Germany and France warn Trump against use of force over Greenland

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/08/france-warns-trump-against-threatening-eu-sovereign-borders-greenland?CMP=share_btn_url

The best of books - 'The Best Catholics in the World'

I’m a slow reader and take to books in fits and starts, go through phases of reading and non-reading.

From time-to time I come across great reads that I believe inspire and impress me.

I remember as a young man reading Sean O’Casey, which left an indelible mark on me. It happens from time to time. The same with Dickens.

Another book that greatly influenced me is Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. It gives the reader, at least it gave me, a whole new perspective of what happened in World War II and the resolve of the Russians.

Yesterday I finished reading Derek Scally’s The Best Catholics in the World. It is a work of genius. It tells and explains the story of where we are with the Catholic Church in Ireland today.

Scally has been living in Berlin for over 20 years. How he describes the similarities between the former GDR and the Irish Catholic Church is intriguing, and accurate.

It is a powerful read and this reader highly recommends it. It certainly should be read by every clerical student and priest in the country. Everyone should read it.

More about the book on this blog in the days ahead.

It’s never a good idea to dismiss another person

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

We are into the first full week of 2025. I don’t know when I last made a New Year’s Resolution. I’m wondering did I ever. But I have an idea for this coming year.

My usual way of travel is public transport and a fold-up bicycle.

On the Sunday after Christmas I was on an early morning Luas with my fold-up bicycle. I was on the Green Line tram, which goes from Brides Glen beyond Sandyford to Broombridge, which is near Cabra.

Somewhere near Harcourt Street, close to the city centre, two men got on the tram. They had an appearance about them that they may have been sleeping rough. They were sitting across from me and I could easily hear everything they were saying. That was not difficult as they were talking very loudly, almost shouting at each other. 

They were discussing what stop they should get off. It was either Grangegorman or Phibsborough. Eventually they decided on Phibsborough. When I heard Phibsborough I became a little anxious as that was my stop too and at that hour on a Sunday morning it’s a deserted place.

I don’t know how it happened, but we got talking. I told them I too was getting off at Phibsborough. They were full of questions, as I was. They asked me where I was going. I told them. But they wanted to know more and asked me why was I up and about that early on this Sunday morning. 

Before I had time to reply one of them asked me was I a priest. I was dumbfounded with the question and told them I was. We had a lovely chat, funny too. 

Before it came to our stop they offered to help me lift my bicycle up the steps at the station. There is a steep set of steps at Phibsborough. When we got there the lift was working so there was no need for them to help. We said our goodbyes and off we went.

The encounter has been on my mind ever since. How stupid and indeed wrong it was of me to make my mind up about two men in a matter of seconds without ever having spoken to them, knowing absolutely nothing about them. 

And I do it all the time, with both men and woman, young and old. I can’t talk for anyone else but I’d make a fair guess and say it is something we all find easy to do. How often we make up our minds about people on how they  are dressed, how they speak, where they live, what sort of work they do. 

There’s a long list of boxes to be filled and we judge people accordingly. And it’s worse than that, so often we decide on people without ever having met them.

There’s a mystery behind every face. It would make the world a much better place if we allowed the mystery of the other person to unfold before we allowed our grubby little thoughts to destroy her or him.

It sounds to me like a wise and good New Year’s Resolution to be kinder and more sensible with our ‘judgements’ on other people.

The weather is often a serious theme of our conversation

The weather is often a subject of conversation in Ireland.

After a relatively mild winter so far we are currently in the grip of snow, ice and wind. So far no snow in Dublin but close to freezing rain. No weather to be on a bicycle.

On January 6, 1839 Ireland experienced the Night of the Big Wind, indeed, to this day people refer back to it.

It was the most damaging storm in 300 years. It damaged more than 20 per cent of houses in Dublin.

There’s more to Artificial Intelligence than meets the eye

The requirements of cooling AI server towers are such that for every 100 words of text generated by ChatGPT, three litres of water are consumed.

The tail that tells its own good story

The cat story of Thursday makes for good reading.

A woman who read  the piece tells the following story. She came across a heron on the road who had been hit by a car. She brought it to a vet who charged her €150 to euthanise it.

She later discovered from a friend an incident about the same vet. The friend brought her sick dog to the vet. He phoned the woman to tell her he had to put the dog down.

Two days later the dog was at her door, tail wagging.

Jimmy Carter’s eulogy for Gerald Ford

Wonderful words spoken by Jimmy Carter about his former opponent. A world that seems now to have disappeared. Unfortunately.

 https://youtu.be/9gNrZypFkPE?feature=shared

The cat I euthanised was not, in fact, our bright boy JJ

A lovely story in The Irish Times by Jennifer O’Connell on Saturday.

Losing a pet, they say, is a practice run for losing a human you love. But for something that’s only a rehearsal, the pain feels very real. In his podcast series Animal, Sam Anderson describes the death of his family’s hamster as a toothache that settles on the house. The days after the death of a pet pass in a fug and eventually, because the human heart is resilient, acceptance follows, and maybe someday in the future you’ll surprise yourself by talk of another pet.

That’s usually how it goes.

But not in the case of JJ, our handsome, sweet, manipulative six-year-old black Bombay cat.

From the start, JJ did everything on his own terms. We planned to adopt one kitten through a local rescue service – Lydia was an 11th birthday present for my oldest daughter. But when we arrived to pick her up, the lady who answered the door had one tiny, shivering black bundle in each hand. Which do you want, she asked. Of course we took them both.

Lydia was ridiculously lazy, unfailingly loyal and, to be blunt about it, a bit dim.

But JJ was different. He was a bright boy. You’re not supposed to be able to train cats – as cat owners will confirm, they train you. (As cat owners will also confirm, there’s no such thing as a cat owner. Think of yourself instead as an unpaid Airbnb host to a perpetually unimpressed guest who might abscond without notice and deposit a poor review in the middle of your floor.)

Let’s put it this way: he entered into a deal with my younger daughter, just three when he arrived, whereby he would sit and stay for as long it took for her to give him a piece of roast chicken. Soon she could leave him for 10 minutes and he’d still be waiting in the same corner of the kitchen, stock-still as a trained sniper.

As they got older, the relationship between JJ and Lydia became more fractious, and JJ began staying away from home. We suspected he was two-timing us with another family, probably the kind of people who didn’t insult him with a diet composed mostly of expensive hypoallergenic kibble. We discovered the identity of the other family when my neighbour Phyllis phoned me once during a bad storm worried because he wasn’t at home. By which she meant her home.

One morning in early 2022, when he was five, JJ didn’t leave immediately after snaffling some grub. By the time the text arrived later that day, I already knew that gentle, cat-loving Phyllis had died. He stayed with us for a while as he mourned her and then he got back out there. But whenever a roast went on, he’d appear like magic in the chicken spot.

I think we always knew that one day he’d just stop coming home. That we could have coped with.

It was a Saturday afternoon in November last year when a neighbour phoned to say there was a distressed black cat in their front garden that looked like one of mine.

Chance to grieve

The painful angle of his back legs was how I knew JJ was in trouble. He had been hit by a car which did not stop. He pulled himself as far as my neighbour’s gate, and was wedged between the railings. I looked around for an adult to tell me what to do, but my small daughter and the poor, broken cat were looking at me.

In the end, the nine-year-old was the brave one. She held him in a box in the back seat, as he whimpered and tried, with his two working front legs, to claw his way out. She talked to him in a soothing voice and kept him calm. In the vet’s surgery, I put a hand on his small, warm head and whispered goodbye.

The vet phoned later. The cat’s spinal cord was severed. She could dose him up with steroids and fluids overnight, she said. That would give you some time to decide, she said. I asked her what she would do if it was her cat? She said that she would let him stay asleep. But if you need time ... But taking time would have meant delegating the decision to my three children, so I told her to let him sleep.

The days after were hard. The absence we thought we had got used to now permeated every room. The vet called again and asked about caskets for his ashes. Something nice, I said. Maybe wood.

Seventeen days later, I was at work when my husband rang.

“Guess who just walked in?” he said.

If you have cats, you may have seen this one coming. JJ was back. JJ had sauntered in, eaten some kibble and was now, as we spoke, in the chicken spot, gazing optimistically at the oven. I didn’t believe it until my daughter sent photographs.

The vet was understanding when I phoned to say that the cat I euthanised was not, in fact, our JJ. It happens, she said. Does it, I asked. Well no, she conceded. But black cats are hard to tell apart. We tried to find the owner, but he had no microchip. I felt terrible. She said I had still done the right thing, and offered to split the bill.

By the time I got home that evening, JJ had been fed and cuddled and told off and reminded how much he was loved. He slipped back out into the night. And we never saw him again.

It’s been a year, and we have nearly all come to terms with the fact that JJ is really not coming back. The other black cat, the cat I am still only half persuaded was not JJ, gifted us the chance to grieve. My younger daughter is convinced JJ is still out there, living his best life eating someone else’s roast chicken.

The Sparrow was the last sportswriter in Nazi Paris

May 2025 be kind and good to all readers of this blog, indeed, to all mankind.

Within the last 24 hours this blog has been read on all continents bar Australia. 

Readership in Brazil tops the list with 1,160 logging on, then the US with 1,140, 497 in Hong Kong and 479 readers in Ireland, 419 readers in Singapore, 24 in Russia. In Trinidad and Tobago it was read by 14 people.  Eighteen in Uzbekistan, 64 in Turkey, 115 in Mexico.

There were 629 unidentifiable places where it was read.

The blog began in June 2007.

The link below is a wonderful read about a quirky type of man, a man of many parts. It was published in The Irish Times on Monday

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/2024/12/30/the-legend-of-sparrow-robertson-the-last-sportswriter-in-nazi-paris/

Vivian Boland’s 2008 review of book by Jimmy Carter

The world is talking about Jimmy Carter ever since his death was announced. He was truly a great and inspirational man.

Even president-elect Donald Trump spoke well of him, though he did add that he disagreed with him philosophically. Interesting to know the specific philosophy.

Below is a review of a book by Carter. It’s written by Dominican Vivian Boland and makes for an interesting read on the first day of 2025 and some few days before Donal Trump becomes US president.

REVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PASTORAL REVIEW 4 (2008) 90-91

 

 

JIMMY CARTER, FAITH & FREEDOM: THE CHRISTIAN CHALLENGE FOR THE WORLD London, Duckworth, 2005, x + 214 pages

 

This best-selling book by President Jimmy Carter recalls a more hopeful time, when the phrase ‘ethical foreign policy’ actually meant something. His Christian faith, he says, helped rather than hindered his activities as President and it continues to inspire his current activities. The foundation established in his name is now a major non-governmental agency promoting development, justice, reconciliation and peace in many parts of the world. In recognition of its work, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2002.

 

On issues that divide Christians across the US – science and religion, for example – he takes a liberal line for the most part. In regard to divorce and gay unions he argues that governments should define and protect the rights of citizens while church congregations define ‘holy matrimony’. He recently left the Baptist congregation of which he had been a member for seventy years on account of its attempts to justify biblically a subservient position for women. He has ‘never believed that Jesus Christ would approve either abortions or the death penalty’ but as President obeyed Supreme Court decisions to the best of his ability, ‘at the same time attempting to minimize what I considered to be their adverse impact’.

 

He is one of the best-placed commentators on current concerns about religious fundamentalism: he knows what is involved in trying to be a faithful believer and a politician in the ‘real world’. He is clearly not in sympathy with neo-conservative fundamentalism, which threatens the separation of church and state, ‘one of America’s great glories.’ He is clearly angry that a lot of painstaking work in relation to Cuba, North Korea, Palestine and nuclear non-proliferation has been crudely undone by subsequent administrations, in particular the present one.

 

The chapter on the use of torture in the war on terrorists is the most shocking in the book. It includes the extraordinary revelation that some of the countries in which the ‘rendition’ of terrorist subjects by the United States is carried out are Islamic states, some of whose human rights records have been condemned by the US itself – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan and Uzbekistan. This use of torture, as well as the internment camp at Guantanamo Bay, represents a departure from America’s historic leadership as a champion of human rights. He calls it ‘an embarrassing tragedy’. He is clear that the pre-emptive war against Iraq and the continuing occupation fail to meet the criteria of the just war tradition.

 

He writes also about environmental concerns, but in his view the world’s greatest challenge in the third Christian millennium is the growing chasm between the rich and poor people on earth. The clarity and conviction of his writing remind the reader that here is no armchair academic or idealistic preacher but a man who has given his life to the search for solutions to these problems. Although there are many things here that might tempt one to pessimism, perhaps even cynicism, the overall sense is hopeful, that the space between the truths of religion and the officially protected scepticism of free societies can be successfully negotiated. Mainline politics may not be the place to do it but President Carter’s experience shows that there are other ways, other kinds of institutional involvement, that do allow it to be done.

 

Vivian Boland OP

A worrying flip-side to all our technology and globalisation

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

On Tuesday, December 17 I received notification from Vodafone, thanking me for shopping with them and informing me that my order would be delivered within one to two working days.

 

The order was a SIM card. It must be one of the smallest items possible to deliver anywhere.

The following day, Wednesday, DPD sent a van to my address, alas I was not at home. You would imagine they would simply drop it in my letter box. No such thing, they drive off without delivering it. It arrives the following day, Thursday. 

The tiny SIM card is wrapped in an enormous amount of ‘stuff’. I place the new SIM in my phone to discover it would not be activated until the following Monday. After many phone calls to Egypt and India and listening to robotic voices, which maybe sourced in Dublin I eventually am connected to the world with my mobile phone on Monday.

No I am anything but a Luddite but honestly I can’t help wondering where is all our technology taking us. It took two van journeys to deliver my SIM, which was wrapped in such a way that the parcel that arrived was hundreds of times the size of the SIM. The waste of materials, including power to fuel the van.

On the one hand anyone with a brain is shouting that this planet is in trouble and on the other hand we are becoming more profligate. 

Yes, the technology is simply amazing, totally beyond my understanding but is all this ‘magic’ and globalisation not leading us to dark places. Just look what social media is doing. I have heard stories from people whose job it is to examine the phones and computers of those who have been arrested for serious crimes. The material they see is unimaginable.

It can’t be healthy that any one family or any one individual can have vast wealth. It gives them too much power. After the atrocity in Magdeburg Elon Musk, who is worth €309 billion, called the German Chancellor an incompetent fool and suggested he resign. Naturally the leader of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party Alice Weidel, agrees with Musk. 

Large corporations run to the countries where they can get the cheapest labour. The individual person is becoming less and less important. We seem to be swallowed up in some sort of vortex that makes us feel helpless and hopeless. 

People feel alienated, especially the poorest and the marginalised. It’s inevitable that they will grasp at any fake promises that seem to offer a new beginning. We sure do need change but not the change of a Trump or a Musk.

I wish all my readers a great year ahead. Let’s all make a special effort in 2025 to be kinder to one another. 

It’ll make the world a better place.

You have to be doing something

Film maker and author Bob Quinn quotes Antonio Francesco Gramsci. Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, linguist, journalist and politician. He was a critic of Benito Mussolini and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party.

The quote goes: ‘Pessimism of the intellect - optimism of the will’. Quinn says this means that ‘although doing anything about anything may be futile, you have to be doing something.

Puzzling.

Al Pacino’s speech in Scent of a Woman screams hope

Over the last few days all television stations have shown films. Many of them favourites, others old chestnuts.

On Friday night RTÉ One screened SCENT OF A WOMAN, an Al Pacino great. The Irish Times TV guide refers to it as a comedy. It’s far from comedic.

The impromptu speech that Lt Col Frank Slade (Al Pacino) gives at the end of the film is a masterclass performance. It’s bound to give anyone hope who fights for justice and right. It casts a cold and dark cloud over people, especially people in authority, who try to diminish those who seek the truth and correct behaviour, whatever the cost.

It’s a fabulous reminder to what the individual can do if we put our mind and energy to the cause.

Below is the link to Lt Col Frank Slade’s speech.

https://youtu.be/Jd10x8LiuBc?feature=shared

Musk pens German opinion piece supporting AfD

This appears in tomorrow's German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

The article includes this paragraph: “The portrayal of the AfD as rightwing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!”

What nonsense. Has Mr Musk any idea how many homosexuals were in Hitler’s close circle?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/28/elon-musk-germany-afd-party?CMP=share_btn_url

The banks are among those who know we are cowards

Why do we allow corporations, organisations treat us badly? It’s so easy to look to the past and see the wrong that was done. Where were the wise and prophetic people back then? Where are they today?

I phoned the PTSB fraud telephone number yesterday. It was 26 minutes before the call was answered. And that call was my third attempt.

Before the call was finally answered the caller is subjected to a flow of meaningless words from the bank. Indeed, at one stage they talk about how modern technology is enhancing customer service.

And we accept it all, not a word from us.

PTSB are no exception. We are all victims of this nonsense day-in day-out. Why? Because most of us are cowards and the companies and organisations want to employ as few people as possible in order to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.

Are the days of capitalism and democracy nearing their sell-by date?

Pope Francis calls for peace talks on Ukraine Russia war

The piece below is from The Irish Times on St Stephen’s Day.

Interesting to know what Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy thinks of it.

Pope Francis yesterday called for talks between Ukraine and Russia to end the war that followed the Russian invasion two years ago and has accounted for tens of thousands dead and injured.

In his Christmas Day “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and world) address, the pope noted the Ukraine conflict directly and called for “the boldness needed to open the door to negotiation”.

Speaking from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica to thousands in the square below, the pope said: “May the sound of arms be silenced in war-torn Ukraine!” He also called for “gestures of dialogue and encounter, in order to achieve a just and lasting peace”.

The pontiff, who has been in situ since 2013, was criticised by Ukrainian officials this year when he said the country should have the courage of the “white flag” to negotiate an end to the war with Russia.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy had previously ruled out engaging in peace talks without the restoration of Ukraine’s pre-war borders. But Mr Zelenskiy has shown an increasing willingness in the weeks since Donald Trump was elected US president to enter negotiations.

Earlier this month, Mr Zelenskiy raised the idea of a diplomatic settlement that would involve a “freezing” of the current battle lines and the deployment of foreign troops in Ukraine. Russia has demanded that Ukraine abandon its ambitions to join the Nato [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]military alliance.

The 88-year-old pope, celebrating the 12th Christmas of his pontificate, called for an end to conflicts, political, social or military, in places such as Lebanon, Mali, Mozambique, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Pope Francis, who has grown more critical of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza recently, describing it last week as “cruelty”, also renewed his call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas war and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas. He called the humanitarian situation in Gaza “extremely grave”, and asked for “the doors of dialogue and peace [to] be flung open”.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign for the October 7th massacre, which it says is aimed at eliminating Hamas, has killed more than 45,000 people, mostly civilians, said authorities in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. The campaign has displaced nearly the entire population and left much of the enclave in ruins.

The pope opened a holy year for the global Catholic Church on Christmas Eve which will run through to January 6th, 2026. The Catholic holy year, also known as a jubilee, is considered a time of peace, forgiveness and pardon.

Yesterday, the pope said the jubilee year should be a time for “every individual, and all peoples and nations . . #. to become pilgrims of hope, to silence the sound of arms and overcome divisions”. He also said it should be a time “to tear down all walls of separation”. – Reuters

The day the Cold War ended and a new world order began

On this day, December 26, 1991 the Supreme Soviet  formally dissolved the Soviet Union. The end of the USSR.

In the years that followed the Russian people felt humiliated. Why did the West not offer help similar to the Marshal Plan, which helped rebuild Germany after World War II?

Would the world be in a better place today if the Soviet Union had never been dissolved?

A pleasant and enjoyable Christmas Day 2024 to all readers

One hundred years ago, December 1924  John Jameson Irish whiskey was selling for  15/- a bottle and a bottle of Lorex cognac cost 18/6d. A dozen mince pies cost 2/6d at Robert Roberts Tea and Coffee Merchants of Grafton Street.

Occasional Scribbles wishes all its reader a lovely and pleasant Christmas Day 2024.

Keeping our faltering faith despite a hierarchical church?

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

December 8 was the traditional start to the Christmas season. It was the day people from the country descended on Dublin to buy their Christmas shopping. December 8 in the Christian calendar is the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Last week I asked three young women, all educated in Catholic schools, what  was the meaning of the feast. 

They had no idea. Some days later I asked a 60-year old man the same question. He stumbled for a short time before telling me it was about Jesus being born of a virgin. He too was educated in Catholic schools.

The Immaculate Conception was made a dogma of the Catholic Church by Pope Pius IX in 1854. What it states is that Mary was conceived free of Original Sin.

Christians believe that we are all born in a state of sinfulness as a result of the behaviour of Adam. What that actually means to most Irish people today is an open question. We baptise our children to free them from original sin and welcome them into the Christian community.

From my experience young people seem to know little about the tenets of the faith into which they were born.

What exactly do older people know about the tenets of their faith? The majority of Irish people have attended Christian schools. 

When I hear people say that it would be a shame to lose the ethos of the Catholic school I scratch my head in puzzlement, and ask myself what actually is that Christian ethos that was meant to have been passed on to us.  Corporal punishment was prohibited in Irish schools in 1982. 

Before that date many of us know exactly the full extent of that so-called ethos, how we were brutally and savagely assaulted.

What really were our religious knowledge classes about? What did we ever learn about the history, culture, theology of the Christian tradition?

In the last few days I heard someone say that we have tendency in Ireland to swing from one extreme to the other. Wise words. 

Right now we are being deluged with all the razzmatazz of the season. It’s as if the original idea of Christmas has been hijacked. For many it’s a time of over- indulging in everything that’s available. Of course it is also a time where people come together to enjoy each other’s company. 

The churches will be full on Christmas Day. It’s a great day for priests to use the opportunity to talk and pray in a language that makes sense to people about what the feast of Christmas is about.

Why do I keep thinking the churches’ communications skills are poor? Think about it, the churches are meant to be telling a Good News story. 

That can be difficult to believe. I often wonder is our faltering faith still alive despite a hierarchical church that seems to live in the strangest of comforting bubbles.

A peaceful and blessed Christmas to all my readers. Don’t stress yourself. It makes no sense. And please, stay sober for everyone’s sake, yours too.