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.

It Does What it Says on the Label…but Read the Label.

On By Michael KirkeIn Faith MattersLeave a comment

Tom Krattenmaker in his column in USA Today (Monday, April 2) makes some interesting points but spoils it all with a superficial lumping together of all sorts of bedfellows under the catchall of fundamentalism. Why can’t otherwise sensible people begin to see how useless and destructive a label this has become through its excessive use?

“The polar ends of the religious spectrum — atheists on one hand, fundamentalists on the other — often eclipse the believers in the middle. Yet the faithful middle provides a compassionate and constructive form of faith that has much to offer our fractured world,” he writes.

“These are not the brightest times for religious moderates. Mainstream Episcopalians, Methodists, Catholics and the like, they’re being upstaged by the more aggressive actors at the polar ends of the spectrum. From Christian conservatives flies rhetoric that pays little heed to the inclusiveness, reasonable tones and subtlety of the ecumenical middle. And from anti-religion author Sam Harris and like-minded atheists comes the damning suggestion that moderates enable violent fundamentalism and that moderation, as Harris puts it, “is the result of not taking Scripture all that seriously.” 

He goes on then to say that “No doubt, the high-profile atheists have a legitimate point when they detail the destructive excesses of fundamentalism. Whether it’s the conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei and its practice of self-mortification, evangelical Christians who invoke martial language in their call to “reclaim America for Christ,” or fundamentalist Muslims who legitimize violence in the name of Allah, a tide of harsh, divisive faith seems to be rising around the world.”

This is, frankly, ridiculous. I have been a member of Opus Dei for over 40 years and I know it only as a thoroughly orthodox, mainstream and very moderate in all its exhortation and teaching. Krattenmaker mentions self-mortification, suggesting that this is a mark of extremism. Let us deal with that first. Christian practice obliges all followers of Christ to die to themselves in some way. That is what we mean by mortification (and it has to be “self-mortification” because deliberate mortification of others is in fact sinful). This is all on the basis of Christ’s own words. To mention just one instance, he told us quite clearly that unless a seed dies in the ground it cannot have life. Then there is the exhortation to take up the cross, and many more. Some members of Opus Dei – and other Catholics as well – choose to adopt one or two traditional practices which are relatively uncommon but are no more harmful to the body than the practice of moderate fasting which is the more common practice of Christians.  

Detractors of Opus Dei – Dan Brown at the top of the heap – have painted some very lurid pictures of mortification as something extremist. The Christian apostolic zeal and concern for evangelization of members of Opus Dei is similarly portrayed. Read all of the writings of its founder- in context – and look at the work it does throughout the world and I challenge you to find anything that is not 100 percent consistent with the teaching of Jesus Christ. Taking things out of context is the main source of difficulty here. Take some of the words of Christ himself out of their context, without the balance provided by all of his teaching, and you also be likely to judge them as extreme – like the bit about cutting off your hand if it causes scandal. 

Another source of difficulty is the denial by the some of personal freedom of expression to individual members of Opus Dei. The members of Opus Dei do not speak with one voice. When I write now as a response to Tom Krattenmaker  I do so personally. If some find me somewhat extremist then it is to me that the charge should be addressed. It is not fair to brand all of Opus Dei and paint it in the colours of my personal views.

Kratenmaker remarks that “Because of their good manners, the moderates’ voice has been relatively quiet, and their message has had a harder time breaking through. Unity? Inter-religious understanding? Peace? In a time of over-heated rhetoric from the extreme-opposite camps, it’s almost as though these are things for wimps.” The first sign of good manners in most conversations is the readiness to listen, and listen as carefully as you can. I would like to say that Tom seemed to be listening carefully but sadly I cannot.

– Michael Kirke

A New Dawn on the Island of Ireland?

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

It might be the end of a 30 year war, a 400 year war or an 800 year old war. But whichever it is it was about as muddled an end as you will find in many a war as far as winners and loser are concerned. We are all winners – because it is over – and we are all losers because it should never have started in the first place. Dr. Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, yesterday’s men par excellence, finally met and agreed to let the forces of normal – well, fairly normal – political life fall into place in the six Ulster counties which make up the political entity of Northern Ireland.

Some would say it all began a little over 800 years ago in the distant feudal past when a disgruntled king of an Irish province asked Henry II of England to help him in his row with one of this neighbours. Others might put the key date at exactly 400 years ago when the leaders of the last great rebellion of Gaelic and Catholic Ireland came to an end with the flight of its leaders from the shores of Donegal. It was essentially a tragic event, recorded in Irish history as the Flight of the Earls. It is not a little ironic that this event is being commemorated nationally in Ireland this very year. For others it is a 30 year war of unfinished business left over after the Anglo Irish settlement of 1922.

Whatever it was, Irishmen on both sides of the so-called “Border”, Irishmen across the Irish Sea, English, Scottish and Welshmen on either side of the same sea – the largest single group of non Irish-born residents in the Republic of Ireland are British – have longed for this peace. They do not mind too much that it came in the end, not with a bang but with a whimper. This kind of peace comes better in this way.

Now ordinary men and women can get down to work and think about the ordinary needs of normal people. Dr. Paisley – with his phantom-dread of a united Ireland ruled from Rome – and Gerry Adams with his equally grotesque myth of a tyrannical British State occupying the sacred land of Ireland and oppressing its innocent people can now fade into the shadowy past where they belong. Nevertheless, some gratitude is owing to them in their later incarnations: they helped create two monsters but in the end they came good and have successfully chained them up again. Hopefully they will stay there. Real and unqualified credit, however, must go to the Prime Ministers of the two states which have had to suffer the consequences of the terror unleashed by these two monsters on their respective island jurisdictions – Tony Blair and Bertie Aherne. Both should surely be high on any short-list of contenders for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Their efforts have not only been supremely skilful but also truly heroic.

The business of containing death-inflicting terror on the island of Ireland can now be left behind. Sadly for Britain, no sooner has one source of terror gone than another raises it ugly head. However, the peoples of these two islands can now get together again to pursue their common economic interests and the business of life, sharing their common heritage of language and literature, institutions and laws,  and in the mutual enjoyment of their glorious differences – sport, music, native languages and customs.

While the undoubted event of the week was that “Meeting”, there were a few other events which seemed to contain a not-unrelated symbolic significance, pointing to the reality of our shared culture. The first was the investiture – if that is the right word – of Bono of U2 with a knighthood by Her Majesty the Queen of England. In Ireland, if you say “the Queen”, some will ask you, “which queen?”

For the other event we have to go all the way across the Atlantic and down to the shores of the Caribbean. There, in Guyana, the English cricket team faced the Irish (that is, island of Ireland) cricket team in the World Cup. Unsurprisingly England won – although as one of Ireland’s first cricket players, the Duke of Wellington, famously said of the Battle of Waterloo, it might have been “a damn close run thing”.

The irony and symbolic significance of the event runs right through it. The Irish team consists of a mixture of native born Irishmen and British Commonwealth citizens living and working in Ireland, while the English team consists of native born Englishmen, not a few from the same Commonwealth and probably the best cricketer Ireland has ever produced – well, at least since the Duke of Wellington – Irishman Edmund Joyce.

If all that doesn’t give us a glorious confusion of identity to rejoice in what will? But it is not confusion. It is what we are that matters and gives us our true identity. The truth is that what the people of these two islands have in common far outweighs our differences – differences about which we sometimes share a joke but which in the end we really value. Narrow nationalistic preoccupations with what we think we were, should be or might have been is – as sad experience shows – the stuff of poison cocktails.

– Michael Kirke

Days of Heaven, Reviews from Hell

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

I found myself getting very annoyed the other day – with something written almost 30 years ago. I had just watched – for the fifth or sixth time – Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven and felt as rewarded as on the first occasion I watched it. Indeed, even more so because, as is the case with really good films, books or plays, the depth becomes more perceptible with the closer examination multiple encounters offer.I then did a little internet trawl to check out if many felt the same way about it. In doing so I cam across the September 14, 1978, review by HAROLD C. SCHONBERG in the New York Times.  How wide of the mark can you be? I thought as I read it.  I also thought how terrible an experience it must have been for Mallick on reading it. Had it anything to do with his failure to make another film until he made The Thin Red Line in the 1990s? In those 20 years, of course, it became clear to many that those like Schonberg who consigned Days of Heaven to the rubbish heap had completely missed the point. Malick today stands out as one of the truly great poets of cinema – along with Andrei Tarkovsky, Ermano Olmi and, perhaps, Terence Davies.This was Schonberg’s judgement:“Some years ago Terrence Malick produced, wrote, and directed
Badlands, a film that created a certain stir. Now comes Days of Heaven… it obviously has cost a lot of money; it is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film. “At the beginning, it is as though this is going to be a film about European immigrants in the early days of President Wilson’s presidency. Then it switches to the Texas Panhandle, where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope still play. Migrant workers, fleeing the big cities, help reap the wheat harvest of a young, wealthy farmer. There are all kinds of special effects, including a plague of locusts and a prairie fire. There is a romance, in which the girlfriend of a young worker, who poses as his sister, marries the farmer. What results is jealousy and murder. “But Days of Heaven never really makes up its mind what it wants to be. Back of what basically is a conventional plot is all kinds of fancy, self-conscious cineaste techniques. The film proceeds in short takes: people seldom say more than two or three connected sentences. It might be described as the mosaic school of filmmaking as the camera and the action hop around, concentrating on a bit here, a bit there.”  

What can one say about all that? Essentially it is a hopeless case of a person reading a film totally on the surface and failing to grasp any of the suggestions, the nuances, the allusions which go to create its deep layers of meaning and observation of human existential experience and what lies beyond it. It is like someone coming to The Waste Land and complaining that it is all over the place, does not quite know what it wants to be – funny, pathetic, apocalyptic or whatever. So be it. A man sees what he wants to see – or is able to see – and disregards the rest, because he has no choice. But what a pity that an authoritative paper like the New York Times should allow a review like this to be inflicted on an artist of such sensibility as Mallick.On a first viewing Days of Heaven presents a visual feast. The cinematography and direction are flawless in their marrying a vision of nature, human tragedy, social description and an historical epoch. The economy of expression – which Schonberg mocks as “the mosaic school” – was superb. Take for example the very short scene where Woodrow Wilson’s campaign train passes through the Texas Panhandle and the migrant workers line up to see it as it passes. One can imagine Schonberg and his ilk asking, “What was all that about?” While you can’t say they should know, at the same time you know what they miss because they don’t know. This is the cinema of allusion and if we are unable to connect with such allusion we are the poorer for it.

The Times and the BBC both report (Monday 26 Febru…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

The Times and the BBC both report (Monday 26 February) that the British Council is cutting its budget for work on the European mainland to allow it to put more into its work in the Arab and Muslim world. Surely this is a good idea? There cannot be much more that Europe needs to know about British culture than it knows already – at least not much more that an organisation like the BC can help with. With the language as dominant as it is and with the BBC so far ahead of any other broadcasting organisation in terms of quality and penetration, all the BC can be doing in Europe is preaching to the converted.

The Muslim world is really the critical frontier. But as the experience of living with Muslims in Britain seems to show, it will not be easy. It is fashionalble to laugh off the idea of a clash of civilizations. Don’t be fooled. There really is a clash – and the BC’s initiatives are likely to exacerbate it in the short term. In the longer term, hopefully, it will be resolved.

The problem of course is not the mainstream of Islam. The problem is the radical fringe which will see any effort to introduce the faithful to Anglo-Saxon-Western values and way of life as a corrupting exercise – and they are right. Radical Islam cannot go to bed with Western values and survive. This is a fight to the death for the radical Muslim. This is what is going on in Afghanistan and in many other places. The outcome is pretty certain but there will be casualties and the resolution will take a long time. More power to the British Council.

In the same issue of the London Times I see that AA Gill is declaring that “gayness is not a sin. It’s not even a faux pas”. Is this more of the deliberate muddling of Christian morality which we get so much of from the “liberal” wing. I do not know any serious moral teaching that says “gayness” is a sin – no more than being hot-tempered is. Sin has to do with willful acts, acted out or otherwise. It comes only with surrender to tendencies which are contrary to an ordered human nature.

The Catholic Church shocks some people when it describes gayness as a disorder. We find lots of disordered tendencies in our nature – greediness, laziness, anger – but we do not get offended when it is suggested to us that we deal with these appropriately. Gays who deal with their gayness will be on the right track when they do the same – just as I will be when I deal with my laziness by getting out of bed in the morning when I don’t feel like it.

Christopher Howse in the Daily Telegraph a few weeks ago put his finger on the problem of course, writing in the context of the pickle which the Anglican Church has got itself into on this matter. The moral confusion, he suggested, all stems from the rejection of the moral principle that sexual acts are sinful if they are radically dissociated from the act of procreation. In other words, if deliberate contraception is not sinful, then no consensual or individual sexual act is sinful. Is it fair to say that the great moral divide of our time is the gap between those who believe this and those who don’t?

Finally, on a more uplifting note: what a special weekend we had here in Dublin.
The papers are full of historic musings about how our two islands, our two nations which share such an overwhelmingly common culture as to be really only remotely two nations, came together paradoxically in a great act of reconciliation on the battlefield of rugby. Needless to say our equivalent of the Taleban, continuity, real – or whatever they want to call themselves – IRA were hanging around the fringes of our celebrations. Mercifully, their day is gone at last and never did “tiochaid ar lá” sound more foolish.

We all wanted to put the past behind us – and we did. Whether or not we thought the 1916 rebellion was a wrong turning in our history, diverting us from the legitimate path to self-determination which we had hopefully entered on a few years earlier, we put those thoughts aside. Perhaps the long and painful saga of our invention of a false and forced national identity as “anything but British” might finally be petering out and we will be able to get on with genuinely being ourselves, accepting all those elements, Irish and British – to name but two – which make us what we are.

Saddam is gone – and what conflicting reactions ab…

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International Affairs6 Comments

Saddam is gone – and what conflicting reactions abound. Many supporters of the war which overthrew him still cannot bring themselves to reverse their judgements – and I number myself among them. Some of those judgements have clearly been undermined as the law of unintended consequences unfolded. However, new ones have taken their place and on balance these still support the intervention. But we are clearly in the minority. Is it pride, desperation or right judgement that keeps us sticking to our post?

The reality of our position now – whatever rational arguments we may still be prepared to entertain and advance in its support – is more that of the desperate victim who has walked into a trap and has to fight for his life to get out of it. The enemy has been engaged, the engagement has opened a Pandora’s box of indescribable complexity but now has to be closed. They cannot leave it open. They have no choice but to fight to the end and hope against hope for an ultimately positive outcome.

The anti-war faction is of no help. The sterility of their “I-told-you-so” stance – spoken or unspoken – offers nothing. Whatever might be said for the misgivings on which they based their original opposition to the military action they now have nothing to say that is positive.

The unpalatable thought for those who supported the action – in the belief that it was protecting the world from an imminent threat (nuclear chemical WMD) which turned out to be no threat in fact, and in the belief that the volatility of Iraq under Saddam was something that could be removed with his removal – is that death and destruction have come in its wake along with the creation of an apparently more threatening instability than was there before.

The most painful truth of all that may have to be faced is that the just war basis which had been held to support the action has been fatally compromised by the apparent calamity that has ensued. On the basis that some kind of proportionality should apply and on the basis that a hope of a successful outcome with a minimal suffering and death should ensue, the case for this being a just war seems no longer tenable.

And yet a lingering suspicion persists. All this may be necessary, all this may be an unavoidable conflict in the interests of avoiding an even greater conflict and catastrophe. Had there been a political will prepared to face up to the perceived threats of Nazi Germany in the 1930s which would have been prepared to engage militarily with the monster at an earlier stage of its development, would millions, tens of millions of lives been saved?

There is a Middle East scenario which is potentially as disastrous as any of the two great world wars proved to be. Millions have already died in a conflict between Iraq and Iran. In this case the majority who died were military personnel. Sadam was not going to live forever and one might have anticipated his death – from either natural or unnatural cause any time over this decade. What was likely to happen in the aftermath of that death is probably a pale shadow of the conflict now raging there. The Rwanda massacres for which the world still feels guilty would probably even have been a pale reflection. The world’s greatest military machine is grappling with a situation which by now would be a quagmire of blood were it not in the place to help contain it.

A militant fundamentalist Islamic nuclear power is a far more frightening prospect than a nuclear Communist power ever was. Iran still threatens to become one. Had Sadam become one Iran would certainly have done so. Had Saddam’s regime collapsed into a vacuum then Iran would almost certainly have gone to war to protect the Shia community and Saudi Arabia to protect the Suni. The rest of the world could not have stood aside and watched the oil on which its entire economic structure is based run into the sand. A war bringing unimaginable suffering and death and of unimaginably disastrous consequences would have followed.

Hypotheses? Perhaps. But politics of any kind, national or international has to take account of hypotheses, weigh them up and act. Had the hypotheses of the few in the 1930s been acted upon there would doubtless have been death and destruction and many would have excoriated the few responsible. But had that happened the greatest evil that the world has ever seen would have been prevented.

America and Britain have to stay the course in Iraq and in Afghanistan. It does not mean they have to conduct themselves on this course in the way they have to date. The reality is that there is a monster lurking in the fold of Islam. It is not Islam itself but it will destroy Islam the world as we know it unless it is removed.

These are the conflicting thoughts lingering in the mind of one who in 2003 thought that the Coalition which invaded Iraq was going in to do good job quickly. Guilty of naivety? With hindsight, yes? But if he was guilty of naivety once he may be even more determined not to make the same mistake twice.