Author: Michael Kirke

Michael Kirke was born in Co. Donegal and attended St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, 1957-1962. In 1966 he graduated from University College Dublin (History and Politics). In 1966 he began working on the editorial desk of The Evening Press in Dublin and in 1968 went to the newsroom of the Irish Press group of newspapers – contributing news and features to the group’s three titles, The Irish Press (morning paper), The Evening Press and The Sunday Press. In 1969 he went to Belfast and covered the initial unravelling of the Unionist hegemony in the province. Later that year he became the group’s education specialist. In 1973 took leave of absence to pursue postgraduate studies in education in Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1976. In 1978 he left journalism and moved into teaching. In 1981 was appointed headmaster of Rockbrook Park School in Dublin (www.rockbrook.ie). In 1994 resigned from that post and moved to live in the West of Ireland (Galway) where he began working part-time in media again. He is now back in Dublin working, among other things, as a freelance writer. His main interests are in political, cultural and educational affairs – as well as issues related to religious faith.

An Unexpected Dividend

On October 22, 2008January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Call it the unexpected dividend of the financial melt-down – the getting of real wisdom. Amid all the outpourings of gloom, predictions of disaster and downward spiraling of this that and the other, there has been a clear upward spiraling of deeper reflections which see the silver lining in all this – in one way or another.

Even in the gloomier pieces churned out by the commentariat you can see the beginnings of a wisdom akin to – but on a much higher level than – that famous catchphrase which has come down to us from another US presidential election campaign. “It’s the economy, stupid”. This was a sign hung in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters to keep everybody “on message” in 1992. But in the end we seem to be coming to realise that it’s not just the economy, stupid. It’s a question of good old-fashioned virtue, stupid.

Novelist Margaret Atwood, writing an op-ed piece in the The New York Times on October 22 wisely warns us that we would be deluding ourselves if we were to think that recovery from the mess will be heralded by a simple return to form by the Dow Jones. Our wounds are deeper, she thinks. “To heal them, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose.”

India Knight, columnist with the London Times declares herself “happy to observe that the decades of vulgar excess are finally over. There is a strong collective sense of us all coming back down to earth. It’s like a huge national reality check and, unwelcome as it may be, there is a possibility that it will result in us straightening out our priorities”

Sarah Lyall, reporting from London for The New York Times a day before Atwood’s article appeared, quoted the sage observations of 65-year-old Audrey Hurren whom she met on a platform in the Underground. It had all been too much in her view. “I think it wouldn’t do any harm at all for some of the younger generation to be less greedy.” Her grandchildren seemed to have everything they wanted and were still dissatisfied. “They get a mobile phone and if they don’t like it they throw it away and get a new one”.

But in that “having” there has been a problem. The trouble is that it wasn’t, in many, many cases, a “real” having. That was a “having” covered by – not necessarily in the cases of the Hurren grandchildren – a £1.52 trillion mountain of debt. And this was the broken moral balance which Atwood examines: the meaning of debt had gone out the window.

The simple economics of everyday life lost touch with the real world – even something which children know instinctively when they see something unfair happening and they shout out “That’s not fair”, was lost , she holds. Once you start looking at life without that sense of fairness, debtor-creditor relationships go much worse than pear-shaped.

“The version of the Lord’s Prayer I memorized as a child” recalls Atwood, “included the line, ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.’ In Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself spoke, the word for ‘debt’ and the word for ‘sin’ are the same. And although many people assume that ‘debts’ in these contexts refer to spiritual debts or trespasses, debts are also considered sins. If you don’t pay back what’s owed, you cause harm to others.

“The fairness essential to debt and redemption is reflected in the afterlives of many religions, in which crimes unpunished in this world get their comeuppance in the next. For instance, hell, in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy,’ is the place where absolutely everything is remembered by those in torment, whereas in heaven you forget your personal self and who still owes you five bucks and instead turn to the contemplation of selfless Being.”

Atwood is loath to make predictions that we are heading towards paradise on earth. However, she at least hopes that “if fair regulations are established and credibility is restored, people will stop walking around in a daze, roll up their sleeves and start picking up the pieces. Things unconnected with money will be valued more — friends, family, a walk in the woods. ‘I’ will be spoken less, ‘we’ will return, as people recognize that there is such a thing as the common good.”

Elaine Byrne in The Irish Times on October 15 also connected the financial debacle with the moral, quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt who told his public in 1937 “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics…We are beginning to abandon our tolerance of the abuse of power by those who betray for profit the elementary decencies of life”. He spoke scathingly of the “blindly selfish men” who had plunged the people into misery in the preceding decade. She ended her piece quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great parable of the era, “The Great Gatsby”, portraying that same selfishness and disregard for real human values which have been at the heart of our current woes. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

Reading all these reflections on a catastrophe gives hope that perhaps this time our political, intellectual and spiritual leaders will come up with a more penetrating solution that they did before and begin to look at the roots of our malaise. Rachel Sylvester’s observation in a London Times article on October 21 should give politicians some pause for thought:

“Mammon has been exposed as a false god whose worshippers seem to have been sacrificed on the altar of the credit crunch. There is a yearning for answers that go beyond interest rates, targets and the public sector borrowing requirement. The bishops have started bashing the bankers. Yet politicians, of all parties, have never been more fearful of faith.”

She does not seem particularly optimistic. She sees the retreat of Ruth Kelly from government and politics as a symptom of the problem which she describes as “a God-shaped hole in Westminster.” She implicitly recognises that the belief so readily discarded or despised by so many among Britain’s political class is a foundation without which a true recovery will be shallow and superficial.

“It would be wrong to suggest that Britain is any longer a Christian country in terms of the population – only 7 per cent of people regularly attend an Anglican church. Yet neither is Britain a secular State like France. Its history, culture and constitutional settlement are based on the link between Church and State. Earlier this year, Nicholas Sarkozy criticised the French republic’s obsession with secularism and called for a ‘blossoming’ of religions. ‘A man who believes is a man who hopes,’ he said. It is ironic that politicians in this country have abandoned belief – at the very moment that the people need hope.”

But the mass of politicians follow and do not lead. Only the few lead. Perhaps with a coming of a new-found wisdom – which undoubtedly is to be seen in all these tentative explorations for the deeper truths which our present pain may point to – then we can hope for the emergence of that critical few who will realise that financial regulation, state guarantees and better banking are not the ultimate solution to these problems. Let’s see a few signs hanging in the offices of our leaders reminding them that virtues – and where they come from – will go a long way to make the world a better place for us all.

Michael Kirke, formerly of The Irish Press, is now a freelance writer. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net . Other writing can be found at www.mercatornet.com and on at www.positionpapers.ie

Don’t Rubbish the American Dream

On October 20, 2008March 23, 2022 By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Don’t rubbish the American Dream – it is alive and well and continuing to redefine itself into reality for yet another generation of immigrants.

David Gonzalez is a journalist – he calls himself a “street reporter” – with The New York Times. David is the son of Puerto Rico immigrants and grew up in the Bronx in the nineteen sixties and seventies. His parents, poor but hard-working, had one ambition for their children – a good education and a life, in material terms at least, on a level different from their own.

They fulfilled that ambition. David was put through good Catholic schools and went on to win a scholarship to Yale. When his teacher at Cardinal Hayes High School encouraged him to apply for a place in an Ivy League college David didn’t even know what an Ivy League college was – and he thought Yale was a place where they made locks. He graduated from Yale with a psychology degree and went on to take a masters degree in journalism at Columbia University. He then went to work for Newsweek and eventually ended up in The New York Times.

Last weekend David Gonzalez addressed a media conference at Cleraun University Centre in Dublin on the topic of “Cities in Transformation, or The Varieties of Ethnic Experience”. While his own experience was relevant it was not what he dwelt on. His focus was more contemporary but it still shows that the immigrant experience in a place like New York – while it can be terrifying and traumatic – still is what it always was, a place where dreams can come true.

He began the story a century and a half ago, looking a an ethnic group trying to make their homes there then. He described how they were portrayed in the newspapers of the day – the Dublin conference’s focus was on the ethical challenges facing media in reporting the world around us. “They were scorned as dangerous louts, suspected of being loyal to a foreign power which cloaked itself in odd raiment and practiced bizarre rituals. They were caricatured as monkeys and drunkards. They were…the Irish.

“To a New Yorker of the 21^st century, such an assertion would be laughable. Since then the Irish have a long and proud history in our city. They are captains of industry, politicians, philanthropists and scholars. They are indisputably American, too.” He jumped forward to the 1990s and found that the same fears which greeted the waves of Irish who flooded into the United States in the mid 1800s still characterise the “welcome” accorded to today’s immigrants – but he also finds that the response of the Irish at that time is still working today and has paved the way for the numerous ethnic groups who succeeded them in the century and a half which followed right up to the present. “Excluded from the city’s institutions, they created their own, working through then Catholic Church to establish schools, hospitals and parishes that protected newcomers. They educated, fed and clothed those who could not do so for themselves.” It was a question of the time-honoured “corporal works of mercy” serving as a civic contribution – “and in doing so they set up a network of institutions that have continued to ease the plight of the stranger in a strange land.”

Sprawling cities attract immigrants and immigrants compound the sprawl. Whole communities fly below the radar and get lost until some tragedy turns the spotlight on them. Gonzalez cited the horrific social club fire in New York in the 1990s when 87 Hondurans from a region on the Caribbean coast perished. Later in the decade it was the discovery of a large African community from Mali when 9 members of an extended family died in a house fire.

But all this is the hard end of the story. The story eventually begins to turn good when the resilient humanity of the subject and the civilised institutions of the host city begin to interact with each other. No more than one hundred and fifty years ago, the stories of today’s immigrant communities adapting to and being embraced by this great iconic city make inspiring reading, and the patterns of progress are still remarkably similar.

For example, Gonzalez recounts how churches and church leaders still play a vital role in the process – sometimes as advocates for better housing conditions, sometimes stepping in as pacemakers when inter-ethnic strife breaks out. In the course of his “street reporting” he found a Pentecostal Christian group in a tiny commercial storefront working away with some of the city’s most vulnerable residents – former drug addicts, delinquents, single mothers and impoverished factory workers – helping them reclaim their lives.

And then there is the community group, expressing “citizen democracy at its most basic” and proving very effective at holding officials and politicians accountable. He tells the story of Astin Jacobo who lived in his own neighbourhood.

“I used to live in a community near the Bronx Zoo that had fallen on some very hard times. Arson fires – set by landlords to collect on their insurance policies – had devastated the community. Many families moved away. Many stayed, however, since they had no money and hence no choice. But within that group lay the seeds of the community’s very rebirth.

“Astin Jacabo – who became known simply as Jacob – had come to New York from the Dominican Republic, where he had been a professional baseball scout. He now was a school custodian, which meant he was the man who opened up the school gymnasium after school for basketball practice. He soon learned it the early 1970s that the young people, especially during the winter, did not want to go home.

“He asked them why, and learned that their homes were cold, with no heat. In some cases, their buildings were half-vacant. So he told them to bring their parents to the gym for a meeting next time. Jacob, it turned out, had also been involved with a nascent community group that was trying to rally residents into stemming the tide of destruction washing over their community.

“From those humble beginnings, he was able to start bringing neighbours together to discuss their common concerns. In one memorable meeting, he actually confronted the Mayor of New York, Edward I. Koch, calling him a liar for tolerating illegal garbage dumping on empty lots owned by the city. The mayor, perhaps stunned that someone would challenge him so publicly, wound up visiting the area and in time directed other agencies to help the local group clean up both the abandoned lot and housing stock.

“The lot became a ball field. The buildings were rebuilt. Still, in the early 1990s people did not want to go out on the streets at night because of drug dealing. It was then that Jacob had a brainwave from the old country: as a young man in the Dominican Republic, he remembered how neighbours used to come out to the ball field when their children played. The adults would hang out and socialize. They kept an eye on things.

“And that is how Jacob got the idea to put lights on the field. By persuading officials to install lights, he could hold games at night. In turn, he could get parents to go out and watch their kids play. With scores of people now on the streets, gathered at a well-lighted park – the bad guys would soon find some other place to go conduct their business.

“An old tradition gave birth to a new solution.”

If the liberal chattering classes look to these groups and movements for ground troops in the culture wars of the future they might be very disappointed – and for this disappointment they have probably to blame the background Christian music which accompanies this transformation. What is happening, Gonzalez says, also challenges the ideas the larger society has about people like them.

“While Latinos and other members of minority groups have usually been seen as politically liberal, these congregations shunned any formal political affiliation. If anything, they confounded political stereotypes – conservative on family value issues like gay marriage or abortion and liberal on social issues like housing, education and immigration.

“They also present a major source of change for the future. Outsiders, especially those who would consider themselves to be secular humanists, would view these Pentecostals as people looking for some imaginary reward in Heaven after a lifetime of earthly suffering. But the members of these congregations embraced the value of hard work and its rewards right here on earth. They did not diminish their ultimate reward as Christians. But they did not brook any talk about being doomed to suffer. Instead, they urged their children to go to school and become professionals, rather than toiling in factories or grocery stores.

“The idea that thousands of teenagers are being raised in this faith tradition has implications for the city even if they fall away from their church (which is admittedly common). We are talking about a generation of minority youths who will go on to college and become part of the city’s core work force, taking on the kinds of jobs in business and government that keep the city running. Raised in a tradition that made them feel empowered and not helpless, they represent a segment of the city that will see its influence felt.

“More than a century ago, immigrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean and came to New York with not just a sense of new beginnings but a sense of finality. The old country was left behind, perhaps forever. But in this age of global economies, easy transportation and instant communication, the immigrant experience is being redefined daily”

In other words, the details of the dream may change but the big dream remains intact, and can and does become a reality. To paraphrase Norman Maine’s words to Esther in A Star is Born, “Don’t settle for the little dream. Go for the big one.” Dream on America.

Michael Kirke, formerly of The Irish Press, is now a freelance writer and the director of Ely University Centre, 10 Hume Street, Dublin 2. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net. Other writing can be found at www.mercatornet.com and www.positionpapers.ie .

Is this a Trojan Horse?

On September 16, 2008January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters3 Comments

Michael Kirke

A VERY REASONABLE and carefully worded statement landed on my desk the other day. It was the response of the Educate Together movement to the recent policy announcement from the Department of Education on the setting up of new primary schools in the State. But as it happened, the same morning on which I read this was also the morning on which I caught up with the Pope’s addresses on his recent visit to France. Bells began to ring in my ears. Was this really as reasonable a statement as it first seemed or was there lurking here some hidden agenda of which we should all be truly wary. Educate Together warns us: “There are profound Constitutional, legal and human rights issues involved for parents and children in our existing educational system. The announced approach appears to ignore these issues.”

In his address to nearly 700 representatives of the world of culture assembled in the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, the Pope, having examined the roots and development of Europe’s Christian culture, concluded:

“Our present situation differs in many respects from the one that Paul encountered in Athens, (where he had encountered the statue to the unknown god), yet despite the difference, the two situations also have much in common. Our cities are no longer filled with altars and with images of multiple deities. God has truly become for many the great unknown. But just as in the past, when behind the many images of God the question concerning the unknown God was hidden and present, so too the present absence of God is silently besieged by the question concerning him. Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.”

If this is a question of “disaster for humanity” are we really running the risk of such a disaster if we unthinkingly accept as good the intentions of the secularist movement – which, let’s face it, is pure and simply what Educate Together is all about?

What is Educate Together proposing? In their own words, this:

“Educate Together aims to meet a growing need in Irish society for schools that recognise the developing diversity of Irish life and the modern need for democratic management structures. In particular, Educate Together guarantees children and parents of all faiths and none equal respect in the operation and governing of education.

“The schools operated by the member associations of Educate Together are fully recognised by the Irish Department of Education and Science and work under the same regulations and funding structures as other national schools. However, they have a distinct ethos or governing spirit. This has been defined in the following terms:

· Multi-denominational i.e. all children having equal rights of access to the school, and children of all social, cultural and religious backgrounds being equally respected

· Co-educational and committed to encouraging all children to explore their full range of abilities and opportunities,

· Child centred in their approach to education

· Democratically run with active participation by parents in the daily life of the school, whilst positively affirming the professional role of the teachers.”

That is all very reasonable – but what does it mean in practice? In practice it seems to mean that no specific religious education will take place in these schools. That in effect means precisely what the Pope is warning us about. Forgive me for taking the words of the Pope and paraphrasing them (alterations in italics) in the context of what we have before us here. Is this a glimpse of the future?

“Our schools are no longer filled with altars and with images of multiple deities. God has truly become for many the great unknown…. To seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic educational system which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unconstitutional, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.”

The Educate Together solution to providing education for the multiplicity of faiths we now have in Ireland is to provide education for no faith. It is to remove not only the image of Jesus Christ from schools but to remove also the symbols of all religion and replace it with secular humanism. Their website quotes a satisfied Catholic father as saying:

“My children are catholic and are/will study for their first holy communion as extra curricular activities after school. I am delighted that they are covering the learn together curriculum in school hours and will learn to respect and understand other religions as well as covering inclusion, equality & justice, democracy and environmental responsibilities.” That is, the gospel of secular humanism, unconnected with the faith which gives all life its full and true meaning.

MEANWHILE ACROSS THE Atlantic ther culture wars also continue unabated as the new Joan of Arc takes to the field in the face of multiple slings and arrow of outraged liberals and the media establishment. Well, perhaps, Joan of Arc is stretching it a bit. Nevertheless, Sarah Palin does seem to have many of the admirable characteristics of that dauntless heroine of old Europe.

And they really are out to burn her at the stake. The cremation of Sam Magee was nothing in comparison with what they would like to do to her in the land of the midnight sun. The New York Times in its daily web edition lists its ten most e-mailed articles. One day recently of those ten articles seven were on the subject of Sarah Palin. Of those seven, ALL were hostile to her.

One of those articles cited the charge of censorship. This was because she seemed to have a view as to what should or should not be available for children to read in public libraries. As newly appointed mayor of Wasilla she was charged with tending “carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral. Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves.”

“In 1995,” they reported, “Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book ‘Daddy’s Roommate’ on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it. ‘Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,’ Ms. Chase said. ‘It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.’” Well good for her! Do I need to read “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” before I take it off a child’s bookshelf?

A recent news item in the Daily Telegraph reported the case of an eight-year-old boy who arrived home from his school library with a book entitled ‘Amy’s Honeymoon’. After finding a few swear words in it he rather bemusedly brought it to his mother. His mother looked a little closer and found more than she bargained for. “I noticed a lot more than swearing. There was explicit words about sexual stuff and drugs. I’m glad he noticed the swear words before he read more”. She called for stricter controls at the library and a school spokesman said the book was obviously not intended for children and apologised. He said a review of the library stock would be carried out. How illiberal! He better not let the Palin-hunters hear about it.

In Passing…Imagining a Better World

On September 9, 2008January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Two shivers ran down my spine last month. One was when I read something by a columnist in The Daily Telegraph commenting on her reaction to the news about the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s daughter. The other was the account of the three teenage girls buried alive in Pakistan to maintain the “honour” of their tribe. But I was brought back to some semblance of hope and optimism by the Canadian philosopher-historian-sociologist, Charles Taylor whose great book, “A Secular Age”, I’m ploughing through at the moment. It is a rewarding but demanding read.

Taylor, among other things, reflects in his book on the way our sense of morality has evolved over the centuries, indeed over the millennia, in which we have tried to live and work together as human beings in this world. Out of this reflection comes an awareness that while these two specimens of accepted “moral” behaviour that so disturbed me – the one a specimen of a primitive and backward tribal custom, the other a specimen of ultra sophisticated 21^st century civilization – may always be with us as forms of behaviour, they can ultimately be consigned to the category of barbarism to which they belong.

Liz Hunt, writing in the Telegraph, wondered how good a “mom” U.S. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin could be if her pregnant daughter Bristol was in some way not being given the choice of whether or not to bring her baby into this world. Taylor has devised a term, “social imaginary”, to represent the kind of images, visions, ideas we all have about our time in this world and they way we should live together. Think of what we mean when we say “I can’t imagine myself doing this that or the other” and you get an idea of where he is coming from. We think of ourselves “putting theories into practice”. Well he is using “imaginary” instead of “theory” because, he says – and he is probably right, – people live and act more on the basis of what they can imagine themselves doing than on theories. For many in the western world the “imaginaries” (theories) they have can, tragically, with the greatest of ease encompass the killing of unborn living human beings. This imagining allows, for example, that 17-year-old Bristol Palin, might take the life of her unborn child if, as Liz Hunt puts it, “becoming a wife and a mother at such a young age” just didn’t fit in with her other plans.

Such a killing might not be an “honour” killing of the horrific kind reported from Pakistan. It would pure and simply be nothing more or less than a “convenience” killing. But why should we be any less disturbed by it than we are by the killing in tribal Paksitan? How different in fact are the western social conventions – enshrined in law in so many societies now – which readily accept the killing of the unborn from the conventions defended by the politicians of the province of Balochistan who in the Pakistan parliament defended the punishment of the three teenagers? Their claim was that the practice was part of “our tribal custom”. What was the girls’ crime? They refused to marry the husbands chosen by their families.

What light does Taylor’s theory of “social imaginaries” throw on all this? In essence we see that while the two societies in which both these acts take place – the ruthless and relentless slaughter of the unborn in one; the terrible but much less frequent honour killing of young girls who want to assert their independence in the other – look worlds apart they are in fact no different from each other in real terms. They are only different in the “imaginings” of those who perpetrate them.

The encouragement I get from my reading of Taylor is in his reflection on how the process of change takes place in these “social imaginaries”. In it we can see how mankind and societies have moved from the social acceptance of forms of behaviour to non-acceptance and even revulsion and horror at the same behaviour.

The tribal chiefs of Balochistan are clearly at ease with the practice of their tribe – as were many of the “great and good” of the 18^th century with the practice of slavery and the brutality of the slave-trade. Many of the “great and good” of our own time have no qualms about the mass slaughter in progress in hospitals and clinics across the western world. Indeed, for many, contributing to it could just be part of what “being a good mom” might be about.

What Taylor’s thinking suggests is that all this need not always be so and that moral sensibility does change if our “social imaginaries” can be changed. William Wilberforce effected the change in social imagination of his time and this was what brought the slave trade to its knees. Slavery sadly still exists but the “civilised” world at least has set its face against it and seeks to eradicate it. Sadly also, human beings will continue to kill each other, born or unborn, – probably until the end of time – but we can hope for a time when our imagining and our vision of how our society should be will always seek to prohibit such slaughter.

And a further consideration which I glean from Taylor seems to deepen the hope that we might have that rather than being on a slippery slope to more and more of this mayhem, we may in fact be climbing to a new flowering of the civilization of life. The practice of abortion is not new. What is new – at least on the scale on which we have it now – is the legal sanction of the practice. It is now carried out in the name of every member of those democratic societies in which it is legalised.

But this very sanction has the effect of bringing the practice into deep and potentially disturbing focus and therefore can be the very catalyst which may bring about the moral revulsion which should be the natural and rational response to such slaughter of innocent life. A Royal Navy which protected the slave ships crossing to and forth across the Atlantic in the 18^th century revolted the British people thanks to the work of William Wilberforce and his friends. In the 19^th the Royal Navy became the agent for the abolition of that brutal trade. This is a process of change which can be brought into play again. Indeed it is already in play. We can hope that the day will come when the conventional “wisdom” which says that it is moral and proper for one human being to chose to terminate the life of another in certain given circumstances will have no place in the social imagination of anyone.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

On June 24, 2008January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?We always seem to be making lists. It is hard to remember a month over the past decade when you opened a newspaper or a magazine without being confronted by a list of somebody’s favourite something to adjudicate on – the best book of all time, the best films of al time, the best jokes ever told. Indeed, the list is endless. But maybe we should not be too irritated by it. If they make us think a little, help us to judge and compare and reflect on things it’s not all bad.

Some, needless to say, are pretty trivial. Others, however, are more serious and thought-provoking. Time Magazine recently presented us with its current list of the world’s top 100 “influencers” – ranging across the world of politics, sport, literature and entertainment and more. On an even more serious level two political magazines, one on each side of the Atlantic, Prospect and Foreign Policy, are currently surveying who their readers estimate are the world’s top “public intellectuals”. Since it is always worth asking ourselves who is leading the world of ideas – and with what ideas – this is a worthwhile exercise. To qualify for the “competition” you have to be a) alive, b) active in public life, c) have shown distinction in your field, and d) have shown an ability to influence debate across borders. So when all that is taken into account the field narrows considerably and excludes most of us. Nevertheless, it is still very much our business to know who is included.

However, they didn’t bargain for the pitfalls of the world wide web. The word got out that the survey was on and the whole thing when pear-shaped when Muslims across the world effectively hijacked it. The results now report that the top ten public intellectuals in the world are an assortment of Islamic clerics and writers. The whole story can be found on www.prospect-magazine.com . Nevertheless, while the survey is invalidated the question it poses is still a very valid one. Who is leading the world in the realm of ideas?

The last poll taken on this by these magazines made interesting reading and gave us a kind of snapshot of what we might call the intellectual ferment in the world at the time. For some of us, looking at the evolving membership of these lists over the years, there were encouraging signs of improvement in the climate of public opinion which they reflect. For example, whereas in the early years of the exercise the list was peppered with varying shades of Marxist, remarkably now, among the 100 names offered for consideration for selection, there is only one self-proclaimed Marxist.Furthermore, despite the best efforts of militant atheists and secularists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – both of whom were in the top ten last time round – the secularist camp has diminished somewhat and the camp of those adhering to one faith or another is growing.

Regardless of what this poll produces surely the public intellectual who towers above all others in our world today is Pope Benedict XVI? If you measure this in terms of the number of people hearing him, listening to him and whom he influences, or in terms of the wisdom of what he says, then he is out in front on all counts.

This pope speaks to all Catholics as all popes have done over the centuries. All popes have also addressed themselves to men of good will everywhere down through the ages – and have had mixed responses from them. But this pope – and his immediate predecessor, it must be said – speaks to all men of good will with a new emphasis, on the basis of a new common denominator, one might almost say with a new kind of language, the language of Faith and Reason. It may well be that history will look back at the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and see in them the beginning of a new age, the age of Faith and Reason.

Don’t get me wrong. Faith and reason have always been in harmonious partnership in authentic Catholic teaching. But as history looks at it, emphases differ over the ages. I remember a series of history books tracing Western thought down through the centuries. There was one entitled “The Age of Belief”. Another was entitled “The Age of Reason”, and yet another, “The Age of Science.”Can we now add “The Age of Faith and Reason”?

Pope Benedict is tireless in underlining for the world the vital role which both these elements have to play in mankind’s search for a better world through which he can fulfil his true destiny. Man’s journey, man’s search for truth and a proper understanding of that truth, he tells us, “can never suppose itself to be at an end and the danger of falling into inhumanity is never simply overcome — as we see in the panorama of contemporary history! Today the danger of the Western world — to speak only of this context — is that man, precisely in the consideration of the grandeur of his knowledge and power, might give up before the question of truth. And that means at the same time that reason, in the end, bows to the pressure of interests and the charm of utility, constrained to recognize it as the ultimate criterion.”

These were words written by Pope Benedict for a university gathering in Rome, written but not spoken because some die-hard secularists – clearly men of less than good will – objected to the invitation to the Pope to speak there. In that context the words carry more weight than they already had.

“The danger exists”, he concluded, “that philosophy, no longer feeling itself capable of its true task, might degenerate into positivism; that theology, with its message addressed to reason, might become confined to the private sphere of a group more or less sizable. If, however, reason — solicitous of its presumed purity — becomes deaf to the great message that comes from the Christian faith and its wisdom, it will wither like a tree whose roots no longer reach the waters that give it life. It will lose courage for the truth and thus it will not become greater but less. Applied to our European culture this means: If it wants only to construct itself on the basis of the circle of its own arguments and that which convinces it at the moment — worried about its secularity — it will cut itself off from the roots by which it lives; then it will not become more reasonable and more pure, but it will break apart and disintegrate.”

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We may live in a secular age, in an age “worried about its secularity” as the Pope says, but if we do perhaps we can now see light at the end of that particular tunnel and hope that this is only a prelude to an age in which the truth now being put before us by Benedict XVI will come into it own and usher in this new age of Faith and Reason.

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Michael Kirke, worked as a journalist with The Irish Press. He is now a freelance writer and the director of Ely University Centre, 10 Hume Street, Dublin 2. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net.

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Bertie Ahern bites the dust. Did it have to be this way…?

On April 9, 2008January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

It was probably inevitable, and perhaps it was the best outcome given all the circumstances. Nevertheless there was something vaguely shameful about the way Ireland disposed of one of its most capable prime ministers since it made itself independent of the United Kingdom nearly 100 years ago. Mr. Ahern – Bertie, as he was familiarly and generally affectionately known to one and all – fell on his sword on April 2^nd, succumbing in the end to the relentless attrition surrounding the investigations of his financial affairs by a judicial tribunal.

The uneasiness generated about all this stems from two sources. Firstly there is the sense of loss at the demise of a man perceived by most – nationally and internationally – to be good, capable and worthy of respect for what he has achieved for his country and for the European Union of which his country is a part. The resignation of no prime minister in Irish history has attracted the kind of international press coverage which this one did last week.

Secondly there is the realisation that this is a victory not for a judicial process but for a relentless media-driven pursuit of the biggest scalp campaigning journalism could ever hope to capture, the prime minister of the country.

Ahern protests his innocence. “I know in my heart of hearts I did no wrong,” he asserted in his press conference when he announced his intention to vacate his office on May 6 next. Whether he did or didn’t remains to be clarified by the tribunal in question. The gut feeling of many people is that whether or not he should have resigned was something that could only be answered after due process had been completed and the tribunal judge had pronounced judgement having heard all the evidence and counter-evidence.

The problem for the country and for the government of which Mr. Ahern was leader was that in tandem with the work of the tribunal, the media was conducting its own investigations. Day after day, at whatever function – public or private – he or his government colleagues attended, the media tribunal was in session and the interrogation was constant. Culpable or not, in those circumstances, he could no longer sustain his role as leader of the government and saw clearly that the public – whether or not it felt he was guilty – was going to suffer if the work of government continued to be interfered with in this way. He knew he had to go and made what he saw was the responsible decision. I think most people see it that way. I also think most people feel it was a pity it had to happen like this. On the day after the dramatic and surprise announcement the Daily Mail (Irish edition of a London paper) carried the headline which seemed to have a slight tone of remorse about it: “DID IT REALLY HAVE TO END LIKE THIS?” That was the lead into 18 pages of reports, comment and analysis.

The unease is of course double-edged. We know the value of a free press. We need a free press and a press which has the right to ask questions and keep asking questions until it gets answers. However, there does seem to be a conflict of processes. Is there not some better way in which we could manage the parallel running of these processes and if the ultimately more refined process – from the point of view of natural justice – is the judicial one should the other not suspend its activity until the latter has reached a verdict?

What is being investigated by this tribunal is of course a real can of worms, opened up several years ago as a result of revelations made in the media that generous donations had been made by businessmen to politicians in sensitive public office. Once the tribunal, established by the parliament, began to ask its first questions the statements being made to it under oath led to more and more allegations. More and more politicians seemed to have received gifts which might or might not be deemed corrupt or corrupting. Eventually Mr. Ahern himself was discovered to have received gifts which had not been publicly declared. This was back in the early 90s when he was Minister for Finance. He maintained that these were received at a time when regulations relating to the declaration of gifts by those in public office had not yet been brought to their current standard. His enemies maintained that this was irrelevant, that he was a government minister and that basic ethical principles were being disregarded by him when he accepted such gifts.

Initially he had public sympathy because the gifts were given to help him through a difficult personal situation when he and his wife were separating and the costs involved in this were proving crippling for him. But as often happens in these cases, questions kept being asked and answers given were never fully satisfactory. The issue of tax payment was raised and his negotiations with Revenue to regularise his tax affairs became public knowledge.

The whole tribunal process is now a seemingly permanent part of the Irish political system – costing the tax-payer hundreds of millions of euro. The cost is horrendous but by and large the public values something which may help raise ethical standards among its public servants and representatives. One such tribunal is investigating corrupt behaviour within the police force. We are all aware that were it not for media investigations this task would never have been addressed and low standards in high places would continue unabated. Nevertheless, the fall from grace of a man who has done the sate some considerable service – including that of helping bring peace to these islands, is felt by many to be a sad and regrettable event.

Playing With Fire

On March 16, 2008January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

How we humans love to play with fire? And how dangerous, even disastrous, our playing around can be? Metaphors wonderfully enrich our language and our thought. How dull our language and our thought would be without them. Yet they are also dangerous, as dangerous indeed as playing with fire if we let them muddle us and make us mistake the image for the reality. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet but anything other than a rose which we might decide to call a rose will get us into very embarrassing situations. Today we seem hell bent on confusing our metaphors with reality and playing with fire as we do so. The family, one of nature’s and society’s foundation stones, is being messed about with in a way that is akin to playing with fire. We do so at the risk of pulling down our house on top of us. Indeed we have already begun to do so. The family in nature is a real thing. It is not just a nice idea, an image we have dreamed up for our own sentimental reasons. The animal world has no problem seeing this. It is we humans who seem to be getting the whole thing muddled. In the animal kingdom the male comes together with the female and they mate. All other things being equal, offspring are begotten and for as long as is necessary and in the manner appropriate to each species, the offspring are nurtured to the point where they become independent and can go off and do likewise. Wonderful. It all happens as day follows night. Sometimes, it is observed, there can be confusion. Males mess around with males and get things wrong. This is all fairly exceptional and whatever happens is never set up as a model for future behaviour of the species. Eventually they all get on with the business of life. If they don’t they become extinct. It is the humans, poor creatures, who get themselves into trouble. Part of the trouble comes from their capacity to think and talk to each other, reflect on themselves and use beautiful language to do so. Our current confusion over the nature of family is a case in point. For aeons – and I don’t know when it started – we have been using the concept of family as a metaphor. Family of nations, family of businesses (ASDA is billed in Britain as “part of the Walmart family”), spiritual families, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is when we begin to confuse the real thing in nature with the thing which we are using it to help us describe. Occasionally in the animal kingdom we hear of a lost offspring of two progenitors attaching itself to other members of the species, indeed sometimes across species, and becoming a member of a family. All this illustrates is the power of the real, the natural power of the family rooted in the nature of the animals themselves. It works for nature because it is natural. Misunderstand its true nature, contaminate it with false sentimentality and it will no longer work. Sadly this seems to be what we are doing. We have been misled by our metaphors. We want to call marriage what are patently not marriages. We want to call families what are patently not families. Which brings us back to the rose. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet. A true family by any other name will work as well. But if we call a potato a rose and send a bouquet of them to someone we love we know what will happen. Equally, if we concoct a ménage of any old kind and dare to call it a family then we will not have a family – and it will not give us the natural outcome that the true natural product will give. Furthermore, while our society may get away with a scattering of such arrangements on an ad hoc basis, it will not get away without dire consequences if we riddle it with them. Some societies are already so riddled. Do we really need to spell out the consequences? They are already there for all to see.

Try this as a sample. Anthony Reynard was, until last year, part of the senior management team of one of the largest primary schools in the UK. He reflected recently in The Daily Telegraph:

“11 years after Tony Blair proclaimed “Education! Education! Education!” to be New Labour’s priority, schools are opening their doors to more poorly behaved pupils with greater learning difficulties who, in turn, are emerging from a growing number of broken or poorly functioning families.

“Last year, having agonised over whether to leave a profession I loved, I finally turned my back on a position in a large London primary school. I decided that I had had enough after dealing with the behaviour of a boy who had shot himself with a handgun at home, having struggled to settle a girl who had been placed with her 12th foster parent and ninth school and, finally, having tried to comfort two assaulted teachers, one of whom had been knocked unconscious by a pupil in the playground.

“It would be simplistic and incorrect to say that well-adjusted children invariably emerge from two-parent families and that maladjusted children are the inevitable product of broken families – we all know there are some very skilled and caring single parents out there. But it is clear to all teachers that the most settled children come from conventional two-parent families.

“I’m reminded of three different schools I worked for. In the first, children ate in a spotless dining room and were praised for using the correct cutlery by teachers, who were happy to eat their own lunches with them, chatting for 10 minutes before succumbing to the pull of adult conversation in the staff room. In the same school, children routinely opened doors for adults and stood for them upon their entering a room.

“In a second school, staff had to be coerced to eat with children, who used any implement available, including their hands, to eat. Proper conversation was impossible because of the noise, and teachers would make a bad-tempered exit as fast as they could.

“In a third school, no teacher would be seen dead in the dining hall, where lunchtime supervisors were sworn at by pupils and the floor looked as if the contents of a pig trough had been up-ended there.

“What was clear in each of these schools was that the effect of staff intervention on table manners was minimal. The state of dining decorum was quite clearly dependent on what had been picked up at home.”

Which in turn brings us to fire. It was interesting to read Sir Peter Sutherland some weeks ago commenting on the genesis of the Celtic Tiger, where this wonderful beast had come from and how much longer it was likely to survive. Some say it is the creature of the European Union, some credit our level of corporation tax, some credit the wonderful family of Anglophone nations – there we go again – to which we belong and over which our generous Diaspora is spread. Some credit our superior education system. It was this lat that Sir Peter was probably most sceptical about. At best he thought our education system was mediocre. No, what he seemed to place real emphasis on was the strength and quality of the Irish family and the influence it exercised throughout our society – both in terms of the upbringing of children, the motivational force it exercised and the communities it created throughout our society. Of course it is, was and – if we are careful with it – always will be. Its power is even seen in the strength and cohesion of that very Diaspora with which we identify so closely. But will it last? Are we not really playing with fire as we mistake sentimentality for compassion, as we muddle love and lust, as we meddle with marriage and the family as our legislators – some of them anyway – are threatening to do?

Michael Kirke, worked as a journalist with The Irish Press. He is now a freelance writer and the director of Ely University Centre, 10 Hume Street, Dublin 2. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net. Other writing can be found on his blog, www.garvan.wordpress.com .

With friends like this….thoughts on P.C. own goals

On March 9, 2008January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Over the past few years Christmas has become a bit of a battlefield between those who value the customs and traditions we associate with the season and the P.C. brigades. While some of the age-old traditions might seem to be on the losing side, all is not as it might seem. With their blatant excesses the “politically correct” may be their own worst enemies in the long run. The latest that caught the eye was in the school in Britain where little children were singing – hopefully Advent carols – about Mary and Joseph making their way to Bethlehem. They were stopped and told to change the lyrics for fear that someone might be offended. In the original words they sang, “little donkey, carry Mary safely on her way.” This was far too explicitly Christian, they were told – Mary was the offending word, – and were ordered to change the lyrics to “carry Lucy safely on her way.” With friends like this the multi-culturalists don’t need enemies. They are so devoid of logic and common sense that they inevitably bring down so much ridicule on their heads that sensible people – who are really in the majority when they put their minds to it – see through their folly and begin to think again for themselves. They even begin to find their way back home. This is probably part of what happened over the past few Christmases. A survey just reported on has found that in spite of all the multicultural ballyhoo about Christmas being “offensive” to non-Christians, in spite of all the rampant materialism which invades this most spiritual of seasons, in spite of all the consumption and self-indulgence, Church attendance at Christmas services in Britain has gone up 15 percent since the beginning of this millennium. There are, presumably, multiple factors contributing to this – among them the influx of Catholic immigrants from Eastern Europe – but surely the folly about Lucy, added to the follies we read about when schools feel they have to avoid putting on Nativity plays because they might offend non-Christians, must be making people think. Do some of not them say to themselves, “how dare they try to take our valued traditions away from us?” Is it any wonder that parents might decide to bring their children to something which will speak to them of the event which is at the heart of our very civilization? Perhaps there is also in this something of a reaction to the onslaught of Richard Dawkins – and his cohorts – over the past few years, branding us all as deluded – if not dangerous – dreamers. The great advantage of being challenged is that it makes people think and thinking then may urge them to act. OK, this is just Christmas attendance at a communal celebration of faith. The attendance at services throughout the rest of the year is still in decline. But this is a celebration of when it all started and perhaps it may help a lot of people to start all over again. Bring it on!

Not too far removed from all that was the spectacular own-goal by the pseudo liberals in La Sapienza University in Rome who made themselves the laughing stock of Europe by insulting the Pope after Christmas. Last time it was Muslims who were up in arms when Pope Benedict quoted a medieval Emperor’s not too flattering question about Islam’s contribution to religion. This year it was the “intellectuals” of La Sapienza who staged a protest sit-in when the Pope was invited to address the university. His crime? He had quoted – 18 years ago – an Austrian philosopher who had the temerity to suggest that Galileo’s treatment at his trial was “reasonable and fair” by the standards of the time. The Pope’s office responded with dignity and issued a statement saying that “Following incidents known to all” it seemed best to cancel the event to which the Rector had invited him. “However,” it went on, “the Holy Father will send the university authorities a copy of the address he intended to give.” And what an address! It must have heaped coals on the heads of the silly protestors. He spoke of truth, goodness and the proper relationship between the Church of God and the university in which men sought above all to search for these things in freedom.

“What does the Pope have to do with, or have to say to the university”, he asked? “Surely he must not attempt to impose the faith on others in an authoritarian way since it can only be bestowed in freedom. Beyond his office as Shepherd of the Church, and on the basis of the intrinsic nature of this pastoral office, there is his duty to keep the sensitivity to truth alive; to continually invite reason to seek out the true, the good, God, and on this path, to urge it to glimpse the helpful lights that shine forth in the history of the Christian faith, and in this way to perceive Jesus Christ as the Light that illuminates history and helps us to find the way to the future.”

This, and the 200,000 people from all over Italy, intellectuals, politicians, ordinary people, who turned up in St. Peter’s Square on January 20, to categorically disassociate themselves from the clique who had insulted the Pope and shamed the University, was a perfect response to a shameful folly.

Books and Our Future

On December 13, 2007January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Books are important. Some people feel that the habit, the skill, the pleasure of reading is under threat and that what is threatened is more than just something to pass the time. Britain’s chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks has written: Until recently, national cultures were predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew. In the case of Britain they included the Bible, Shakespeare and the great novels. The existence of a canon is essential to a culture. It means that people share a set of references and resonances, a public vocabulary of narratives and discourse.” The implication is that when this set of references begins to disintegrate then the very fabric of the culture itself will begin to disintegrate.

There is no doubt but there is uneasiness among us about the coherence of our culture today – in both these islands. It is debatable whether or not the weakening of this canon is a factor. But it is worth debating. The increasing dominance and impact of aural and visual media seems to be the main agent in supplanting our attraction to the written word on the page. Can these media give us what the written word on the page gives – a time and a space for reflection on what we absorb? Perhaps. But until we know that what we might be losing can be sacrificed without risk, it behoves us to do all we can to keep the canon of great books, great music and great art which help define what we are and who we are. In this task the educational curricula of the home and the school are the central pillars.

Pullman Having His Cake and Eating It

On December 13, 2007January 31, 2013 By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The problem with Philip Pullman – well, one of them at any rate – is that he wants to have his cake and eat it. Pullman is the author of a series of children’s books which purport to expose what he sees the myths that make up our Christian faith. The first of these has now been filmed at an estimated cost of €120 million. “The Golden Compass” is probably showing at a cinema near you just now. Pullman wants to be an atheist who thinks that “God” is dead and who thinks that religion has brought nothing but suffering for the human race. However he now has a would-be blockbuster film for children to promote and the promise of a rich harvest of book sales on the back of it. If he doesn’t backtrack from his more militant stance and some of his stated intentions – “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief”, he was quoted as saying in the Washington Post in 2001 – his Hollywood producers and his bank balance may suffer. Undoubtedly there are people out there who either think like him on the question of God and religion and there are probably more who don’t care one way or the other. They won’t mind bringing their children to what they see as a well-made film which is a bit of exciting fun and full of marvellous special effects. However, the market place has a lot more to offer if it is carefully manipulated and this marketplace has a large segment of families to whom the meaning and intention of Pullman are important: the nascent faith of their children is not something that they are going to be happy to put at risk for a bit of fun. The cohorts of Pullman’s legion are pulling up behind him in his defence. Shane Hegarty in the Irish Times took up the issue of Pullman’s critics. Mockery was the tactic used as he lined up the easy targets of those who talk about banning Pullman. He quoted Pullman’s own view of his critics – “oh it causes me to shake my head with sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world”. My goodness. That’s strong. What would he like to do with them? Lock them up, or worse? And this is the man who thinks C.S. Lewis “was dangerous”. Of course, the notion that anyone might suggest that what he writes is dangerous is laughable. It’s that cake again. The trouble with this camp is that they are not really interested in a debate which might help us arrive at the truth. Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Good) , Pullman, et al, do their utmost to stifle debate by setting up easy targets, those they can label as “fundamentalists”. Dawkins and Hitchens take the extreme manifestations of belief and use them as evidence to condemn those who have already stipulated these manifestations as aberrations and heresies. Nicole Kidman, one of the stars of the film has even had to row in with a fluffy sort of defence. “I was raised a Catholic, the Catholic Church is part of my essence” – whatever that means? “I wouldn’t be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.” Poor Nicole. She shouldn’t say things like that or we might think that “thinking” is not one of her strong points – or that she has not even bothered to read the script properly. In the film, as Mrs. Coulter, Ms. Kidman is the evil emissary of “the Magisterium.” Does she not know that the “magisterium” is the term which Catholics use to identify the teaching authority of the Church? In the end of the day we can’t allow this to be just a battle between those who believe in a world beyond this world and those who believe that this world is all there is – because science can’t take them any further. That makes it too easy for the non-believer since it gives him so many straw men to demolish. It has to be engaged on the level of the truth and the teaching of Christ and the Church he founded. Apparently Pullman’s next book is going to address the question of whether “people can be helped by something that is palpably not true, is this better than denying the thing that is not true and not being helped.” While this doesn’t sound much like a bestseller it is clear that he has not the slightest interest in honestly asking whether or not something is true. He has already made up his mind and just wants to destroy the “nitwits” who think otherwise than himself.