Gazing into the past at my windowsill

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

I was standing up against the windowsill of my house in a West Kerry village two Sundays ago. The sky overhead was pure blue. Crows were flying from one chimney top to the next, perching on television aerials.  A wagtail was metres away from me. 

The house door was open and I thought the bird might be about to enter. But no, it had found a crumb on the ground, which it nibbled at for a while. 

I must have moved, and off it flew, up on to the roof and away. Because it was early on Sunday morning there was little or no traffic passing. The tourist season was over.

 

I’m told my grandaunt was noted for sitting outside this same house. What would she and her siblings, her parents and grandparents say if they came back as ghosts to the village where they once lived?

I remember standing up against the windowsill of the same house with my father and our next door neighbour approximately 30 years ago.

 

My next door neighbour was a very witty man, a character. He had a great turn of phrase. Many of his one-liners are still quoted in the village. 

It appeared all his friends were millionaires. But on that particular day when we were talking at the windowsill he began to regale my father and me about some friend of his and then, with no bother, told both of us that this particular friend was a billionaire. My immediate reaction was to say to myself, the economy must be banjaxed. Some years later we were in financial crisis.

Naturally leaning up against the windowsill on a quiet Sunday morning with no-one about I was thinking of the passing of generations. My paternal grandparents were born in this house shortly after the famine. The church on the main street was built in 1831.

We’ve come a long way since then. We’ve made extraordinary progress in every aspect of our lives. 

Are we happier? I have no idea but I do know that the medical help that I have received in recent weeks would not have been possible, there would have been no electricity here, no high speed fibre connections, no running water, no sewerage, no cars, no processed food.

The day before I stood at my windowsill the funeral of a Dominican colleague took place in Tallaght. I watched the funeral Mass on the webcam. At the Mass the provincial spoke about how Fr Philip McShane would now know the answers to all the questions he asked during his life as a teacher of philosophy and theology.

From birth to death isn’t life one long intriguing mystery? If there were no God question, I for one would miss it, I think.

Everything about living is nuanced, speaking about God is nuanced. All our words are but tiny reflections about reality. And our words are always influenced by the time and place we live.

Forty-seven years ago we could hear in this village the sonic boom as Concorde broke the sound barrier flying out over the Atlantic, 37 years before that there was a train from here to Tralee. We know something of the past. What do we know of the future?

John Clarke talks about Marian Finucane

John Clarke, who was Marian Finucane’s husband, was interviewed by Miriam O’Callaghan on her Sunday morning programme on RTÉ Radio 1 yesterday.

It made for great radio. Below is the clink to the clip. 

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22315136/

Máiría Cahill and John Boyne tell two horrific stories

Author John Boyne was interviewed by Brendan O’Connor on his show yesterday. It made for excellent radio.

Máiría Cahill’s recently published ‘Rough Beast’ is an excellent read.

Both Máiría Cahill's book and John Boyne’s interview are highly recommended. Everyone in the land should read and listen to both Máiría and John. Certainly every priest and everyone who has a vote in the country should familiarise themselves with the story each of them has to tell.

The link below is to yesterday’s RTÉ interview.

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22315069/

German journalist with the right skills reports from Israel

In the current war in the Middle East Sophie von der Mann is reporting for German public broadcaster ARD.

She has a degree in theology and oriental studies

Her undergraduate dissertation focused on Christian Reformation history, and analysed how anniversary celebrations in 19th century Germany reflected the changing significance of Martin Luther as an avatar for rising German nationalism. 

She is interested in the intersections of religion, culture and politics and would like to study further the phenomenon of “reform” in Christian Reformation history, modern Islamic thought and the varieties of modern Judaism.

The right person to have reporting from Israel/Palestine at present.

 

Fr Sean Sheehy attacks current Synod

Some years ago Fr Sean Sheehy an Irish priest,

who returned from the United States, spent some time working in the parish of Castlegregory in the diocese of Kerry. 

As a result of his shaking hands with a convicted rapist in a court in North Kerry he was removed from  Castlegregory by the then bishop of Kerry, Bill Murphy.

As a result of a sermon Fr Sheehy preached in Listowel on November 2, 2022 the bishop of Kerry, Raymond Browne prohibited Fr Sheehy from celebrating public Mass in the diocese.

In the article featured on this page Fr Sheehy writes: “Is this happening in the Church today with the so-called Synod on Synodality? Are there people in and outside the Church who are trying to wrest control over her from Jesus her Head.”

The article appears in the current edition of the Catholic Voice.

Before Photoshop a picture was worth a thousand words. How many words is a question worth?

Máiría Cahill’s book tells an interesting story

"Still, there is nothing worse from the point of view of a political party than an angry, hurt, articulate woman with a forensic memory. I resolved to keep going.”

A quote from Máiría Cahill’s Rough Beast - My Story & the Reality of Sinn Fein 

It is a fascinating read and highly recommended.

Roddy Doyle says of the book: ‘Shocking, important & unputdownable.'

The above quote is from page 255.

The book is published by Head of Zeus.

Fifty years ago today ceasefire between Isreal and Egypt

On this date, October 25, 1973 Egypt and Israel accept United Nations Security Council Resolution 339.

The resolution was adopted to bring about a ceasefire in the Yom Kippur war.

The resolution was adopted with 14 votes to none; China did not participate in the voting.

Fifty years ago today.

The world’s spend on weapons is an obscenity

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

Often in the most unexpected situations and in places you never expect you can hear the wisest of words, stories if they were lived out, could change the face of the earth.

Last week I found myself talking to a stranger. I don’t know the man from Adam. He obviously had a great interest in all things GAA. He asked me had I been at the hurling final and went on to tell me he was a big hurling supporter. 

The conversation broadened out and then he recalled how his local GAA club in recent years had amalgamated with the neighbouring club. Both clubs had seen a large fall off in player numbers so the only way for the GAA to survive in the area was for them to merge.

‘It has worked a dream,’ he told me. ‘And do you know what, before we joined there was terrible rivalry between the two clubs. And it wasn’t just in GAA matters. We actually hated the other crowd and they hated us. It was pure murder between us. And now we are the best of friends,’ he said.

Of course I dare not mention the names of the two clubs or parishes But it certainly has set me thinking.

I’m not a politician, have never formally studied politics, economics, world affairs but that does not stop me from being scared out of my living daylights about how precarious world peace is at present.

Some days ago I read in a newspaper that North Korea has shipped a consignment of weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Is that not beyond hideous when North Korea is having serious difficulties feeding its own population.

My knowledge of the problems in the Middle East is limited. Beyond two visits to Lebanon and a general narrow understanding of its history, it would be unwise of me ‘pronounce’ on the current situation. 

I am aware how the Jewish people have suffered down through the centuries and I can understand how determined they are to protect themselves. But I have also seen how the people of Palestine have been brutalised year in year out. It was in Beirut that I learned that there are old women and men who have spent their entire lives in camps in Lebanon. That can’t be right.

There is the war in Ukraine where Russia broke all international rules in invading a sovereign state. The people of Ukraine have been tortured and brutalised by the Russians, the Germans, the Poles, the armies of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Its borders have moved backwards and forwards over the centuries. Russia has been invaded by the Mongols, the French and the Germans. And then there are all the disputes, wars and hunger across Africa.

The US spent €834 billion on its military in 2022, which was 40 per cent of military spending worldwide. For the same period the Chinese spent €219 billion and the UK €64 billion. 

With those vast sums of money the world could feed, house and educate a lot of people. Don’t forget anything that is produced is intended for use.

How much time, energy and money is dedicated in an attempt at bringing people together? I’m back thinking of the two GAA clubs.

Goofy makes it to the top with German youth

US claims Russia working to undermine democracy,

An interesting read. True or false?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/20/russia-spy-network-elections-democracy-us-intelligence?CMP=share_btn_link

'President’s foreign policy statements are utterly reckless'

Below is an article written by Stephen Collins in The Irish Times yesterday.

Collins makes valid points about President Michael D Higgins breaching constitutional convention. Indeed was it appropriate for President Higgins to speak about Pope Francis as he did after his meeting with him on Thursday in Rome?

It may be a trivial issue in the midst of the crisis now gripping the Middle East, but President Michael D Higgins has once again breached constitutional convention and demeaned his office with his attack on the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

Whether his description of von der Leyen’s support for Israel as “thoughtless and even reckless” in the wake of the Hamas massacre is justified is not the point. As President he has no right to make big foreign policy pronouncements and it is reckless of him to do so.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was also critical of von der Leyen’s intervention, but that is his prerogative as the head of government. It is certainly not the role of the Irish President to usurp the government’s function, particularly in the midst of an international crisis.

If the world was not in such a dangerous place, it might be amusing that the President saw no irony in his criticism of von der Leyen for exceeding her remit when he was doing the very same thing himself; stepping far outside his constitutional role as he has done repeatedly since taking office.

The President’s intervention came as the Government attempted to walk a fine line between articulating the horror most Irish people feel at the massacre of 1,400 Israelis while insisting that the response to that attack should be in accordance with international law.

Appropriate reaction

It is the job of the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, to devise the appropriate reaction to such an international crisis, and both have stressed the need for a proportionate response from Israel. The President simply has no role to play in the matter.

The situation has only got more dangerous since the terrible loss of life at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza city where more than 500 people are thought to have lost their lives. At the time of writing, it is not yet clear who was responsible but President Biden on his visit to the Middle East suggested it was the “other team, not [Israel]”. The Israeli military said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Palestinian group Islamic Jihad.

Tánaiste Micheál Martin said Biden may have access to more information and intelligence than he would but he rightly urged caution in attributing blame. “It is very difficult for us at this distance to make any judgment call for who was responsible for this.”

Biden’s visit to Israel was clearly designed to show solidarity with a country that has suffered a terrible loss, but he also encouraged the Israeli government to pull back from a full-scale invasion. His advice not to repeat the rage-filled reaction of the United States after 9/11 was unambiguous.

The slaughter carried out by Hamas was clearly designed to provoke a reaction that would inflame the entire Middle East. A wiser leader than Netanyahu would recognise the long-term interests of his country and demand a considered response rather than immediate and terrible revenge.

As for President Higgins, his latest intervention in politics comes hot on the heels of his recent denunciation of the United Nations for its failure to prevent war and famine. How the UN is supposed to perform those feats he didn’t say. Not long before that he waded into the neutrality debate, using pejorative language to claim that the Government is trying “to crawl away” from “the self-esteem of our foreign policy” and making unpleasant comments about the chair of the Forum on Neutrality, Prof Louise Richardson, for which he subsequently apologised.

From early in his first term President Higgins has pushed the boundaries of his office, making speeches critical of the direction being taken by the EU and expressing thinly veiled criticism of the Irish economic model. He went so far as to intervene on the eve of the last general election campaign by making comments on taxation policy.

It is one thing to have a President exceeding his powers in domestic politics, but his interventions in the area of foreign policy are even more inappropriate and have the capacity to do long-term damage to the country’s interests and its standing in the world.

The Government has understandably shown a deep reluctance to get involved in a public dispute with the President or even attempt to rein him in. There is a long-standing convention that politicians never express criticism of the President, who is deemed to be above politics. But what is a government to do if the President has no qualms about flouting the convention that he should not comment on current political issues? While it might not be popular to do so, the government of the day has a duty to uphold the Constitution in the long-term interests of the country.

The great achievement of this State since independence a century ago has been the survival of democracy. That has happened because our politicians have operated within a clear constitutional framework. Democracy is a fragile flower that needs to be protected by strict adherence to constitutional norms. A President repeatedly flouting the rules is not a good omen. 

Hamas attack happened on Vladimir Putin’s birthday

A guest on the popular Markus Lanz,  ZDF German public broadcaster, said on Wednesday night that he thought it significant that the Hamas attack on Israel took place on the birthday of President Vladimir Putin, who was born on October 7, 1952.

Interesting or daft?

Additions/corrections to the obituary of Philip McShane OP

Since the publication of the obituary of Fr Philip McShane a number of people have contacted me with more information about the man. They have also pointed out errors.

That material has now been added and corrected. You may wish to read the edited version.

I am currently away from my desk, which has meant I was limited in my preparation of the obituary. For that I apologise.

Fr Bernard Philip McShane OP (1946 - 2023) - an obituary

Dominican priest Philip McShane

died in St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin on Wednesday, October 18.

We talk about people dying with their boots on. Nothing could be a more appropriate and fitting idiom when talking about the death of Philip McShane.

Just this last weekend he was working with the Priory Institute in Tallaght, travelled to Newry where he was engaged in an apostolate. On Sunday he celebrated Mass with the Dominican nuns in the Siena monastery in Drogheda, and on Monday he celebrated the lunchtime Mass in St Mary’s Priory Tallaght.

Philip had been diagnosed with cancer approximately two years ago but somehow or other he managed to stay on his feet, seldom if ever talking about his illness and all the time working away.

Philip was born in Dublin on July 9, 1946, spending his early years in Westport and Tuam. His father worked in the bank, which accounts for his multiplicity of addresses.

He attended the Dominican-run secondary school, Newbridge College from where he joined the noviciate of the Irish Dominican Province in St Mary’s Priory, Pope’s Quay, Cork in 1964, making his first profession the following year. 

On receiving the Dominican habit he took the name Philip. In the following years the majority of Dominicans reverted to their baptismal names, whereas Philip retained the name given to him on receiving the habit.

He studied philosophy and theology in the Dominican studium in Tallaght and was ordained a priest on July 4, 1971.

After a fourth year of theology, at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, he began a postgraduate study of moral theology at the same institute, while living in the Dominican Priory of Saint-Hyacinth in the city.

Philip was a scholar and a gentleman. His scholarship meant he spent most of his life teaching theology and philosophy. He taught in a number of academic institutes in Ireland, including the Dominican studium and the Milltown Institute. He also taught at Providence College, Rhode Island in the United States. 

From 1976 to 1979 approximately, he was a lecturer in religious studies at St Catherine’s Teaching College, Sion Hill, Blackrock, Co Dublin.

Up until his sudden death he was course leader for the MA programme in Aquinas Studies at the Priory Institute, where he was also cataloguing books at the Priory Institute library.

He attended many general chapters of the Order, where he simultaneously translated from French into English. He had a working knowledge of German.

He was an accomplished musician and played the organ.

Philip was s regular visitor to the Dominican summer camp at Knockadoon in east Cork, where he gave classes in music.

He was an intrepid photographer, taking pictures of Dominicans all over the world. He would come back from general chapters with photographs of exotic places and people, including Dominicans from the four corners of the earth. He also had a keen interest in the great outdoors and recorded lovely aspects of mother nature on his camera. Philip made all his work available to his fellow Dominicans. His photographs are available on the web.

Between 2001 and 2012 Philip was master of novices. One of his novices, on hearing of his death, recalled what a wonderful novice master he was.

He spent many hours helping and talking to homeless people, who slept in the grounds of the priory in Tallaght. 

He was also exceptionally kind to fellow Dominicans, who were in difficulty or ill. He went that extra proverbial country mile to help those who felt alienated and forgotten. 

Nothing was ever too big a task for him. If someone wanted something done they could be assured Philip would be there to do it if he were available.

As a student in Tallaght in the late 1960s and early '70s Philip belonged to that brigade of tough mountain men, who were known as the ‘Long Outing Men’. Back then it was the custom that on Thursdays students would head out for cycling and walking. Popular cycles/walks were to Bohernabreena, Glencree and Glenasmole. But the group of Long Outing Men went on major adventures. In his six years in Tallaght Philip and the LOM would have climbed every mountain in Dublin and Wicklow, including Lugnaquilla, Maulin, Djouce, Croghan, Tonelagee, Kanturk and many more. 

In the summer he would have cycled to Newbridge to work on the farm, which the Dominicans owned and managed at the time.

He was a gentle person, who had a wonderful smile. On a personal note I can say I would have always considered him to be in many aspects a private person. He was someone, who had a small circle of close friends, with whom he shared his wit,  scholarship and fun.

There was also in some ways the attributes of the ‘nutty professor’ about him. He could easily forget about an appointment, turn up late for Mass. But it was always done in a charming and eloquent manner and of course sincere apologies offered.

Philip was generous with his wisdom, scholarship and time.

He was a man of deep faith, who inspired by his lifestyle.

May he rest in peace. 

Philip's body will be lying in state at St Mary’s Priory, Tallaght from 3pm tomorrow, Friday, October 20, removal to the church later that day at 5.30pm. Requiem Mass at 11.30am on Saturday, October 21. Burial afterwards in the community cemetery.

Philip McShane OP, RIP

Dominican priest Philip McShane died today in Dublin’s St Vincent’s Hospital.

An obituary to follow.

May he rest in peace.

The idea of humanity all too often means ‘people like us’

Fintan O’Toole’s piece in The Irish Times yesterday makes for an interesting read.

The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt told us that the worst thing to be in the modern world is stateless. 

She knew what she was talking about: as a Jew, she was stripped of her German citizenship by the Nazis and lived as a stateless person for 18 years.

In her hugely influential reflection on the horrors of her time, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt identified statelessness as the most terrifying of conditions. 

For those who were deprived of citizenship, “the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger  It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”

Being “nothing but a man”, woman or child means that there is no limit to what can happen to you. You can be spat at, humiliated, raped, murdered, plundered, driven off your land, turned into a refugee and, in the end, systematically exterminated.

It is one of the most tragic of ironies that the route out of this appalling circumstance for Jews – the establishment of Israel – simultaneously rendered another people stateless. 

By failing to support the creation of a Palestinian state, Israel and its allies have condemned millions to live in the very condition that Arendt described.

This much has been obvious for 75 years now. What has been less obvious is that by surrounding itself with stateless people, Israel was making its own existence as a state more and more precarious.

Even before the sickening Hamas attacks of October 7th, it was clear to most thinking Israelis that their state was at a point of existential crisis – not because of the Arab threat but because of the messianic extremism that is now at the heart of its own government.

Internal threat

Last July, for example, I read a powerful essay in the Times of Israel by Yossi Klein Halevi, written in the middle of the night in Jerusalem because he could not sleep: “Like many Israelis, I have become a political insomniac. 

The disruption of sleep is a small reflection of the dread so many of us feel for the long-term viability of the Jewish state.”

Halevi’s fear, shared by very many of his compatriots, was that the state they thought they belonged to – a secular democracy – was being liquidated before their eyes by its own far-right government. 

And that this new kind of statelessness would again render Jews defenceless in the face of those who want to exterminate them.

He wrote: “This government, which promotes itself as the guarantor of Israeli security, is the greatest internal threat to our security in the nation’s history. Israeli security isn’t only a matter of toughness and posturing. 

It depends on a complex web that includes national solidarity, a strong economy and civil service, confidence in the competence and judgment of our leaders, moral legitimacy of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) among our allies, trust among legal authorities abroad that Israel will monitor itself without intervention from the International Court in the Hague. This government threatens every one of those essential preconditions of our self-defence.”

These premonitions proved to be appallingly accurate. A government obsessed with humiliating Palestinians on the West Bank, and beating its own young people off the streets when they protested against its drift towards outright authoritarianism, left its citizens undefended.

And, as a result, a new generation of Jewish people experienced, at least on one day, what it is to be stateless. There was no limit to what could happen to them at the hands of messianic jihadist fanatics seeking collective revenge.

None of this was inevitable. Even while he was on his way to join in the attack on Gaza last week, Nir Avishai Cohen, a major in the IDF reserves, wrote in the New York Times that “I’d like to say one thing clearly, before I go to battle: There’s no such thing as ‘unavoidable.’ This war could have been avoided, and no one did enough to prevent it. 

Israel did not do enough to make peace; we just conquered the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, expanded the illegal settlements and imposed a long-term siege on the Gaza Strip.”

Pitiless terror

The folly of that failure is that it allowed the condition of statelessness, imposed on the Palestinians, to fester and grow in all its pitiless terror, so that it could engulf Israel too. If you live amongst those conditions and put vast resources into keeping them alive, you cannot expect to be uncontaminated by them.

It is now the turn of the children of Gaza to experience “the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human”. Being human ought to be enough to ensure that you have the right not to be obliterated. 

But it was not enough for the young people at the Supernova music festival at Kibbutz Re’im, and not enough for the terrified kids in the crowded neighbourhoods of Gaza City.

Humanity is insufficient because, too often, it only means “people like us”. We have seen yet again, both in Israel and Palestine and among activists in other countries, the ease with which those who are the wrong kind of humans in the wrong places are stripped of individuality and abstracted into membership of a group that “deserves” whatever happens to it.

There is no escape from this terror that does not involve the construction (and in Israel’s case the reconstruction) of states to which people can belong as full citizens with all the legal rights and moral responsibilities that citizenship implies. Israel can, for a time, live as a military hyper-state that reduces its own complex and deeply uncertain existence to the capacity to crush the existence of its enemies.

But all that levelling Gaza will achieve in the longer term is to remind Israel itself that it borders on an abyss. The abyss, as we see time and again, has a way of creeping under every wall constructed to keep it out.

Silly and worrying aspects about GDPR

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

The acronym GDPR comes trippingly off all our tongues at this stage even if we don’t know the letters stand for General Data Protection Regulation. It’s a piece of law which regulates information privacy within the European Union, including Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

I well appreciate the importance of the legislation, which has now been in force across the EU since 2018. Indeed for many people it may not at all impede on their lives but over the last few years I have seen it being used as an excuse for all sorts of laziness, obfuscation and pure inefficiencies, lies too.

Sometimes I get the impression that it is a great tool at the service of those who don’t want you to know information that you are entitled to have.

I can recall being on a finance committee where a member asked for information on a person’s salary. 

They were told by the employer that because of GDPR they were unable to further that information. Of course it was nonsense and I knew at the time but, to my shame,  I said nothing.

I get the impression those four letters GDPR are a great way of frightening people. 

There are also silly aspects about it.

If you walk into a hospital and ask at reception if J Bloggs is a patient in the hospital you would be told that because of GDPR such information cannot be given. If you come back 15 minutes later and ask what ward or room J Bloggs is in you will be given the information. If he or she is not in the hospital you will simply be told that there is no one by that name a patient in the hospital.

Earlier this year I was in hospital, where I received excellent treatment. I spent one night in a double room, where I could hear every word that was said to the man in the other bed and that included every word his consultant said to him. And all that happened after I had received a sheet of paper about the importance of GDPR

This happens in all multi-bed hospital wards. 

I know a world-wide organisation in Ireland that does not print individual material on its members in its in-house annual publication. They claim that GDPR prevents the publication of such material. The same organisation in Germany prints the individual material of its members. No question of infringing on GDPR. 

And then there is the world of harvesting material on individuals. Isn’t that what gives the oxygen to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, now X, Instagram et al. At times it appears that there are people and organisations out there that know more about ourselves than we do.

The State knows so much about us and then when the individual wants the simplest and the most non-threatening information she or he is told that GDPR prevents the issuing of such material.

A fuzzy understanding of GDPR can lead to all sorts of misunderstanding and tempt people to go down the road of conspiracy theories. It can easily add fire to the current unstable world.