The Real Evil Within
The venal, rotten truth about Irish politics has been exposed for the world to see – but what about the far more serious crimes perpetuated against children by the Catholic church? How can those who were party to such outrages continue to go unpunished?
Eamonn McCann, 11 Apr 2012
Would this litany of evil not suggest that the problem has to do with the character of the Church itself, not with any kink in the character of its Irish operation, and that it is Benedict and not Brady who bears ultimate blame for the ravages of the rapists?
The Apostolic Visitators declared before they headed back to the Vatican that the victims of abuse whom they’d met on their visit “were assured of the particular closeness of the Holy Father.”
That must have made them feel safe, right enough.
It’s all aboard for the Titanic Experience as Belfast goes en fete for the centenary celebrations of the disaster which saw 1,500 people perish in the icy waters of the north Atlantic. Stormont Minister Arlene Foster has urged “all sections of the community” to “get on board.”
It is confidently asserted that 400,000 people a year will pay good money to amble around the nine galleries showcasing separate aspects of the Titanic story. Whether the figure has emerged from careful calculation or mad guess, I wouldn’t know. But I am inclining towards the mad guess theory.
If the organisers had seriously wanted to know how to present the Titanic experience so as to respect the memory of the dead, they should have looked back to the old Daily Herald. On April 18, 1912, four days after the ship floundered, its page one story began: “Mr. Bruce Ismay, Chairman of the White Star Line, has been saved. Why is it that so few of the steerage passengers have been saved?”
A week later, having interviewed survivors arriving back in Southampton, the Herald streamed across the front page: “Women and children last!” The story told that of 266 women and children in first and second-class, 20 drowned. Of 255 women and children in steerage, 134 drowned, including 53 children.
“Where were those 53 steerage children, Mr. Ismay, when you saved yourself?” asked the paper. Referring to White Star’s latest profit figures, it continued: “They have paid 30% to their shareholders and they have sacrificed 51% of the steerage children.”
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