Ukraine says MEP Clare Daly promotes Russian propaganda

Irish MEP Clare Daly has been included on a list of international public figures who promote Kremlin propaganda.

The MEP’s father was a senior officer in the Irish Army and her brother is a Jesuit priest.

The lights begin to dim in Germany

Germany is turning off lights on public buildings. All illuminations are to be turned off and all showers at public swimming pools supply only cold water.

Last night the iconic Berlin cathedral was mainly in darkness.

Germany has decided to send 16 Biber bridge-layer tanks to Ukrainian forces.

“The Biber will enable Ukrainian troops to cross waters or obstacles in combat,” the defence ministry said in a statement. 

“The delivery of the first six systems will take place this year, starting in autumn. Ten more systems will follow next year.”

The Biber tanks are armoured support vehicles equipped with a bridge-laying system instead of the turret, which can be deployed to help troops cross streams, ditches or other obstacles on the battlefield.

The announcement comes days after it emerged Germany had given the green light to a request by the defence company Krauss-Maffei Wegmann to produce 100 Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzers for the Ukrainian army.

Bishops may not be happy with synodal process

The text below is from an article  written by Sarah McDonald in the current issue of The Tablet.

Is there a tone or a sense in this article that might remind one of what Archbishop John Charles McQuaid said on his return from Rome having attended the Council?

In his homily at the annual Mass and investiture of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem in St Patrick’s College Chapel, Maynooth, Archbishop Eamon Martin stressed the need for communion amid concerns over a polarisation of views emerging over the synod.

“Concerns have already been expressed in Ireland, and around the world, that the synodal discussions could damage, rather than create, communion in the Church,” he told the assembled Knights and Dames. 

He said it was “vitally important” to work together in Ireland to ensure that the ongoing synodal journey avoids divisiveness and polarisation of views, or degenerates into a “them and us” adversarial process which “loses sight of our shared belonging within the Church of Christ”. 

According to the Primate of All Ireland, the synodal synthesis will acknowledge the impact of a major decline in the practice of the faith, and in vocations to priesthood, to the religious life and to sacramental marriage. 

Many of the thousands of people who took part in the consultations over the past nine months called for greater transparency, participation in decision-making and accountability within parish and diocesan church structures. 

“We have heard about the importance of renewing our connection with the energy and gifts of our young people and of finding fresh models of responsibility and leadership which will especially recognise and facilitate the role of women, as well as men.”

The listening process also identified the need to reach out to those who have left the Church and, in some cases, feel excluded, forgotten or ignored. 

Underlining that this is not a time to “hunker down and try to wall off the vineyard of the Lord from the challenges of the world around us”, Archbishop Martin said the next chapter in the life of the Church in Ireland will be different to the last, and the Church may find itself increasingly marginalised in public debate.

But it must remain a Church that is outward looking, confident and prophetic. “We must become a Church which serves, a Church which is more about mission than maintenance, more about movements than monuments,” he said.

Separately, the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) has expressed its full support for the Irish bishops’ adoption of the Synodal Pathway as the way forward for the Catholic Church in Ireland 

QAnon on way to being America’s new religion

Michael McDowell’s column in The Irish Times yesterday

What is it about the Americans? A recent picture of ecstatic young male Trump supporters, on clad in a “Trump Won” T-Shirt, posed a question for me: did he really believe that and on what evidence? Ot is it a question of wishful thinking?

For a society that steadfastly refuses to “establish” any religion, even though most of the founding generation were nominal Christians of one kind or another, the United States has embraced Christian fundamentalism and other beliefs to an extent far greater than any modern society.

But it goes further than that, There is an emotional blotting paper type of appetite to believe in things that would appear improbable to most modern Europeans.

The Church of Scientology is a case in point. Significant and well-placed figures seem willing to ignore the origins of Scientology in the far-fetched writings of a very dubious figure, science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard, and to adhere to a sect that keeps most members in the dark as to its ultimate beliefs.

I cannot even attempt to explain their belief in Thetans in the space allotted here, but they can be summarised as types of spiritual entities which have existed for billions of years and who willed the universe into existence – disembodied entities occasionally captured in human bodies.

The niceties of these beliefs are not revealed to people who become members of the church until they succeed in graduating through various challenging stages of development. The documentary Going Clear (available online) shines some light on Scientology and it is not a very pretty sight.

Massive fabrication

The church claims eight to 15 million adherents worldwide but a US religious attitudes survey suggests this claim is a massive fabrication and that only 25,000 American are thought to be believers.

While European audiences may find the musical Book of Mormon an amusing piece of lighthearted comedy and while many of us are amazed by the zeal that sends earnest young Mormons to our doors seeking converts, there are, according to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more than 15 million believers worldwide – people who don’t see the funny side of the musical at all.

The origins of that book – golden plates of text briefly given by the angel Moroni to one Joseph Smith in the early 19th century showing that Jesus was in America in Biblical times and translated by him into the style and vernacular of the 17th century King James Bible – might appear implausible to most modern Europeans. But Mormonism is a strong and growing church in the Americas.

QAnon is a new phenomenon online dating from 2017 which propagates theories including Trump’s stolen election and another that America is controlled and manipulated by a cabal of liberal paedophiles which abducts and kills children as part of a satanic global conspiracy to dominate us.

They believe Donald Trump is secretly combating that evil cabal. While QAnon is not yet a church, it is well on the way to becoming a politico-religious sect in the way that Scientology morphed from science fiction into a self-styled church.

Beliefs

What do Americans make of QAnon beliefs?

While most Americans reject the beliefs of the QAnon conspiracy, recent surveys show a fifth of Americans share some of its beliefs, including more than 60 per cent of Republican voters who say they believe the last election was stolen. Some 14 per cent of Americans told one recent survey they regard themselves as QAnon supporters.

Trump has been careful not to alienate QAnon or disown its theories. He courts any form of fundamentalism and extremism he considers potentially useful to his forthcoming bid for re-election.And that re-election is by no means improbable, notwithstanding the proceedings of the US Congress January 6th Committee. The Democrats are probably within months of losing control of both Houses to the Republicans. Trump is still the most dominant force in the Republican Party.

Can we in Europe feel morally superior and aloof in respect of all these American developments? After all, we rely on the US for our collective security as the Ukraine war has once again emphasised.

Europe has been complacent and misguided in many ways, not least in its misreading of Putin. Those of us in Europe who are still happy to be called liberal feel helpless as the post-Cold War international order fractures and shows signs of crumbling.

Liberal democracy needs its own champions. At the time of writing, the UK is witnessing a nasty and vindictive, cynical political knife-fight among Tory factions – a struggle for control of what appears to be the bridge of a political Titanic. Europe too seems to be led by political nonentities.

Will anything save us from a remake of Make America Great Again? Is there any limit to American credulity?

Luke Mullally RIP (1994 - 2022)

A young man in Brandon, Co Kerry died unexpectedly last Friday. He was 28.

A friend of his said about him: “He was a kind person. The whole world would pass by and you’d take notice of it if you were talking to Luke Mullally.

May Luke rest in peace.

his funeral Mass is today in Brandon, in West Kerry.

A shame Irish Rail has no catering service

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

Covid has proved a disaster. It has killed millions of people worldwide but it has also done terrible damage to so many of the things we have taken for granted.

Before Covid Irish Rail offered a dining service on its InterCity trains along with a trolley facility, which worked its way through the train and allowed people to purchase light snacks and drinks. Alcohol was part of the menu.

With Covid restrictions lifted Irish Rail has not reintroduced its outsourced dining car and trolley services on its trains. And it has prohibited alcohol on all its services. 

I’ve been a regular traveller on the Dublin Cork/Tralee train for well over 30 years and in that time I have seldom if ever experienced any anti-social behaviour. During one three-year period I was travelling between Tralee and Dublin on a weekly basis. It meant using a super early morning train out of Tralee on Tuesdays and then returning to Kerry on a late evening train from Heuston. I don’t think I ever once had an uncomfortable experience.

Irish Rail has said it is going to take some time before its onboard catering service is resumed. The company is currently in search of a new service provider.

Does it really take that long to find someone who is willing and able to sell food and drink on trains? After all it is a captive audience.

I remember the time when Irish Rail provided its own catering service on its InterCity trains.

I have such fond memories travelling on the  then 09.00 direct service from Heuston to Tralee with my late father. Somewhere south of Portlaoise we would walk to the dining car and treat ourselves to that famous full Irish breakfast. It was delicious and over the years we both got to know the Irish Rail staff in the dining car. It was as good as anything on the Orient Express, at least so it seemed to me back in the day.

Once Irish Rail outsourced its catering service I for one felt that the mystique, the charm of dining on a train disappeared.

Might I suggest to Irish Rail instead of searching about for a new company to provide catering on its trains it could do a lot worse than return to what it once did so well. And by the way, I often wonder is out-sourcing really as wonderful as it’s made out to be.

The recent disclosures of Uber’s shenanigans in attempting to gain access to the Irish taxi market should be a warning to all of us. Congratulations are in order to the Uber whistleblower, who is an Irishman.

 

It’s the same old story with zero hour contracts, whereby the employer is not obliged to guarantee any working hours to the employee.

I have often spoken with contract workers to discover to my horror how inferior their terms of employment are compared with permanent staff.

It seems to be a relentless race to the bottom. It always means the rich get richer on the backs of the less well off. Also, I’d much prefer to live in a society, and with whistleblowers too, than in an economy.

The catastrophic accident that killed the Concorde dream

On this day, July 25, 2000 the supersonic passenger aircraft, Concorde crashed on take-off in Paris.

All 109 passengers and crew, and four people on the ground were killed. The plane ran over debris dropped on the runway from an earlier aircraft on take-off.

Concorde was retired in 2003 after 27 years of commercial operations.

The Russians also designed a supersonic passenger plane, the Tupelov Tu - 144. It flew for less than a year and crashed in May 1978.

The Concorde was a British French project. Design planning began in the 1950s.

The attire oft proclaim the woman

The Irish Times yesterday carried a two-page report on the story of Dundalk woman Lisa Smith, who on Friday was sentenced to 15 months in jail for membership to Islamic State.

There are two large pictures of Lisa, dressed in traditional Muslim attire. Her head is covered and she stands out as someone who dresses differently from her contemporaries.

In the August edition of the St Martin Magazine there is a photograph of a young woman, who is sitting either in what appears to be either a swing or hammock. She is smiling. Her name is not given.

Her head, like Lisa’s is covered and she too stands out as someone who dresses differently from her companions.

For both women their attire is linked to their belief in God.

German Catholic leaders astonished at Vatican warning

 From Crux

German Catholic leaders ‘astonished’ at Vatican warning about ‘Synodal Path’: https://cruxnow.com/church-in-europe/2022/07/german-catholic-leaders-astonished-at-vatican-warning-about-synodal-path/

The price of lobbying tells the story of what it is worth

In 2003 Google spent $80,000 on lobbying.

In 2021 Google spent $9.6 million on US lobbyists.

Vladimir Putin quickly saw the power of the media

The quote below is from Catherine Belton’s  Putin’s People. It’s a great read. It’s complicated at the beginning, especially with all the different characters and those unpronounceable Russian names. But if you stay with it you will discover it is a fascinating account about how Vladimir Putin is where the is today.

One has to ask the question is it true? And if so how come western intelligence did not know what was happening.

“Putin had become obsessed with the media’s power, knowing all too well how, with the help of Berezovsky’s TV channel, he’d been transformed from a nobody into the country’s most popular leader.

“He was aware that without control of the country’s federal TV channels, that could change at any time.”

Vladimir Putin knew exactly what he had to do and he did it. [Page 203]

Sailor and explorer Tom Crean

Tom Crean from West Kerry, who was a famous sailor and explorer was born on this day, July 20, 1877, though Wikipedia gives his birth as February 16, 1877. He died in 1938.

He took part in three major expeditions to Antarctica

Crean's third and final Antarctic venture was as second officer on Ernest Shackleton’sImperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. 

After the ship got stuck in the pack ice and sank, Crean and the ship's company spent 492 days drifting on the ice before undertaking a journey in the ship's lifeboats to Elephant Island. He was a member of the crew which made a small-boat journey of 800 nautical miles (1,500 km) from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island to seek aid for the stranded party.

After retiring from the navy on health grounds in 1920, Crean ran his pub the South Pole Inn in Annascaul in West Kerry with his wife and daughters. He died in 1938.

Covid meant a lot more time in front of the television screen

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

Covid isolation meant that I sat in front of the television far longer than I usually do. The Boris Johnson lies and shenanigans did add a large dollop of top class entertainment to my television viewing.

By accident I came across a film on RTE One, ‘A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood’. The name didn’t catch me but the blurb did and within two or three minutes into the film I decided it could be interesting and so it was, indeed, fascinating and much to learn from it. It’s based on a true story.

Journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) working for Esquire magazine was asked to write 400 words on children’s television presenter, Fred Rogers, (Tom Hanks) who was a famous American television personality, who hosted ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighbour’. The programme ran from 1968 to 2001. Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister and the programme was a feel-good show with innocence written all over it. A lovely simple show for young children and their parents.

When Lloyd Rhys is asked by his editor to write the piece on Rogers he feels it is below him as he considers himself a top-class investigative journalist. But he has no choice but to do what Ellen his editor tells him to do. There’s bad blood between the two of them and he feels this assignment is a clear demotion for him.

 

He heads off to Pittsburgh to interview Fred, convinced he would uncover him as a chancer and charlatan. Nothing of the sort happens. Slowly but surely he realises Fred is a genuinely good man.

Eventually the two of them become close friends and Fred is the catalyst for Lloyd rebuilding his relationship with his estranged father, Jerry.

Earlier in the film Lloyd had a fistfight with his father at his sister’s wedding. Lloyd’s mother had died when he was young and he hadn’t been impressed with his father’s philandering.

At face value Fred’s television programmes were simple stories appealing to children but the stories they told were universal truths and it was that same truth component of the shows that filtered down to Lloyd, which eventually made him come to terms with the long-hidden anger he had towards his father.

The originally commissioned 400-word article on Rogers ends up as a 10,000-word cover story and proves a best seller for Esquire magazine.

Of course the world has its fair share of tricksters and con artists. And maybe there are times when I can be a tad suspicious of what might seem too good to be true.

‘A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood’ is a reminder that there are genuinely good people out there doing great work. It’s better to see the glass half full than half empty. It is the job of the journalist to uncover wrong doing but it’s also our job to tell the good news stories as well.

Fred had a great way with children. Don’t we often underestimate the wisdom of children? Very often they are far more tuned in than we might realise.

The film had its world premier in 2019 and critics praised Hanks and Rhys for their performances. Time magazine named it as one of the best films of 2019.

Pope Francis reimposes restrictions on Latin Mass

Good news from the Vatican.

In recent weeks a priest of the Dublin Archdiocese was overheard saying that it is now his belief that the Catholic Church is heading of schism.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/francis-reimposes-restrictions-latin-mass-reversing-decision-pope-benedict

Uber revelations underline value of whistleblowing

Niamh Brennan, who is the Michael McCormac Professor of Management at University College Dublin, has an article on the Uber story in The Irish Times today.

She reveals how an Irishman exposed his former employer’s dirty tricks.

The article stresses the importance of whistleblowing, and the valuable job that whistleblowers do.

We are fortunate in Ireland to have the Protective Disclosures Act of 2014.

All organisations, whether secular, military, voluntary or religious are subject to all the laws of the land, including the law on whistleblowing.

Brennan concludes her article: "The leaks also highlight driver exploitation, with little concern for driver safety. The leaks reveal how the company side-stepped paying its fair share of taxes, instead redirecting tax officials to collect taxes from its drivers.

"All its lobbying was ultimately unsuccessful. Uber did not win Uber-friendly regulation in Ireland. Our civil servants and politicians are to be commended for standing firm against Uber’s efforts.”

It is interesting how the whistleblowing revealed how the company avoided paying its correct tax. It is also interesting how the revelations uncover the unorthodox relationship between Uber and its drivers.

“I have nothing else to do"

The Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times today.

Michael Commane

Recently I noticed an elderly patient in our hospital oratory. I spoke to him saying that it was an inspiration to see him simply sitting down in the oratory in prayer. He looked at me, smiled and said: “I have nothing else to do”.

We’d spoken before. He introduced himself to me one day  when I was rushing to a meeting and on that particular occasion I had been  somewhat brief with him as it was close to the time of our meeting.

 

Afterwards I was annoyed with myself for how I had handled our exchange. But subsequently we had some interesting and enjoyable encounters. A few days later I was laid low with Covid. I had been telling people how I had managed to escape it so far. And then like lightening it struck overnight and knocked me for six.

 

I have not seen that hospital patient since that day in the oratory,  but I shall never forget what he said. At the moment he spoke those words to me I stopped in my tracks. I was completely flabbergasted by how they had resonated with me. I have wondered since if  he realised  the effect they had.  They came tripping out of his mouth, completely naturally and then the pure honesty of the words: “I have nothing else to do”.

Tomorrow’s Gospel (Luke 10: 38 - 42) is the famous story of Martha and Mary. Martha, who is rushing about making sure everything is in order, criticises Mary “who sat down at the Lord’s feet and listened to him speaking.” In response Jesus upbraids Martha and assures her that Mary is a wise woman.

I have always been intrigued by how we can so easily put “spins”  on what we read and how that gospel is used in an attempt to promote the contemplative life within the churches.

On the other hand, isn’t it a pity we don’t think of that Gospel when we realise how we have turned quiet Sundays into frenetic shopping days.

As Jesus reminds us, that story can  be read two ways. I remember only too well that when I cared for my parents in old age the people who most impressed me were those who rolled up their sleeves and helped me with the dishwashing. Of course the chats and the comfort of friends help to get us through difficult days.

  

But when I read about the shooting in Highland Park, 40 km north of Chicago on July 4, where seven people were killed and dozens wounded I really did wonder about the fragility of our lives. A young couple Kevin McCarthy and his wife Irma were shot dead in the Chicago shooting, leaving behind their two-year-old son. And then there are the  thousands being killed and maimed in Ukraine. It makes no sense and how at all can we even try to put a handle on it? The young man who did the shooting in Chicago surely must have serious psychiatric problems. The young people driving the tanks and firing the missiles in Ukraine will not walk away from that butchery mentally healthy or well-adjusted . How can they?

How do we make sense of it all? I keep asking what is it all about? Life after death, resurrection? Is it possible to lay down one specific way of leading our lives? I doubt it.

 

How can we imagine ourselves all knowing and all powerful when we look around us and see what is happening? For myself  I wish the churches would take themselves less seriously, try to stop thinking that they know the mind of God. No one does. 

In all our rushing about, in all our belief in our own importance do we miss what’s staring us in the face. 

“I have nothing else to do”. The man who said that was praying to his God. He wasn’t killing people or making tanks. 

‘Too much whisky is barely enough'

Last week a rare Scotch whisky sold for £16 million to a private collector in Asia.

The single malt, which dates to November 1975, was produced at the 207-year-old Ardbeg distillery in the Scottish island of Islay.

Known as Cask No 3, the £16 million barrel sold for more then double the price that Ardbeg’s owner Glenmorangie Company, a subsidiary of LVMH luxury group, paid for the distillery and its entire stock in 1997

Some 88 bottles, priced at approximately £36,000 each, will be drawn from the cask each year for the next five years.

From the Financial Times Weekend Saturday, July 9/Sunday. July 10.

Mark Twain has something to say on the topic: “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whisky is barely enough.”

An apposite quote form Vladimir Lenin

 "The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament". Lenin

A Northern Ireland transphobe

This is extremely funny. 

It’s not gone away and I know firsthand

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers' column.

Michael Commane

I’d been telling everyone that I had managed to avoid Covid, at least so far. And would add that I usually pick up every sort of dirt but have dodged Covid. Only in mid-June I gave out my spiel with a smile, saying: ‘touch wood, no Covid,’ and at that, I’d jokingly touch my head.

My luck ran out. Late on Thursday, June 30 I felt queasy, not exactly sure what was wrong with me. But by early Friday morning I knew exactly what the score was. I felt worse than miserable. 

Over the last two years there was a number of occasions when I wondered should I take an antigen test but on this occasion I had no doubt what the result would be. I had almost forgotten how to take the test. Within minutes of swabbing my nose and ‘filtering’ the solution into the reader the two pink lines appeared. I had Covid but I didn’t need the test to tell me that.

It was a weird sensation. I felt my legs were hanging off, plus a feeling of nausea and dizziness. I wanted to cough but couldn’t do so in any satisfactory way and I had also broken out into a terrible sweat. I was floored. But I had no temperature, it kept hovering at 37.7 Celsius.

I have been flabbergasted with how suddenly it attacked me. Just imagine had I been on an early morning train to Kerry or snaking along in a queue at Dublin Airport. It’s unthinkable.

After 48 hours of misery I felt the worst was over and began to experience normality return to my veins.

With a few minor hiccups and annoyances, within a few days I was back to my usual good-healthy condition. I’ve been fortunate. What would it have been like had I not had my two boosters? What would it have been like had I had some underlying condition? What would it have been like if I were living in war-torn Ukraine?

It’s been another moment for me to realise how fortunate and privileged I am.

 

I remember back in March 2020 seeing firsthand how Covid had the viciousness to take the lives of those who were weak and vulnerable.

It’s been the strangest of times. We have had the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. But most of all we have had our nurses, doctors, carers, all the medical personnel, going that proverbial extra mile to protect and save us. And we have also had our Government and the HSE organising the greatest ever campaign in the history of the State. 

Of course mistakes were made, anywhere there is life, mistakes are made. From day one of this pandemic I have had no patience with the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. But now, having fallen victim to Covid, I find myself getting apoplectic  with the madness, nastiness, stupidity and arrogance of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.

A word of caution. It’s important that we remain on our guard. Keep up to speed with HSE.ie. Is it time to make mask wearing compulsory on public transport and in public buildings? I’m inclined to think it is. It’s not gone away you know. I know firsthand. And thanks to all who helped and advised me.

In a time of plague Jonhnson’s act wasn't funny anymore

A piece by Fintan O’Toole in the Weekend Review section of The Irish Times Weekend. It makes for great reading.

What happens to the boy in the bubble when the bubble bursts? He falls from a great height.

The vehicle in which Boris Johnson floated to power was Brexit. It took him to an astonishing place, one where, in any sane world, he did not belong.

But bubbles are wildly erratic in their movements, and they don’t last. The same was always going to be true of Johnson’s premiership.

There is, in much of the British media and within the Conservative Party, a story about this week’s surreal events: they are all to do with character. They have nothing to do with policy.

This is self-delusion. For Johnson’s character is itself inextricable from the biggest policy decision Britain has made in the last 50 years: leaving the European Union.

His great strength, indeed, was his uncanny ability to embody an entire, and epic, political project. Others cared about Brexit and fought for years to make it happen. But Johnson, who did not care about it, gave it an ample physical form, a voice, an attitude.

The old Eurosceptic cranks wrote a script – Johnson performed it. Without his brilliant ability to enact Brexit as a persona, it would simply not have happened.

Just as 18th-century cartoonists invented England as a character – the big, meaty, stubborn John Bull – Johnson reinvented it as Boris: big, meaty, stubborn, anarchic, rule-breaking, freedom-loving, fun.

That’s what 52 per cent of UK voters voted for in June 2016. Not a political and economic programme — there wasn’t one. But a spirit of “freedom”, a word made flesh in the unlikely, ungainly but instantly recognisable shape of an Old Etonian populist.

In this act there was a confusion of two meanings of “character”. “Boris” was a great character, in the sense of a fictional personage. Johnson was, and is, a terrible character. Sooner or later, the second reality was always going to overtake the first.

It is hard to overstate the degree to which Johnson was the single greatest asset for the Leave side in the 2016 referendum. Andrew Cooper, chief pollster for the Remain campaign, later admitted that “in the focus groups and in our polling, Boris invariably came top on the question of which politician has made the most persuasive impact”.

Detailed exit polls found that how people felt about Johnson correlated strongly with how they voted. It is not a stretch to suggest that if Johnson — as he might just as well have done — plumped for Remain, the UK would still be in the EU.

Why was Johnson so extraordinarily influential at such a momentous moment?

Firstly, because, in his extraordinary fusion of the Upper Class Twit with the Man of the People, he brought together two currents of Englishness. One was that weird concoction, Tory anarchism, the privileged fecklessness of a decadent post-imperial ruling class. The other was the two-fingered salute to “the establishment” favoured by a post-industrial working class.

The Bullingdon Club brat and the spit-in-your face punk are not all that far apart. “Boris” brought them together, creating a cross-class alliance that carried Brexit and smashed the Labour Party’s red wall of old proletarian loyalty.

Secondly, he embodied a promise that was at the heart of the Brexit moment: no consequences. If part of the appeal of Brexit was that you can f**k everything up, the crucial other half was that you can f**k everything up and yet pay no price.

If Johnson were a stick of rock, No Consequences would be written all through it. In his personal life, in his journalistic career and in his political adventures, he has always been the one who walks away unscathed and leaves other people to clean up his mess.

There could be no one more fitted to personify the promise that Brexit would be like this, that Brits could (as Johnson repeatedly promised) leave the EU but still enjoy all of its advantages. Bear in mind that Johnson actually thought – or claimed to think – that the UK could still have a seat on the European Commission after Brexit.

Showman

But, in the end, there are consequences. As they accumulated, Johnson’s real character could not sustain the potency of his fictional one.

The first and most obvious consequence was that a man so patently unable to govern himself could not possibly govern a country.

Everybody knew this. Johnson had held two serious political offices.

As mayor of London his job was quickly delegated to competent subordinates, while he became a frontman and a showman, indulging himself with idiotic and grandiose schemes (Boris Island, the Garden Bridge) on which, to use a term from his own adolescent Etonian vocabulary, he spaffed tens of millions of pounds.

As foreign secretary he was almost universally hailed as the worst holder of that great office. His highlights reel includes giving Iran the excuse to lengthen its detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and sucking up to a prominent ex-KGB agent.

It says much for the self-proclaimed patriotism of so many Tories that they knew damn well that Johnson was simply incapable of functioning in high office with either honour or ability — and yet gave him the keys to 10 Downing Street anyway.

There is a nice line in an Elbow song: “I want to be in a town where they know what I’m like and don’t mind.” Brexit turned the Conservative Party into the town where they knew exactly what Johnson was like and didn’t mind – so long as his bumptious energy could keep their bubble aloft for another year or two.

And so long as he was fun. Johnson’s great skill was that of dissolving the difference between a serious thing and a joke. The tongue with which he lied was always also, somehow, always in his cheek.

But the problem with every comic act is that it requires the collusion of the audience. If the crowd decides that it is no longer amused, the act dies, excruciatingly, on stage.

This shift would probably have happened anyway, simply because government is a serious business. But the pace of the shift was greatly advanced by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a time of plague, Johnson’s act wasn’t funny anymore. Not that he didn’t try: he allegedly told his subordinates in one fit of fury: “no more f**king lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

But no one was laughing anymore. And the anarchic rule-breaking that had appealed to so many people in England became suddenly less attractive when it meant that Johnson and his subordinates were flouting all the rules that ordinary people had to follow, often at great personal and emotional cost. “Freedom” turned out to mean what it has always meant for the upper-class: the right to do as they please while telling the peasants to obey. The peasants finally realised that they were not in on the joke – they were the joke.

Without the protective force field of “only joking”, Johnson could not possibly ward off the consequences of his own cynicism, corruption and incompetence. His habitual mendacity, having lost that quality of comic evasiveness that had made it palatable to so many of his compatriots, now looked like what it was: crude and constant lies.

Perhaps none of this would have mattered much, though, had it not been for that deeper revenge of consequence: the bursting of the Brexit bubble.

Johnson managed to squeeze two distinct (and essentially contradictory) energies out of the Brexit story. But neither of them could be sustained.

Mindless boosterism

The initial energy was boundless optimism – the Golden Age, the sunlit uplands, the new dawn of “world-beating” Britain in which the gloomsters and doomsters would be put to flight and all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

English political culture was alarmingly susceptible to this kind of mindless boosterism – but blather is still blather. The sharp pin of reality was always waiting for the bubble.

Brexit is making most British people poorer. The sunlit uplands, as the SDLP MP Claire Hanna put it recently, are becoming ever more obviously the gaslit uplands – a fake world that no one can inhabit. Johnson, though, got a second shot at shaping this story. He turned it – again with a rather brilliant opportunism – into a much more downbeat appeal: let’s get this bloody thing over with.

He won an election, and a huge parliamentary majority, on a breathtakingly brazen slogan: Get Brexit Done. It implicitly conceded that most people just wanted not to be bothered anymore by his grand project.

But he couldn’t even deliver on this promise to pretend the whole thing never happened. He couldn’t do it because he had nothing else to offer.

Stoking and exploiting English animosity to Europe has been Johnson’s career-defining shtick. It’s the horse he rode in on. But once Brexit actually happened, it also died under him.

The “Boris” act was essentially a one-hit wonder. That hit was massive, mega, multi-platinum. But his follow-up numbers – Levelling Up, War on Woke – were flops.

He had to become his own tawdry tribute band, using the Northern Ireland protocol to play an increasingly out-of-tune rehash of the same old song.

The DUP and the Brexit ultras in the ERG may have applauded, but the vast majority of English voters were merely bored and baffled.

What, then, happens to Brexit without Johnson? To call it Hamlet without the prince would be to dignify it too much. There is too much farce intertwined with this tragedy.

It is, perhaps, just a circus without its clown, its high-wire act, its illusionist and its contortionist. Johnson has been all of those things – and the performance has been dizzying to watch, by turns gloriously ludicrous and incredibly death-defying.

Where the tragedy does lie for his compatriots is that this is a circus that will not fold its tents and leave town. It has taken up residence in the main square and cannot be shifted.

Who can replace Johnson as its star act? No one.

Part of the reason why the succession race is so open is that Johnson can have no successor. He embodied a project that has no future, that is merely stuck in a moment it can’t get out of.

Johnson’s only value to his country has been as a stress test. He showed that its existing order was so fragile that an absurd opportunist, armed only with excruciating jokes, debating society bombast and a bottomless well of shamelessness, could shape it to his own appetites.

If the UK is to have a future, it must start by asking not how Johnson finally fell, but how it was possible for him to rise so high.

Remembering the day Yeltsin became Russian president

On this day, July 10, 1991 Boris Yeltsin became the first elected president of Russia.

The Queen’s English in a fading empire

Overheard during the news marathon on the Boris Johnson saga.

This sentence from Conservative Brexiteer MP, Peter Bone and a Boris Johnson fan, who sounds extremely posh and a tad arrogant. Surely a fact is always true: "You are saying a fact that is not true."

And this from Sky reporter John Crea, again talking about the resigning UK prime minister: "A clear lack of dishonesty.” 

Would that not make Boris Johnson an honest and truthful man?

And the man himself, standing outside 10 Downing Street said that he had the best job in the world.

To think that the sun never sat on the British Empire. How ruling organisations, secular and religious, subjugate and fool so many.

Former Dominican Barry Nyhan (1945 - 2022) - an obituary

Barry Nyhan was born close 

to Sunday's Well in Cork city on September 12, 1945. He attended Coláiste Éamann Rís Christian Brothers School on the southside of the city. Two other Christian Brothers’ schools were much closer to his home on the north side but the family had links with the school as an uncle of his was the main building contractor on the Sullivan’s Quay project.

For many Dominican novices in the 1960s, '70s and '80s the Nyhan household was a port of call, where they were always received with open arms by Mrs Nyhan. 

Barry, who grew up close to the Dominican Priory in Pope’s Quay, where he served as an altar boy alongside James O’Gorman, joined the Dominican Order with James in September 1962 and both were ordained priests on July 6, 1969. Barry died on the 53rd anniversary of his priestly ordination, Wednesday, July 6, 2022. James died in 2002.

Barry studied philosophy and theology at the Dominican Studium in Tallaght. 

After priestly ordination he did postgraduate studies in theology at the University of St Thomas in Rome while living at the Dominican Priory in San Clemente on the Via Labicana.

On returning to Ireland he obtained his Higher Diploma in Education and taught christian doctrine in a vocational school in Dublin's north inner city. During this time he was a member of the Dominican community in St Saviour’s on Dublin’s Upper Dorset Street.

Barry resigned from his priesthood in 1975/1976 and married Jane Robinson in 1978. They had two children, Stephen and Marc.

Barry obtained a Masters in Education, First Class Honours, from Trinity College, Dublin and was awarded a PhD from the University of Bremen in 2004.

He spent most of his working career with the European Commission in Maastricht, Brussels and Thessaloniki, where he worked on the development of further education. He coordinated programmes to assist the advancement of adult/further education within the European Union. 

Before taking up employment with the European Commission Barry worked with AnCo, the National Manpower Service and the Youth Employment Agency, later named Fás and now called Solas.

On retiring from the European Commission in 2007 Jane and Barry returned to Ireland, living in their home in Churchtown.

Barry kept in close contact with the Irish Dominicans and had life-long friends within the Order. 

For many years both he, Michael McCarthy and Jerry O’Keeffe, also  former Dominicans, made it their business to call to visit Fr Fergal O’Connor in Dominick Street, before attending rugby matches at Lansdowne Road.

Barry was a man of great faith, who was an avid reader of theology. His theology/philosophy studies strongly influenced him all during his working career.

The proud Cork man was interested in many sports. He played golf  with a respectable handicap and was an excellent Gaelic, rugby and soccer player. It is said by many of his friends that he was close to being of FAI football league standard. And of course he was an avid supporter of Cork hurlers and footballers but had been greatly disappointed in how they had performed in recent years.

He enjoyed hill walking, and before they became popular on Irish roads, he cycled a fold-up bicycle, indeed he was the proud owner of the Rolls Royce of fold-ups - a Brompton.

Barry was a first cousin of the late Fr Micheál O’Regan, a Dominican priest who died in 1997 at the age of 59.

He was a tall, athletic person, who loved the great outdoors. So, when struck down with a form of Parkinson’s/Lewy body dementia approximately two years ago it came to him as a great shock. But he carried his illness with dignity and patience.

Barry Nyhan was the quintessential gentleman. He was the kindest of men, a gracious person, who always saw the positive in the other person.

His retiring from priesthood was a terrible loss to the Irish Dominican Province but a wonderful moment for his wife Jane and for their two children, who would later be born to them.

It so happens that Stephen, who lives in Dublin, is married to a woman from South Korea, and Marc, who currently lives in Japan, is married to a Japanese woman. 

Barry’s funeral Mass takes place on Saturday at 11.00 in the Church of SS Columbanus and Gall, Milltown followed by committal in the Garden Chapel at Mount Jerome Crematorium. The funeral Mass will be live-streamed at mcnmedia.tv/camera/milltown-parish

I shall greatly miss his friendship; his kindness and wisdom.

May Barry rest in Peace.

Former Dominican Barry Nyhan dies

Barry Nyhan died close to midnight on Wednesday, July 6 in Orwell Care Nursing Home.

The former Dominican was a gentleman.

An obituary to follow. 

Pantomime in a parliament that once misruled an empire

Last evening Boris Johnson sacked Michael Gove. A statement from 10 Street referred to the sacked government minister as a snake.

Anyone watching proceedings in the House of Commons yesterday might wonder how did this parliament see over an empire where the sun never set. It mismanaged and caused great injustice and harm.

To think that Boris Johnson is responsible for what has happened in Northern Ireland and that no one in his cabinet shouted stop.

Boris Johnson may have played his last trick

The saga of the Johnson premiership trundles on. Yesterday his chancellor of the exchequer  and health secretary resigned. Earlier in the day a retired senior civil servant said that the prime minister had not told the truth in the current controversy surrounding Chris Pincher.

Johnson gave an interview yesterday to BBC where he admitted he made a mistake in appointing Chris Pincher to a government job. He even tried to sound contrite.

It’s interesting with all of his tricks, lies and deceit it looks as if it’s the alleged sexual behaviour of Chris Pincher and Johnson’s attempt at cover up that will be his downfall.

Johnson talks of 'absolute truth’. He seems to think it’ different from truth.

Might bishops learn?

It would seem Johnson has surpassed the world of - GUBU.

__________________________

RTÉ’s The Late Late Show began on this day, July 6, 1962, in black and white. It is the world’s longest-running tv chat show.

The wise and truthful words of RMT’s Mick Lynch

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

Mick Lynch has been all over the British media in recent weeks.

He’s the General Secretary of the  UK’s RMT(National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) which is currently in dispute with Network Rail and 13 rail operators.

Lynch was born in London of Irish parents. His father was from Cork city and his mother from outside Crossmaglen in County Armagh.

He’s a media sensation. The UK government and some sections of the media try to make him out to be a Marxist trouble maker and when they ask him silly questions he immediately brings them down to size and explains quietly, intelligently and supremely articulately that it’s his job to get proper conditions and a decent wage for his members working on the railway.

Watching him I can’t help but think the world of priesthood would do well with a Mick Lynch.

Has the Christian community, more specifically, Catholics, any idea the state of play in the Catholic Church at present? Yes, the synodal process has rightly received positive vibes but there is so much wrong with how the church is managed right now, one would wonder what can Pope Francis’ synod do.

 

Some days ago I was talking to a diocesan priest. A few minutes into our conversation he had no trouble telling me that he had little or no time for his bishop.

He pointed out that the bishop had seldom if ever spoken with him. Two days later I overheard someone say that he was shocked with the lack of communication there is between priests in a particular religious congregation. 

May I assure you they are not isolated cases; right across priesthood there is little or no conversation, little or no honest charity or understanding.  

Indeed, it’s not too long ago since a priest said to me that in the past bishops had power across society. 

That’s all changed now and the only people over whom they can try to wield power is their priests and they make sure to do that. That’s the opinion of one man but he speaks for many. 

And I know what I am talking about. I was ordained a priest on July 7, 1974. Please, don’t get me wrong, I have come across great priests but right now there is a terrible breakdown in trust and communication within priesthood and between the foot soldiers and their superiors. There is far too much secrecy, far too much nonsense and distrust, gobbledegook too. And guess what, if the truth be told, jealousy often rears its ugly head within priesthood.

Priesthood today could well do with the inspiration of a ‘Fr Mick Lynch’.  Another trade unionist, Will Thorne, founder of the GMB union in 1889, which is today one of the UK’s biggest trade unions said: ‘There is a world of freedom, beauty and equality to gain, where everyone will have an opportunity to express the best that is in them for the benefit of all, making the world a place more to our heart's desire and the better to dwell in.’ 

Irish priests, bishops and religious superiors could make priesthood and the Irish Catholic Church a far better place if they took those words to heart.

Arrogance of Jacob Rees-Mogg on BBC’s Newsnight

On BBC’s Newsnight last evening British government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg quipped to presenter Kirsty Wark: “I hope he’ll[Boris Johnson] be a Walpole and do another 21 years.

Robert Walpole was British prime minister from 1721 - 1742.

Is it arrogance, humour, stupidity that's the glue that keeps the current British government in place? 

Making a promise to love just one person

A lovely, interesting and honest piece of writing. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/03/ive-had-crushes-all-my-life-but-im-getting-married-soon-and-making-a-promise-to-love-just-one-person?CMP=share_btn_link