This is getting very serious and dangerous. At the same time the far right AfD in Germany is growing in power and status with the passing one every day.
German intelligence claims the AfD has links with Moscow. There have also been physical attacks on politicians in the last few days, including on the finance senator in Berlin.
Today Moscow holds its celebratory parade in memory of the victory of the Great Patriotic War. In World War II the Soviet Union lost approximately 27 million.
The link below is to a talk given by Fr Stephen Cummins in the Dominican Priory church in Galway last week.
It was part of a series of talks in the Dominican church to celebrate 800 years of the Dominicans in Ireland.
The talk is enlightening and well worth a listen.
https://mcn.live/Cameras/Player/239660
This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.
Michael Commane
It’s a long time since I have been in the centre of Dublin at morning rush hour. I was taking a train to Sligo to visit someone in hospital.
The traffic was extremely light, it meant the bus got into town much quicker than I had expected. With close to an hour to kill I took a stroll up and down O’Connell Street.
Interesting observing people on their way to work, getting on and off buses, shops opening. The city coming alive. Spotted a number of new all-electric buses, discovering they have no outside mirrors, replaced by monitors in the cab.
Close to the newly restored Clerys Quarter a man was foraging through a litter bin. We got talking. He told me he was searching for bottles and cans that had the Return symbol on them so that he could claim the money due on them.
My initial reaction was to smile. Because, while I haven’t quite being doing that, I am picking up the odd bottle and can I see on the street. It’s become something of a joke I’m playing with a few friends. Mind you, I am amazed with the number I’m collecting.
Continuing to smile, I got talking to the man at the bin. He told me he is making between €40 and €50 per day on the enterprise. He explained in detail his daily route. I was surprised to hear he was making so much. I told him I too pick up the odd bottle and can.
Our conversation broadened. He has five children and is living in a hostel. He felt he had no chance of getting permanent employment because of his criminal history.
He was a tall man, friendly and polite, probably in his early 50s and poorly dressed.
I was impressed with how careful he was in keeping everything as tidy as possible. He replaced all the rubbish back into the bin when he was finished.
And with every bottle and can he is collecting he is helping make our environment a better place.
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’
The Re-turn scheme began on February 1. In the first 40 days, Re-turn took back almost seven million containers – 3.4 million plastic bottles and 3.6 million cans. That left approximately 193 million containers either awaiting return or already disposed of. It is unfortunate that so many machines are out of order as it is a great scheme.
It means there’s a fortune out there to be made. And I sincerely hope the unemployed man I met on O’Connell Street at eight o’clock on Friday morning might be able to develop his collection system, even turn it into a flourishing business. Who knows? But I do know new doors always open for us and we should never sit back and languish in self sympathy. That’s so easy to do. I know.
It was lunchtime when I arrived in Sligo Hospital to visit my friend. She is unwell but upbeat and not at all interested in talking about herself. She spoke about her wonderful family and how fortunate she is to have such loving children.
It’s good for the soul to meet within 12 hours two people in difficult circumstances making the best of things and with a smile on their faces too.
On this day, May 6, 1998 Steve Jobs unveiled the first iMac.
Jobs, who was born in San Francisco in 1955, was adopted shortly after his birth. He was co-founder of Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak.
He pioneered the personal computer revolution in the 1970s and '80s.
He left college in his first year and in 1974 travelled through India and later studied Zen Buddhism.
Steve Jobs died in 2011.
Bill Clinton’s eulogy at the funeral Mass of Martin McGuinness.
Whether or not you like either man’s politics, Bill Clinton’s art of speech giving should be on the curriculum of every person preparing for priesthood.
A class act.
Justine McCarthy in The Irish Times yesterday.
Lionel Shriver writes novels. She called one of them We Need to Talk about Kevin. It was scary. Lots of people bought it. Her new book is called Mania. It is set in the near past. It is about the Mental Parity Movement. Under its rule nobody is allowed to be cleverer than anyone else. The word “stupid” is forbidden. Big words are scorned. No sentence (such as this one minus the parentheses) may have a subclause. The vernacular has lobotomised smartphones. Chess and crosswords are abolished. Qualification points are unnecessary for admission to university. Barack Obama is no longer president. His eloquent oratory proved his electoral undoing. The Three Stooges is banned. Ditto Mr Bean and The Big Bang Theory.
Mania breaks every Mental Parity rule. The novel is intelligent, satirical, literary, dystopian and absurdist. But by no stretch of the imagination is it absurd. It’s chillingly plausible because the anti-intellectualism it depicts is already sprouting in our midst.
Cork city’s main library had to lock its doors to the public last year during protests over books with LGBTQ content and after agitators entered libraries, filmed themselves verbally accosting staff members and put the footage online. In the pre-internet Dark Ages, books were ritually burned. Shriver sets her story in a town called Voltaire, after the oft-exiled French philosopher and civil liberties advocate whose books were publicly cremated in Paris.
In our age of “bigly” Donald Trump, “fake news”, grade inflation, “citizen journalists”, populist politics and keyboard warriors, the lowest common denominator sets the agenda. If you can’t say it in 280 crude characters, it’s not worth saying. Nuance is a no-no. The erosion of respect for expert knowledge – Shriver’s “brain-vain snobs” – is eating away at the foundations of public discourse. Covid-deniers, climate change-deniers, Holocaust-deniers and Elvis-is-dead-deniers demand equal esteem for their opinions as for those of specialist scientists and historians who have spent entire careers studying their niche subjects. In that arena, facts are rendered redundant. Truth perishes. Society slides to hell.
This zeitgeist has produced a new catch cry – why on earth is everyone so angry these days? What so enrages people as to make them picket Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman’s home with their masked faces and odious slogans? What fuels the hatred that makes someone phone in a bomb scare concerning Minister for Justice Helen McEntee’s home, necessitating the evacuation of her two infant children? How resentful must the arsonists feel when they set fire to accommodation for asylum seekers? This is not the genial Ireland of the welcomes that many of the protesters claim to love.
Where did it all go horribly wrong? Social media seems the obvious culprit but they are primarily the platforms for ire; not fully the cause. Political correctness gets blamed, along with lefties and too much change too fast. “Progressives” and feminists, transgenderism and NGOs all get a kicking.
But liberalism is not the root of it either. Laxity is. Decades of bungling public administration and institutional mendacity have shattered public trust. One by one, the citadels that once presumed to command the people’s faith have fallen – the Catholic Church aiding and abetting paedophile priests; the government denying the IMF was on the way even while the limos were waiting to greet them at Dublin Airport; Charlie Haughey and his Charvet shirts; the economists assuring us “the fundamentals are sound”; the media whooping up the property boom; the EU threatening we would burn the bondholders at our peril; the health service withholding information from women with cervical cancer; the €2 billion-plus national children’s hospital; the developers and builders flinging up fire-hazardous apartment blocks; the councillors bunged brown envelopes for the planning permission.
When trust dies, anger is its natural successor. Cynicism will not be far behind.
Most people try to live by the rules, but allegiance to the orthodoxy starts to crumble when you cannot get a school place or mental health or scoliosis treatment for your child, or you cannot see the same doctor twice in your out-the-door GP surgery and your frail parent is lying on a trolley with a broken hip in A&E, and you have little hope of acquiring your own home in your fecund prime. These are the realities of life in Ireland little more than a decade after two monumental State reports by the Mahon and Moriarty tribunals were published, chronicling payments to politicians and corruption in the planning system. No politician or businessman – only one PR bagman, Frank Dunlop – has gone to jail on bribe charges as a result of those inquiries. In the same period, the country’s population has exploded, eclipsing five million people for the first time since the Famine, but much of its infrastructure has remained stuck in the 1980s.
Corruption and bad government, excessive taxation and human misery conspired in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Then along came the Dark Ages to take its place. That’s a pattern that is starting to look worryingly familiar. If a country can be traumatised, Ireland is a candidate for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Since the economy crashed in 2008, while the sordid details were flowing from the tribunals and citizens were losing their homes, their livelihoods and their sense of security, scant attention has been paid to its collective psychological impact. Yet the symptoms are visible – anger, fear, destructive behaviour, poor concentration.
When you discover the rules you thought everyone was obeying were being spurned by those at the top, a natural instinct is to reject everything you used to think was true. Thus blind faith is supplanted by cynicism. Trust in those who are supposed to know better turns to knee-jerk derision.
Only by regaining the people’s trust can Ireland recover. That will require every institution to be fastidiously fair and candid with those they serve. It means no political playing to the gallery, no empty election promises, no pretence about quick-fix solutions, no refusing to answer questions, no more hubris. Once trust is broken it is doubly hard to regain it.
For all our sakes, we should remember the Carl Jung quote that Shriver chose for Mania’s preface: “It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is mankind’s greatest danger, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
We are now into the May Bank Holiday weekend. There has been much publicity on the media asking people to be more careful on our roads.
Is it working? The traffic on Dublin City roads yesterday was heavy, far too many drivers behaving in a reckless manner and on a selection of roads not a sign to be seen of the Garda Traffic Unit.
The amount of tailgating, drivers on phones and people driving over the speed limit was plainly visible yesterday to anyone who has eyes to see.
And we the driving public are the people to blame.
Michael McDowell in The Irish Times yesterday.
There has been some degree of public controversy in recent times concerning the role of schools in educating children about sexuality, gender identity, and the treatment of dysphoria and self-identification by children and adolescents.
The whole question of gender identity among children and adolescents has become a much greater issue in the last decade than it appeared to be before then. Whether this has to do with access to online information concerning gender and identity or whether such issues always bubbled beneath the surface but rarely found expression in former times is hard to determine. It is probably a case of both to some extent.
Certainly in my school days, issues of dysphoria, gender identity and gender fluidity simply never arose in an educational context. Which is not to say that such issues simply did not then exist.
On the other hand, it seems to me that there is an abundance of evidence internationally that children these days are exposed to doubts, discourse and online material in connection with these issues to an extent never known before. Surveys suggest that children are now much more aware of issues concerning gender identity and are devoting more thought to these issues than previously.
In addition, sexual orientation is now much more commonly discussed and considered by children and adolescents than it was a generation ago. Certainly it is far healthier that children and adolescents can address questions of their sexual orientation in a far more open way than was permitted in previous generations. I am aware of one school where a teacher sought to convince a class that homosexuality was wrong “morally, mentally and medically”. His pupils, conscious that a number of the class were gay, simply informed the teacher that they did not want to hear him any further on this matter. And that ended his teaching on the matter.
That contrasts with my years of secondary education where to my certain knowledge none of our religious or lay teachers ever once mentioned homosexuality at all. One might have thought that in the course of a traditional Roman Catholic education the matter might have arisen if only for condemnation. But it didn’t. Was it “taboo”? Or did teachers simply consider that its discussion was more likely to do more harm than good? It is hard at this remove to be certain as to whether avoidance of “scandal” motivated our educationalists to ignore rather than confront that issue.
But nowadays, the experience of children and prevailing attitudes among adults in relation to sexuality are radically different. The internet effectively means that nearly any child or adolescent can explore issues relating to sexuality outside of educational and parental supervision.
Where does that leave modern parents? Insofar as they attempt to control their children’s consumption of online material, they fight an uphill battle. It is not simply a matter of controlling access to pornography. Children and adolescents cannot be corralled into a state of blissful ignorance, as was practice in the past.
Article 42 of the Constitution states that “the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family”. The State, by that article, guarantees “to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children”.
The European Convention on Human Rights in article 2 of the first protocol provides: “In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical teachings”.
As Conor O’Mahony pointed out in his published work, Educational Rights in Irish Law, the ECHR guarantee extends not merely to respecting religious and philosophical beliefs of parents in private or religious schools but extends to State-run or State-funded schools.
While what used to be termed “sex education” is undoubtedly a proper part of every child’s school curriculum, there remain significant questions. These include whether and to what extent the State should attempt, through State-funded primary and secondary education, to deal with enormously complex and contested areas of gender identity, gender fluidity and associated issues – especially during children’s formative preadolescent and adolescent years. Both our Constitution and the ECHR require that parents must be given a very considerable input into what is – and what is not – taught on these subjects to their children.
The matter is not simply one for educationalists – whether teachers or policymakers. It is not an area where one social or ideological viewpoint becomes imposed educational orthodoxy to the exclusion of parental beliefs or values. Nor is it enough to accord opt-outs to individual parents. Do the collective wishes of parents not need to be discerned as the guiding value in each school’s policy on such matters?
This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column
Michael Commane
Paddy Cullen, no, not the former Dublin goalkeeper but a retired chemistry lecturer in Dublin’s Bolton Street, now part of TU Dublin, died last week. He was born in Screen in Wexford in 1939, the year World War II began.
I first briefly met him in the late 1960s in Tallaght. He was heading off on his Honda 50 to Dunsink Observatory, where he was studying astronomy. Even in that extremely cursory exchange of words I was greatly impressed with him. There was something gracious about him. He made me feel at ease.
At the time Paddy was a newly ordained Dominican priest.
It was 50 years before we met again. This time under different circumstances. Soon after our first encounter Paddy left the Dominicans, retiring from priestly ministry and began his career in chemistry.
This time around we got to know aspects of each other and again I was greatly impressed with the man. I felt I was in the presence of a wonderful human being, a gracious and wise person. He had time to listen to me. I always got the impression there was no game playing, no spoof, no trotting out any sort of party line about anything. And he also had a lovely smile.
I’m nervous about using the word ‘holy’ because I think it is a most misused word. In some ways the same applies to the use of ‘sacred’.
Far too often they come across as fake. But the moment one meets genuine holiness they know immediately they have encountered something real, something holy and indeed, sacred.
I saw a sign in a church telling people to be quiet because they were in God’s house. Some days later I saw another sign on a sacristy door informing people entry was only for priests and staff. Both those signs came across to me as profoundly unholy, un-sacred too. I consider those who put those signs in place are establishment apparatchiks, doused in clericalism.
I can’t help but think there are forms of religion that simply alienate people. The sacred and the holy are not the exclusive possession of any group or any specific place. We can encounter the holy and the sacred stopping and talking to the person on the street, whether they be the powerful or the powerless.
Breaking down all the suspicious and dark ideas we might have about others, realising that they too suffer fear and dread, helps us communicate with the other. Surely then we are close to the holy and sacred.
Jesus spent his time engaging with people. The breaking of bread was a powerful sign of the union between people and between Jesus and people. It was so deep a sign that it had a whole new reality to it.
The breaking of bread or the Eucharist goes hand-in-hand with our deep love and respect for each other. Christians believe the Eucharist is at the pinnacle of friendship and respect. There can never be anything anonymous about the Mass.
Holiness and sacredness are sublime words. They cut through so much nonsense. Isn’t it ironic they can be used in such fake and insincere ways.
In the first 40 days of the Re-turn scheme almost seven million containers were returned. But 193 million never made it to the machines.
It’s a great idea, that is, when the machines work. There are too many machines not working at present, something that will discourage people from using the system.
In the midst of a world in turmoil, torn by hatred and greed, lines from Psalm 140 offer consolation:
To you, Lord God, my eyes are turned:
in you I take refuge; spare my soul!
From the trap they have laid for me keep me safe:
Keep me from the snares of those who do evil.
Jimmy O’Grady, who died in March 2014 spent his working life on the railway. He was a gracious and wise man.
Jimmy drove the last train out of Ballaghaderreen in 1963.
It was recognised that he was a great locomotive driver and was considered a special person by his colleagues.
A railway enthusiast asked a relatively young locomotive driver if he were old enough to remember Jimmy. He immediately replied: “No, but I’m young enough to know that he was and is a legend."
Conor Cruise O’Brien was prescient when he coined the acronym GUBU when he referring to a political scandal in Ireland during a Haughey government.
Its application goes well beyond the Irish shores. Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre,Unprecedented.
The state of the world at present.
The Trump story continues to evolve. The big cars, the security detail and Trump shouting his mouth off. And while all that is going on the poor, the young, women and men are being slaughtered across the world.
Thirty/40 years ago AI meant Artificial Insemination, today it stands for Artificial Intelligence.
The growth of the far-right.
Climate change.
Too much.
I would be grateful if Sean, who made a comment on this blog about the late Paddy Cullen, contact me. Is it possible to have your email address please? Someone has requested it. Of course it will not be published on the blog. Thank you and best wishes. Michael Commane
On this day, April 25, 1945 a symbolic event happened on the river Elbe in the south east German town of Torgau.
It was here that the United States and Soviet armies met. A picture went around the world of two young men, one wearing a Red Army uniform, the other the fatigues of the United States Army shook hands and embraced.
That poignant moment offered hope to the world. And look at us now. Back fighting, manufacturing shells to maim and kill.
In the dark times
will there be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
- Bertolt Brecht
This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.
Michael Commane
Eir CEO, Oliver Loomes was interviewed on the Business programme on RTÉ Radio 1 last Saturday week. Oliver has been with the company since 2022 and before that had senior jobs with a number of companies including Mars and Diagio Ireland, where he was MD.
Naturally he spoke about his experiences at the different jobs and his early life. The family moved back to Ireland when he was a child. His father, who was a dentist and had hopes his son would follow in his footsteps, something that never happened.
He spoke how he had been diagnosed with cancer and how it had changed his outlook on life. He also mentioned the support, love and help he received from so many people, family, friends, work colleagues. Close to the end of the interview he mentioned that his parents, who are now in their 80s, are currently driving around Europe on a motorbike.
His father driving and his mother the pillion passenger. Good for them and wonderful to hear. It set me thinking about the arguments that are currently making the news about ageism.
That same day there was a a report in the media of a woman who was refused the student reduced rate to a Dublin gym because of her age, even though she had a student card. She took the case to the WRC and rightly so won her case and collected €3,000. Good for her.
Vladimir Putin is 71, Joe Biden is 81, Xi Jing Ping is 70, Pope Francis is 87 And Micheal D Higgins was 83 on April 18. Why should one’s age be a deciding factor if someone can do the job? If a person can pass a medical examination, which is required for a specific job why can’t they be given the job if they pass all the requisite requirements irrespective of age?
People who think otherwise are slaves to an outmoded way of thinking. We have been shouting for many years from the rooftops how enlightened a society we are. So what’s this business about telling someone at a specific age that they are no longer fit to work. It is a shocking insult, degrading too. And constitutionally unsound.
I lived in Berlin before the Wall came tumbling down. The day I saw that Wall collapse I said I would never again listen to someone who says ‘it can’t be done’. Ok, there are the laws of gravity, but outside of that I refuse to accept the status quo. My father worked till he was 82, mother until she was 78.
Of course there is need for a retirement age and that’s for many good reasons, including health and financial aspects, but if someone, who is capable of doing the job and wants to stay working after 65/66 why should they be prohibited?
The country is crying out for workers in many professions and skills, including teachers nurses, GPs, bus and truck drivers. Why can’t a person of any age, who is qualified, fit, capable and wants to, be allowed work at their trade? It is preposterous that they can’t. And it’s such silly thinking.
Mr and Mrs Loomes keep driving that motorbike and good luck to both of you. Your son Oliver said you have been a source of inspiration to him all his life. You sure are to all of us today. Well done. By the way, I drive a Honda 680 Deauville.
Patrick Cullen died in Wexford yesterday.
He was born in
Before joining the Irish Dominicans Paddy studied marine engineering in Cork. On qualifying, his one and only maritime experience was to Malta. He was on the high seas for six weeks but realised he had no sea legs. He was sick every day at sea.
While studying in Cork he regularly cycled home to Garrylough, a journey that he did in six to seven hours.
One can presume Paddy got to know the Dominicans in St Mary’s Pope’s Quay while he was studying in the city
When he joined the Dominican noviciate he was given the name Francis but was known in the Order as Frankie.
Paddy was perceived as a spiritual and devout person. His fellow Dominicans were surprised when he decided to leave the Order and priesthood.
Fadó fadó Dominican students went on long cycling and walking adventures. On one such occasion Paddy fell off his bicycle as a result of having fainted. It transpired that he had been fasting the previous days. Paddy was recognised as an ascetic.
After priestly ordination he studied astronomy at the Dunsink Observatory at the request of the then provincial, Fr Louis Coffey.
It must have been 1969/1970 when I first met Frankie. He was heading off from Tallaght to Dunsink on his Honda 50. It would be another 50 years before we met again.
I can vividly remember that day in Tallaght. In the few short minutes we were chatting I felt I was in the presence of a special person. It was the briefest of encounters.
On leaving the Order Paddy studied chemistry at UCD and spent the rest of his working life lecturing in the subject at Kevin Street College. Some time after retiring, the college authorities asked him to come back to lecture on a part time basis, something that he readily did.
During his years as a student at UCD he travelled to the United States to take summer work. On one occasion he went with a number of fellow students. The plan was to work on the buses in Chicago but it so happened that that summer there was a bus strike and Paddy ended up working on the buildings.
All his life Paddy had a great interest in nature. While working in Kevin Street he would regularly be seen in the nearby park feeding the birds and the birds always knew when Paddy was arriving with his food for them. He was known by staff and students, and people in the locality as the Birdman
He used a humane trap to catch mice. On one occasion he called to the local hardware store to enquire where there was any place he could release mice into the wild. The man behind the counter suggested he should let them free on the 46A bus.
It was in 2019 that I met an elderly man. He was looking for his Rosary Beads, which I happened to find for him. I was surprised when he knew something about me. He told me his name was Paddy Cullen. At first it meant nothing to me. Maybe it was a day or so later that someone told me he was Frankie Cullen, who had been a Dominican. The Frankie Cullen, I met 50 years ago on a Monday 50 in Tallaght.
Though his mind was ever so slightly beginning to fail he came alive when he spoke about the Dominicans. He recalled his time studying astronomy. While he enjoyed the subject he thought it was daft that he had been sent off to study the science. He felt extremely lonely and isolated during those years. He never spoke to me about why he left the Dominicans but if he were given half a chance I got the distinct impression that it would have been his life’s ambition fulfilled to rejoin.
When you have the special grace to meet a genuinely holy person, a gracious and fine human being, you realise it almost instantly. So was my experience with Paddy Francis Cullen.
Paddy's nephew, James Cullen is a priest of the Diocese of Ferns
Paddy is brother of Betty Roche and Stephen and the late Tom and Eamon, and son of the late Tom and Nellie.
Paddy’s body will be lying in state at Knockeen Nursing Home, Barntown Y35CY80 today, April 22 from 4pm to 6pm. Removal at 6.30pm to St Cyprian's Church, Screen for arrival at 7pm. Funeral Mass tomorrow, Tuesday at midday followed by burial in Curracloe cemetery.
May he rest in peace.
