On January 29th a thug walked into my friend Ray Coyle’s Red Star shop on Waterloo Street in Derry and shot him three times. He was left lying in a splurge of blood. He had been selling “legal highs”. Two days later, a protest against the hoodlums, styling themselves Republican Action Against Drugs, drew about 150 local people – a hundred more than we’d thought might come and stand up to the gang. 

The yobs of RAAD have two things going for them. One, they are not doing anything the Provisionals didn’t do for years. An IRA front, Direct Action Against Drugs (DAAD) – not very creative in the acronym department, are they? – killed 11 people in Belfast in the early 1990s. Some who sent out those death-squads are to be seen on television these days talking with straight faces about their passion for peace. 
Two, hysteria about drugs – and recently about legal highs in particular – makes rational discussion impossible. From Prime Time to The Sun to every phone-in programme polluting the airways, dangerous, ignorant opinions are presented every day as high-minded concern for young people. 
Unrepentant Provisionalism combines with moral frenzy to create the conditions in which low-lifes can believe they have a mandate for maiming and murder. 

The revelation that Norbertine priest Brendan Smyth served in the Boston diocese in the 1980s casts new light on the grubby manoeuvres of the Catholic Church in seeking to protect itself from truth. 
Smyth conducted a rampage of child-rape across Ireland for 40 years before his arrest in 1994. The Norbertine Order and a number of bishops were aware of this odyssey of abuse and chose to sing dumb. Smyth died in prison in 1997. 
Now, a campaigning group, BishopAccountability.org, has named 70 Irish priests who served in the US and who face child abuse claims. Smyth ministered in Massachusetts, North Dakota and Rhode Island. Allegations were levelled against him in each location. As in Ireland, the US church covered up and moved him on. 
Helen McGonigle says that Smyth abused her when she was six at Our Lady of Mercy (!) Church in Rhode Island. He told her that his finger was “the finger of God” and that God would punish her if she breathed a word. 
What emerges is that the Catholic Church has been shifting predator priests not just from parish to parish but from continent to continent. 
The fact that Smyth had served in the US and then returned to Ireland to resume his savagery will have been well known to Church authorities when his case came to front-page prominence in 1994. But omerta remained the order of the day until BishopAccountability forced the evidence into the open. 
Notwithstanding its bluff about contrition and change, the Catholic Church shows no sign of readiness to accept responsibility for what it did to, and failed to do for, children entrusted to its care, allowing to slip out only those slivers of truth which it can no longer keep hidden. 

Meanwhile, bishops brazenly suggest that the Church’s sins are the sins of society as a whole – like a murderer pleading that while, true enough, it was he who plunged the knife in, the blame lies elsewhere since there’s a lot of meanness in the world. 
The latest manoeuvre in this vein came last month from the Irish Church’s top man, Cardinal Sean Brady, in an address marking Church Unity Week in Belfast. 
“Ireland today, I believe, is expressing a crisis of hope. Part of the problem lies in an understandable reaction to dramatic events... in the Church.” This in turn arises from “a culture of disregard for the dignity and worth of the body in this life (which) may be caused by a lack of interest in the resurrection of the body in the next life.” 
No mention of the nature of these “dramatic events”, nor reference to anything other than loss of faith in Church teachings as possible cause of the loss of respect for the dignity and worth of the bodies of children. 
This thoroughly dishonest and deeply immoral attempt to shrug off responsibility is standard operating procedure for Catholic prelates in Ireland and the rest of the world. 
Meanwhile, the pope tells us, again, in a statement preparatory to his visit to Britain this year, that gay sex is contrary to human nature and that gay citizens are not entitled to equality before the law. The bluster of a hypocrite and bigot.

It is a relief to turn away from the Catholic Church toward the relatively wholesome topic of bestiality. Sex with an animal is surely less offensive than child rape? 
Thomas Edwards, 20, from a town called Hope in north Wales, is awaiting sentence for trying to penetrate a rottweiler. The court heard that he’d met the rottweiler, Devil, when relieving himself in the garden during a party at a friend’s house. He told the court that he was working at Chester Zoo but intended to go to college and study to become a vet.
And a warrant has been issued for Leicester man Joseph Squires, 66, charged with buggery of a donkey and a horse and criminal damage to both animals. How come the criminal damage I cannot imagine. 
Bestiality seems very popular these days, especially with goats. I have never tried it myself, but I believe they are a nightmare to get into fishnets.