Poor old Keith O’Brien, Cardinal Archbishop of Edinburgh and the most senior Catholic cleric in Britain, has been given the chop from the conclave currently electing a new Pope. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t resent the fact Sean Brady is meantime roaming the Vatican, pondering how best to bargain his vote.

The only charge against O’Brien – hypocrisy doesn’t count in the Catholic Church – is that he touched up and tried it on with younger priests. It isn’t claimed that he forced himself on anyone. Nor that he covered up for a serial rapist who was to go on to despoil children for a further two decades.
Brady did exactly this when, having investigated the crimes against children of the paedophile priest Brendan Smyth, he decided not to alert the civil authorities and instead swore the victims to secrecy under pain of mortal sin. He invoked the Church’s ultimate sanction to free Smyth to continue his rape-spree.
Shortly before leaving for Rome, Brady and the other three Irish archbishops responded to Enda Kenny’s proposal to legislate for the X case by warning that, “The lives of untold numbers of unborn children in this State now depend on the choices that will be made by our public representatives.”
Of course, the lives of untold numbers of born children have already been blighted by choices that were made by rapist priests.

At Derry Crown Court on February 28, a 27-year-old Cookstown man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years after pleading guilty to sexual assault. Many observers thought the sentence very lenient: Eileen Calder of the Rape Crisis Centre said it was “awful”.
Judge Piers Grant had had a number of character references for the assailant in front of him as he deliberated on sentence. One was from GAA icon and Tyrone county manager, Mickey Harte.
Five days later, Mr. Harte issued a statement calling on members of the Stormont Assembly “to put aside normal party political differences and join as one on this issue.” He was urging support for a proposal from Alban Magennis (SDLP) and Paul Girvan (DUP) to change the law in order to shut down the Marie Stopes clinic which had opened in Belfast last October offering medical abortions up to nine weeks where a woman’s life was at risk or there was risk of permanent and serious damage to her mental or physical health – the current conditions in the North for legal abortion.
Thus, Mickey Harte, fresh from pleading for leniency for a man who had sexually assaulted a woman and then thrown her out of a van naked from the waist down onto a ditch where she was found unconscious hours later by two men who thought at first that they’d stumbled on a dead body, had assumed a position on the high moral ground from which to demand that women be prevented from exercising the very limited right to choose allowed them in the North.
An icon? More a gobshite.

James McClean is in bother again at Sunderland after tweeting that his all-time fave-rave song is the Wolfe Tones’ ‘Broad Black Brimmer’.
‘It’s just a broad black brimmer with ribbons frayed and torn / By the careless whisk of many a mountain breeze / A old trench coat that’s battle-stained and worn / And breeches almost threadbare at the knees / A Sam Brown belt with a buckle big and strong / And a holster that’s been empty many’s a day – but not for long! / When men claim Ireland´s freedom/The one they’ll choose to lead them / Will wear the broad black brimmer of the IRA’.
There’s a thumping gusto to it right enough. But James ought to be aware that it isn’t just at Sunderland that the ballad could cause him bother. You’d get the bums’ rush if you tried to sing it these days at a Sinn Féin social. James should update his repertoire and try out a couple of my own increasingly popular as-advertised-in-Hot Press Rebel Song Peace Process adaptations.
“The Slim Black Briefcase of the IRA.”
“Oh Grá Mó Chrói I Long To See a Transitional Arrangement in Place.”
“Every Man Will Stand Behind The Men Behind The Desk.”
Set-lists available tailored for your own Easter commemoration. Special bonus song “A Notion Once Again” with every order.

There was a surprising consensus at the close of the Salute to Henry (McCullough) gig at Vicar St. on March 3 that the glitteriest star of the star-studded show – Christy and Declan, Sweeny’s Men, the Fleadhs, Philip Donnelly, Mick Flannery, John Spillane, Honor Heffernan, Johnny Duhan, Victor McCullough, Jimmy Smith etc. etc. – had been James Delaney, a manic presence in a number of the night’s overlapping line-ups. Not since Jerry Lee has a keyboard been pummelled with such sustained inspirational intensity.
The other thing that struck me was the number of the instrumentalists on stage who wouldn’t be included in anybody’s list of showy performers but can be counted among the most accomplished practitioners of their craft. I wondered, but wasn’t about to ask, how many are getting a regular gig these days, when session work is scarce and the priority of people with the power of preferment seems always to be for the schlock of the new.
I eased through the end of the night backstage with Beep, having a smoke and feeling privileged.
The show was produced and directed by Pete Cummins and Frank Murray.