Tag: The Irish Times

Regrettably, the end of the line

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Perhaps a day will come when this decision can be reversed. Today, with a heavy heart, I sent this to the subscriptions department of The Irish Times.

Regrettably, because of what seems to me to be an inbuilt editorial bias towards the so-called pro-choice side in the ongoing debate on abortion I wish to cancel my subscription for morning delivery of the Irish Times. I say “so-called” because we are all, hopefully, pro-choice. What we should be judged on is the justice of the choices we make. 

I have no wish to provide funding for what appears to be an extension of a campaign to introduce abortion legislation to Ireland.  I am not referring to the free expression of opinion on the issue, either by columnists or leader writers  My concern is about a bias I find in the treatment of news stories.
One small example is the burying of Patsy McGarry’s minimal news coverage of the Irish Bishops’  pastoral initiative at the bottom right hand corner of page 6 yesterday (cf some observations on this in a post on http://www.garvan.wordpress.com). 
Another example would be your sub-editorial treatment – the report itself was fair enough – of the medical conference on maternal health a few weeks ago. This spoke volumes to me about your lack of openness to any positive pro-life stories in the news. Had that conference produced a story which would have served the cause of introducing abortion legislation here I have very little doubt but that it would have got a much more explicit headline and an much better space than the far-left column of a right hand page. I cannot judge about what is happening on the letters page but I have anecdotal evidence that many people on the pro-life side do send letters which never see the light of day.
My observation to you would be that while your by-lined reporters try to be reasonably objective, your anonymous sub-editors are playing a different game.
 
Yours sincerely
 

Michael Kirke.

Is the “paper of record” troubling consciences?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Well what do you know? The “paper of record” has done it again. If you wanted some detailed news about what the leaders of the Catholic Church in Ireland is offering to its followers this weekend by way of information and encouragement to take a stand consistent with the belief and moral teachings of the institution they have freely chosen to follow, which paper would you go to? Not the paper of record.

Below are the three reports from Saturday morning’s Irish broadsheets. The Irish independent gives us nearly 400 words in its comprehensive summary of what the Irish bishops have issued to the parishes throughout the county. The Irish Examiner gives us over 200 and a good report. The Irish Times, however, gives us just over 150 words from its renowned even-handed religious affairs correspondent and buries the story at the bottom right hand corner of page six, probably one of the most “invisible” news slots in any newspaper.

Wonderful – and this after last week’s numbers debacle where the Times reported – apparently under “tweeting” pressure from the pro-abortion people –  that “several” thousand protesters thronged the ranks of a pro-choice street demonstration in Dublin last weekend when in fact a serious count using the video images from the demo showed that the number did not even reach one thousand.

Combine this observation with everything else we have been reading in the Irish Times in the past few months pertaining to the abortion issue and it is very hard not to conclude that here we have a paper which has deliberately set it face in the direction of the Mecca of introducing abortion legislation into Ireland.

What choice has a conscientious person who considers that such legislation, if put on the statute books of this country, would lead to the wholesale taking of the innocent lives of babies awaiting delivery from their mothers’ wombs? One choice, I think – if they are paying subscribers to that paper.  Cancel their subscription because it looks very much like a financial subscription to a cause supporting that wholesale slaughter.

Irish independent

Church launches new anti-abortion campaign

By Luke Byrne, Saturday October 06 2012

The Catholic Church will tomorrow begin a public campaign to oppose access to abortion in Ireland under any circumstances.

A pastoral message is to be read out at Mass opposing abortion and earlier this week all 1,360 parishes north and south of the Border were sent material on the church’s opposition to abortion, including homily notes, prayers, and posters.

The move is being seen as the opening salvo in the church’s campaign to lobby against access to abortion here.

It follows a promise by Cardinal Sean Brady in August that priests would be provided with the resources to campaign on the issue.

The homily notes have suggested that tomorrow’s first Bible reading come from the creation account of life from Genesis. “This provides an ideal context in which to speak of the beauty and sanctity of human life as part of the gift of God’s creation,” it said.

A prayer card has also been provided for parishioners. Along with a prayer, the card will say: “As science makes clear it is at fertilisation that a new, unique and genetically complete human being comes into existence.”

Responding to the planned campaign, Senator Ivana Bacik said she believed that the church’s moral power had been “significantly weakened” by the sexual abuse scandals.

“I think it’s disheartening that the church still thinks it can dictate to women regarding sexual health matters,” she said.

“I think the church should get its own house in order,” she added.

The church has also called for a month of prayer dedicated to the theme of ‘Choose Life’ to begin tomorrow, which it has called ‘Day for Life Sunday’.

The literature has told priests that it is not necessary for the Government to legislate for legal abortion in Ireland following the 2010 European Court of Human Rights case against the State.

Instead, it said that the Government “could choose to protect the life of the unborn baby in the womb” by changing the Constitution to set aside the Supreme Court ruling in the ‘X-case’.

As part of the campaign, the bishops’ conference has also commissioned a website at www.chooselife2012.ie

Ms Bacik said that the issues of the ‘X-case’ have twice been put to referendum and both times Ireland supported safe abortion in the case where a mother’s life was at risk.

Irish Examiner

Church to launch pro-life campaign with messages to Mass-goers

By Juno McEnroe, Political Reporter, Saturday, October 06, 2012

The Catholic Church will launch its pro-life campaign this weekend with anti- abortion messages for Mass- goers, posters in churches, and testimonies from women who have experienced crisis pregnancy.

The campaign details, letters, and materials have been sent to 1,360 parishes ahead of the release of the Government’s expert group report on abortion.

Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Seán Brady, recently said the Church would run a campaign against legalising abortion in Ireland.

Cardinal Brady said the State was not obliged to legislate for abortion as a result of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights on the so-called ABC case, which the expert group is addressing.

The “choose life” campaign will run for the next four weeks. Notes sent to priests on homilies read: “Any mother or father who has gazed in wonder at an ultrasound scan of their baby, or heard his or her heart beating for the first time, will know how rapid and beautiful is the development of their baby in the womb.”

Priests are also being advised to tell Mass-goers the Government should introduce laws or a constitutional amendment that would set aside the Supreme Court ruling in the X case, which allowed for abortion in some circumstances.

The Irish Times

Bishops launch anti-abortion month

PATSY McGARRY

Ireland’s Catholic bishops have called on “all who believe in the equal dignity and beauty of every human life” to “join us in calling on our public representatives to respect the humanity and life of children in the womb and to reject abortion.”

The bishops made their appeal in a special pastoral message which will be read and distributed in all Catholic parishes on the island this weekend. It coincides with “Day for Life Sunday” tomorrow, which also marks the start of a month of prayer around the theme “Choose Life!”, announced last month.

Relevant “Choose Life!” material was sent to all 1,360 Catholic parishes in Ireland this week to promote the month of prayer campaign. A special website chooselife2012.iehas been launched with a complementary Choose Life! presence on social media (Choose Life 2012 on Facebook, and @Chooselife2012 on Twitter and on YouTube).

The bishops said their message was for people of all backgrounds and traditions across the island.

This will either make you laugh or cry

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

The Irish Times probably isn’t too worried by what appears in The Daily Telegraph about it. For the rest of us, however, it is encouraging to have some confirmation that we are not alone in our nausea when we have to read it every morning – for the time being.

Damian Thompson took it to pieces in today’s Telegraph and tossed a few more Irish pc fellow-travelers under his kosh for good measure.

He begins by asking us to check out a few headlines, not telling us where they came from. It didn’t take some of us to pick up the scent. It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Here’s a trenchant headline for you, he wrote: “Transgender community celebrates ‘great diversity of gender identity’ in new book.” And another: “President tells youth groups to be vigilant against racist attitudes and to value diversity in society.” Care to guess which venerable organ published them? Here’s a clue: “Multicultural awards take place in Dublin following three-year break.”

Actually, that last one is a bit of a scoop. To anyone who knows modern Ireland, the notion that Dublin went a whole three years without multicultural awards is frankly incredible. Somebody really screwed up. They’re supposed to happen every month at least. The newspaper is the Irish Times, which these days makes the Guardian look like the bulletin of the Prayer Book Society. Rumour has it that it employs a special nurse to soothe joints sprained by marathon sessions of finger-wagging.

This week was a good one for the finger-waggers. The Irish parliament passed a law stripping political parties of state funding unless 30 per cent of their candidates are women; in later elections the quota will rise to 40 per cent. This means that bright men will be dissuaded from entering politics because the system will fill the Dáil with dim hectoring feminists with DIY Sinéad O’Connor haircuts. (Incidentally, did you know that eight out of the past 10 World Hectoring Champions have been lady members of the Irish Green party? It’s called Comhaontas Glas. Don’t ask me how it’s pronounced: the bizarre vagaries of Gaelic pronunciation were designed to trip up the English.)

Anyway, my point is not that rigged elections will destroy the democratic mandate of the Dáil, though they will. It’s that an especially toxic strain of political correctness has infected almost the entire Irish intelligentsia. Small-government conservatives are treated like lepers – something that, the Guardian/BBC axis notwithstanding, isn’t true of British public life. Meanwhile, the sucking up to minorities is beyond parody: a recent Irish Times profile of the travellers made them sound like latter-day Athenians. How long before there’s a transvestite traveller quota in the Dáil?

Admittedly, the programme of thought reform is not complete: the Irish working class is still instinctively socially conservative. But it is, unsurprisingly, increasingly anti-clerical, and that takes us to the heart of the matter. Churchgoing in Ireland has fallen off a cliff, thanks to the clergy’s dreadful record of committing and covering up paedophile crimes. The moral vacuum at the top of a hierarchical society has been filled by political correctness, much of it imported from the European Union at the height of Ireland’s Brussels-worship.

PC ideology flowers on the ruins of religion. It’s not just Ireland: in Australia, Canada and metropolitan America, the Catholic Church is paralysed by scandal and the old Protestant denominations have turned into gibbering pantheists or angry sects. Secularism is spreading incredibly fast.

Well, we shall see. There is only so much nonsense – not to mention nausea – that people can take. Just now The Irish Times has something like a captive readership because there is no half-responsible alternative to go to.  The Irish Independent , although it has some good columnists – as even the Times has – is trying to be too many things at the same time. A few years ago Damien Kiberd shook up the radio news monopoly of the national radio service, Radio Telefis Eireann, with his Newstalk station. He did the same thing a few years before for the Sunday newspaper market with his Sunday Business Post. Newstalk is now owned by one the The Irish Times’ top hate-figures, Dennis O’Brien. O’Brien is now poised to take over Ireland’s biggest newspaper business, Independent News and Media and that “entire intelligentsia” to which Thompson pays his tribute is becoming apoplectic at the thought. Could an O’Brien-Kiberd combo be the way back to health and lower blood pressure levels for a lot of us?

An open letter to Mr. Kevin O’Sullivan, the Editor of the Irish Times

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

While there is an element of what you, Mr. O’Sullivan, might call ideology – but what I would simply call professional instinct and religious fidelity – in this, ultimately it is a matter of trust in the integrity of your newspaper.

I am a journalist and at the start of my career worked for a newspaper which stood alongside The Irish Times as one of Ireland’s three national dailies. I know how honest mistakes, errors of judgement and differing personal perspectives can all render news presentation less accurate and dependable than editors would wish.

However, the story on the front page of yesterday’s Irish Times shattered all my confidence and trust in your paper’s sincerity and commitment to even-handedness. The entire thrust of the story and my dissatisfaction with it as straightforward presentation and reporting seemed to me to come from something inherently dishonest.

I would be reassured if you were to tell me that there was here an honest mistake or a simple error of judgement at play. If not I have to say that I doubt if I can continue to subscribe to the Irish Times, something that I have been doing consistently for 50 years. A paper which could bring itself to stand over such a gratuitous and tendentious news report is no longer a reliable source of news.

The news report was in fact nothing less than a pretext to make a not-so-veiled attack on the Catholic Church and its teaching. I had to read it several times before I could believe that it was actually saying what I seemed to understand. I still cannot work out what connection it was making between Catholic moral teaching on contraception and sterilisation and the dubious medical procedure which was ostensibly the subject of the report.

In the end all I could see was that an individual doctor seemed largely responsible for the continued use of this procedure in a particular hospital when other hospitals had ceased to follow this procedure. That he did this was attributed to the “church”. Carl O’Brien’s introductory paragraph on the front page – or was that your subeditor’s work, as undoubtedly your headline was – told us that the Government’s draft report “says one of the reasons it was used was to obey laws influenced by the Catholic Church that banned contraception and sterilisation.” However, in his report on page 5 Carl writes that the “report suggests this”. There is a difference.

This is a bad and regrettable scene, Mr. O’Sullivan. It simply adds to my growing suspicion – a suspicion I have so far tried to resist out of respect for the integrity of my profession and my colleagues – that the Irish Times really does have an anti-Catholic agenda.

I asked a few friends this morning if they had read the article and what they thought in meant. One described it as an utterly ridiculous story with a ridiculous angle. Another no longer reads the Irish Times because of the constant slant it gives its stories on the Catholic Church. A third only reads the Irish Independent now. That is something I would rather not have to do – but I fear that for Irish news coverage I may now have no alternative.

Sincerely, Michael Kirke.

Talibanesque act of wanton destruction?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

The Irish government’s decision to close its embassy to the Vatican has dismayed the few million Catholics in Ireland and many more around the world. Letters to the Irish print media in the past few days – from Ireland and further afield –  have expressed a mixture of anger and resentment at what many see as a small-minded attempt to further justify the petulant and intemperate attack made by the Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Enda Kenny on the Holy See last July. Others see it as a more sinister volley in an ongoing campaign by the left-liberal wing of the Irish coalition government to further undermine adherence of Irish people to the Catholic faith.

John P McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of History, Fordham University, New York, (Irish Times, 5/11/11) puts his finger on what some see as the kernel of the issue when he suggests what he thinks is the real source of the Irish coalition government’s hostility to the Vatican:  “Might the Taoiseach’s rhetoric of last summer have emboldened the secular fundamentalism of some of his coalition partners?”

For another correspondent to the paper the decision smacks of a secularist  talibanesque act of wanton destruction of something of deep historic significance in the landscape of Ireland’s international relations. “The closing of the Irish Embassy to the Vatican… is, I suggest, a sad reflection on this Government’s sense of historical, cultural and religious values”, wrote Dr. John Cooney of Monaghan.

“It is one of our oldest embassies, having been established in 1929 on the creation of the Vatican State as a result of the Lateran Treaty with Italy and in the early days of our own Irish government. The Vatican had been one of the first entities to recognise the Irish State.” He continued: “At a time when countries such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan are opening embassies to the Vatican, we, still a Christian country with a majority Roman Catholic population, welcoming also those of other faiths and none, chose to close ours. The fact that we are closing it now, after our Taoiseach’s unprecedented verbal attack on the Vatican, delivered in the Dáil, will be interpreted by most intelligent people both here and abroad as a further demonstration of our official contempt for the Vatican and indeed for the Roman Catholic Church of which it is the symbol and centre of the magisterium or official teachings of the church.”

Donal Deasy, writing from  Richmond in British Columbia, Canada, contrasts this decision with the Vatican’s decision to continue placing its nunciature to China and Taiwan in Taipei, Taiwan. “Taiwan is democratic. China is communist. While the vast majority of countries including Ireland have followed the dollar to Beijing, overlooking a few intangible human rights issues, the Vatican maintains a lonely but noble stand in defence of what some of us still consider to be priceless values.”

Ireland’s “paper of record”, The Irish Times, seeks to assure its readers that the Irish government’s decision is not an ideologically driven move. Not everyone is convinced.

People, it said, who seek to link the closure with an assault by the Labour Party on the Catholic Church and its control of national schools, have got it wrong. “Such ‘reds-under-the-bed’ language has little relevance.”

The Irish Times may be a paper of record but records cut a number of ways and the “B” side – or is it the “A” side – of this particular record shows clearly that The Irish Times is often little more than an apologist for the liberal secularist ascendancy which dominates Irish political life. People trust its judgement on many things, but this is one area where it consistently proves itself to be very suspect.

The paper admits that there is “little doubt the Cloyne report on clerical child sex abuse, highly charged exchanges between the Taoiseach and the Vatican concerning unwarranted interference in this State and the recall of the papal nuncio have all contributed to the closure of Ireland’s embassy to the Holy See. Difficult fiscal circumstances may have provided official justification for the decision but it overlaid a deep chill in relations between the Catholic Church and the Government.”

So far so good. But the paper’s religious affairs correspondent, Mr. Patsy McGarry, in his opinion piece the day after the announcement, provided its readers with a very tendentious account of events leading to this decision.

In his analysis he was  rather selective in his presentation of the facts of the case. For example, he stated (correctly) that the Murphy Commission, when investigating child abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin, wrote to the Vatican seeking relevant information. But he leads his readers to believe that the Vatican ignored this request. It didn’t.

The Vatican contacted the Irish Government upon receiving the request and asked the Government to ask the Murphy Commission to put its request through the normal diplomatic channels. When an Irish court writes for information to a foreign court, this is what happens.

Further on in his piece, Mr McGarry tells us, again correctly, that the Vatican described the Irish Church’s 1996 child protection guidelines as a “study document”. But he doesn’t tell us that this is how the Irish bishops themselves described it to the Vatican.

He also tells us of the Vatican’s “opposition” to the guidelines. This is an exaggeration.  The Congregation for Clergy, from which the Vatican response originated, had a reservation about mandatory reporting, just as the then Irish Government had.

Towards the end of his article Mr McGarry simply repeats the most lurid lines from the Taoiseach’s attack on the Vatican without substantiating the Taoiseach’s accusations and without giving any details of the Vatican’s measured and detailed rebuttal.

There are Irish people muttering now that they detect a concerted campaign in Irish political circles to de-couple Irish society from its allegiance to anything “Catholic” in its culture – , laws governing education, marriage, procreation, health, etc. For some, up until now, this has smacked of scare-mongering, a “reds-under-the-bed” mentality as the Irish times would have it. For many it is no longer so. Mr. Kenny’s July speech may have been a watershed moment in more ways than one. In it he proclaimed himself a “practising Catholic”. Some recall that King Henry VIII saw himself living and dying as a “practising Catholic”. Despite that he succeeded in tearing the Catholic heart out of England. He failed to do so in Ireland, and Ireland resisted his successors’ efforts to do so for 500 years. Will Enda Kenny – unwittingly, perhaps – succeed in doing what Henry VIII failed to do?

A Tale of Two Cities

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

A very short story in Dublin’s Irish Times this week probably said more about the great divide between the City of God and the earthly city in the world today than anything else I have read for a long time.  All the acres of print we have been reading surrounding the death – effectively his summary execution – of Muammar Gadafy was truly dispiriting in so many ways. If it wasn’t spewing out hatred and vengeance, like News International’s The Sun screaming at us, “That’s for Lockerbie” over a lurid picture of the dead dictator’s corpse, it was sanctimonious posturing on how that was not the way it should have been done. The dignity being moaned about was not the dignity of a dead human being but the dignity of the new state which had just been born.

A somewhat bemused Irish Times – Tuesday, October 25, 2011 – reported that a Catholic priest in North West Ireland actually prayed for Gadafy. Cronan Scanlon wrote, in the language of investigative journalism, “it has emerged” that former Libyan dictator Muammar Gadafy was prayed for at Mass in a Donegal church. “The prayers were said on Sunday in St Eunan’s Church, Raphoe, by parish priest Fr Dinny McGettigan (72). The popular priest surprised parishioners when he was praying for local people who had recently died. The last name he read out was that of Muammar Gadafy.”  Had the reporter been writing for one of Ireland’s tabloids it might well have described them as “shocked and horrified” rather than as merely surprised by what they heard.

Asked by a local newspaper afterwards why he had prayed for the “ruthless dictator” the priest told the reporter “I would pray for anyone, so I have no problem whatsoever praying for Muammar Gadafy.”

Asked if he thought it was all right to pray for the soul of a man who murdered, maimed and oppressed Libyan citizens for four decades, Fr McGettigan said. “That’s all the more reason to pray for him. They all need our prayers no matter who they are.”

But his parishioners were not shocked. They were edified and had no problem uniting themselves with the prayers of Fr. McGettigan. One of them told the reporter, who was clearly still trying to come to terms with this manifestation of Christian moral theology, “It bothered no one. Fr Dinny is a very Christian man and would pray for anyone. He was stabbed during a break-in at the parochial house 10 years ago. When the matter went to court, Fr McGettigan stood up and pleaded with the judge not to send the man to jail. That’s just the kind of person he is.”

Has the earthly city, in its relentless pursuit of justice and retribution, lost all sight of the bigger picture? Has our pursuit of justice become one-sided? Perhaps it is because of the culture of victimhood which has become so dominant? But it is more likely that it is simply – in Western society, and indeed in most civilizations which at one time carried within them a belief in immortality – the result of the loss of vision of our human condition as an eternal one: a troubled one here, potentially an untroubled one after our time here.

Christians have a principle of life which says, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” It is a principle which has many consequences – and one of them was exemplified by Fr. McGettigan. Sadly, it is not often that we seem to encounter it. Perhaps it is because we do not talk of or understand the real nature of sin anymore. We think only of illegality, criminality and injustices – and those only in a totally earthbound sense. Might it be that if we regained a sense of sin then our sense of victimhood might become a truer one?  The truth is that whenever injustices are perpetrated all are victims – the sinner as well as the sinned-against.  If that sense is pervasive then all will be perceived as in need – the sinned-against needs justice done on his behalf and the sinner needs redemption. The parishioners in a small town in North West Ireland were not as surprised by their priest as the World thought they might be because they probably thought the same way as he did. Muammar Gadafy – despite his terrible crimes – was a human being like themselves and redeemable like themselves. How could they not pray for that redemption and still call themselves Christians, they probably thought.

It was, as a footnote, interesting that three days after it appeared The Irish Times story got only 17 Facebook “likes” and 7 tweets. Only 10 readers thought the story worth sharing.