Well Done Enda

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For many years the Irish establishment connived with the Catholic Church. Police and government officials helped them to conceal the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children and vulnerable adults. Complaints were ignored, trivialised or even perverted into accusations against the victims.

Despite recent expressions of regret and protestations of intentions to be open by the church and the Irish state there has been little reason for victims to believe that things had fundamentally changed. The recently published Cloyne report was damning in its assessment of the behaviour of the Catholic Church at every level in the Irish Republic. That was good, but it is just another report. There have been many of those which have not brought about proper recompense for victims or indication that there is genuine contrition by the Church.

Now Enda Kenny, the head of the Irish Government, has said in parliament hat the Cloyne Report into how allegations of sex abuse by priests in Cork had been covered up showed that change was urgently needed. Mr Kenny said the historic relationship between church and state in Ireland could not be the same again. He said the report exposed the elitism, dysfunction, disconnection, and narcissism that dominated the Vatican.

“The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’,” the Taoiseach said. “The Vatican chose to focus on the interests of the church rather than the children abused by its clergy and shielded by its leaders.”

During the debate, the church was called upon to publish the audits currently being sent to every Catholic diocese in the country.

All of this is long, long overdue, but it must be welcomed that the leader of the Irish Government is now recognising the reality of the extent of the crime and cover up that has occurred. Mr Kenny must follow through to make sure that the church can never again hold such sway that it can obstruct justice and conceal crime.

Related articles

• Dublin: Vatican Conspired To Frustrate Cloyne Child Sex Abuse Inquiry: Taoiseach (lostchildreninthewilderness.wordpress.com)
• Kenny attacks Vatican over abuse (bbc.co.uk)
• Irish prime minister attacks Vatican (guardian.co.uk)
• Ireland stands up to the Catholic Church (scienceblogs.com)
• Irish prime minister slams Vatican over child sex abuse (cnn.com)

Family fairness index – get out of our lives

My first ‘news’ of today was hearing a twerp called Rob Williams from the Fatherhood Institute telling us that Britain is low on his Fairness in Families Index. This is because we don’t have enough paid paternity leave, men don’t do enough housework or spend enough time in child care  and we suffer from out outdated distinction between fathers as breadwinners and mothers as home-makers. According to him this means that we are not family friendly.
Only a few countries like Japan and Switzerland do worse than us on Fuehrer Williams’ index.
I was a pretty rubbish father, but that is a long time ago and as I am now retired I can make a bit of a contribution to keeping the house together, but the idea of ‘fairness in families’ is just infantile twaddle. I am reminded of P J O’Rourke when tired of his young daughter complainging of unfairness said:
“It’s not fair that you were born in the USA, it’s not fair that you have prosperous parents who love you, it’s not fair that you have a warm, comfortable home to live in, it’s not fair that you have a high quality education, health care, safety, friends and masses of opportunity for choices in your life. Shut up or I will start imposing some fairness.”
Of course Sweden came top of Williams’ index. Being a turnip he might fit in there, but I have some advice for him. Wind up your stupid institute Rob and get a proper job. If you stop wasting time and money  by pestering us with this drivel you might have a better chance of some contentment in your own life and that could contribute just a little bit to family happiness.
I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed Williams and his nonsense so much if it wasn’t for the last few days of being told that the government was going to measure the happiness of the nation. I can tell you Cameron & Clegg that what makes me really unhappy is wasting the taxes of a bankrupt nation on idiotic schemes like that. You are providing the perfect breeding ground for The Fatherhood Institute and every other ridiculous parasite group wanting to tell us how to live our lives.

NICE is Nasty

 

NICE is a bloated quango which interferes in which medicines we may or may not be permitted to use. Apart from providing excessive incomes and gold plated pensions to its over sized staff, the purpose of this body was supposed to improve health care by regulating the introduction of new treatments and ending a ‘postcode lottery’ of availability. For those who may not know, quango means quasi-autonomous non-government organisation. That in turn means a mysteriously appointed, completely unaccountable bunch of politicians cronies who interfere in the lives of everybody.

 

What is often attacked and derided as a ‘postcode lottery’ is actually the healthy variation that results from local services being provided appropriately to meet local needs. Crofters in the Hebrides do not have the same health issues or requirements as coke snorting, champagne swillers in Knightsbridge. While ordinary people can recognise that, the nanny loving broadcast media and their mates in government cannot.

 

It is now reported that a sub committee this nasty NICE bureaucracy has done some work at the request of the Department of Health (HaHa – Department of Sickness Management and Drug Administration wouldn’t have quite the same ring would it?) and come up with the recommendation that Council staff and Health & Safety inspectors should be given the right to enter every parent’s home to check if you have stair gates, hot water temperature restrictors, window locks and a whole load of other stuff. Many of these things could be useful and sensible, but all of them are things to be decided by adults dealing with the needs and priorities of their lives. We all know what the result of the snooping would be. Apart from the terrible invasion of privacy, branding people with different approaches to the bureaucrats as child harming criminals and the further infantilisation of every citizen there would be prosecution of poor parents so that their difficult lives would be made impossible. The next thing would be to take some of these children into institutional care where they would be exposed to abuse and condemned to a future in which they would have a far greater likelihood of becoming criminals or abusers in adult life.

 

If all this was not bad enough, NICE also recommends a new government database to allow GPs, midwives and other officials visiting homes to log health and safety concerns they spot. These people would be asked to provide home safety advice and where necessary conduct a home risk assessment.

 

“If possible they should supply and install home safety equipment”

 

This revolting, Orwellian garbage has been put out to consultation with the intention of introducing it next year. We must tell the government clearly and quickly to scrap this stupid idea now. My own children are long grown up, but if any of these busybodies want to come and check on my grandchildren or great grandchildren in my home I can only suggest that they preserve their own safety by not exposing themselves to the risks they would face by coming here.

 

Doctors, midwives, etc. are well regarded for their professional skills and services. I wonder how people would feel about them if they are turned into Stasi style state snoopers?

Parents lie to get kids in school

Parents are being threatened with court action over telling lies to get their child into the school of their choice. I don’t advocate telling lies, but parents are absolutely right to try to get the best possible education for their children and it is an absolute outrage that the state should be threatening and intimidating parents to force their children into inadequate schools or ones which they consider to be unsuited to their child.

This is yet another example of how Britain has been turned into a soviet style tyranny where the state knows best, individuals are forced to do what the government demands and dissenters are criminalised.. The choice of education for a child is a matter to be decided between parents, their chosen school and the child themselves. It is nothing whatever to do with either national or local government, they must keep out of it completely.

Schools need to be freed from local education authorities and the dictation of what they can or cannot teach, but what needs to be done immediately is to provide vouchers to cover the cost of education for each child up to the normal school leaving age. The family will then be free to choose the schools that their children will attend irrespective of where they live, what religion they have or any other criteria. The voucher will cover the full cost of state education, but if the parents choose to send their child to a school in the private sector that has higher costs they top up their voucher from their own resources.

Education is too important for decisions about it to be stolen from families by authoritarian governments who insist that they know best when all of history tells us that they always result in the worst. The Soviet Union collapsed because it made the lives of its citizens a misery with wrong headed attempts to control every part of their lives. Our government is heading the same way. Throw it out before it is too late.

Rise in UK teenager pregnancies

Teenage preganancies in the UK have risen for the first time in five years. Britain has the worst record in Europe although it is not as bad as the USA where Bush’s capitulation to the Christian lobby has placed emphasis on abstention from sex before marriage while removing support from anybody helping with contraception or abortion.

Here, the government is asking whether there needs to be an improvement in sex education in schools or classes for girls to show the burdens of motherhood.

I am not sure whether the idiots who suggest this stuff believe any of it or not, but either way it doesn’t matter. They are still going to throw away vast amounts of taxpayers money doing it and building their empires while the misery caused by immature, inadequates becoming parents will continue.

One thing that these children and their families do understand is the benefit and welfare system. Some of them have been living on it for generations and they share their experiences with all their mates. Kids who do not get on at school, have miserable experiences at home and do not see any prospect of doing well in the working world just don’t care about exams or putting effort into anything which is not pleasurable in their eyes.

When a young girl gets pregnant, the state rewards her with loads of attention, a support network, financial benefits and the prospect of a home for her and her baby. Even if she does not get pregnant deliberately to escape her own disfunctional parents or to create another living thing that loves her, she might be happy if it happens for completely rational economic reasons.

These kids are perfectly well aware of the facts of sex and no amount of education is going to make any difference. Still less will there be any point in telling them to save themselves for marriage.

It is really fairly simple. Stop rewarding children for producing more children. The welfare system needs to be dismantled, but a very good start would be to say that there will be no child benefit, no housing provision, in fact no benefits of any kind whatever for parents below the age of eighteen.

That will not stop under eighteens from having sex and it will certainly not stop all of them from becoming pregnant, but it will definitely make them much more interested in using contraception and for many girls, for whom motherhood would be a very bad thing, they will choose a termination rather than going on to face the full reality of what they have done.

I know this will be repugnant to many people. So be it. Let us discuss the issue and consider the consequences of our respective opinions.

The Fifth Commandment

 

Respect your father and mother

 

We are half way through and at last god has started looking at something other than his self obsession.

 

Most people would probably agree that children should respect their father and mother. I certainly hold that view in most cases, but really this commandment is such a generalisation that it’s value is very weak.

 

Humans are full of failings. Not because Adam ate a fruit or Eve was a temptress or that they were lead astray by a serpent, but because some people do very bad things.

 

Should a child respect a parent who abuses them? Sadly, some children are so badly treated that they are killed by one or other of their parents. Does respect for the abusive parent extend to the point at which the child should not tell anybody about their suffering and so allow it to continue until their life is taken or irretrievably damaged? Surely not.

 

I am in favour of laws being simple enough that they can be easily understood and enforced, but simplicity can be taken too far. In this case the exhortation to respect ones parents is fine for parents who respect their children. It is wrong to suggest that children have responsibilities to parents without reference to the responsibilities of parents to their children.

 

The commandments were a set of rules put together between two and three thousand years ago by people who lived simple, often brutal, lives in tribal communities without schools or any of the institutions of the twenty first century world. Children, like wives, were seen as assets of a male head of household. This demand of respect for parents is still worthwhile, but the relationship lying behind it in which children are not seen as deserving of the same should be put behind us as a more primitive stage of human development.

 

The fifth commandment stands up better than the four going before it, but it really isn’t very much use for the modern world and it suffers from the risk of giving an excuse to poor parents who demand undeserved respect from their children.

Hermione Pringle

 

“Hermione dear come here, come hear.

Now listen to what I say.”

“Your father and I have a wonderful plan

with a part for you to play.”

 

“We are going to knit a voluminous craft

to travel in, far away.”

Daddy will steer and pedal it too,

but you will show him the way.”

 

“We will journey at night, by the light of the stars,

and relax in sun beams by day.

I will ensure, as a mother should,

that you eat three times each day.”

 

“Off you go now and compile the route.

With my knitting I will stay.

Daddy my dear, just finish the gears,

and we’ll set off later today.”

 

As the sun went down on the Pringle yard

they flew off without delay.

Father pedalled and pointed the craft

while Hermione showed him the way.

 

They parked up at dawn on a goonibah beach

where a jerrimble nibbled away,

at the purl and the plain of the undercart,

while he burped and brungled all day.

 

With fresh spun cloud, and jerrimble horns

Mum knitted a new landing tray.

Dad pedalled awayfor all he was worth

while Hermione plotted the way.

 

The day and the night time rocketed past,

and the world was hurled far astray.

Father braked hard on the wonderful craft

so it came in to land on the tray.

 

High in the boughs of Venusian trees

the Pringles came out to say:

“here is the most deluptiful place

that ever we came to play.”

 

At Alpha Centauri they stayed for two weeks

in the forests of purple and grey.

Centaurans all loved them and copied their craft,

then waved as they went on their way.

 

It was horrid inside the black hole that they found,

when they toured the milky way.

It turned inside out, the fatherly drive,

and made all the purl into plain.

 

The Pringles decided this just wouldn’t do.

They simply declined to stay.

So mother refurbished the stitches, and then,

Hermione showed them the way.

 

In seconds they swept to the Pringle

front yard and screeched to a halt on their tray.

Close up behind them Centaurans came.

Three hundred decided to stay.

Phase Out Child benefit

 

Raising a family is a personal responsibility not a collective one. Child benefit should never be increased or extended for children already born. The benefit should be discontinued for any children born in the future.

Chemistry

 

 

Doctor twisting that child’s brain with

Ritalin.

Numbing the neurotic’s anxiety with

Prozac.

Vanquishing a housewife’s mind with

Valium.

Killing some junkie’s cramps with

Methadone.

 

Goes home and relaxes with

Alcohol.

Sucks stress out with

Nicotine.

Chews the fat with

Khat.

Keeps sleep’s curt call away with

Caffeine.

 

He puffs secretly with

Cannabis.

Condemns the kids who rave with

Ecstasy.

Abominates abuses with

Amphetamine.

Curses cretins corrupted with

Cocaine.

Heaps hell on those haggard with

Heroin.

In fact, he’s full of

Shit

 

Sexual Abuse of Children by Catholic Priests

Around 4,400 Catholic priests in the USA have been accused of sexually abusing children and there have been thousands of other cases throughout the world. Enough of these cases have been proved to demonstrate that child sex abuse was endemic in the Catholic Church, its schools and other institutions for many decades and most probably for centuries. Most of the cases involve priests and male children although female children and nuns have also been involved.

 

For years the church avoided reporting cases of abuse to the police and known offenders have routinely been moved around rather than taking positive action to stop their crimes or acting to support victims.

 

We are entitled to think that the church was more interested in protecting its own institutions than caring about the damage it was doing. We should also ask whether an organisation that enforces the unnatural state of celibacy on its staff and maintains continuing secrecy, can ever eradicate sexual misconduct from its ranks. I do not believe so.