Yesterday I was speaking to an elderly patient in a hospital oratory. I commented on how often I had seen him in the oratory and asked him to remember me in his prayers.
He replied: “I have nothing else to do”.
Will he ever know the impact those seven words had on me? I doubt it. Maybe I’m wrong. One way or another it doesn’t really matter.
Sensationally profound words at that moment and in that place.
Should I tell him? Probably not.
In the link below Iain Dale interviews RMT general secretary Mick Lynch on LBC. It is sensational radio.
And it’s sensational because Mr Lynch is simply speaking the truth in an articulate and convincing manner. No spin, no spoof and above all no lies.
On the other side of the Atlantic former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson revealed at the January 6 hearings yesterday how former US president Donald Trump grabbed his security detail by the neck because he would not drive him to the Capitol. She also told how the former president broke delph and smeared a wall in his office with ketchup.
Cassidy Hutchinson on what Trump said about crowds and weapons on Jan 6: "I don't F'ing care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me. Take the F'ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the F'ing mags away."
Lynch represents railway workers, speaks for working people, who earn small sums of money.
Trump represents the capitalist class and people who earn large sums of money.
Has there been a bishop or senior clergyman who has spoken in support of what Mick Lynch is saying?
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.
“People are sick and tired of being told by rich people that they have to rein their belts in and pull their purse strings tighter, and I don’t think people are going to take that any longer.
“If you don’t get fairness off the business community, there’s going to be a response.”
About the press he says: “They’re a bit shallow and a bit unprepared and a bit glib."
-Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the RMT in an interview with Niamc h Horan in the Sunday Independent yesterday.
Jennifer O’Connell in her piece in The Irish Times yesterday, asking How Dublin is getting tourism so wrong has a great one liner explaining why the capital is getting it all so wrong:
“The most concise explanation is a shortage of rooms and no shortage of greed."
EU countries have paid Russia €59 billion for oil since February 24, the day the Russian Army invaded Ukraine.
War never makes sense.
And while thousands of people are being killed and maimed weapons’ manufacturers are making large sums of money.
Hate him or love him but he is the man of the moment. London born of Irish parents, RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch is the supreme television personality right now.
He has interviewers shuffling for their notes, even laughing at their own questions. He makes backbenchers and senior government ministers look worse than pathetic.
And why is that? Because he is telling the story as it is. While billionaires are making more billions, working class people cannot put enough food on the table.
He is trying to protect rail workers being delivered up to the tricksters who take the last penny from the working class to put it in the pockets of the billionaires.
Below are some interview clips with the RMT General Secretary.
It is quite extraordinary how history these days is repeating itself hour-for-hour but in some sort of perverse way.
On this day, June 23, 1941 the Lithuanian Activist Front declared independence from the Soviet Union and formed the Provisional Government of Lithuania.
Some few weeks later Germany occupied Lithuania, which put an end to the country’s brief independence.
In these days Russia is threatening independent Lithuania as a consequence of EU sanctions halting the passage of some materials between Russia and Kaliningrad.
On Tuesday co-leader of the SPD and a member of the German parliament, Lars Klingbeil said that it was time for Germany to forsake 80 years of playing a minor role in Europe and make itself militarily strong.
This piece by Kathy Sheridan in The Irish Times today. It needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
The energy emanating from the Athlone assembly of the Catholic faithful seemed hopeful – but for whom?
When the lay membership of any church feels obliged to prioritise compassion and inclusivity in the demands of its hierarchy and then expresses surprised gratitude for being heard, the bar seems comically low.
For those wobbling on the margins, neither in nor quite out, it’s the silly own goals that come to mind.
Ten years ago, I was assigned to cover the funeral of Barney McKenna, the last of the original Dubliners ballad group.
McKenna was 72 and the congregation crammed into St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Trim, Co Meath, led by McKenna’s siblings and partner along with President Michael D Higgins, reflected the years totted up by that generation.
Most would have gone home or for a bracing beverage of some kind after the Mass but since the Meath diocese forbids eulogies inside the church, they felt bound to walk or limp to the cemetery instead to hear McKenna’s old brother-in-arms, John Sheahan (72) eulogise his gentle-natured friend.
It was a sorry spectacle. While the 72-year-old president took shelter from the chilly April rain under the undertaker’s gazebo, other older people had to pick their way through sodden clay and around gravestones to seek a safe footing near Sheahan as he struggled to make himself heard in the drizzle.
McKenna once explained to him, said Sheahan, that “holding a plectrum is like holding a fledgling bird. If you squeeze it too hard, you’ll choke it, and if you hold it too gently, it will fly away, so it’s somewhere in between”.
Surveying the damp and shivering old mourners forced by diocesan policy to leave the shelter of the people’s church to hear a moving and respectful eulogy, it seemed that McKenna’s analogy could as easily have been applied to the church.
In what universe of compassion and inclusivity could that scene have made sense? My report described the mood among mourners as “fractious”.
Some weeks ago, that memory roared back to life – but too late sadly – when I arrived, eulogy in hand, at a different church in the same diocese, for the funeral of a family member. Having listened in the preceding days to hundreds of moving testaments of his many remarkably discreet and surprising kindnesses, it seemed appropriate that some should be included in a short appreciation by a relative in the church.
The officiating priest had put out the word that he wanted to talk to me. He was standing beside the hearse where the coffin lay waiting to be carried into the church. Without a perfunctory “sorry for your loss” he declared that no eulogies were permitted in this diocese, asked to see the speech anyway, flicked officiously through the pages, pronounced it to be indeed a eulogy – ie bad – but agreed (with himself) that he would read parts of it, described as “remarks” from the family, before mass began. All the while a large crowd of mourners eyed us and the coffin in disbelief. Then he went away with my pages.
It’s fair to say that our deceased relative would have found the entire scene hilarious. But observers of my generation were not amused. More pertinently for the church, the large groups of protective young people around us were stunned.
Clearly the debate is more nuanced than a flat ban or facilitating a free for all. Paragraph 382 of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal: “At the funeral Mass there should, as a rule, be a short homily, but never a eulogy of any kind”. The bishop of Meath has endorsed that, rigorously.
He must feel vindicated when he hears of eulogies and altar offerings being egregiously abused elsewhere, the most recent being when the deceased was described as a “f**king legend”, and the offerings included a screwdriver, a torch and a banner with the words,“You know the score, get on the floor, don’t be funny, show me the money.”
Yet for the majority of mourners muddling through a haze of shock and grief, eulogies represent something complementary to the death and resurrection liturgy, a comfortingly familiar relative or friend with relatable things to say in a solemn setting about a dear one’s footprint on earth.
Funeral negotiations are delicate by definition. The bereaved are exhausted and nerves are fraught. The wise officiants – and there are some – seek a middle path in what they know are simultaneously the worst days of a family’s life and the church’s best – potentially; a rare opportunity to demonstrate that longed-for compassion and inclusivity to strangers entering its doors.
A model for grown-up discussion was articulated some years ago by Fr Joe Mullan, a Dublin diocesan priest, after a famously lively funeral. “To forbid someone speaking seems unnecessary to me, harsh even; why not allow one of the community to speak about the deceased and the way in which their life was God’s gift to the world. The length of the address, the choice of person to deliver it and the general tone can all be discussed often with some pretty firm guidelines laid down.”
Why poke a terminally weary faithful in the first place? What’s the use of hidebound rules if there is no one left to abide by them?
The latest EU sanctions against Russia involve not allowing certain goods travel through EU member State Lithuania en route to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
Russia has informed Lithuania that there will be severe consequences for this latest action.
Lithuania is a member of the EU and Nato, and the lead Nato troops in the country are the Bundeswehr, German troops.
Until 1945 Kaliningrad was Königsberg - a German city, the home of Immanuel Kant (born April 22, 1724).
Russia has direct access to the city, which has a population of 500,000, through the Baltic.
This is a most serious development and the world must surely be holding its breath.
Yesterday the first of Germany’s howitzers arrived in Ukraine.
The howitzer made by Krauss-Maffie Wegmann and Rheinmetall is one of the most powerful artillery systems used in modern warfare.
That German howitzers are in combat against Russian artillery on Ukrainian soil sounds unthinkable.
Kaliningrad may have changed its name from Königsberg but right now there is so much of what is happening in Ukraine that is steeped in history, in names, in battles. This time it is all turned upside down, with Russia as the aggressor and Germany on the side of the free democratic world.
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column
"Power is the ability not to just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”
- Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In her Ted talk about cultural stereotypes Adichie describes a phenomenon she calls ‘the danger of a single story’.
“Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become."
A damning report of clerical child sex abuse has been published in the German diocese of Münster. The independent report was carried out by the University of Münster
The diocese lies in the state of North Rhine Wesfalia and includes an area which has a significantly large Catholic population.
The study covers the period between 1945 and 2020. In that period 196 clerics sexually abused over 600 children. But there are hints that there could have been between five and six thousand under-age young people abused by clerics.
The report has received much publicity in the German media over the last number of days.
The current bishop of the diocese is Felix Genn. He admits failures had been made and criticised previous bishops in the diocese. He also said that he is part of the organisation from which the perpetrators came.
But Genn says he won't be resigning in light of the report, which criticises the way he dealt with sexual abuse. The bishop has stressed that he never attempted to cover up any of the wrongdoing.
The Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times today.
Michael Commane
While I was sitting at the hospital bedside of an elderly woman, she received a text message from one of her grandchildren. Having read the message she looked at me and said how the world had changed since she had been a teenager. We agreed that young people today have great opportunities. She asked me – in something of a rhetorical question – if it was all for the better. That led to an interesting conversation about the pros and cons of the times that are in it. We agreed that there’s never a paradise on earth.
The death of Noel Collins has been carried across many Irish media platforms. The piece below is from Tuesday’s issue of The Irish Times.
It refers to Mr Collins studying for the priesthood.
Noel spent some time with the Dominicans in Tallaght in the late 1950s. On leaving the Dominicans he wrote a critical account of his experience in Tallaght, which was published in the News of The World.
Ireland’s longest serving public representative Noel Collins who died on Monday repeatedly topped the poll for over half a century despite shunning modern technology such as mobile phones and computers.
The Cork County councillor was in his late 80s when he died at Oaklodge Nursing Home in East Cork. He was a public representative for 55 years, representing the people of Midleton and East Cork on Midleton Urban District Council and Cork County Council.
“Noel was unique,” said his close friend, Cllr Michael Hegarty of Fine Gael. “He never drove, he had a landline but never gave out the number, he never had a mobile phone or used a computer and shunned social media and yet he topped the poll time after time in East Cork in the county council elections.”
Cllr Collins was, to use his own phrase “of Blueshirt stock”, but he went his own way as an Independent in 1969 when he failed to get a party nomination for the next general election.
“Noel used to use a typewriter for all his official correspondence to the council, but he would send handwritten letters to his constituents – he did a pile of work in his own quiet way for people who might be going through tough times – he was like a charity worker at times,” said Cllr Hegarty.
A past pupil of Mount Melleray, Cllr Collins studied for the priesthood but abandoned the clerical life to go working in the UK as a professional social worker before returning to Ireland to work in a grocer’s shop in Midleton from where he began his political career in the late 1960s.
But as fellow Independent, Cllr Alan Coleman recalled, Cllr Collins never quite left his clerical training behind him. “He used to come in with his motions typed out and he was a brilliant orator as he proposed his motion – it was like listening to a bishop and you would listen through to the end.”
While he was deeply religious, Cllr Collins was far from judgmental and had a commitment to social justice that made him popular across the chamber, garnering him huge respect from political colleagues and great affection from council staff.
“I think everyone in the council, colleagues and officials will be very sad at Noel’s passing because there was great affection for him – I will remember him as a close friend and colleague but more so, he will be remembered for the great work he did for the people of East Cork and beyond,” Cllr Hegarty said.
Mayor of Cork County Cllr Gillian Coughlan led the formal tributes, pointing out that the late Cllr Collins was “the longest sitting councillor since the establishment of Cork County Council and the longest serving public representative in the State”.
Cllr Coughlan pointed out that when Cllr Collins celebrated 50 years of unbroken service as a public representative in 2017, his fellow councillors remarked on his unwavering dedication to social justice, his uncanny local knowledge and his generous support and advice to younger councillors.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin also paid tribute to Cllr Collins, whom he described as a friend whose great commitment to helping the less well off and his tireless dedication to fighting for the most vulnerable in society were qualities that he greatly admired.
His body will be lying in repose at the Church of the Most Holy Rosary in Midleton after 6pm on Tuesday, June 14th with requiem mass taking place at 11am on Wednesday, June 15th after which his remains will be transferred at his instruction to University College Cork for medical research.
If President Vladimir Putin tells the word that the reason for his ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine is to protect its borders and to make sure the security of Russia is protected why then is the Russian Army blowing to smithereens the eastern part of Ukraine, which Putin claims is pro Russian?
When this evil war eventually comes to an end and if Putin succeeds in his terror, what then?
In the meantime Alexei Navalny has been moved to an unknown penal colony.
How is is that tyrants, dictators and despots so often win the minds and hearts of so many people?
The link below is about Navalny’s disappearance.
This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column
"Russian organised-crime leaders, their members, their associates, are moving into Western Europe, they are purchasing property, they are establishing bank accounts, they’re establishing companies, they’re weaving themselves into the fabric of society, and by the time that Europe develops an awareness it’s going to be too late."
- Former FBI special agent Bob Levinson
Levinson disappeared on March 9, 2007, in Kish Island, Iran, while on a mission for the Central Intelligence Agency.
An Iranian man who illegally entered the United Kingdom in recent weeks is to be sent to Rwanda next Tuesday on the first deportation flight to the central African country.
The Iranian was a policeman in the Islamic Republic. He had been asked to open fire at a demonstration, refused and was subsequently arrested. Eventually he fled Iran and made his way to England.
Yesterday a high court judge ruled that a controversial deportation flight to Rwanda that was due to take off early next week can go ahead.
Mr Justice Swift refused to grant interim relief – urgent action in response to an injunction application made by four asylum seekers facing offshoring to Rwanda.
Lawyers acting for the asylum seekers and the groups had argued the policy was unlawful and sought the urgent injunction to stop next week’s planned flight and any other such flights ahead of a full hearing of the case later in the year.
The decision will not stop individual refugees from further legal challenges to their removal to Rwanda, or a judicial review of the policy – which Justice Swift said could take six weeks.
Catherine Belton joins Dan on the podcast to discuss the remarkable story of Vladimir Putin's rise to power.
After working from 2007-2013 as the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, Catherine's career has offered an exclusive insight into the workings of Putin's Kremlin.
Her book 'Putin's People' is packed with interviews with the key inside players, uncovering fascinating details about how Putin subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe.
It's a story of billions of dollars being siphoned out of state enterprises, murky networks of operatives and the suppression of independent voices.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/dan-snows-history-hit/id1042631089?i=1000563188277
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on a visit to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on Tuesday said Russia had broken all the rules that countries had been abiding by for decades.
He assured Baltic State leaders that Nato is fully committed to defending every centimetre of the alliance’s territory.
The three Baltic countries all border Russia, and Latvia and Lithuania border Russian ally Belarus.
Thousands of Nato soldiers, including German troops, are stationed in the three countries.
Scholz assured his listeners "we are demonstrating unity in the face of Russia's aggression.”
The Chancellor spoke of the allocation of €100 billion to the German Army, saying that would help it become the strongest armed forces in Europe and the most powerful in Nato.
He said that support for Ukraine would be provided for as long as it was necessary.
This is an extract from DW - Deutsche Welle.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her legacy on Ukraine on Tuesday in her first major interview since leaving office.
Alexander Osang interviewed the former chancellor for Berlin Television. The venue was the Berlin Ensemble Theatre.
She refused to apologise for her policies towards Moscow, but stressed there was no justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
"It's an objective breach of all international laws and of everything that allows us in Europe to live in peace at all. If we start going back through the centuries and arguing over which bit of territory should belong to whom, then we will only have war. That's not an option whatsoever.”
Merkel on Putin
The former chancellor insisted she had not been naive in her dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"Diplomacy isn't wrong just because it hasn't worked," she said. However, she never believed he could be won over by trade promises. "Military deterrence is the only language he understands," she said.
Merkel recalled a 2007 summit in the Russian resort of Sochi. Knowing Merkel's dislike of dogs, Putin famously encouraged his own dog to approach the German chancellor.
Putin told her that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been "the worst event of the 20th century.”
Merkel replied that for her, as someone who grew up in communist East Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall meant she could live her life in freedom.
It was obvious already, she said, that there was a "great discrepancy.”
Putin, she said, "hated" the Western model of democracy and wanted to "destroy" the European Union.
Merkel on opposition to Ukraine joining NATO
Merkel defended her opposition to Ukraine and Georgia joining Nato in 2008. At the time, Nato pledged that the two countries would join at some point in the future, but declined to trigger the "membership action plan" to let them join the alliance within five to 10 years.
In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hit out at Angela Merkel and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, suggesting their move had been a clear "miscalculation" that emboldened Russia. The Ukrainian president made his remarks after alleged human rights violations by Russian forces came to light in Bucha.
In Tuesday's interview, Merkel said that if Nato had granted them membership, Russian President Vladimir Putin could have caused "enormous damage in Ukraine." As it was, Russia invaded Georgia less than six months after this declaration in Bucharest, instigating Europe’s first war in the 21st century.
Merkel also cited systemic corruption issues in Ukraine as reasons to block their membership.
"President Zelenskyy is bravely fighting against corruption, but at the time, Ukraine really was a country governed by oligarchs, and so there you can't just say 'ok tomorrow we'll take them into Nato,'" she said.
"It was not the Ukraine that we know from today. It was a Ukraine that was very, very divided politically," she said. "It was not a stable democracy. And when you accept a country into a Nato — and the Membership Action Plan is the clear precursor to that — you have to know that we are then prepared to really defend such a country if there is an attack.”
"Secondly, I was very sure … that Putin is not going to just let that happen. From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war."
Merkel on the Minsk agreement
Merkel said the Minsk agreement — a 2014 deal she helped broker to ease the conflict between government forces and Russian-backed separatists — while not entirely palatable to the Ukrainians, bought important time for Ukraine.
"This agreement was commended, approved, welcomed by the EU. This agreement has been incorporated into a UN Security Council resolution, so it has the character of international law," she said.
"At the time, it brought calm and gave Ukraine, for example, a lot of time, seven years, to develop into what it is today.”
Merkel conceded that there could have been a harsher response to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, but that serious steps had been taken. She cited Russia's exclusion from the Group of Eight (Leading Industrial Nations) and NATO's stipulation that members spend 2% of GDP on defence.
By the end of her chancellorship, it was clear that Russia was moving in the direction of conflict, she said. And that Russia was finished with the Normandy format talks [between Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia].
"I don't blame myself for not having tried hard enough," Merkel responded to a question about how much she could have done to prevent an escalation with Russia. "I tried sufficiently. It is a great sadness that I did not succeed.”
Merkel on the US and Nord Stream 2 sanctions
The former chancellor also touched briefly on the controversial, now-mothballed Nord Stream 2 pipeline, largely to criticize the US decision to sanction entities over their participation in the gas project.
"Basically, they sanctioned us as allies because of a different political opinion.”
"What we have learned is Putin attacked Ukraine even though Nord Stream 2 was not yet in operation. So he didn't wait, but that this was a geopolitical goal of preventing a country on his doorstep from choosing another model, which he describes as Western-influenced.”
She said that given Russia’s proximity to Europe, it was politically impossible not to trade with each other. However, she denied believing that she thought it was possible to transform Russia through trade.
Merkel's government has been criticized for steering Germany into its considerable dependency on Russian oil and gas. Yearslong construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry Russian fuel directly to Germany was officially completed and ready to begin operation before it was put on indefinite hold by current Chancellor Olaf Scholz just days before Russian forces launched their assault in February.
But Germany's "appeasement of Russia" runs through decades of German foreign policy. The clearest shift in stance came under former Chancellor Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat, whose 1969 "Ostpolitik" was reviled by conservatives. Successive West German and reunified German governments, including those headed by Merkel, then continued to pursue a policy of constructive cooperation.
