Sssh! The Week’s daily briefing reports:
OBAMA: MORE GOLF THAN ECONOMICS
US President Barack Obama has spent almost 1,000 hours on holiday and playing golf since he took office in January 2009 but has spent less than half that amount of time, 474.4 hours, in meetings about the economy. The claim comes in a report from the Government Accountability Institute, based on analysis of the presidential diary and newspaper reports.
Is this the most lethal euphemism of all? We have had ethnic “cleansing”, a clinical-sounding term for numerous and variously bloody instances of forced migration. We have had “cultural revolution” for mindless communist barbarities. We have even the benign-sounding term “re-education” veiling the gulags of soviet Russia. There was, of course – until now – the daddy of them all: the “final solution” covering the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.
But how about “planned parenthood”? We are fast reaching a stage where that very term, suggesting an acute sense of responsibility and connected with the most elemental and sublime of all human experiences, must send a shiver through us. But despite the horrendous evidence from the Gosnell trial in Philadephia, illustrating just the tip of the iceberg of human depravity which the abortion industry represents, and industry which is itself the very flagship of Planned Parenthood, we have the leader of the “free” world championing this “cause”.
This industrial health-service complex – which has nothing to do with health and less to do with service – has accounted for the deaths of millions and millions of human beings, children and women, across the world in the past 50 years. You can take any approach to statistics you like and the figures will still come out showing that this is the single greatest human disaster that the world has ever seen. Don’t get distracted by the statistics but just for the record, one source cites
approximately 42 million abortions occurring every year worldwide. The same source calculates that abortion killed 73 times more Americans than died in battle in their last 12 wars combined.
There seems to be little doubt that the local Planned Parenthood group had been aware of complaints about what Dr. Gosnell was up to but did not intervene. The Philadelphia Daily News quoted the local group’s leader as saying that women had complained to the group about conditions at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic, and that the group would encourage them to report their complaints to the health department. That’s responsibility?
In the context of Obama’s shameless support for Planned Parenthood, show most recently by his going out of his way to celebrate with them last week, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion group said: “President Obama blatantly ignored this inconvenient truth about the abortion industry’s horrific lack of oversight and disparaged the pro-life advocates who wake up each morning with the goal of saving the lives of unborn children and women from the pain of abortion,” said.
Mr. Obama at the dinner last week ignored the Gosnell case but condemned lawmakers who have targeted Planned Parenthood. “When politicians try to turn Planned Parenthood into a punching bag, they’re not just talking about you, they’re talking about the millions of women who you serve,” he told the group’s gathering, at a Washington hotel. “And when they talk about cutting off your funding, let’s be clear they’re talking about telling many of those women you’re on your own.”
He pledged his loyalty to the group. “You’ve also got a president,” he said, “who’s going to be right here with you fighting every step of the way.” Now they are chilling words.
Matt Barber in his TownHall.com column pulls no punches when he confronts these horrors.
I mean, why are we surprised that an abortionist and his staff would, behind the walls of an always-lethal abortion clinic, commit one of the most horrific serial killings in American history? What did you think abortionists do, heal people?
Why are we taken aback that there was no oversight, no regulation, or that Planned Parenthood, though privy to the clinic’s filthy, medieval conditions, refused to report it to the Department of Health? After all, Planned Parenthood, Barack Obama and the DNC have vehemently opposed all laws – such as those in Virginia, Mississippi and elsewhere – designed to prevent exactly the same kind of squalid conditions found in Gosnell’s clinic (and others), laws that simply direct abortion mills to meet the same minimal safety standards required of all other medical facilities.
You didn’t really buy that whole “women’s health” nonsense, did you?
We live in bewildering times. The President of the United States won his second term by a slender enough margin of the popular vote. But he is not just the President of the United States. He is the most powerful man in the world and for the old West he is effectively the unelected primus inter not-so-pares. As we were reminded during his last election campaign, had the peoples of Europe had a vote in that election he would have won by a landslide. Frightening.
Congratulations to all Irish parliamentary deputies and senators taking a stand against the legislation threatening to bring abortion on demand into Ireland. The stand of some is reported in this morning’s Irish Times.
Those who say that the legislation which is being prepared is not going to lead to a very liberal abortion law in this country in due course are either burying their heads in the sand or are being disingenuous. They are ignoring the overwhelming evidence of history from the past 50 years.
What those of you who are opposing this legislation as it is currently drafted are doing is to my mind the first example of principled and even heroic political action that I have seen in this country for a long time.
Consensus politics has a place in a political system but where consensus trumps values and principles of life and human dignity then we are on a short path to corruption.
This week The Thirsty Gargoyle’s blog turned its attention to the utterly despicable manipulation of public opinion in which the sad case of Savita Halappanavar has become mired. Not having got the verdict they wanted from the inquest into her death the abortion campaigners – ably abetted by a national and international media which long ago made up their minds that she died because a hospital refused to abort her baby – they are by-passing the verdict and spinning out the very peculiar evidence given by a pro-abortion doctor.
The Gargoyle writes:
It’s astonishing to look at the reaction of so many people in Ireland to the recent inquest into the death last October of Savita Halappanavar in Galway, and in particular at how so much attention is being paid to Dr Peter Boylan, erstwhile master of the National Maternity Hospital, that the inquest seems to be being rewritten in the popular mind.
Everyone seems aware of what Dr Boylan said at the inquest, but in directing the jury towards its verdict, the coroner didn’t so much as acknowledge Boylan’s claim that Savita would have survived if the law permitted doctors to terminate pregnancy in order to pre-empt hypothetical risks rather than real ones.
The jury could, of course, have disregarded the coroner’s advice and given a narrative verdict which would have given due weight to Dr Boylan’s belief that the law was the problem. Instead it opted for a verdict of medical misadventure, accepting the coroner’s recommendations, the emphasis of which was almost wholly on procedures and systems failures, with the sole reference to terminations being a recommendation that the Medical Board and An Bord Altranais should have a common, clear, and explicit set of guidelines for how situations such as Savita’s should be handled. It looks, in truth, as though the inquest implicitly rejected Boylan’s analysis.
The official response from Galway University Hospital seems to recognise this, with lots of browbeating about systems failures and not a word said about the law putting Galway’s staff in an impossible position.
If the inquest implicitly rejected Boylan’s analysis, Savita’s widower Praveen seems to have gone rather further, going so far as to cast aspersions on Boylan’s integrity.
Read the rest of The Thirsty Gargoyle’s dissection – with access to all the relevant links – of this shameless and sinister plot to subvert Ireland’s Constitution.
Four militants belonging to FEMEN — a Ukraine-based “feminist” group which organizes topless protests at people and things they dislike — yesterday evening attacked the Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, Andre-Joseph Leonard, as he took part in a university debate on (of all subjects) freedom of speech and blasphemy.
Professor Guy Haarscher, who was debating the archbishop, said afterwards:
What most shocked me was the attitude of the photojournalists present. When we arrived in the hall, we were both surprised by the number of photographers — about a dozen of them. Obviously they photographed the whole scene, then left with the Femen [militants]. We must therefore deplore this event as something concocted between the Femen [militants] and the photographers to sell pictures. The proof was that very shortly afterwards the pictures were on Lalibre.be and other sites.
Read the full account from Catholic Voices here
Donal Walsh is a young Irish boy living in County Kerry, one of the most beautiful places on this earth. He came to national prominence this Spring when a letter he wrote made a plea for an end to what has all the appearances of a suicide epidemic among young Irish people. Donal is 16. At 12, he was diagnosed with cancer. This is his letter:
A few months left, he said. There it was; I was given a timeline on the rest of my life. No choice, no say, no matter. It was given to me as easy as dinner.
I couldn’t believe it, that all I had was 16 years here, and soon I began to pay attention to every detail that was going on in this town.
I realised that I was fighting for my life for the third time in four years and this time I have no hope. Yet still I hear of young people committing suicide and I’m sorry but it makes me feel nothing but anger.
I feel angry that these people choose to take their lives, to ruin their families and to leave behind a mess that no one can clean up.
Yet I am here with no choice, trying as best I can to prepare my family and friends for what’s about to come and leave as little a mess as possible.
I know that most of these people could be going through financial despair and have other problems in life, but I am at the depths of despair and, believe me, there is a long way to go before you get to where I am.
For these people, no matter how bad life gets, there are no reasons bad enough to make them do this; if they slept on it or looked for help they could find a solution, and they need to think of the consequences of what they are about to do.
So please, as a 16-year-old who has no say in his death sentence, who has no choice in the pain he is about to cause and who would take any chance at even a few more months on this planet, appreciate what you have, know that there are always other options and help is always there.
I’ve grown fully in both body and mind by climbing God’s mountains
I live in a part of the world that is surrounded by mountains. I can’t turn my head without finding a bloody hill or mountain and I suppose those were God’s plans for me. To have me grow up around mountains and grow climbing a few too. And that’s exactly what I’ve done, I may have grown up in body around them but I’ve fully grown and matured in mind climbing his mountains.
He’s had me fight cancer three times, face countless deaths and losses in my life, he’s had my childhood dreams taken off me but at the end of the day, he’s made me a man.
I am always called brave, heroic, kind, genuine, honourable and so many other kind compliments, but I have to try and explain to everyone why I seem to reject them. I have never fought for anyone but myself, therefore I cannot be brave or heroic, I’ve only been kind because my religion has taught me so.
What impact could I ever make on the world if I was fake or how could I ever be honourable if I was not honoured to be here.
I am me. There is no other way of putting it, little old Donal Walsh from Tralee, one body, one mind with a few other cobwebs and tales thrown in.
I’ve climbed God’s mountains, faced many struggles for my life and dealt with so much loss. And as much as I’d love to go around to every fool on this planet and open their eyes to the mountains that surround them in life, I can’t. But maybe if I shout from mine they’ll pay attention.
If I start to accept these compliments, I’m afraid of what I’ll become. Will I be braver than YE? Will I be kinder than YE? More genuine than YE? Or more honourable than YE? Better than YE? No. I can never accept that there is a YE. We are all the same, we are all given one body, one mind. The only difference for me is that I’m looking from the mountain.
That was impressive enough. Then, two weeks ago Irish television took the story further and last Sunday a national newspaper took up his story and Irish people were able to learn something very special, not just about one special person, but also about themselves, about life, death, and above all about friendship, human and divine.
In the Sunday Independent, Donal told practically the whole story of his life from 12 years of age to the present day, of his battle with anger and disappointment, how he won his life back, and how he has faced his terminal illness.
Every day people say I’m brave, that I’m courageous and I hate that, he wrote. I’m just doing what I have to do to survive, to live another day.
I had a friend, Stuart Mangan. He said he wasn’t brave because he didn’t have a choice. He didn’t have a choice to be paralysed but he chose to live every day of his life with a smile on his face and even though he knew he didn’t have long to live, he spent the time he had designing technology for people who would end up like him. That to me is brave and inspirational.
The first time they told me, I was at home, I was on the phone to my friend. It was September 11, 2008, my mom came in, she didn’t have to say anything, I knew straight away what had happened. The test results were bad and the tumor was malignant. I hung up the phone without saying anything and I felt like throwing it at the wall. But to be honest, I didn’t know what it meant. I was 12, and all I cared about was playing sport. I knew it was bad but I didn’t understand the severity of it. I had cancer, a tumor that had grown on my right femur just above my knee and little did I know it would destroy parts of my life that I had never planned on letting go of.
The first step was chemo. Donal takes us through the months of treatment. We see his mind, his mentality evolving through those months – and his maturity unfolding.
They would save my life and nearly kill me but I was doing it. I wanted to live, to play for Munster, to travel the world, to raise children and die when I’m 100, not 12.
On June 1, 2009, Donal walked out of St John’s Ward in Dublin’s Children’s Hospital a happy boy. He had finished his last chemo and he promised he would never return as a patient.
Over the next few years he collected over €10,000 for the ward. “They looked after me and I promised myself that I was going to do everything I could to look after them. They were looking to renovate the ward for the first time since the Seventies so I had to help.”
It was a promise he was able to keep. The other promise was a different story. O February 15, 2012, he went for a chest X-ray and a CT scan of my chest. He describes how he and his father waited for the result.
There was a bin next to me and tissues on the table. He came in and told us I had a tumor in my lung. It was back. My heart sank. My world fell apart again. I was angry. This was too much. I stood up and kicked the bin. I wanted to run. I fell to my knees in tears. I couldn’t handle it. He said I would be going for surgery the week after, on February 25.
The operation was successful but more chemo had to follow. This was the hardest part for him but now his resilience and courage were beginning to reveal themselves.
I realised I was back to where I was three years ago, he wrote. It is unreal the support I am getting. He explained: I don’t take it seriously when I’m at home because if I do, my friends will and I don’t want them to worry about me. Cancer has already ruined my life so I’m not going to let it do anything to my friends. It’s hard to call some of them ‘friends’, when they spend every day with you, they become family. So at home I’m Donal, but in hospital I’m sick and that’s the way it’s going to stay.
Even the focus of Donal’s anger is exceptional. He describes his return to Our Lady’s Hospital for his treatment:
I walked back into that ward with a sick feeling inside me, knowing what I was walking into. The ward hadn’t changed at all. The walls were the same, the curtains were the same, the airtight windows were the same and, of course, the same empty promises given to countless dying children by countless gentlemen in suits. It really does make me ashamed of my government when they can get wages in the hundreds of thousands annually, but when one of the most important children’s wards in Ireland, for some of the sickest kids in Ireland, has to rely on charitable donations to buy a bucket of paint and a brush. That is one of the sickest things I have ever come across in my short lifetime here.
Nor was his anger a futile emotion. As a result €50,000 was raised for the hospital in Dublin and another children’s charity. He also describes how in these months his friendships deepened.
During my three-week breaks, I would have spent most of the time recovering while my friends were at school. I had one friend who came around every day after school and made me smile. That was John. He visited me in hospital and made me laugh even though it hurt like hell. We ended up like brothers throughout it all. Then there’s Cormac, Hugh and James, my three best friends from school, they supported me through everything and visited me as much as they could while studying for their exams. I was also trying to study for my Junior Cert as best as I could but I could only make it into school for one week while I was at home. This made it difficult at times but I had huge support from my school and they helped me to do as much work as I could at home.
At the end of his second bout of treatment the time came for his scan. This took place on Friday June 15, 2012, his 16th birthday. The news was good.
I couldn’t believe it, that all I had thought over the last few weeks and all I had gone through over the past few months was over. I spent the summer travelling between Bantry and Tralee. I spent the time in Bantry with my cycling coach James Cleary. I returned to school in September and had gotten into a daily routine of an early start at seven to get my food ready for the day, go to school, go straight to the gym or go for a cycle which I had reached up to 60km at the time, come and study and then some weeknights coach youth rugby. My life seemed to be perfect. I had everything I ever wanted and it couldn’t have gone any better.
One day in September Donal had an accident on one of his cycling trips. He recovered from his injuries but when some pain persisted anxiety began to increase and when eventually he returned to Dublin for his check-up his worst suspicions were confirmed. Dr Capra, the oncologist gave him and his mother the news with these words: “We’ve been on this road too many times, eh?” That was it. My heart sank. I didn’t know whether to follow them to his office or run out the front door.
We arrived home four hours later to a house full of support, everyone had come out. That week was a blur to me. After letting the news out that the cancer was back, the amount of support that I got was crazy, I didn’t need any of that chin-up bullshit, because I had all the positivity and strength and support I needed to get through this 10 times over but it still felt like a mountain I couldn’t climb, nonetheless God had given me hiking boots so I might as well start climbing.
We were called up for scans the following Thursday. On the way home, I stopped in Portlaoise to meet with a prayer minister, John Delaney. He has been a very strong part of my faith and on that night we prayed together. I thought to myself that if this was what God wants me to do, if he wants me to fight cancer, if he wants me to be a symbol to other people, or if he just wants me to die then I guess I’ll strap up my hiking boots and get to the top of this mountain.
The scans now revealed that the condition was terminal. Donal remained calm. At the start of his school midterm-break, he asked his parents if he could go away on a break with his friends somewhere. They did. Then, as a family, they later went to Lourdes.
While I was there, I didn’t experience much healing but I went for confession and met a South African priest. I asked him why God could give such an illness to young infants who have not had a life. His reply gave me great comfort: we are not in this life for answers, this life is for lessons and questions, it isn’t until heaven that we receive answers.
I met for the first time with my palliative doctor and her team, after that it kind of hit me that these were the people who were going to help me die. It was like they were fluffing my pillows for a good night’s sleep and it sunk in that there was going to be an end soon. That still didn’t mean I was going anywhere without a fight. I had trips to Cork for radiotherapy which would slow the cancer down but my doctors still warned my parents to have an early Christmas but because I knew this was going to be my last Christmas, I still wanted it to be special. Nonetheless Christmas remained December 25.
I wanted unique gifts for all the people I loved, signet rings for my four best friends and one that I would wear as well, unique pieces of jewellery for my sister and my mother and other special friends. I didn’t ask for any gifts but somehow my mom managed to bring Santa Claus to the house on Christmas Eve while my friends and cousins were here. He gave a gift to everyone and we had a good laugh.
I got a lot of happiness out of Christmas, we had more house parties and my debs was soon after. I got to bring one of my best friends, Joanne, and went with James and his date for the night.
Some days I would wake up and I could easily appreciate the beauty of the world that I was leaving behind, although it does make me upset that I will never get to experience the feeling of living that I had on the bike or in the gym, or that I will never get to see my sister walk up the aisle next to the love of her life, or that I will never get to travel the world and see places like New Zealand, Asia or America or that I won’t get the chance to see my four best friends do as good in life as I know they will. But I have to remember that God is using me; whether He is using me as a symbol for people to appreciate life more or whether His first two mountains weren’t high enough for me, all I know is that I am walking with Him even though it is along His path.
Donal ended what he wrote with this:
I would like to take this chance to thank the people who asked not to be named but who have made a difference to the past few months for me and my family, whether they are other family members, business men or complete strangers. Thank you.
The jury in the Savita Halappanavar inquest in Galway, Ireland, today returned a medical misadventure verdict based on systems failures and deficiencies in the medical management of Ms Halappanavar. Among the nine recommendations the jury made was that the Irish Medical Council should draw up clearer Guidelines.
Commenting on the inquest verdict, Dr Berry Kiely of the Pro Life Campaign said:
“We welcome all the recommendations from the inquest, including the call for Guidelines providing clarity for doctors in relation to medical interventions for women in pregnancy, which may result in the unintended loss of the baby,” she said.
Dr Kiely described as “little short of shameless” the manner in which those seeking the introduction of abortion legislation based on the X case ruling have exploited the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar all along, claiming that the failure to bring in such legislation was what led to Ms Halappanavar’s death.
“It is now clear from the facts presented at the inquest,” Dr Kiely stated, “that a number of what the inquest terms ‘systems failures’ and communications shortcomings significantly delayed the moment at which the medical team recognised the seriousness of her condition and carried out the appropriate medical intervention.”
“It is disturbing,” she said, “that those calling for abortion legislation never point out that no medical evidence whatsoever was heard in the X case.”
“The recent Oireachtas hearings, however, heard unanimous and authoritative evidence that abortion is not a treatment for suicidal ideation. Not only that, but the international evidence shows that legislation based on mental health and suicide grounds has invariably led to abortion virtually on demand.”
Dr Kiely acknowledged how difficult and upsetting the experience of the Inquest must have been for Savita’s husband, Praveen Halappanavar. “I hope that the manner in which the Inquest was conducted has brought clarity to the events which led to the tragic death of his wife,” she said.
“What are they thinking”, we sometimes cry out in near despair as we look on at the folly of governments and their agents, here and around the world, dismantling and destroying before our eyes the very substance of our social and economic fabric.
The economic fabric is, in most if not all western societies, the patient currently in intensive care. The medical teams are furiously arguing with each other about the treatments being applied to bring the wounded subject back to some level of well-being. The austerity faction has the upper hand but no one is really sure – with the exception of the opposing team – what history’s verdict is going to be on that. We are hoping for the best.
What there is no doubt about in anyone’s mind is what the judgement of history will be on why we got here. Everyone now knows that the folly of greed brought the house down about our ears.
But while we worry and fret over this patient, a deeper and more sinister folly remains rampant and untrammelled in the corridors of the powerful and is tearing apart something which will be much more difficult to restore to health. Every day – and for some decades now – the people entrusted with the care of the common good are putting new measures in place which are one by one destroying the very core elements which sustain our human and social well-being.
Booms and busts have been and will always be, we are told, part of the economic cycle. They come and go and as we muddle through them we learn a little each time – and then promptly seem to forget it again, falling back to some earlier position as in a game of snakes and ladders. But generally our muddling along seems to work out on average like three steps forward and two steps backwards.
With our social fabric the story is frighteningly different. For some reason, probably because the process of collapse is more silent and slow-moving, we are being lead onwards blindly into what a a growing clamour of voices is warning us will be a morass of social dysfunction and disintegration.
How is this happening? Part of the answer may be found in a wise and sobering book by one of the great popular historians of the Twentieth century, Barbara Tuchman. In The March of Folly, she dissects the “wooden-headedness” of the world’s leaders – of every political persuasion, from tyrannical despots to dedicated democrats – in their pursuit of public policy. This is a book which makes sober but certainly not consoling reading and explains something of the riddle we are forced to contemplate in our own day and age.
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history, she writes, regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggest? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?
Tuchman wrote her book in the early nineteen eighties so she did not have a chance to witness or comment on the economic follies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She did not need to. Her case is watertight without them. From the lesson on man’s folly shown to us in the mythological tale of the wooden horse of Troy, through the follies of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, down through to the follies of any number of empire builders who ended up destroying their own work, to any number in our own day, the embarrassment of the powerful should be assured.
The mystery she puts before us is why can mankind, elsewhere than in government – and in government she includes all agencies engaged in the shaping of public affairs, like trade unions, representative organisations, and others – accomplish such marvels: inventions to harness wind and electricity, raising earth-bound stones into soaring cathedrals, construct the instruments of music, and so much more, and yet make such a mess of government. She quotes John Adams, the second President of the United States who had just witnessed one of the greatest follies of the 18th century – Britain’s blundering loss of her extension into the North American continent. Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “While all other sciences have advanced, government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”
Indeed, if we look at the United States today and compare it with the achievement of its founding fathers, we would have to question whether its governance is a “little better” or a good deal worse than in John Adams’ day.
No country or state has a monopoly of the commodity we call folly when it comes to public policy. The Chinese state is forging ahead to economic world-dominance while at the same time it is cutting its own throat with a one-child policy which will cripple it in the not too distant future as pampered spoiled brats grow into selfish adult males who will wreak havoc on a limited female population brought about by the whole-scale culling through sex-selective abortion. India, another state promising itself great achievements in the economic sphere, is silently destroying itself with its unlimited sex-selective abortion on demand.
Meanwhile in Europe the old countries which began their domination of the planet a millennium ago are slowly dying under the weight of their self-indulgence, aided and abetted by governments at every turn. Rampant divorce rates are wrecking families. Marriage is being destroyed in the rush to facilitate homosexual self-indulgence in the name of a concept of equality rooted in an utterly flawed anthropology. Marriage has been further weakened by fiscal arrangements which facilitate cohabitation without commitment. The unintended consequence of this: rampant child abuse – where mothers seek to nurture multiple children begotten serially by nameless fathers.
All of this is fostered in one way or another by governments.
Tuchman qualifies her concept of folly in a way which makes it more than just idiocy but makes it culpable. Idiots can be excused. Culpable fools should not be excused.
To qualify as folly the policy adopted by a government or a representative agency must meet three criteria, she says. Firstly, it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. Judging a past era by the standards is a rampant modern practice which generates its own kind of folly. The injury which is perpetrated by the folly must be something recognised and predicted and warned against by contemporaries. Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. Thirdly, to remove the problem from reasons of personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.
The follies we fret over and predict above, as the harbingers of social disaster, fulfil all these criteria.
President Obama and his administration are constantly being warned of the legacies they are bequeathing to their society as a consequence of the destruction of the institution of marriage in which they are currently engaged. The same is true of the Dutch, the French, the British and now the Irish. David Cameron – with his government – is proceeding relentlessly with his redefinition of marriage in spite of a petition from well over half a million of his citizens to stop his folly – not to mention the wise and solemn warnings from the leaders of all the main religious denominations.
In relation to another folly, the world’s legislators were well warned by the teachers of the Catholic Church about the consequences, moral and social, which would follow the generation of a contraceptive mentality by the whole-scale ignoring of its teaching on human life and human sexuality in Humanae Vitae and the provision of contraception services to all and sundry. There are plenty of warnings on record to both the Chinese and the Indians about the folly of the abortion and semi-eugenicist practices which their policies are generating.
The governments of the world’s oldest states, and some relatively new ones, are verifying once again the truth placed before us by Barbara Tuchman and John Adams. Tuchman concludes:
If John Adams was right, and government is “little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago,” we cannot reasonably expect much improvement. We can only muddle on as we have done in those same three or four thousand years, through patches of brilliance and decline, great endeavour and shadow.
That is a worrying thought, for the stakes involved in our current follies seem much more serious than any since the follies she listed which lead to the tragic religious rupture of Europe in the sixteenth century. The injuries which mankind will sustain from our current follies will require much more than some geo-political adjustment or economic tweaking to put them right. The consequences may require much more than a bit of muddling on.
This is from a very interesting article by the ever-astute Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today’ Daily Telegraph:
“Let us all agree that top bankers behaved very badly. Let us agree too with Vince Cable that the fraternity operated like a cartel, rewarded far beyond ability or worth to society.
That said, the global crisis would have occurred even if bankers had been saints. The roots lie in the “China effect”, the world “savings glut”, and the whole way that globalisation has worked for 20 years.
The rising powers of Asia and the oil bloc accumulated $10 trillion of reserves, flooding bond markets with money. Japan put $1 trillion into play through the carry trade. Central banks in the West played their part by running negative real interest rates. They set the price of credit too low, especially in Club Med and Ireland.
All this combined into one colossal bubble. Bankers were the agents, not the cause. The witchhunt against them gathering force in this country has a nasty edge, and it has the character of a pogrom in much of Europe. We should be careful.
It is hard to see how this crisis can be defused. Germany’s Wolfgang Schauble has belatedly realised that the EU is playing with fire by pushing the UK too far. British exit would be “catastrophic”, he said, asking how the EU could convince anybody in Asia that it has a future if a key member is walking out.
This olive branch comes late in the day. Euroland leaders cannot exempt Britain from the Tobin tax because they know that their own finance will migrate en masse to London if they do, yet they are too committed to this suicidal enterprise to retreat altogether. So we must fight.”
Lest Enda Kenny get carried away by the shameless self-promotion and the consequent adulation he received on his recent bout of surfing the St.Patrick’s Day waves of Irish American euphoria, one of that country’s conservative magazines, the Weekly Standard, has given us something of a counter balance.
Author and senior editor of the Standard, Christopher Caldwell, in an in-depth and long article entitled “Irish Stew”, examines – among other strange metamorphoses in modern Ireland – the transformation of Kenny. He explores and suggests why the Irish Taoiseach moved in a matter of weeks from being a conservative rural Catholic into “an outright anticlerical politician” and a comfortable fellow-traveller with the ultra-liberal socialist party to which he has hitched his own mildly right of centre Fine Gael party.
Of Kenny’s now notorious and still, for many, baffling attack on the Holy See and the petulant penny-pinching rupture of the historic diplomatic links between the Irish State and the Papacy, he says it was much more suggestive of Cromwellian England than of twentieth-century Ireland.
The main substance of Caldwell’s article is concerned with the impending debate on abortion legislation in Ireland. That issue, however, he sees as intrinsically linked with the political ramifications of post-boom Ireland.
The present Irish government, he says, shares a peculiarity with many Western governments (including the American one): Like them, it came to power primarily because it was not in power when the bottom fell out of the world economy in 2008. All these governments claimed a mandate to act with unprecedented force to set their countries’ finances to rights. But the complexity of the crisis stymied them, and they failed to come up with anything in the way of economic innovation. They did notice, though, that the Bubble Era ruling parties had been reduced to a smoldering political wreck, wholly unable to act as an effective opposition. So with a combination of zeal and self-delusion, these new governments clung to their mandate to act forcefully, diverting it from the purpose for which it had been granted—the economy—and towards a variety of long-cherished partisan (or interest-group) projects. Barack Obama passed health reform in the United States.
He sees David Cameron’s gay marriage manoeuvres in England fitting into the same pattern.
This, he thinks, is how Kenny’s reinvention of himself came about and led to Kenny tacking in line with his Labour coalition partners on the abortion issue rather than with his own mildly anti-abortion party. The European Court of Human Rights offered him a way to do this with the decision it issued in December 2010 asking Ireland to “clarify” the circumstances in which women could have an abortion under the X case.
Kenny, he thinks, may have calculated that those he describes as the “scoundrels of Fianna Fáil” were now so discredited by their “wallet-stuffing greed” and their financial incompetence that he would face no viable opposition anytime soon. If so, Caldwell says, he was mistaken. In the months since Kenny embarked on the path for abortion legislation, he notes, Fine Gael’s support in the general public dropped like a rock, from 34 percent to about 25. Left for dead as recently as last fall, Fianna Fáil found itself restored this spring to its position as the country’s most popular party. Twenty-five thousand people demonstrated against Fine Gael in front of the legislature—not as impressive as the crowds that came to protest the Iraq war in 2003 or austerity in 2009, but far more impressive than anything the opposing side could muster.
Caldwell now thinks the expectation that Ireland, after a brief political to-do, will settle into a European-style consensus about abortion is probably wrong. Ireland, he suggests, is more likely to resemble the United States where the abortion issue, recklessly addressed at the outset, has done decades’ worth of damage to the political system.
He interviewed Clare Daly for his article, describing her as “an ebullient, forthright, charismatic North Dublin radical who advanced a groundbreaking abortion bill last year. A veteran of Labour and the country’s small Socialist faction, she has yet to find a party she cannot get herself kicked out of for being too left-wing.”
Daly was very honest with him, in a way that suggests that those introducing the crucial abortion legislation are less than honest. She accepts, recognises, that the change that Fine Gael is trying to pass off as a mere tweak is nothing of the sort. “Symbolically it changes everything,” she told him. “And once you’ve legislated one circumstance, well, then, you’re immediately dealing with fatal fetal abnormalities, rape, incest, blah-blah. That’s why they’re all kicking so much. That’s why they’re going mad. That’s why they have the campaign that they have.”
She means the pro-lifers. I say, rather hesitantly, “So the Rónán Mullens of the world—”
“They know!” Daly interrupts. “They’re right!”
Garvan Hill 