Did you know that “Irish culture has created a situation in which it is impermissible to speak about God”?
 
Mention the word ‘God’ and the powers-that-be will have your guts for garters.
Catholics have been “marginalised,” their Church made “virtually invisible.”
So the Bishops don’t control 90% of the schools? Catholic clergy are never quoted in the news? You could be dragged out and shot for suggesting RTÉ might broadcast the Angelus once in a while?
All this and more can be found on the website of The Iona Institute, an organisation whose leading lights include Indo contributor David Quinn, freelance flipperty-gibbet Breda O’Brien and former Hot Press stalwart John Waters.
Check out the institute’s case against marriage rights for gay people at ionainstitute.ie/index.php?id=2560. You’ll laugh and spit with anger simultaneously.
Or consider John’s explanation of the meaning of family values: “There is a need to talk about the term ‘family values’ in a way that explains more fully what those values are where they come from. [Family values] are those values which derive from the blood link, the biological link between parents and children. So therefore it is a given, these things are given to us by whatever we want to call God”.
Go on. Argue with that.
Nobody knows why John threw it all away.
 
I am surprised that so many commentators missed the significance of Gareth Bale’s denial that he had dived during Tottenham’s game against Sunderland on December 28.
Booked for going down too easily under challenge from Craig Gardner, Bale said: “I think the referees need to look a bit closer. It’s not something I’m doing. It’s people thinking I’m diving when there’s actually contact… If there is contact then it’s not diving.” Given that understanding of the rules, it’s no wonder Bale is seen as a cheat.
A player is not entitled to go down if there’s contact, but only when there’s contact which makes it unreasonable to expect him to stay on his feet.
Still, hard to expect Bale to have grasped the rules of the game when a foul seems now to be defined not by reference to the law but as behaviour you don’t get away with. Thus, bouts of tag-team wrestling in the box at corners and nary a penalty nor a free awarded.
And whatever happened to obstruction? Once, every game would see a couple of indirects given for obstruction. Now there are fans - not Hot Press readers, of course – who couldn’t tell you what that means.

The new year began with Cardinal Sean Brady lecturing the people of Ireland on a matter of morality: bringing the law on abortion into line with the constitution “could never be morally justified in any circumstances.”
This is the wretch who, last May, was exposed as having helped cover up sex abuse by a priest who went on to abuse scores of other children. There were demands at the time, including from devout Catholics, that Brady be required to resign. But neither he nor the Vatican showed any sense of shame.
Some of Brady’s recent media appearances must have been seen by some of the victims of the rapist whose crimes he concealed.
The future cardinal was a canon lawyer in his mid-30s in 1975 when he interviewed two boys who gave detailed accounts of abuse suffered at the hands of Father Brendan Smyth. One of the two, Brendan Boland, told BBC reporter Chris Moore that his father had been ordered to wait outside as he told Brady what had befallen him – and provided the names and home addresses of five other of Smyth’s child-victims. In one case, Boland provided eye-witness evidence: he had been present at the abuse.
None of the families of the victims nor the State authorities North or South was alerted by the Church to what had happened to the children. One of those named by Brendan Boland went on to suffer sexual assaults by Smyth for another year. Then Smyth set about abusing other children in the same extended family.
This rape and abuse continued for 13 years after Brady had been told in detail of the savagery Smyth was inflicting.
Brady’s explanation has been that telling the authorities or the families didn’t fall within his job description. He had passed on his notes to the Bishop’s office and that was the end of his involvement. It had never occurred to him to ask what action had been taken against Smyth or what had become of the five victims he’d been told about. He said: “I didn’t think it was my role to follow through.”
As clerical abuse survivor Colm O’Gorman remarked: “He is offering the classic excuse of the Nazi death camp guard – I was only following orders.”
Now Brady is back on the television screens of the land pontificating about “the profound moral questions that arise in responding to [the proposed abortion legislation]. We encourage all to pray that our public representatives will be given the wisdom and courage to do what is right.”
There are some dodgy operators in Dáil Éireann who could be said to be in need of prayers – but none, I’ll wager, more bereft than Sean Brady of the wisdom and courage to do what is right.
And the clowns of the Iona Institute say he’s not getting a fair crack of the whip.
Holy fuck.