Now that Fianna Fáil has been thwarted in its ambition to burn the country down for the insurance money, perhaps we can at last begin to deal with the uglier corruption that moulders within.
 
Bertie Ahern never colluded in the rape of a child and then threatened the victim with eternal damnation if the crime was reported.
Fianna Fáil harboured liars, frauds and thieves but never encouraged a culture of child molestation.
Bertie is out on his ear, with only ill-gotten gains for comfort in the cold. And commentators have given Enda Kenny a passing dig with the elbow for standing with State-sponsored billionaire Denis O’Brien to bang the drum at the New York Stock Exchange. But cardinal sinner Sean Brady has blithely announced that he will be taking the role of “Principal Presider” during brass-necked Benedict’s visit in June and nobody seems to have balked.
Brady has admitted that during his ‘70s stint as secretary to the Bishop of Kilmore, he required two teenagers to take vows of silence after they’d come to him with complaints of sexual abuse by Fr. Brendan Smyth. Many of the 90 offences against children of which Smyth was eventually convicted took place after Brady had silenced the victims.
The FF cabal which robbed the people and ruined the Republic has been entirely discredited and discarded from public life. But the Catholic hierarchy of hypocrisy remains unchanged.
The report last month from the seven (!) teams of top-notch sin-sniffers deployed to Ireland by the Holy See revealed that Benedict felt “betrayed” by the Irish Church’s inadequate response to the sex abuse problem. The Holy See, the Visitators explained, had sent them to “assist the local Church on her path of renewal.”
But if the scandal has resulted from the local Church straying off the right road, what are we to make of the similar scenarios emerging in Canada, the US, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Austria, Tanzania, Australia, South Africa, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the Philippines, Croatia, France, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Italy, Malta, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Argentina?
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.”
There’s none of that sort of stuff to be seen in the “iconic” Titanic Building today.
The Daily Herald is long gone. It lasted as a Labour paper until 1964, when then-owners the Mirror Group sold it to Rupert Murdoch. Five years later, Murdoch changed its name to the Sun.
Did good stuff while it lasted, though.

As I write, the aforementioned Pope is over in Cuba mouthing off about Marxism. “Marxism is obsolete and no longer corresponds to reality,” he intones.
Some of us would challenge the notion of Cuba with its hereditary leadership and single-party government as “Marxist”. For the moment, we can let that pass.
But “no longer corresponds to reality?” This from a guy who reckons that he, uniquely in the world, can speak for a God who was born to a virgin two millennia ago, who died and came back to life, and whose body, blood, soul and divinity can now be conjured up by an anointed underling incanting a mantra over a wafer of bread and a glass of wine, who sees women as inherently inferior creatures and denounces homosexual acts as deserving of eternal hellfire.
Marxism doesn’t correspond to reality? Fucking cheek.