I don’t like the cut of this new Pope’s jib, but I’ll give him a chance.
 
He sang dumb when “slum priests” and fellow Jesuits Francisco Jalics and Oraldo Yorio were kidnapped and tortured by the military junta which ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 and the bodies of others were regularly found on rubbish tips. Yorio accused then-Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of effectively setting them up by ordering that they cease their work among the poor, which the junta regarded as subversive.
But there’s room for Francis to find redemption. He could speak out now not only against State killings in his home country in the past, but against the continuing massacre of priests elsewhere in Latin America. Take Colombia.
Father Luis Alfredo Suarez Salazar was gunned down on February 2 last in the Northern city of Ocana. His family have a simple explanation of why he was singled out: “He was known in the community for his solidarity with those in need.”
The previous day, February 1, another “slum priest”, Fr. Jose Mejía Palomino, was assassinated in the district of Caldas.
A fortnight earlier, on January 16, Fr. Francisco José Vélez Echeverry was ambushed and riddled with bullets in Tuluá, in the Cauca Valley.
The deaths marked resumption of a murder-spree. The last priest-killing had been in 2011, of Fr. Reynel Restrepo Idarraga in the city of Marmato. He had been leader of a campaign against Canadian mining company Gran Colombia Gold, which was attempting to assert mining rights over all of the land on which Marmato is built.
The number of Colombian priests murdered for political reasons in the last 30 years is approaching 100. One reason the massacre isn’t a worldwide issue is that the worldwide Church hasn’t pushed it. But the first-ever Latin American pontiff could now expunge his Church’s shame by denouncing successive Colombian governments, including the current regime of President Calderon, for complicity (at least) in the killings.
This would instantly plunge the new Pope into political controversy. Governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and elsewhere are no longer beholden to the Yanqui. But Calderon is Washington’s man.
It is here, rather than in a search for new scandal from his days as leader of the Argentine Church, that we will discover what mettle Pope Francis is made of.
 
Bats and badgers are bearing the brunt of the new Northern brutalism.
The habitats of the supposedly protected species are being trashed to make way for the A5, an 85-kilometre dual-carriageway being gouged across the countryside from Derry to Aughnacloy.
Licences to remove bats and badgers had been issued a month after the Alternative A5 Alliance (AA5A) had launched a court challenge to the road plan. Roads Service and the NI Environmental (!) Agency say that they hadn’t known of the court action at the time the licence application was made.
An alternative explanation is that they knew well of the AA5A challenge and had applied for the licence to kill precisely to pre-empt the issue by cleansing the route of indigenous fauna.
Roads Service then guaranteed there’d be no interference with hedges until the court made a ruling. But a fortnight ago, the AA5A published photographs of hedges ripped out and replaced by wire-mesh fences stretched between concrete posts rammed into the soil.
The AA5A believes the hedges were uprooted to disrupt the bird-nesting season beginning in March so the authorities could argue that no nesting birds were endangered.
Disregard for the environment isn’t surprising in a project designed to boost the number of pollution-belching vehicles trembling the land and threatening the built heritage: the road would pass within 50 metres of the only Gaelic stone fortress on the island, Harry Avery’s Castle near Newtownstewart, constructed around 1380 by Aonrai Aimbreidh O’Neill.
Nor is it surprising that official bodies feel free to ignore all resistance and ram the road through. On January 18 2010, even as 2,000 objections lodged with a consultation process were being studied, Martin McGuinness told Stormont: “Let nobody be in any doubt whatsoever that [the road] will go ahead.”
The main reason for the couldn’t-care-less attitude is that the A5 project isn’t based on social, economic or environmental considerations but on the politics of the peace process.
Talks in St. Andrews in October 2006 found Sinn Fein under huge pressure to back the police – a hard sell in the heartlands where stiffing a cop had been regarded until recently as a patriotic duty. A series of sweeteners was called for. Thus, a billion-euro all-Ireland building project jointly funded by Belfast and Dublin was summoned into being. Nationalism has since been implacable in insisting that the road go ahead.
The fact that Dublin has reneged on the deal and donated its half-billion to the banks instead is neither here nor there. Nor does it matter that the road isn’t all-Ireland any more, the Aughnacloy-Dublin section postponed until the return of prosperity to the Republic is signalled by the rising of a blue moon made out of green cheese.
Building the road was part of a bargain to underpin peace, and has to be made to happen.
So the badgers and the bats, the song-birds, the hedges, the built heritage and the dreamy beauty of fabled Tyrone must all give way to the Belfast / Good Friday / St. Andrews Agreement.
Say a vice-versa word and you’re exposed as a lover of badgers and hater of peace.