failed to provide this information over a four year period!

In this timeframe, our experts (Jack O’Sullivan, Environmental Scientist, and Dr Paul Johnson, Hydrologist at the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, Trinity College, Dublin) produced three detailed reports which confirmed that the entire project proposed by Dublin City Council and its consultants was and remains totally unsustainable and cannot not be entertained at any level.

A summary of their very exhaustive and comprehensive reports is provided in the following pages, and it is an absolute fact that not one of their findings or conclusions has ever been challenged by either Dublin City Council, Irish Water or any consultants working on the project.

The situation has changed somewhat in the intervening period with the establishment of Irish Water and its role in the water supply issue to Dublin. John Tierney was the leading proponent of the original lunatic plan in his capacity as Manager and supreme wizard of Dublin City Council. The biggest waster in the history of statutory corporate waste who should have been sacked for inefficiency was given a horizontal transfer into Irish Water as its new CEO. Beat that!

As Enda says “the best little country in the world to do business in”.

November 27 2015

“Guests of the Nation”. Never did we conceive of having so many.

In 1931 Frank O’Connor published the story of two British soldiers held captive somewhere in Ireland to be treated as hostage guests and used for purposes of recrimination in the event of the British committing some outrage or other against our sacred island or our brave soldiers.

O’Connor was well equipped to write the story having joined the First Brigade of the Irish Republican Army in 1918 and served in combat during the Irish War of Independence. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and joined the Anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War, working in propaganda in Cork City. He was one of twelve thousand Anti-Treaty combatants who were interned by the government of the new Irish Free State. Between 1922 and 1923 O'Connor was imprisoned in Cork City Gaol.

Neil Jordan’s film ‘The Crying Game’ was inspired by O'Connor's short story.

Nowadays we entertain an enormous army of different guests of the nation. According to the Central Statistics Office Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians now number over 200,000. After the 2011 Census it was calculated that 550,000 of our permanent residents were non-Irish nationals. Has this migration been beneficial or otherwise? Hard to call. Has their contribution to Ireland in social, economic or cultural terms been positive or helpful? It is imprudent or unwise to generalise but the overview that I have garnered is that while British citizens, who make up the second biggest ethnic grouping, are positive, contributing and decent in the main.

The Eastern Europeans contribute very little and in many cases have adopted a leech-like attitude to their new homeland. The levels of crime in which Eastern Europeans are involved is greatly disproportionate to their numbers in society. How do I know? Read the court-case reports in any provincial newspaper in the Republic and the evidence is irrefutable. They invariably get ‘Free Legal Aid’ and an interpreter at enormous cost to the Irish taxpayer and in many cases seem to have total disregard for the laws of our land.

If the climate of opinion gets a little overheated in respect of any of these people they can always piss off home. Another example of their civic spirit can be evinced from a quick visit to the social welfare office in Longford. You can play the game of spot the Irish accent and you would be detained for more than a little while. Their concept of civic spirit is poles apart.

It might be construed that my attitude towards some of these people is a little hostile and bordering on racist. I repeat that I reflect common if not popular opinion among many of the people I know and with whom the Prodigal discusses such matters. On a personal level I am entitled to comment on my own experience of interaction with some of these people.

Do Eastern Europeans support Irish retail outlets, hotels or pubs? No! They have their own shops wherein they purchase their groceries and other commodities which ironically represent much better value than any of the Irish shops. We almost always buy Polish ham which retails at a quarter the price of a similar amount in local supermarkets and tastes a lot better. They never socialise in Irish pubs except to make a nuisance when they are already carrying a full off-licence load of liquor.

Again, considering the price of drink in Irish pubs, it’s hard to blame them. As for hotels, they are happy to work there but never don the garb of guests. It is all too common to find that they work in the black market economy, regularly living off state benefits, and demand every perk of the welfare system as if they have a divine right to so do. They represent a considerable share of persons nominated on Local Authority housing lists and are very demanding in this regard. They even insist on religious services being held in their own languages and shun any other.

In half a decade or more of activity with the local Tidy Towns Committee I have collected monumental amounts of discarded rubbish.

There are invariably three common denominators. The source of the fly-tipping is always from a rented property, and in every single case is dumped by either a member of the mobile fraternity or a Non-Irish national. They don’t believe in paying for refuse collection at any level.

I personally prevented foreign children from dumping in adjacent property and saw to it that their cargo of disgusting household refuse was brought back to their own house. Two days later the same rubbish was deposited at another location which activity was pointed out to the litter warden. She promptly issued a hefty fine for littering which was received by the offending party.

The first reaction of the mammy of the house was to bring me the fine notice and ask if I could get it quashed! I advised her to pay it immediately and pointed out how lucky she was that the amount was so modest compared to what it might have been. No bother ever since. Again in general terms these people contribute nothing to the local environment and avoid any commitment to positive contribution to the areas in which they live. There it is as I see it.

 

November 26 2015

Hooray, Hooray, good old Thanksgiving Day! Today in the United States is celebrated Thanksgiving Day. What does it mean? I’m inclined to agree with Regina Brett.

“If no one shopped on Thanksgiving Day, the stores wouldn't open. End of story. I say we all take the pledge and stay home. Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks for what you have, not to save a few dollars to get more”.

Regina is Brett is the New York Times bestselling author of ‘God Never Blinks’, among other semi-religious works including her latest ‘God is always hiring’. Thanksgiving Day is a bit like Father’s Day, Granny’s Day or Apple Picking Day. All creations of the capitalist regime to part the fool from his hard earned money or his welfare cheque which is somebody else’s hard earned money. 

It all started in 1840 when the ‘Penny Post’ was established and postage could be prepaid with the printing of the first stamp called ‘The Penny Black’. It was the brainchild of Sir Henry Cole following a pamphlet by Sir Rowland Hill on the reformation of the British Post Office.

In 1843, Cole introduced the world's first commercial Christmas card, commissioning artist John Callcott Horsley to complete the design. Clever fellow Mr. Cole. This was the start of the greeting card business and almost every day of the year now has a special ‘Day’ for some stupid cause or another. The charities are now the biggest beneficiaries of this universal scam. There are now cards to celebrate every step of the humans’ existence; New Baby cards, Christening cards, Birthday cards, Communion and Confirmation cards, First Day at school cards, Graduation cards, Engagement cards, Get well cards New Job cards, Mass cards etc. etc. etc. It’s only a matter of time until we have Happy Divorce cards or Congratulations on your Failure cards.

Total load of horse manure to further increase the slope on the scales of the haves versus the have-nots. Reasons for celebration should be the idea of the individual and not that of a commercially motivated third party.

I like Christmas Day for the feeling that comes with turkey legs after copious amounts of strong drink, and visits of choice, incoming or outgoing. Shag the rest of it. Christmas cards I don’t send.

Still, if our Yankee cousins want to partake of a bronze turkey with all the trimmings more luck to them on this Thanksgiving Day. The only sentiment of my giving thanks today is the fact that I don’t live there.

November 25 2015

Exactly 20 years ago today The Irish people tuned in to their TV’s and radios to find out how the divorce referendum had panned out. There was an overall turnout of 62% which amounted to 1.63 million electors. In the end the issue was totally an urban versus rural vote with a mere 9000 votes separating the sides. Apart from minute majorities in favour of the ‘Yes’ vote in Cork South Central and Limerick East the entire remainder of the rural constituencies voted against the Dissolution of Marriage in the Referendum while all of Dublin and its nearest pale neighbours in Louth, Wicklow and Kildare voted for Divorce. More West-Brit practises introduced by the Capital. Poor ould Dev was doing handstands in Glasnevin!

Comment of the campaign was credited to Úna Bean Mhic Mhathúna, a prominent figure of the ‘No’ divorce campaign, who gave the sound bite of the year: “G’way, ye wife-swappin’ sodomites”, she hissed, as the count in the RDS veered towards the Yes side.

What did the introduction of divorce into Ireland achieve? It was estimated that more than 80,000 separated Irish citizens were trapped in a legal limbo. It must be presumed that they, at least, were satisfied. Aside from this the power of the clergy got a serious rattlin’.

For many ‘Yes’ voters, the referendum represented a chance for the final push to detach Church from State. Ireland had become almost another country since the 1986 divorce referendum, which had been defeated by two to one. In 1980, no politician in the Dáil openly advocated divorce; by 1995, no party in the Dáil opposed it.

That intervening decade had seen Robinson elected president; the X case; the passing of two referendums relating to abortion information and the right to travel and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Didn’t the Wilde one ground the following quote about marriage;
“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
 Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”
Why did he always have to be so right and accurate? Sickener.

Aside from all this the legal profession has developed a whole new and very prosperous side to its family law business. I had the mostly forgettable personal experience of freewheeling through the legal separation minefield and that, for a starter, was sufficient. I didn’t bother going back for the main course of divorce. Thousands of other less-than-perfect mortals have to run this gauntlet every day.

Day after day, couples wishing to divorce collect at 10am in the lobbies of courthouses throughout this rich and rare land. Some have legal representatives, others do not. They wait, some well into the afternoon, for their cases to be called in one of the courtrooms in the building. Many are bored and some are nervous. These are mainly the men. They are seen by Circuit Court judges; divorce and judicial separation are applied for at Circuit Court level, although occasionally high net worth individuals go directly to the High Court.

A couple may be legally divorced once they have lived apart for four years. This is of course in the physical sense. In Ireland, a husband or wife does not need to prove, for example, adultery or cruelty. It is a “no fault” system, but people still try to air their partners’ perceived faults in court.

Shortly after 10am, the judge runs through a list of the cases, prioritising short matters and putting longer cases to the end of the list. Then the roll-call of recrimination is announced.

Spectators cannot attend, unlike other blood-sports, although since January 2014, journalists may report on proceedings with strict limitations to protect anonymity. Each set of divorce proceedings fits somewhere on a spectrum between civility and acrimony and each couple’s experience of the courts depends on the choices they make about their approach. Divorce cases can take less than five minutes or more than five years. In one courtroom in Dublin earlier this year, a judge finalised three divorces and two judicial separations in 15 minutes. Another case was in its fifth year and still floundering. More assets associated with the latter coupled with the added spectre of a younger woman. Lethal!

Not all divorces are fraught, particularly among a certain age group, often called the “silver splitters”. They have often both realised that they can no longer stay together and come to court with agreements in writing. Younger couples, with all the complications of maintenance, custody and access to children, may also arrive in court with an agreement. This may have been produced through mediation or negotiated through legal representatives.

Negotiations often only occur just before entering court, but do take the stress out of the case for both parties. Unhappy separations, where one or other party feels aggrieved by what they did or didn’t get, can drag on until divorce time. Conversely, separations that leave husband and wife feeling things have worked out as well as possible pave the way for less acrimonious divorces.

Contentious divorces make for ugly scenes. Parties cannot keep from arguing in court, backbiting and interrupting each other. Even those represented by solicitors and barristers sometimes break out into open warfare and quibble over the smallest details.

Sometimes adversarial lawyers make the situation worse, by for example, withholding documentation until the last possible moment.

Every detail may be argued over: “Dad will collect Cindy at 6pm at the bus-stop on the main road. He will take him from mother’s car, not putting his hands into the car. He will ring his former darling no less than four hours before the meeting if he cannot make it.” In such cases, traction is not attractive. Each side of the argy bargy is desperate to say “I sorted that bitch/bastard out” but the only winner is the man with the shirt and tie and of course, the briefs.

It is said that in quite a lot of high-conflict cases, one party often has a totally tunnel vision perspective of affairs and that the totality of odium and blame is wholly the responsibility of the opposing team. 

It is virtually impossible to get through to people who don’t see the other side of the argument, who reference life to themselves completely and don’t see the damage that is being caused by their stance.

It is also very common to evidence the unreasonable stance of overprotective mothers. They insist they know ‘what’s best’ for the child and court orders are then undermined because they don’t feel satisfied that the orders of court are in the interests of ‘my children’. Alternative dispute resolution processes, such as mediation are of little use when faced by such bitter and bitterly entrenched views.

Since the time of the Wedding Feast of Cana marriage, wedding and matrimony has been a cause of great celebration in recognition of union and unity. This is rightly so and is as much a vote of confidence in the future as it is an immediate manifestation of the coming together of kindred spirits and souls. If a great and positive union can be a cause celebre of such magnitude on a global scale then why should the separation of unhappy persons not be as significant in real terms?

Surely the ridding of unhappy existence is just as positive in its end as the initial coming together. Yet we see very few divorce celebrations. Is this a refusal to recognise that we are finite in matters of judgement and are capable of taking risks that don’t always have happy conclusions? The gold ring is the symbol of marriage and the vice of marriage might be described as divorce. In Irish or Spanish, gold is either ór or d’or.

The Prodigal has assembled some thoughts on the advantages of separation.

VICE D’OR

Gone, the irritating whingeing whining,

The siren wail that might have been a voice,
No more, the manic screech of shifting misery,
At which turning, triumph will rejoice.
Never more the taunt of exultation,
Shrill and shallow victory-cry of hate,
Gone forever, deadly dart of darkness.
Touching amber embers in Hell’s grate.
Left behind, the mutant accusation,
Self-propelled to maximize the maim,
Abandoned, the philosophy of cruelty
Robbed of target, inward turning blame.
History, a child of legislation,
Blind, for men the future is a veil,
A memory, the fetid fruit of lying,
Dark cloud of oppression turning pale.
Tiny foetal whisper of a prospect
Striving to survive at fading verge,
A sliver slit of dark enveloped radiance
Struggling, must from shadows yet emerge.
A bonding in the hope of expectation,
The union of the body and the mind,
A turning on future’s hapless highway,
Spectacles are useless to the blind.
Hope, that well of never-ending succour
Propping life on legs of tremulous yew,
Forward inch by inch to newer dawning,
Budding green will overcome the blue.

November 24 2015

About my sons; the boys! Who can afford to be judgmental, certainly not me! An opinion is one thing; a mental ruling is something else. Whenever I speak with my two boys the harmony we always had is rediscovered. Not that it was ever missing, just dormant.

Barry John knows that dad could never sour towards that young man and he is quite entitled to be secure in that knowledge. By the same token, Derval is more than aware that his ould fella could never maintain any enmity or ill-feeling towards either of those boys and is correct in this presumption. The fact is that we can all play little games, but eventually we must realize that the close bond between us cannot be sundered by trivia. Perhaps they know, more acutely than I know, what is significant and what bullshit is. Am I waiting to play catch-up in this game or are they? When they laugh, they almost echo one another.  Good for them; they are light years ahead of the rest of us in mental harmony and that possessed-of-ability cannot be bought, leased, hired or stolen.

The only conclusion that dad can come to is that they are fortunate and their fondness for each other is understated but important. May the Deity bless all of their endeavours! In the light of my stated position on this situation, it must be assumed that their inherent dispositions of well-being must be a genetic combination of unlikely bedfellows. Angie baby is priceless in terms of honesty, down to earth savvy, calling a spade a spade, and telling it like it is when it is. Dolores was always a rock of sense and gave her qualities of Mayo decency to all of her children.

I’ve spent some time reflecting on the relationships between fathers and sons and as always there are more questions than answers. Is it better to see yourself in your son or not to so do? Are we always ready to recognize the talents demonstrated as proof positive that we have achieved or can any father be even moderately objective?

When I compare Derval John to Barry John what conclusions may I reach? Derval is more methodical, deliberate and analytical and thinks he is sure of what he wants. Barry John is more laid back and less fussy, lacks the need for advance planning of his elder brother and is equally as clever and intelligent but in a less assuming way. Both are possessed of outrageous amounts of charm and are in no way self-doubting. With total application either could achieve almost anything. In each case their strength and Achilles Heel is their total honesty.

They didn’t inherit property, financial assets or things material of this world. They inherited good grace from their mothers and a sufficiency of grey matter from both sides to ensure their respective abilities to survive and prosper. This will be enough.