With rain threatened we all descended on King House at about noon to prepare for the event.  As it happened the day was bright but as the afternoon wore on conditions tended to deteriorate but it stayed fine for our service.  This is the 10^th year we have commemorated this day and ne’er a drop of rain have we seen.  God’s light shines on his brave souls, or so we like to think.

A lovely crowd gathered, it seemed larger than previous years but whether one or a thousand it is the remembrance that matters.  The service went like clockwork and the priest Fr Donal Morris did an excellent job, representing all Christian callings.  It was my honour and privilege to read out the Roll of Honour for the day.  Traditionally we read out 10 names but always things happen between cup and lip and this year we eventually had a thirteen.

As we were in Boyle and because we had never blown the trumpet in the past for the town, I thought Boyle’s sacrifice should be honoured.  It is not a widely known fact but approximately 120 men from Boyle were killed in the Great War.  Applying army statistics means that there were also approximately 500 wounded soldiers from the district.  These figures must have been an awful burden on such a small community when you think that in the 1911 census in Boyle Urban and Rural figures there was a population of approximately 3700 people.  These men were from the active male population and probably relate to 50% of that cohort, this obviously had the effect of thrusting a lot of hard work on the female population and on the old and young males.  It must have affected the town for years afterwards.

To pick 10 or 11 names from this list of 120 was a difficult choice and I decided to put in two men from the big houses, two officers to show that all classes of society were affected and I thought it would be nice if all brothers could be included and that immediately brought me up to ten, my supposedly allotted number.  However on a chance meeting with a lady from the town in the Boyle Church of Ireland graveyard when I explained my visit was to look up Old Soldiers and she explained she was collecting a database of all graves in this very old graveyard, did we chance on a common cause.  Sandra McCrann was the lady, who I had known since we first hit the town a good few years ago and she told me of a relative of hers who had been killed in the Great War but she knew absolutely nothing about him.  This set my inquisitive mind rolling and I promised to find out about him.  Both she and I decided to attack from both sides of our fence and arranged to meet in a few days time.  She did her family investigations and I did my basic research and we found out nearly all there is to know about the poor man who died 94 years ago.  He certainly was not on our list of 120 dead but now he is and he has rightly found his place among men he must have known well.  The list was now 11 but there had to be one more.  For months now with the help of a lady called Vivian Roche from Galway, I have been piecing together the life of her great grandfather, a man from Carlow who died at Ladysmith in South Africa in 1900.  She said she would be up for our service and I thought it right that a man who had given his life for his country should be in there with the lads from Boyle.  So now we had 12.  Then I thought the first man from Boyle also probably deserves his place on the list, so we eventually finished up with 13.  My chairman was thinking I was out of order but if it was down to me I would have read out the names of a million men or at least the 2300 Connaught Rangers who were killed in that brutal conflict.

Here are the names I read out and I hope the reader remembers them as we all did on Sunday afternoon.

1.)  Pte John Daly No 10540 of 2^nd Battalion Connaught Rangers.  The youngest man from Boyle to be killed and also the first.  John was 20 years old when he disappeared on that hectic retreat from Mons in the first few days of the conflict on 26^th August 1914.  His body was never found and he is remembered on that memorial on the River Marne at La Ferte sous Jouarre along with about a hundred other Connaught Rangers whose bodies were never accounted for in those disastrous first few weeks.  John was from Green Street in Boyle.

2.)  Lt John Irwin Fraser of 2^nd Battalion Connaught Rangers.  John was born in China and was the son of the Surgeon General to the Royal Navy who lived at Riversdale House in Knockvicar.  His sister married Capt Charles O’Sullivan then of the 4th Battalion and their child was Maureen O’Sullivan, the famous film actor.  John died of wounds received in the defence of Soupir Farm on the River Aisne on the 14^th September 1914 when the Rangers gave the Germans a bloody nose as they pushed them back from The Marne.  On that day also Charles O’Sullivan, who was acting Lt Col of the 2^nd Battalion was badly injured and took no further part in the fighting.  John is buried at Vailley British Cemetery on the Aisne.  He was 29 years old.

3.)  The next day and only a few hundred yards away from Soupir Farm, John’s friend 2^nd Lt Richard Henry Cole Magenis of the 3^rd Battalion Royal Irish Rifles and the owner of Drumdoe House near Corrigeenroe was killed.  Richard was 27 years old.  Richard left behind him six younger sisters who were not interested in handling the affairs of the estate and the house and lands were sold to Sir John French, who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff.  Richard’s body was never found and he is also remembered on La Ferte Sous Jouarre Memorial.

4.)   There were two brothers, Lance Sergeant Michael Keane, No 7621 of 2^nd Battalion Connaught Rangers.  Michael was 30 years old when he died from his wounds received at Polygon Wood during the 1^st Battle of Ypres on 30^th October 1914.  A scene of particularly heavy fighting when many Connaught Rangers lost their lives.  Michael was from Quarry Lane in Boyle and he is buried in Ypres Town Cemetery Extension.

5.)  Michael’s brother Pte Edward Bernard Kane (Keane), No 4360 of 2^nd Battalion Connaught Rangers.  Edward was 35 years old when he was killed in action at the end of the 1^st Battle of Ypres on 6^th December 1914.  Edward’s body was never found and he is remembered on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres.  Edward was also from Quarry Lane in Boyle.

6.)  Then there were four brothers, sons of Patrick, a shoe maker and his wife, Ellen who lived on Eaton Terrace in Boyle.  Eaton Terrace was where part of Patrick Street is now around Clarke’s pub, a very populous part of Boyle where about 350 townsfolk lived.  The first brother to die was Pte Thomas Wynne No 7779 of the 1^st Battalion Connaught Rangers, who was killed during the 2^nd Battle of Ypres on 26^th April 1915.  Thomas was aged 30.  His body was never found and he is remembered on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres.

7.)  The second brother to die was Pte John William Wynne No 10996 of the 8^th Battalion Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment.  John had been over in Halifax in Yorkshire working when war broke out and he enlisted.  He was killed in action in Gallipoli on 6^th August 1915 as the 8th Battalion landed at Suvla.  John William was 29 years old and he is remembered on the Helles Memorial at Gallipoli in Turkey.

8.)  John’s brother Francis was the next to die.  Pte Francis Wynne No 9900 of the 6^th Battalion Connaught Rangers was killed at Ronssoy Wood on the Somme on the 21^st March 1918 at the start of Kaiserlacht, Germany’s ill fated final push in what was to be the start of the end of the war.  Francis was 27 years old. With Russia out of the war, Germany transferred all its eastern divisions over to the Western Front.  They attacked and caught the Allies by surprise, the unfortunate 6th Battalion  lay in their path and were overrun, they lost 8o% of their numbers on that and the following couple of days and never were able to operate as a fighting force afterwards.  Michael is buried at Villers-Faucon Communal Cemetery Extension on the Somme.

9.)  Finally and very sadly Pte Michael Wynne No 15098 of the 5^th Battalion Connaught Rangers was killed at Le Cateau in Northern France on the 10^th October 1918, just a month before the end of the war.  Michael was 29 when he was killed, he had fought at Gallipoli, Salonika and Egypt and must have felt that he had a charmed life.  Michael is buried at Montay-Neuvilly Road Cemetery, Montay, just outside of Le Cateau which is south of Mons where it all began over four years previously.  Michael is alongside 19 other soldiers of the 5th Battalion Connaught Rangers who died round that date..  So near yet so far away.

And there were two more brothers:-

10.) Pte John Dodd No 8918 of 1^st Battalion Connaught Rangers.  John died at Amara in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) on 9^th July 1916 and he is buried at the Amara War Cemetery in Iraq.  John was 28 when he died.

11.) Pte William Dodd No 4599 of 5^th Battalion Connaught Rangers.  William was killed at Ramleh in Israel on 10^th March 1918 and he is buried at Ramleh War Cemetery.  William was 24 when he was killed.  The Dodd brothers were from Green Street in Boyle.

12.)    We now mention the latest name to grace our pages of Boyle war dead, a man who emigrated to Canada with his brother looking for work and fetched up in Saskatchewan, where they married and both had children, unfortunately one of their wives died leaving one child, war was declared and Pte John Burns Taylor No 100401 of the Signalling Corps, attached to the 16^th Battalion Manitoba Regiment, left his daughter Alice with his brother, William Glover Taylor and set off for war in Europe.  George was killed in action at Cambrai in Northern France on 1^st October 1918.  George had grown up in Bridge Street in Boyle and he was 32 years old.  As news was filtering through to George’s parents in Boyle of their sons tragic death, they received a telegram from Canada informing them of William Glover’s death from influenza.  He was a victim of that vicious pandemic that killed millions of people in 1918 and 1919.  The two Taylor brothers had died within a week of each other 6000 miles apart.

13.)  Last but not least we have Pte Peter Dunne No 3068 of the 1^st Battalion Connaught Rangers who died at the relief of Ladysmith on 10^th April 1900 during the South African War.  Peter’s name is commemorated on the Ladysmith Memorial which is in the grounds of All Saints Anglican Church on Murchison Street along with 66 other Connaught Rangers who died in the relief of that town.  Peter was from Carlow Town but living in Dublin where he left behind him his wife Jane and two young daughters.  Annie the youngest was not four months old.

So whenever war is discussed think of these men who died so that you could live and do your best with whatever powers you have of not letting another war happen.

*In gathering the above information , I have been helped considerably by Mr Oliver Fallon, The Connaught Rangers Association archivist.

I have just taken a peek at Richard Sipe’s blog on the sartorially excellent, once Lord High Bishop of St Louis, Raymond Burke, who has now just been made up to a cardinal.  Dick always did look good but only as good as most in that divine brotherhood and Richard after talking to his friends has nominated Ray as haute couture episcopate of the year.  Richard Sipe at least should know what he is talking about as he was a Benedictine monk for 18 years and along with Tom Doyle, a Dominican priest and Patrick Wall, another Benedictine monk, wrote the best selling book Sex, Priests and Secret Codes.  They are recognised as being the foremost experts on clerical abuse and have given their expert testimony in thousands of clerical trials against aberrant priests in America and round the world.

In his blog Richard Sipe describes the raiment a thoughtful bishop needs, to maintain the splendour of his office and these include two different types of mitre (pointy hat) and a zuchetto (a little skull cap) and a biretta (a four cornered collapsible hat for walking out in).  Around his ecclesiastical body, he swathes himself in either a purple cassock and matching sash for saying mass in or a black one with purple trim for walking out in.  Handily the sash doubles up for either.  Around his neck he wears a pectoral cross hung from a special braided cord and over the cassock, he wears an amice, a piece of white linen that is the remnant of a hood.  Then he wears an alb, a long white robe which is trimmed with lace at the cuff and hem.  This is tied round in a cincture, which is a braided rope, like a belt.

He wears a stole around his neck which hangs down to below his waist and matches his outer vestments.  On his right arm he wears a maniple, a narrow strip of cloth that matches his stole and looks like a napkin a waiter hangs over his wrist.  He then wears a tunic over all this which can be anything from a coloured plain overall to a magnificently jewelled one and over that he dons a dalmatic which is identical to the tunic only it has a distinguishing bar.  Then on top of everything he wears the bejewelled chasuble, the highly coloured garment which is most visible and which comes in various designs and colours depending the occasion and the time of year the mass is being said in.  On his legs he wears buskins, which are leggings, like the lining of boots only they are made from silk.  On his feet ceremonial slippers in different designs to suit the chasuble and on his hands gloves also to match.  A ring on his right hand symbolizing his wedded state to the Church and a crozier (a staff) finishes the whole thing off.  The crozier denotes that he is a shepherd of men.

Colours of chasuble, maniple, stole and slippers and which are official colours are red, white, green, purple, rose and black with gold and blue optional.  So for these four items of apparel the old bish needs eight separate costly items because colour co-ordination is an absolute must.  When he says concelebrated high mass, he is assisted by a deacon, a sub-deacon and an arch-priest and two deacons of honour who all have to wear vestments to match his goodness.

Archbishop Raymond Burke – photo courtesy of richardsipe.com

The cost of these items is amazing.  His bejewelled mitre over $8,000, his gloves $1,400, his slippers over a $1,000, his dalmatic up to $10,000 and his chasuble up to $12,000.  The minimum cost of clothing for the bishop to get out of bed for is possibly over $30,000 and his bling, the cross $7,000, his ring $4,000 and his mitre which is made to order could be any price in the multiple thousands and they all go to the premier episcopal tailors in Rome, Ars Regia or Gammerelli’s who seem to have the market cornered.  I wonder if the Pope has shares in the business.

Vatican II emphasised the simplification of this dress code but Benny 16 has brought back this extravagant medievalism of the church, presumably because he thinks it impresses his dull as ditch-water congregation.  Ray Burke is one of a growing number of episcopates who consider themselves part of a privileged aristocracy, lording it over us poor swine, but all this splendour and finery does is bring out the fears and insecurities of the Church’s hierarchy.

Go to Richard Sipe’s blog, richardsipe.com, and click on Archbishop Burke photo album and see the glory and colour and also try and read everything these three men, Doyle, Sipe and Walls, have and are writing.  They are leading the fight against this apostasy, this bunkum that is the Church today.

I now give an itemised shopping list the modern go-getting, do-gooding, penetrating, sharp, commercially minded would- be Bishop needs to keep in mind, when he puts in those extra hours hoping for a promotion.

And that is not allowing for his acolytes who I have got to say can tog themselves out cheaper but not by much.

Therefore the old loftiness needs $44,740 to walk down stairs and $114,000 to be dressed for all dances, a total of $158,740 and that is buying stuff in the sales.  Now where the hell does this thrusting young whipper-snapper get this kind of mazuma from.  Why, of course, you auld eejit, from me and you in the collection box.  Correction, from you, I stopped giving and going years ago.

Do not forget the three main men, DOYLE, SIPE and WALLS.

This is a story of soldiering in the 19^th century, when England ruled nearly half the world with a standing army of approximately 100,000 men.  It was a life; full of action and bravery some of the time, but mostly a life of humdrum boredom, basically a lowly labourer’s life in uniform.

In Ireland in the 19^th century the best employer around for the vast majority of the unemployed in Ireland was the British Army.  Providing you were reasonably fit, you had a chance of travelling the world, earning a living wage and being confident of sustained employment for at least seven years and longer if you wanted it.  Irishmen flocked to the colours in all sorts of regiments, certainly into the six southern Irish regiments of the Connaught Rangers, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Regiment, the South Irish Horse and the Prince of Wales Leinster Regiment but also into English regiments, so much so that in the late 19^th century it was estimated that 50% of the British Army were Irish, some 50,000 men.  In the army a soldier was fed every day and received a decent level of basic education which was more than was on offer in the civilian world by 1890.  From 1870 to 1890 illiteracy amongst the common soldier declined from 70% to virtually zero.  It almost guaranteed employment once the soldier felt ready for life out of the army.

Into this reasonably cushy existence stepped Peter Dunne in 1888.  Peter had been born in Carlow Town on 1^st February 1868 and four days later was baptized in the Cathedral Church of the Assumption in the town.  He would have received a miserly education and would have started in employment at 12 or 13 years of age and he would soon begin to realise what life was about in a really turbulent period of Irish history with 20 years of civil unrest which became known as the Land Wars.

Peter enlisted in the Connaught Rangers and was given the regimental number 3058 and was sent for basic training to  Renmore Barracks in Galway and then posted out to C Company of the 2^nd Battalion, who were based in Aldershot in England.  Peter had signed up for seven years in the colours and five years after in the Special Reserve where he would be living a full civilian life and on half army pay as long as he took part in the annual two week Summer Camp.  However in times of national danger and if the Army mobilised he would be called upon and would have to report to regimental headquarters within 24 hours ready for duty.

He did not have to wait long to taste the excitement of Army life because in June 1889, the Khedive of Egypt, Tewfik Pasha, started to get annoyed at British interference in his rule of Egypt and the Sudan.  The 2^nd Battalion Connaught Rangers were ordered out to put a flea in the Khedive’s ear. On the 13th July Peter and his comrades boarded the troopship The Himalaya bound for Alexandria.  The Battalion as it left England was more or less at full fighting strength with 23 officers and 924 men.

They docked in Malta for re-coaling on 22^nd July where the Battalion was given orders to stand fast.  Because of the urgent need for fighting soldiers in Egypt, the Maltese garrison, The Black Watch, a Scottish regiment, had been sent out two weeks previously.  The Connaught Rangers took up quarters at Verdala Barracks and St Clement’s at Cottonera, where they stayed on garrison duty until November 2^nd 1989 when four companies moved to Pembroke Camp and the other four to the island of Gozo which is about 6km north west of Malta.

Garrison duty was a mind numbingly boring but necessary part of army life, drilling, washing, polishing and painting, keeping the barracks in extremely clean conditions to ward off any infections.  A thousand men cleaning, sweeping and polishing would soon drive the bugs away and thus prevent contagion.  There was drill and rifle practice and the odd ceremonial duty to perform but even that could not raise any hairs.  During this period and it was noted in the battalion diary, several high ranking visitors complimented the CO on cleanliness including the Duke of Cambridge, the Commander in Chief of the British Army, on his visit to Malta in 1891.  By that time the Battalion had moved back to Verdala Barracks where the drilling, cleaning, sweeping and polishing continued apace.

There was only one bright spot in that year of 1891 when the ship carrying the 1^st Battalion Connaught Rangers docked for re-coaling, en route from Aden to Pembroke Dock in Wales.  This was the first and only time the 1^st and 2^nd Battalions had met since the army reforms of 1880.  The next time was when the decimated 2^nd Battalion was incorporated into the decimated 1^st Battalion in Northern France in December 1914.  On this occasion from the 1^st Battalion only the officers and NCOs came ashore, the men were left shovelling coal.

1892 was very similar to 1890 and 1891 only the Battalion moved to Fort Manoel relieving the 1st Royal West Kents who went home at the end of their tour of duty.  Peter’s Company was moved out to Gozo in September 1892 whilst half the Battalion, in the form of A, D, E and H Companies (13 officers, 2WOs and 527 men) moved to Cyprus to build roads.  B, C, F and G Companies stayed on Gozo for another two years and four months enjoying the weather and the peace of the island but still drilling, cleaning, sweeping and polishing.  The two half battalions eventually joined up in Alexandria in February 1895 where they were again on garrison duty and where the well-controlled Khedive kept his notions to himself.

Peter’s seven year stint in the Army ended in October 1895 never having fired a bullet in anger.  He must have been bored stiff and decided to try his lot in civilian life.  He had obviously made an impression on his senior officers because Major Wood, his Company commander wrote him a reference saying that “I have always found Peter an exceedingly willing and good soldier, always to the front when there was any hard work to be done.  I wish him every success in his efforts to obtain employment in civil life”.

Peter possibly had other ideas has well.  A girl he had met in Carlow prior to enlisting had been sporadically writing to him, a girl from out the country who was in service in the town.  When he returned to Carlow, this friendship grew.  Jane Doyle was the daughter of James and Winifred Doyle, farmers of Boley, a townland in Wicklow, just outside the town of Shillelagh. She was born on 5^th April 1868 and had waited patiently for Peter.  They courted and in early 1897 when they were both 29 years old they married and shortly afterwards moved to Dublin where Peter had found work.

They must have thought themselves extremely lucky with Peter in regular work, his savings from the Army and his half pay from the Special Reserve and they settled in Richmond Cottages, a neat little row of houses just off Summerhill near its junction with Gardiner Street.  Soon Jane was pregnant and on 19^th June 1898 their daughter Molly was born.

Peter had just completed his two weeks at Summer Camp to fulfil his fourth year in the Special Reserve and he was back home in Dublin and enjoying his almost idyllic life with Jane and little Molly, with Jane again pregnant with their second child, when the bombshell dropped.  The Boer farmers in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in South Africa rose up for the second time in nine years, declared war on Britain and laid seige to Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley.  The British Army mobilised on 12th october 1899 and the Special Reserve told to report to regimental barracks.  Peter had just entered his last year in the Reserve and he immediately reported to Athlone Barracks where the 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers were in residence, his own Battalion being in India.

Peter and Jane in 1897

His letters home at this time were sad, he was lonely and worrying for poor Jane and Molly and concerned as to whether Jane in her later stages of pregnancy, was receiving money from the Army and asking for a pair of scapulars (a religious keepsake).  Jane might have been poorly in these latter stages and Peter was not receiving much news.  Jane it seems did not start to receive her separation allowance until the Army Pay Office in Galway signed her Army Form D455 on 13^th March 1900 four months after Peter had left Ireland bound for South Africa.  She was granted 1s 5d per day (seven pence) plus 6d (two and a half pence) per day deducted from Peter’s pay plus 7s 6d (thirty seven and half pence) per month.  How she existed in all that time is anybody’s guess.  However she did and gave birth to a healthy child, Annie, on 11^th December 1899.

532 men of the 1^st Battalion were passed fit for duty and they were joined by 332 men who were the pick of the reservists, one of whom was Peter and they entrained for Queenstown where they boarded the SS Bavarian on 10^th November 1999.  The only thing of interest that day so the Battalion diary mentions is that one man deserted prior to sailing and he put an underage youth in his place on the boat.  They were three days at sea before this legerdemain was discovered and the youth was disembarked at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands on 14^th November.  What happened to him or the deserter is unknown.  The Battalion reached Durban on 1^st December where they disembarked and were immediately entrained for Pietermaritzberg where they camped until 5^th December and where they discovered that they were under the command of General Redvers Buller, one of the most inept generals the British Army ever produced.

Norman Dixon in his book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence says of Buller “…General Buller… failed miserably.  Irresolute from the outset, the three defeats at Magersfontein, Stamberg Junction and Colenso sapped whatever confidence he had.  From being weak and fearful, he became a veritable jelly of indecision. His plans became vague and indefinite and his specific orders scarcely more enlightening.  His lack of moral courage in the face of adversity revealed itself most clearly in his propensity for making scapegoats of his subordinates”.  He was eventually drummed out of the Army in 1901 but not before Spion Kop.

The 5^th Brigade moved to Frere Camp on 7^th December with the Connaughts were the 1st Enniskilling Fusiliers, the 1^st Border Regiment and the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers, none of them knowing what kind of incompetent was making decisions for them.  Buller’s force consisted of 706 officers and 18672 men.  On 15^th December 1899, when Annie his daughter was just four days old, Peter had his baptism of fire when Buller ordered them to cross the Tugela River, just south of Colenso against a well-fortified Boer position.  Buller as usual did not realise the strength or position of the enemy and the Rangers lost 28 officers and men, 110 wounded and 12 taken prisoner and in all, the Brigade lost 525 men killed, wounded or missing.  It must have come as an awful shock to Peter after soldiering for 11 years without any conflict at all.  The whole force retreated back to Frere Camp where it remained until January 10^th 1900

On the 12^th December Peter must have learnt of Jane’s impecunious state in Dublin but not knowing of Annie’s birth and he sent her a letter enclosing five shillings, all he had, because as he said “we get no pay in the front line, we are about eight miles from the enemy and this five is no good to me here, we can get nothing to buy with it”.

They eventually crossed the Tugela River, which meandered all over the country south of Colenso and formed a major obstacle in their thrust north to Ladysmith.  There followed nearly five weeks of sporadic fighting back and forth over the Tugela until the town of Colenso was finally entered on the 20^th February.  Seven more days of intensive combat occurred as the Brigade eventually relieved Ladysmith on the 28^th February.

During this time they had confronted the Boers at Spion Kop, a 1400 feet high lump of rock that could easily have been by-passed on route for Ladysmith but Buller and his subordinate generals decided that this rock had to be captured, a decision that ranks as one of the British Army’s worst.  Peter had the good fortune for his company (C Company) to be kept in reserve whilst the Brigade lost 68 officers and 976 men who were listed as killed, missing or wounded attempting this foolhardy mission.  This loss amounted to 23% of the attacking force before Buller and his generals decided to withdraw.

They set up camp just north of Ladysmith and awaited the Boers next move. Battle hardened Peter was able to relax for a few days.   He would by now know of Annie’s birth and would be rejoicing at the happy event.  In camp Peter picked up a bug, probably from infected water and he was put into a military hospital outside of Ladysmith called Hyde’s Farm along with a few other soldiers who had contracted this fever.  He died there of enteric or typhoid fever on the 10^th April 1900 and he is commemorated on the Ladysmith Memorial which is in the grounds of All Saints Anglican Church on Murchison Street in the town. On it are the names of 66 Connaught Rangers who fought and died in the Relief of Ladysmith.

So that was the end of Peter after seven years of peaceful boredom in the colours and four good years in the Special Reserve, four months of eventful army life in South Africa and three happy years of married life.  He was smitten with a disease he could have picked up anywhere.

Queen’s South Africa Medal

In 1901 Peter posthumously received the Queens Medal for service in the South African War with clasps for Tugela Heights and The Relief of Ladysmith.  Exactly like the medal in the picture shows.  Scant consolation for the family, life went on and Jane with the two little girls had to manage.  The two girls had a good Dublin upbringing and eventually became school teachers.   Annie served with the Cumann na mBan, the female version of the Irish Volunteers and did sterling work in the War of Independence 1919-1921.  Jane, who never re-married, spent years in very menial work and it took its toll as this picture, taken around 1910 shows.

Jane Dunne in 1910

On the 5^th September 1934 Annie married a member of the Garda Siochana, William Kavanagh.  William had been a member of the IRA in the War of Independence and had served time in Mountjoy, Wormwood Scrubs and Dartmoor.  He was in the anti-treaty forces during the Civil War and had stood in the Four Courts with Rory O’Connor and Liam Mellowes, but all that is another story to be told elsewhere.  Their marriage certificate shows they were married at the chapel of University College Dublin where Annie was in residence at the time and where the bride’s father’s profession was proudly put down as soldier.  Peter was never to be forgotten.

Eventually in the late 1940 Jane and Molly pooled their resources and did what was almost unheard of in those days: bought a house and moved to 12 Carlisle Street in Portobello off the South Circular Road in Dublin where Jane died on 24th June 1944, aged 76.  She had been 44 years a widow.

The married couple, Annie and William, eventually rented the house next door to Jane and Molly, 10 Carlisle Street to emphasise the family’s closeness and unable to have a family of their own, adopted a little girl, Maura.  Here are the family gathered in 1968, 100 years after Peter’s birth, with the two daughters of a Connaught Ranger, Molly and Annie, seated and William Kavanagh and Maura behind.  Maura is holding her two year old daughter Vivian to whom we are indebted for much of this family’s history.  Annie died age 80 on 13^th May 1980 and Molly followed on 15^th February 1983 aged 86.  Two ladies born into tragic circumstances but who lived to tell the tale, our bridge between a time of Empire, glory, poverty and Irish Independence and almost to the present day.  Has there been much improvement in all that time?  At least we have a memory of brave men and women and times past.

My lovely wife of nearly forty years summed it up fairly well yesterday evening when, after listening to the idiot ambulance chasing solicitor, Andrew Reid on News At One on BBC Radio 4, said “I think the world has gone friggin’ mad”.  Now Helen, as that is who it is who has shared my life these past few decades, does not normally descend to the gutter like that but she had got upset with the antics of the said Reid and his client, the scion of that famous construction family, Alistair McAlpine.  However I thought she had hit the nail perfectly on the head and to go any further would only over-egg the matter.

She was of course talking about Reid’s idea that anybody who has thought bad about his lord and customer, Magulpin, should make tracks instantly to his office door and volunteer their malcontention and hand over everything they have for distribution amongst the good and holy.  Reid is the R in RMPI, which stands for Reid Minty Personal Injury, a “no win, no fee” firm of grubby legal types and here he was propounding his view to the poor people of England and North Wales that if you sit in front of a microphone and talk earnestly about some form of contaminated truth, the imbeciles listening will believe you.  Some hope.

He was trying to drum up custom for his and Alistair’s fragile, frail line of attack against the poor little people who had twittered and blogged about his lordships unlikely, possible, probable relationship with abuse of young children in various council care homes but especially the unlikely, possible, probable connection with Bryn Estyn in North Wales.

This fragile, frail line of attack has already filched £185,000 off the BBC after their Newsnight programme on BBC2 did not even mention Lord Macs unlikely, possible, probable attachment to that home.  They, the McAlpine/RMPI alliance not content with the easy mazuma from the BBC, which interestingly was not BBC money but you poor bastard licence payers funds which you seem to give up annually to watch tosh.  Come to think of it because you all seem happy converting hard earned into licence fees, why don’t you now just open your wallets and throw what cash you have onto the fire.  I digress, this Mac/RMPI alliance are now going after Phillip Scholfield and ITV for passing a note to his highness, Cameron, during a television interview last week when he also did not mention Mr Mac and they are going after them big style for a million spondulicks.

Now this is a great game if you have the neck to go for it and Mr Reid seems to have acres of it.  Hitting big institutions for not saying anything about anyone and getting them to cough up hundreds of thousands of livres because of their complete disregard for a client’s name.  But old Alistair has been a tenacious guy all his life; he and I go back to the late 1960s so I should know.  We often used to meet on building sites and Alice, for that was our dimunition of his christian name, loved nothing better than the rough and tumble of a site canteen.  Alice was a sleek and strident young man albeit a couple of years older than me and a hairy arsed navvy used to send him all a quiver.

The problem with Alice, although it could be seen he was heading for greener pastures, was that he could never settle down for long enough.  He was buying Moroccan savouries from dodgy fellows in long white dresses one minute, worrying sheep in northern Western Australia the next.  There is a saying that a new Broome sweeps clean and that is what he did with whole flocks of ewes on those god forsaken fringes of the Great Sandy Desert.

His forays into foreign parts and not always foreign, as some were tory toffs from finishing schools all round the country, were legendary and had to be covered by smoke screens.  A succession of tartlets, with exotic names like Romilly and Athena, would sign up to a marriage licence for a number of years and then go their merry way, overloaded with dosh from his tax free capers.  Athena by the way is a distant cousin of mine, from the Cholmondley Malpi branch and believe you me we were glad to off load her.  Even though she was 30 years his junior she had been round the block a few times but I have to say she was a gay old filly and well worth a few seconds of Alice’s time.  Athena had been born in Amiens Street in Dublin in the early 1970s to an ill conceived union between an out of work donner kebab chef and an unlucky longshoreman of a woman.  She had a rowing boat that dealt in contraband and during a crossing to North Wales one day, the boat and her sank has she tried to smuggle in tampered lamb from Anglesey.  Athena needed a mother figure and that is why she jumped at the chance with Alice.

Now you know some of what I have just written is rubbish, a bit of a joke.  I did it to create a smoke screen to what really happened.  Just like Alistair and Andrew, the BBC and ITV, Phillip Scholfield and Cameroony are doing with these stunts on television.  No money passes hands, it is just that minds are diverted from the truth we are after, to fiddle-de-dee rubbish that we see and hear.  The powers need these diversions badly as we seekers draw ever closer to the door of truth.

There was a very interesting judgement yesterday in the Supreme Court that coaxed the law on Vicarious Liability along its merry way.  This law one of the learned judges said “was on the move” and has been tested on a few occasions recently and on one most important occasion during the life of this appeal.  Vicarious liability being the responsibility an employer has for his employees or a master has for his servants.

The case centres around St Williams School in Market Weighton in Yorkshire.  I wrote about this case on 28th October 2010 under the title Vicarious Liability and Co-Principal Liability .  The School was owned and managed by the Diocese of Middlesborough but its head and some of the staff were members of the De La Salle Order of Teaching Brothers.  In this case the head, Brother James Carragher was the chief abuser and 140 plus pupils were awarded £8,000,000 damages, the largest single award against the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

The Diocese appealed the decision and when I wrote the above piece the Court of Appeal had said the Diocese of Middlesborough were solely responsible under vicarious liability as they had contracts of employment with the individual brothers of the Order.  Middlesborough appealed to the Supreme Court and yesterday the five law lords, after over two year, allowed the appeal and said there was joint responsibility under vicarious liability between the Brothers and the Diocese and that this was not a borderline case.  So that ruling will certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons in a number of cases that are lining up against the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

So now at long last Mr David Greenwood of Jordans Solicitors will get his £8,000,000 plus costs after one more visit to the Courts, so that individual assessments can be collated.  He thinks it is nearer £5 million than the reported eight.  Mr Greenwood considers that the Church has played every trick in the book over the last six or seven years to avoid their responsibility.  As he said yesterday “this could all have been cleared up years ago except for the vacillations of the Church”.  The appellants, all mainly poorly educated, middle aged men, living in reduced circumstances can surely do with an injection of funds to ease their shattered lives.  However if you do the mathematics, the award amounts on average to about £50,000 per man.

I ask is £50,000 enough.  Is it apt consideration for in many cases 30 or 40 years of mental torture, 30 to 40 years of ruined lives and the polite answer would be, “no not really”.

These men would never have been allowed to bring this case unless certain solicitors were confident of working on a no win/no fee basis.  After the cost reforms, which will come into effect next April, which stop lawyers recovering all their fees from the losing side, claimants are going to have to pay some of their awards to their lawyers too.  And these lawyers deserve their cut of the damages for putting up their money and reputations in bringing the case.  But with this in mind surely larger awards should be in the judges minds in future cases.  However I think that this has now become such a complex area I will leave the full explanation for a different time and place to be explained by a far more able person than I, a lawyer for example.

I am involved in a similar case in Manchester, where the victims have undergone abuse of this nature and have lived very fractured lives, some living a lifetime dependent on prescription drugs necessary for their depression, some held together for 40 or 50 years by an unbelievably strong family support system.  They deserve better than £50,000. They deserve a lot better.

Jonathan West, a fellow blogger and a champion of victims affected by the abuse of Benedictine monks at St Benedict’s School in Ealing in London sums it all up very well in his recent posting on his Confessions of a Skeptic blog of the 15th November 2012 entitled “£185,000“, where the BBC have paid this amount of money to Alistair McAlpine after never even mentioning his name in relation to sex abuse of children, “so a retired politician’s hurt feelings are valued by this society as being about twenty times as valuable as a life wrecked by childhood sex abuse” Jonathan said.

I have seen it at first hand in my dealings with the men on our case, the men who were abused at St Bede’s College in Manchester in the 1950s and 60s under the tutelage of Monsignor Thomas Duggan.  I have seen the despair under which they live because of what happened to them all those years ago, I have seen their helplessness.  They deserve better, far, far better and I hope our lawyers Anderson Olivarius Advocates can plead for better.

Well he is back and do not tell me you don’t know who I am talking about.  I will give you a clue.  He is a pinchbeck headmaster, one in name only without the qualities of people with that title.  He is an ultra right wing Catholic, steeped in the falangist philosophy of Spain where he spent his young life washing his dishes in the backwaters of Opus Dei.

I think you are with me now, yes give three ringing farts for the second coming of Mr Daniel Kearney, Lord High Headmaster of St Bede’s College in Manchester, back from his hard earned sabbatical or extended home leave as his doting deputy, Mrs Pike, called it.  A year in the job and he needs a few months off to recuperate.  Well he certainly got it.  After the stumbling, stuttering, incident ridden first year of his tenancy, he is back to torment the staff with his ridiculous ideas on how to run a second level educational establishment into the ground, which had run very successfully under its previous head, the sorely wronged Mr Mike Barber, until the putsch when Kearney in his odious Iberian way took charge with the full support of the nodders who call themselves a Board Of Governors, led by that imperious and ruddy complexioned Monsignor Michael Quinlan.

The staff since that time have been hopping mad at his foolish antics, their problem like so many groups of teachers is that they have no proper leader.  Teachers of necessity are guides rather than leaders, they lack the qualities of rumbustiousness and drive that is necessary for one with skulduggery at the top of their list.  I will volunteer if they would have me but I doubt if they could force themselves so low.

The staff looked on,  as Kearney’s star was in the ascendant and as teachers who had served the school admirably, were treated abominably.  All they, the staff that is, were able to do was stamp their feet and mutter and moan like demented banshees as the school plunged inexorably into disarray, its head held up above the raging waters of scandal by parent’s fees and they seemed happy enough to let the school sacrifice their children while they got on with their happy business of earning.

Now the morale and determination is at an all time low as the established staff reel at the ridiculous behaviour of Kearney’s under-educated, over-promoted yes men, who have now over the last year been promoted into positions of control like the government of some eastern European revisionist state.

The other day Kearney called the staff together for an unplanned staff bullying session, it is in this arena that he tends to get his kicks.  I am beginning to think that he is probably a psychopath along with all his other charming attributes.  It was in this meeting whilst obviously talking about the financial position of the school, plagued by diminishing income and rising costs which have only been covered up by some nifty accountancy bookkeeping, that he told the assembled that in the interests of openness and transparency they ought to know that after his first years unremitting hard labours, his salary was so much and that was a lot less than Mr Barber, the previous head, was getting 18 months previously and so it should be when he takes extended home leave at the drop of a hat.  He seemed to want his disaffected, much maligned staff to come rushing forward, pound notes in hand, to offer  their hard earned to the charitable coffers of the College.   My feeling is that in the interests of openness and transparency Mr Kearney should realise he is a square peg in a round hole, he should work the rest of the year for nothing and then piss off and take his Manchester City footballers finishing school with him and set up elsewhere, preferably in the High Sierras.

He seems, Dan Kearney that is, to be trying to restabilise the ship by pulling the bung out of the bottom of the hull to allow the hulk to fill itself up to the gunwhales and in so doing making it an easy task to scuttle her when the time comes and mark my word that time is nigh.  Things are moving at a faster pace than ever he or in fact I imagined.  Yesterday the school’s Achilles or Hector, depending on what side of the Hellespont you live, came a cropper.  For the purposes of simplicity we will call this man, this man of God,  Achillor and let us hope that he has not become one already.

This man who has jumped from nowhere, sphinx-like out of the ashes of Duggan, Dodgeon and their ilk, and who for some inexplicable reason is only understood by the inner most denizens of the Holy Roman Church, was granted powers financial in the running of the school.  Some would call him an honest to goodness parish priest from St Mary’s in Denton, a little parish to the east of Manchester, others would know him better as a Machiavellian misanthrope.  His powers lie behind the throne, Achillor was Cardinal Richelieu to Kearney’s Louis XIII, he it was who organised the 2011 putsch, the florid Quinlan’s right hand man and assassin.

Yes we are talking about plain Fr Timothy Hopkins, a Governor of St Bede’s College in Manchester and a Diocese Of Salford representative on the City of Manchester Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee.  With the massive strides this man made over the last few years he was obviously monsignorial material in the making, he used to walk round St Bede’s College as though he owned the place.  Tommy Duggan would have been dancing in his grave, Terry Dodgeon would have been pouring himself a final drop of craythur at this man’s mighty progress.  He was everything they had hoped for in a regurgitated form of their latter-day selves.  The tortured staff thought differently, they used to call him Father Ted, Achillor to me and you

Who was right?  Well yesterday news came through that must have been devastating to the Bishop of Salford , his Diocesan Trustees, the Governors of St Bede’s and to Mr Pedro Kearney himself.  Allegations of a sexual nature had been raised, the Police and the LADO (Local Authority Designated Officer) are investigating.  This is,  if proved, a very, very serious matter and these two organisations are the best placed to handle these smears.  Priests can no longer hide behind the cassocks of bishops or the gowns of headmasters.  Fr Timothy Hopkins has had to step down.

Let us just say that allegations are that, just words, until investigations takes place but if proven, God forbid, they would  be a massive blow to the Diocese of Salford which has for so long washed its dirty underwear in private and a shattering, almost death threatening haymaker to St Bede’s College already only held up by the sorely tried generosity of a bamboozled flock of parents.

Que sera sera and only time will tell and decide Achillors fate but I have recently been shown a financial report on the College and although no expert myself,  one or two things stood out immediately, I have commissioned an in-depth investigation on the report by an Old Bedian and an ex-De Loitte and Touche accountant, which I will be publishing in the next few days and will give us an interesting insight into a failing company.  As regards all other facts reported above I have been only able to produce same with the help of some very brave and downhearted members and ex-members of the staff of the College and the fortitude of some strong but disheartened members of the clergy of the Salford Diocese who realise now that they are within the realm of a Church they did not exactly join.

Yesterday was a day to remember, we were off early to Dublin and caught the 6.17am train, fearing with the November budget being announced that afternoon, it was probably our last free travel trip under the old scheme.  Still we, that is my first and long enduring wife, Helen, who has stuck by me for nearly 40 years of marriage and two of courtship, and myself, cannot complain.  We have had some smashing trips down to Anna Livia since I qualified by longevity and the Irish government, those upholders of humanitarian gestures, thrust this valuable document, this free travel pass, in my hands.

We arrived at Connolly Station bang on time at 8.45am, we were off to see our daughter Paddy Jo in her one woman play at the Theatre Upstairs in Lanigan’s on Eden Quay.  I had seen the first talk-through rehearsal some weeks back and after some fine reviews in the national papers I was anxious to see the finished product.

But first things first, we had business to do at the Endorphin Release Clinic in Drimnagh, on Errigal Road, next to the Children’s Hospital.  My wife had been there three times recently and found herself almost cured of a number of complaints brought on I suppose by gathering years and thinking of others rather than herself.  On her first visit, she had seen her friend cured in a matter of minutes of a frozen shoulder which would have taken physiotherapists a year’s treatment to sort out.  For herself, whilst previously unable to walk up and down a staircase except for a step at a time, she was now bounding up the steps like a mountain goat.  Cynical me was viewing all this with a little contempt but there was, I have to say, an obvious improvement in Helen’s ambulatory performance.

We had come to meet a daughter, who was flying in from Manchester.  She, on the strength of her mother’s endorsement, had booked an appointment to see if the Clinic could do anything with her sciatica, brought on by rough handling by medical staff with the caesarian procedure at the birth of her first child.  She has had four other children since then and this damaged nerve condition was getting worse.

The weather intervened and daughter was delayed whilst they de-iced the runway at Manchester and we were sitting in the Clinic waiting room when John Carty, the founder and heartbeat of this practice, came in, recognised Helen and invited us upstairs to his nerve centre for tea and biscuits, knowing we had travelled so far.

We started chatting and I suppose he could see that I had a slight hint of sceptism in my voice, he said “let’s have a bit of fun” and he sat me down on a chair and attached me to this apparatus which measures the horizontal and vertical rotation of the neck.  He then grabbed hold of my head and twisted it violently and dug the ends of his fingers into nerve centres under my armpit and in my neck.  The result was that in seconds he had increased my horizontal neck rotation by 50% and my vertical rotation by 60%.  I was dumbfounded and then he told me to breath deeply and I could feel cool fresh air hitting my lungs for the first time in years.  I was more than impressed, I was bloody amazed.  “That’s the kind of thing we do”, he said modestly and chuckled to himself with the look of surprise on my countenance.

My daughter arrived full of apologies and moaning how a little frost can so disrupt international air traffic.  Within 20 minutes he had her sciatica sorted, her neck rotation improved greatly, her breathing and stance improved considerably and made her natal scar disappear and put feeling back into her lower stomach.  She was mesmerised by the improvement in such a short length of time and she just burst into tears with the emotion of it all.

John Carty stresses that he is not a doctor or a physiotherapist, he treats both with a certain amount of disdain when it comes to the nervous system and its relationship with the articulation of the body.  He approaches the corpus from a different aspect, he looks at the electrical system of the body and manipulates that back into proper working order.  He is unbelievable and he treats it all as a big joke whilst talking to you but he withdraws into intense seriousness during treatment.  He stresses the satisfaction he receives from patients who have been cured after years of suffering.  He has even put life back into the limbs of leprosy victims in Ghana and in fact as trained up two nuns who are continuing the treatment on these poor maligned people out in West Africa and he has testimonials to prove same.

He spent five minutes with me and last night I had a wonderful sleep and woke up this morning with clear air passages, breathing deeply and letting this wonderful fresh air fill my lungs.  I felt 20 years younger.  My daughter e-mailed me when she arrived back in Manchester.  “I am lying here breathing freely and deeply and satisfyingly in a way I did not think possible.  I had no sciatica on the flight and passed a very comfortable journey.  I can feel my stomach and my scar has disappeared” and that was all done in 30 minutes.  She is bringing her husband the next time she comes over because John Carty said that he would cure him of snoring.  He surely is a remarkable man.

So if anybody out there is not feeling good and cannot do the things they could do or are troubled by old surgery, ring for an appointment on 00353 (o)1 455 8266 and receive and expect instant relief.  He is refreshingly frank about his treatment and puts a different slant on the medical world.  I, the biggest cynic in Christendom firmly recommend him to everybody including doctors.

So off we trotted like young lambs and down to O’Connell Street and Eden Quay and had a late brunch of Irish Stew in Lanigan’s Bar before going upstairs and awaiting the start of Paddy Jo and her matinee performance.  She was our second breath of fresh air that day.  She was articulate and emotional, her timing was superb and she was word perfect in a show, she commanded for 60 minutes.  To learn 60 minutes of dialogue in a couple of weeks and ally that to articulation, emotion and timing is to my uneducated mind a miracle.  So we have had two miracles in one day.  This Dublin place is getting better than Lourdes.

This particular posting is more a news item than anything, at least news to me and vindication of my blog Les Disparus of 10th October 2011 when I said Mr Mike Barber’s star was still twinkling.  For all new parents, those who have only known the despot Kearney, Mike Barber was the very able, approachable and decent man who was the headmaster of St Bede’s College prior to Kearney and his mate Father Ted, Tim Hopkins, the florid Quinlan’s hit man, organised the putsch that saw Barber leave in June 2011 fed up with the constant politicking of the two sidewinders.

Mr Barber is now the Deputy Head of St Edmond’s, Ware in Hertfordshire, the oldest Catholic school in the country and one that for performance and prestige knocks Bede’s into a cocked hat.  It has more saints in its alumni than Bede’s has rock and roll musicians and BBC men in its list.  So the florid Quinlan’s letter to parents on 10th June 2011 saying that Mr Barber wanted to get back to classroom teaching as soon as possible does not now seem to ring true.  Not that, of course, you would expect the florid Quinlan to tell the truth in these matters; after all he is a monsignor of all that is good and holy.  So fair play to Mr Barber for rising above the turgid nonsense that ejects itself from the mouths of this vicious, vindictive trio of Quinkearnhop and their selected nodders on the Board of Governors.  It does not seem to me that Mr Barber wants to remove himself from management at all.

On another note Mr Kearney so I have been informed, fed up with my sniping, is out to get me.  I understand that he called the staff together the other day and told the assembled not to worry because he was getting the strong arm of the law onto me and he has forbidden the reading of my blog by all the staff and pupils.  I presume he has done this from an educationalist’s point of view because there are so many spelling mistakes and poor syntax in my text that make my stories poor bedroom reading material for his swots at Maine Road or should I say Eastlands now.

Well best of luck with your efforts Danny and many more happy years of teaching Slovakian centre halves.

I have just read a book sent to me from that excellent organization The Folio Society.  These people realize that well written, informative, quality bound books, full of new artwork, are of great pleasure to the owner, giving tangible and olfactory pleasures before the pleasant task of reading commences.  Such a book is Frederick Manning’s The Middle Parts Of Fortune, his only novel in fact, first published in a limited edition in 1929, it was probably the first intelligent novel to come out of the Great War.  How it was published in its original form is a miracle of censorship.  It was printed again in expurgated form in 1930 “with certain prunings and excisions” under the title Her Privates We.  What that reading was like is a puzzle.  The mores of the time demanded the soldiers language of the first publication be pruned and excised.  The book would have lost a lot of its impact.  The Folio Society’s edition of this marvelous book follows the original unexpurgated text and must be all the better for it.

Manning was a private soldier, reg.no. 19022 in 7th Battalion, Kings Shropshire Light Infantry and the book is really his experiences with that regiment.  However the story is of a fictitious battalion, with fictitious characters acting out in real places within true military engagements.  The book could only have been written by a soldier who had served in front line situations, it could never have been written by the casual civilian observer, the whole 288 pages are obvious authentic first hand experiences which at times shocks the reader to the core.

The battalion, the Westshires, had been knocked about badly on the Somme in late 1916.  We have a clue, the village of Guillemont was captured in early September 1916.  In fact the church there rebuilt after the war, is a monument to the four battalions who eventually overran the pile of hardcore that was once the village.  The Westshires had been decimated, they were down to just over 100 men according to one of their officers, Mr Clinton, that from a fighting force of probably 750 to 800 soldiers.

The hero Bourne, named after the Lincolnshire town where Manning lived; and his surviving comrades were moved to a quiet spot in the line around Mazingarbe, on the Bethune-Lens Road to recover from their ordeal and have fresh drafts inserted into their ranks to bring them once more back up to fighting strength.  I say quiet spot, in fact 11 months earlier this area was in the middle of the Battle of Loos (September-October 1915) where my great uncle, Eddie Lenihan, was killed in C Company of the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards, two days after his  Lieutenant, John Kipling, Rudyard’s son disappeared, on 26th September 1915.  No trace of Eddie was found also and he is remembered on the Loos Memorial at Dud Corner Cemetery just a few hundred metres down the road from where Bourne, our hero, is having to deal with desultory German artillery.  Then it was not the place to be with the British army losing 50,000 men in three weeks of fighting whilst the British generals, French and Haig squabbled as to which troops belonged to whom.

After a few weeks in reserve and a couple of weeks retraining at Vincly and Reclinghem, west of Bethune, while the new drafts fitted into the battalion, it was back to the Northern Somme, facing the village of Serre, just north of Beaumont Hamel, where the allied troops had tried in vain to gain an inch of ground from the 1st July 1916 until the Germans offered it to them on a plate when they had a planned retreat to the Hindenberg Line in late March 1917.  By then the book had finished, Bourne killed on a futile night raid because an officer wanted to see what was going on.

The book is electrifying in its detail, the first novel of the war, the first book even, that I have read that has been able to get into the minds of private soldiers.  The ordinary soldier was basically a good man in a lousy position, always willing to accept authority and always looking out for his mates and always railing against orders which he knew might involve unnecessary deaths and injury.  Which is where the NCO’s came to the fore.  Experienced and mainly decent men who felt responsible for all their boys and in a quiet circumspect way could point out the errors of a young officer’s judgement.  They the inexperienced platoon commanders appreciated this sagacity and it proved what a great leveller of humanity war was.

Bourne is well liked by the private soldier, although an educated toff, because he was one of them, he shared emotionally and materially with them.  He believed in fairness and equality, he was a go to man for private soldier and NCO, although he recognised the status of officers he was not uncomfortable in their presence.  They in fact admired his position with the men and in fact seemed at times a little jealous.

The men usually naturally grouped up in twos and threes, and in this grouping did everything together and shared everything they had.  “They had been three people without a single thing in common; and yet there was no bond stronger than that necessity which had bound them together”  These gathered men are not explained only in their limited conversation, the reader knows nothing of their past only their now.  You get no emotional attachment only what you get from the dugout atmosphere.

The book displays the build up in intensity prior to going over the top and how it affects each man with his private idiosyncracies, each man thinking the next few hours are his last.  It takes a very brave man to face his maker and act semi-normally, in fact they were all extremely brave men.  The text shows how thoughts then on deserters were not the same liberal views of today.  The men had no time for people who could not face the pressures of battle.  They had to, so why cannot the deserter.  Which explains somewhat why the firing squad was never short of numbers, although admittedly under orders.

Also although it is explained how decent the men are, sharing and helping their friends in whatever way they could: in battle their characters changed, the survival instinct takes over and killing the enemy means nothing if it saves their own or a mates life.  A German soldier is bayoneted, the bayonet is stuck but easily released when the finger presses the trigger of the rifle, sending a 303 bullet bursting a hole through the man from close quarter.

All the men, NCOs and officers are well aware that to die on the battlefield is a welcome release from the living hell they suffer on a daily basis, but it is not a reason for suicide, they will fight for their lives and hope if they are lucky for a “Blighty one”  There are sections where the way of dying is disseminated and how the affects of a sniper’s bullet’s near miss is more frightening than a close shave from a shell or a salvo of machine gun bullets.  This talk can only come from soldiers who had layer upon layer of frightening experiences thrust upon them.

In the end Bourne realizes that he has gone has far as he can with the men and if his influence is to be felt further he has to join the officer class who are constantly being reminded by the NCOs of his qualities.  While happy enough either side of the NCO line, he takes up the invitation to go for a commission only for this underlying jealousy of an officer who volunteers him for a night raid just prior to his departure for officer training.  Bourne is carried back dead.

I thoroughly recommend this book, as far as I can remember it is the only book I have ever read where on completion I have turned back to page 1 and read again.  It is a remarkable piece of work written from experience by a master of his craft.  The Folio Society’s version might be expensive as modern books go but its quality and manipulative pleasures derived whilst pulling the volume from its packing are worth at least half the price.

I want to know how it is that all politicians are iffy and I will not be vague.  Why is it that all politicians are vainglorious, self-promoters.  They are not and never will be as their blurb insists, seekers after fairness, honesty and good for all.  Interested in the well being of others to ensure decent lives for all the people of the land. No, number 1 is first and last for them and two fingers to the silly electorate who put them into Parliament and the Dail.  The electorate who was mesmerised by their silver tongues and snake oil salesmanship.

I do not think it matters what country you pick, the position attracts the same type of people, the same charmless predators, intent on filling their pockets with money and their minds with thoughts of power and glory.  Let us take the two countries I know best and look at a few of these horrible people who have come to the forefront recently.

Britain

There is that awful gay MP, Chris Bryant, one time Church of England curate, Tory party activist but now a Labour shadow minister of Justice, who made fame by advertising himself in his underpants in the gay media.  He is against everything but building up his MP’s expense account and having it annually knocked back by the powers but never being arrested.  There is that lump of a woman, Nadine Dorries who has been plastering her ample bikini all over your television sets recently.  Instead of looking after our interests in Westminster, she was making love to witchetty grubs in the outback.  People have been researching her for months now and they cannot find any record of her being married, divorced or born even.  So much for the audit trail on these folk.  My theory is that she was put on this earth fully formed by an alien species if to do nothing else than scare the living daylights out of us.

It starts at the top with that face full of lard Cameron, down to the ones like Mensche, who got out before the heat built up and the public found out how many men she had laid before climbing into the team representing the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee to bully father and son Murdoch.   They have all got a cupboard full of skeletons which they do not seem to mind sharing with us as long as you do not expect them to involve us in their daily expense grabbing.

Ireland

In Ireland we have a very similar only more crooky form of politician.  Take Michael Lowry from down the country, North Tipperary to be precise, ex-Fine Gael cabinet member, now an Independent TD, who has been involved in more scandals than you could shake a stick at.  Even now he is involved in several court cases involving corruption and monetary skullduggery, yet the people of that venerable constituency time after time vote him in with increased majorities whilst he continues in nearly every financial year to withhold monies from the Revenue.  There are shysters all over the Dail only interested in their own back yard and fuck the people of Ireland.  They are down in Kerry, up round the border, all along the west coast and they teem around Dublin but what they are all good at, what they all finesse is the art of expense building and the best of it is they never ever or very seldom go to jail.

There is one particular bully and when I have finished with him you will like him less than me.  He has won my prize has being the worst man of 2012 and he is on his way to retaining his crown for 2013. Yes, it is that lovely lad from Carlow, the Minister of the Environment, Philip Hogan, the best back tracker in the business.  The architect of the Household Charge, the person responsible for the complete muddle that has split the country in half, those that have too much and without demur paid this dreadful tax and those that have a lot less and haven’t.

Let me explain, the Household Charge brought in this year by Phil’s department as a forerunner to the Property Tax which comes into force next year, tried to be a nice little earner for Fine Gael in their struggles to understand what government was all about.  It seems, because I have only now just found out about it, that it was advertised on television and in the press and rushed through the Dail in a form of legislation.  Fortunately for me and not for Phil, I do not have a television nor do I read the appalling shite in the newspapers, so I missed these gems trickling from Phil’s lips and was surprised to find a letter from the Council demanding that I pay for something that I knew nothing about.  Why did they not send an invoice and a letter explaining the charge like some right organisation would do.  It seems that they expected me to travel 35 miles into Roscommon town and register my liability for the charge and then pay the said charge of 100 euros which I knew nothing about.  They must think I am fucking daft running up and down the country with fistfuls of fivers throwing them at everybody who does not ask for a dig out.

Anyway since the letter I have done some research and it seems that nobody has to pay a cent, so I hope Phil has got his cheque book handy to give close to a million people their money back.  As it happened Phil was away all last week in sunny Doha supposedly at a conference while his fellow cabinet was sweating trying to get an important budget through the Dail.  The only conference it seemed Phil was at was one of close union with a sprightly 30 something with black hair and curves in all the right places.  The Irish Mail gave us all the details in splendid technicolour last week.  What a sprightly 30 year old brunette with curves in all the right places was doing snuggling up to the ancient Phil I can only guess.  She must have been offered half of what Phil can pull in, in the next while.  Personally I would not touch her with your bargepole never mind mine.

Coming back through Dublin airport on Saturday, hand in glove with all the curves he could handle, Phil was served with a writ; his household charge is deemed unconstitutional by some experts in the field and the demand for a hundred smackeroonies deemed unsafe.  It is being tested in the High Court in the new year so let everybody who was thinking of handing over a late payment with interest, hang fire.  A sad end to a week of smoozing with the one you fancy.  Whatever about the charge, Hogan, who does not live with his wife and son, I bet she is glad, should not be sharing his expensive government time hobnobbing with a girl young enough to be his daughter.  Or should he?  After all he is a politician and is therefore entitled to do whatever he wishes, it does however put a little stain in more ways than one on the character of the young lady.  Obviously she is somebody’s daughter.

One particular incident last year shows Hogan up for the man he undoubtedly is and I now understand why his wife does no longer live with him.  When the household charge was in its early days last year, he was approached at a golf club outing by a 70 year old lady who owned several properties that she was trying to sell.  She said to Phil that she hoped he would not screw property owners who could not sell their properties because of the downturn, to which Hogan replied “No but I would have no problem screwing you”.  Nice chap!

A pox on all politicians and certainly Hogan is going the right way about it.

Writing about that monster Phil Hogan in my last blog posting got my blood up so badly that it has taken me two days to calm down.  What I forgot to mention in that posting was the details of the writ served on Hogan and others at the end of last week.  I give you a link below where you can read the initial correspondence and then the eventual writ.  It is long and detailed so give yourself 15 minutes to read it through properly.

Remember all you people out there who cannot afford these charges, you do not have to pay anything and certainly not interest.  Wait for the court case , which is scheduled for some time in the New Year, to reveal this calumny unravelled.  Remember do not pay anything.

For you people in England and in other countries round the world who are stricken with these trumped up taxes, read, enjoy and learn how the people of Ireland are fighting back against unjust politicians.  Their days are numbered.  No longer are the general public going to be whipping boys for the so called elite.

It does show you how high and mighty these gobshites in the Dail think they are, Hogan and his department have refused to enter into any correspondence in this matter.  They think they can wave their wand and we will respond.  Well we bloody well won’t.

The link is:- http://thecls.blog.com/2012/12/11/hogans-last-stand/

PS. you can download pdf’s of all the docs here: www.eBook.groupsite.com

As I write, the St Ambrose College in Altrincham’s abuse allegations are multipling as fast as Jimmy Savile’s did a few weeks ago.  The allegations began a couple of weeks ago against a former teacher at the school, a 63 year old Christian Brother, by a ex-pupil.  Greater Manchester police arrested him and bailed him to appear in court on March 12th next year.  Since then former pupils by the van load are now coming forward talking of further abuses in the school by this man and other members of the staff of the school.  The police force have now widened the scope of their investigation and are now looking at allegations of abuse from the early 1960s to the present day.

It reminds me so much of St Bede’s College in Whalley Range in Manchester, a close neighbour of St Ambrose’s and as I said in my blog posting regarding St William’s School in York about 18 months ago, you can take any school anywhere run by an independent Catholic order, like Ambrose’s is, or priests of a Catholic Diocese, like St Bede’s was and you start digging, incidents of sexual abuse will immediately rise to the surface, as though sexual abuse and clerics are hand in hand, synonymous even.  As an American priest of world renown in this field, Fr Tom Doyle, said to me over a year ago when I started down this legal path of exposing St Bede’s history of sexual abuse of pupils, “Paul, what you are talking about is massive but it is only the tip of the iceberg.  A lot more will come out” and how right he was and so he should be, he has suffered 35 years of this climate in the USA.

At St Bede’s, we now have evidence to prove sexual abuse by any number of clerics over more than 50 years.  Our earliest allegation is in 1951 and it went on continually for more than 50 years to my knowledge, probably longer.  A television film maker specialising in worldwide pupil sexual abuse told me recently that once abuse starts in an educational establishment, it is almost impossible to wipe out.  It is like a cancer, the longer it lies insitu, the more malignant it does become.

I started off nearly three years ago naively thinking that only one boy had been abused at Bede’s, a friend of mine Michael, by only one man, Monsignor Thomas Duggan, with as it happens tragic results.  I now know that dozens and dozens of boys were molested by several clerics over all this period.  As one died or got too old another took up the cudgel, with at any one time two, three, four and more staff were sexually assaulting pupils at the school.  And what makes me laugh is that the Diocese of Salford and their insurance companies are denying it ever happened even after the Bishop of Salford, Terence Brain, admitted abuse happened to the Manchester Evening News on 15th March 2011.

Why they and their insurance people keep throwing money at these type of stupid defences of the indefensible is anybody’s guess.  Obviously the insurance companies have money to burn and the Catholic Church has a name and position to lose, which it seems it does not mind doing as it will not scatter many of the sheep that follow it.  Certainly the Church has no heed for the victims of all this abuse, it has no heed at all on the thousands of wasted lives caused by this harm done.

Their sin, this sin of disregard for victims of their abuse will be the biggest corporate cock-up in the world’s history and eventually could and certainly has the propensity to destroy the physical entity known as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.  Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to see these harlequins of clerics perish.  The good for not standing up to the evil in their midst and the bad for being that evil.

Well it was nothing really, just the fact of being born of my mother and encouraged by my father.  My mother was Catholicism personified, of North Manchester Irish stock, she came from Corpus Christi parish, off Oldham Road.  Prior to the 1914-18 war every other house in that district was Irish and Catholic.  My father was a Protestant farmer’s son from Denton, who on courting my mother and enamoured of her Irish Catholic charms became a convert to the Catholic faith and became a better Catholic than most, judged on the standards of those far off days.

From my earliest days I was surrounded by candles, rosaries, prayers and hymns.  There wasn’t a mass or a church, especially in North Manchester we did not go to.  A benediction here, a stations of the cross there, a high mass somewhere else.  We travelled miles to go to ordinations, visitations and consecrations.  I have kissed more bishop’s rings than was wise for me.

When you woke up in the morning there were prayers, during the day there were all sorts of reminders of our Catholic way of life, prayers at meals, prayers before bed and for my parents a complete social life organised by the parish of St Robert’s in Longsight and managed most strictly and severely by that giant of a man, Fr Vincent O’Shaughnessy, an Irishman of no mean stature, who was later promoted to Dean and then Canon in recognition of his sterling work in the area.  He it was who taught my father Catholicism, baptised him into the faith, married my parents in 1941, baptised me in 1946, gave me instruction in confession and held the host to my lips in 1952 for my first communion.  He it was who welcomed me onto the altar in 1953 and managed my religious life until I served at his funeral in 1961.

We did not have to think we were Catholics, we knew we were.  Our lives were deftly managed so much so that we never knowingly spoke to a person of another religion.  I was bound up in tradition, ceremony and performance.  We were completely brainwashed or immersed into the whole idea of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, where we the people strove to be good, where the priests were supermen and the bishops, emperors of all.

I served on the altar which involved early morning mass, Sunday mass, Benediction in the afternoon, Stations of the Cross during Lent, mesmeric recitations of the rosary during all seasons and attendance at church 24/7 during the feasts of Christmas and Easter.  I sometimes think that up to the age of 16, I had spent more time on my knees than in any other position but I certainly knew I was one of the lucky ones.  I was destined for heaven and the rest for hell, however there was no resting on our laurels, there was always one more hurdle to climb.

Everything was going well, I was going to St Bede’s College, the epitomy of Catholic splendour, there was even talk of me becoming a priest.  That must have been why I was put into the Classics stream at 12 years of age, I had the makings, O’Shaughnessy must have been whispering to Monsignor Duggan, the Rector of Bede’s.  You can see we did not have to think, everything was laid out for us by this seemingly grand design.  Just put one step in front of the other was the unspoken command.

Then something happened, like a light being switched on, girls appeared on the scene albeit Catholic girls.  I was doing things with girls and they were doing things with me that seemed to go against the grain of everything our priests and teachers had taught us and I was enjoying it.  Only I suppose because they were good Catholic girls and we had confession to fall back on, to wipe our slate clean and start again on what was clearly looking like a downward path.  Heaven knows what would have happened if these very enthusiastic Catholic girls had been Protestant.

Along with girls came drink and as always taken in excess and soon I had stopped all the nonsense of ceremony, prayer and ritual.  I rebelled against the excessive physical abuse at school which for some hardly discernible reason was to keep us on the straight and narrow.  We started to think or at least I did for the first time in my life and I decided the regime was unjust, the authorities rebelled and threw me back onto the streets.

I was on the road, more or less a long distance kiddie, travelling the country, seeking work all over the place and good work, well paid work with plenty of shillings in my pocket to spend on the two aforementioned evils.  Catholicism had lost me albeit temporarily.  That life is not really what I wanted and then I met Helen, a good Catholic girl, what else and just like my father I stopped my gallop and like him turned to the Church because of our love for a woman.

I’ll just stop here, a thought as just entered my head.  If it was not for women the Catholic Church would have died out long ago.  It has been women and only women who have kept the light burning.  I wonder whether it is jealousy because the hierarchy revile women, they are second and third class citizens and yet they are the ones who keep everyone and everything in place.

Helen, who is an intelligent sort, obviously saw something in me, God knows what, as I was as rough as they come having been honed in the school of hard knocks that was the construction industry for eight years.  I was almost uncivilised but she saw that flickering flame and kept close and eventually close enough to marry me.  Obviously she saw a talent there to be nurtured.  Well without a doubt there was and it took a long time for her to make a man of me but she eventually succeeded.

She brought me back on board and we lived the whole of our married lives within the body of the Church.  I was reattreacted to a lot of the demands but was never able to get over the hurdle of confession.  By then in my eyes and with my experience the priest had been relegated from superman to one of the crowd and what was the point in confessing to him, you might just as well blurt it out to the first person you met in the street.  With the lack of confession and because of the scruples I had been taught at school, I found I was not able to take communion, so immediately I was demoted into a sacramentless Catholic and no matter how good I was I could never be as good as those who lined the altar rails every Sunday and then I started to study those who did line the rails and realised they were bigger sinners than me with their sanctimonious old guff and their better than thou philosophy.  It did not put me off and in my born again state I did the best I thought I could, helping my neighbour whenever I could, whatever religion he was and working hard to bring up our six children in the best way we could in this Holy Catholic Faith.  Loving the music, song, ceremonial colour and above all the fuss they made of you when you were dead.

After my toils were over I retired to Ireland enjoying the masses in the futuristic church of St Joseph’s and watching with a smirk the same people crowding the front benches as I used to see in Manchester, different people obviously but exactly the same modus operandi.  With time on my hands I started to think and I took up blogging as a means of improving my writing and at more or less the same time the Murphy Report on Clerical Abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin was issued.  Like 99% of Catholics, I had let critical thought wash over me and promptly forgot what it was but now I was pulling my thoughts into printed words and these thoughts became a lot less abstract.  I started to analyse what I was thinking and my thoughts on clerical abuse of children gave structure to my now new disbeliefs in the Church.  I realised I had been kidded all my life by these so called religious and whether it is 1%, 10% or 20% of the priests who are abusers, these buggers knew it went on and kept it covered up.  This cover up, this fraudulent version of the truth and the hierarchy denials was the destruction of everything I held dear.  My church moved from St Joseph’s on the Carrick Road to my head in Wooden Bridge and there it will stay forever repelling all Holy Catholic pleas.

The production of my blog took over my life, I had a tool to fight this crime and I started to fight against this con trick that is the Catholic Church which is just a machine constructed by a few to make money.  Yes some parts are good but we all have to be honest and outlaw evil.  The Church did not do this and therefore the whole of its operation is blackened by this canker.  As they told us at school, the end does not justify the means.

I now despise the Church and the men who run it, I have now lost all belief in everything.  Funnily enough Helen pulled away from the Church at the same time as I did and under no coercion from me.  She has kept her belief in God whereas I have not.  What made up her mind was the wealth of evidence that was pouring into our house about the sexual abuse of young boys at St Bede’s College.  She wanted no more to do with these priests.  I was just mad at myself for accepting all this claptrap for all those years.  The catalyst for me was the cover up, Helen thinks it was my blog.  Either way I am in a better place now, away from those people that once tried to make me a Catholic.

Fr Dave McGarry is dead.  How I hate writing those words but it was coming up and I was steeling myself for the final news.  I was on the platform of Connolly Station in Dublin, having caught the Saturday morning early train, when my wife, Helen, rang to tell me Dave had died on Friday, 14th December 2012.  I am not sure of his age but I think about 73.  Myself and Dave go back a long way and I will trace our lives later but standing on that station platform will be etched in my mind as one of those iconic dates and places when something tragic happened.  Kennedy’s death, Aberfan in 1965 and the United plane crash in 1958 are the three moments I am thinking of.  Dave’s death ranks with those.

Dave had left St Bede’s in the summer of 1957 as I started in the September.  Although he had left and gone to Rome his presence remained at the School, his sporting prowess at football and cricket echoed down Our Lady’s Corridor for many a year.  We met up for the first time on a hillside overlooking Lake Albano in the summer of 1961.  The Pope’s summer residence was across the waters of the lake.  We were surrounded by Cardinals and Archbishops, there was a Eucharistic Congress of sorts to do with Vatican II but we were there for some serious business.  St Bede’s College were playing the Venerabile, the English College in Rome at cricket.  Dave I think was in his last year of seminary, he got a few wickets for them and I got a few runs for the school and we beat the older chaps.

I really came across him again some years later on the Old Bedian tours of the Wye Valley in the mid to late 60s led by those two stalwarts and gifted cricketers, Chris O’Rourke and the mad fast bowler, Joe Smith, who then taught Attic Greek at Stoneyhurst.  I always wondered what Xenophon would sound like in Joe’s broad Unsworth accent. Dave was our official padre and middle order batsman, his knees already degenerating of neglect from the football field.

I was on the road in those days traveling and working on the motorways that were being built all round the country.  Dave at the time was at St Joseph’s in Longsight under the pupillage of Fr Kavanagh, a late vocationer, who had been married and knew how to run a house.  No housekeeper for him, Kavanagh was the slave driver to Dave’s kitchen maid.  He hated it and if I was in town on a Friday night, I would wait out the back of the presbytery, Dave would climb out of a window into the car and off to a pub up town.  It was around this time that Dave was mugged on Plymouth Grove.  He said to me a few days later, “honest Paul, if I had a thousand pounds on me they could have had it but I only had a penny, I felt dead sorry for them”.

Now we all know that Dave drank too much at one time but any one with the pressures young priests had on them in those post Vatican II days would have turned to drink.  It wasn’t that he drank too much, he just could not hold it as well as some and the odd bully would take the piss but Dave, as all good men do, learnt to live with his faults and eventually weaned himself away.  However pressures remained, the episcopacy undiminished.

He wasn’t a lover of the hierarchy of Salford, he always used to say that if the diocese had been a commercial enterprise it would have gone bust years ago.  As a 30 year old priest, the grimacing Geoff Burke, Auxiliary Bishop of Salford, was treating him like a 14 year old kid at Bede’s.  Burke’s boss, the crazy Thomas Holland, Bishop of Salford for 20 years too long, almost made him renounce his vocation.  I have a list as long as my arm of priests disaffected with the antics of Holland and Burke who decided to call it a day.  Dave soldiered on mainly because of his love for the people and for instilling in kids the benefits of sport.  His knowledge of international sport was tremendous and except for his vocation he could have graced the sports pages of a national newspaper.

And so it went on, Dave grabbing games where he could, never being able to settle at any club because of his priestly commitments.  He could fetch up anywhere.  I remember playing against Manchester Buses in a Wednesday night game at their splendid sports ground on Mount Road in Gorton.  At one end was Chester Watson, once the pride of the Caribbean, fast bowler of prominence with the West Indies but now a bus driver with Manchester Corporation sending down 90mph thunderbolts at one end and the Rev Dave floating over his little tweakers at the other.

Eventually Dave settled into a parish after being a curate in several and made his name at St Catherine’s in Didsbury, where he was my parish priest for many years.  He had many tussles with the stuck up sods of that parish but in the main most people loved him and he eventually won them all over with his innate goodness.  He was one of them, he had his faults like everybody has, he could empathise with them in their troubles.  He was close to them.  There was never a gap between him and the parishioners.  Most priests because of their retarded emotional development do distance themselves, they cannot react to the pressures some suffer.  Dave wasn’t like that, he was working class Newton Heath, what you saw is what you got.

He became the unofficial go to man for all Old Bedians down on their luck, many of them dying prematurely as a result of their experiences at that school.  If they were living he would sub them, never really getting it back.  If they were dead and many were, he would bury them and give them a great send off but he was too nice a man to dig into why they were in the positions they were, although deep down he knew.  We had many conversations over the last few years.  He knew where I stood and he would meet me halfway down the road to accepting clerical sexual abuse was widespread but he could not condemn.  When talking about one priest who was in a neighbouring parish to him in Salford who we both knew to be an abuser, all he would say was that he, the Salford priest, was a man you would not meet up with, a man you kept at arm’s length.  He just could not condemn.

Yet he rued the day that whilst in recovery down in Stroud that he was half instrumental in letting that Fr Andy Lowe become PP of St Catherine’s.  Brain the bishop covered up a lot of what actually went on with that guy and because of it he got away with six months imprisonment.  It should have been at least six years and longer.  For the last eight or nine years Dave has beaten himself up over that.

So that is all I have to say about the man, a true priest in the style laid out by JC, loved by all who knew him and thousands did.  Our last conversation was slightly acrimonious, he rang me six months ago, telling me his illness was not improving but that he was battling on, he wanted to know why I was still fighting the abuse suffered at Bede’s.  Although he knew of it he could only forgive, he had not the heart to condemn.  I saw the victims and could not forget.  I will be going over to Manchester on Wednesday, hopefully his Requiem will have been ordered by then.  I’ll be there if I have to walk over every priest in the diocese.  He was the best and Salford and Brain did not know it.

STOP PRESS – I have just learnt that Dave’s funeral is on Thursday 20th December at St Catherines at 12 noon, however I have had no absolute confirmation.

Before I start this posting I would just like to thank all of you for posting your comments and sending me e-mails about Dave McGarry, your recollections and your thoughts.  They came from Australia, America, all over Europe, including England and Ireland and it just shows how well the man was thought of by all and sundry, by the great and the good and by one or two dodgy customers as well.

The morning was wet, not raining but it had been; there was a cutting easterly wind that bit through many layers and I felt sorry for the few hundred who could not get into church in the melee of mourners before the service started.  The requiem mass was to start at 11.00am, myself and Helen were first in at 9.45am which allowed us time to have a few last thoughts with Dave as he lay in supine repose behind stiff oak boards at the front of church.  By 10.15am the pews were full and there was little standing room left inside.  The only ones filtering through the crowds were the clerics dribbling in, in more ways than one, in twos and threes with their little attache cases.  Looking around the assembled, there were many recognisable faces, older no doubt than I remember them but recognisable none the less, less hair, more lines and definitely more rotundity, some friendly, some trying to shield a glower, some with a vague and empty look.

With twenty minutes to go, I received a shove on my left shoulder and a very audible voice hissed “you ought to be ashamed of yourself, you hypocrite” and the voice quickly retreated into the crowd.  What right this man had for saying that had me reeling, surely I had as much right to be there as any.  I must have known Dave for as long as most, for 50 years at least.  This man had only known him from St Catherine’s but on reflection I realised his outburst had nothing to do with Dave.  The prodder was a lad who was in my cohort at Bede’s.  A self-admitted abusee of Monsignor Thomas Duggan and a catholique extraordinaire.  He it was who slammed the phone down on me 30 months ago when I asked him for help with my need to oust Duggan.  He seems to relish unfinished conversations, his bravura is excellent.

The bell to start proceedings rang clear and an impressive line up of rheumy eyed clerics moved as one through the nave led by Kev O’Connor and with the Bishop bringing up the rear.  50 or 60 in number and possibly only two of them under 70 years of age.  Some familiar faces, some I felt sorry for who I hope I know to be good men, others I know for whom I would not give tuppence.  All the same it was an impressive phalanx and seemed to be putting out the message that we are still here and strong in spirit but as they settled into their seats and as the Bishop doffed his white mitre in favour of his zuchetto in order to lead the mass, they promptly fell asleep, leaving a few sentries to give them a nudge when their positions had to change as the service developed.

The Bishop started off with a humorous comment on the size of the crowd but he quickly tailed off to mediocrity.  I ain’t denigrating him for that, its just the way bishops are but it would have been possible for his lightheartedness to have continued and his gravitas diminish.  The highlight was the panygeric given by Fr Tom Mulhearn, a long standing mate of Dave’s.  It was given with knowledge, with passion and massive chunks of humour and emotion.  The emphasis of Mulhearn’s words were on Dave’s goodness and love of the people with which I truly concur but has I looked across at the serried ranks of clergy on the altar there would have been few to live up to Dave’s standard.  Certainly the prodder possessed little of it.

The mass ended, the bishop donned his white mitre once more and the priests exited stage centre.  There was a look of absolute ennui on the faces of many of them, Tom Devaney was visibly moved but Tom knew Dave better than most.  Tom Mulhearn was goodness in the Dave McGarry mould.  I would be absolutely uncertain of the florid Quinlan and the gimlet eyed Kay and most of the other emotionally immature clerics.  As we trooped out behind God’s commandos, I noticed a few more old friends, John Byrne, once head of Bede’s and now an active governor, grown small without his flowing gown and with a Bell’s palsied look about the right side of his face.  There was Mike Devlin, chair of the Salford Diocese Safeguarding Commission with his latest squeeze.  I admire Old Mike, he has certainly got what I ain’t and that is sex appeal.

Outside it was cold and rainy.  I have gone through a vast transformation since I last stood in that church.  I suppose the Devil has claimed me, certainly old Brain claimed Dave and spirited him away to a clayey hole in St Mary’s Cemetery in Wardley which is more or less in his front garden, many a mile from Didsbury and a place where few will venture.  It is a pity he was not buried in Southern Cemetery or Moston where his family are but the Bishop knew that either of those two would be a place of pilgrimage.  Dave would be safer in God forsaken Wardley, so Brainless thought.

I left the church a sadder man than I expected, I had to be there for Dave.  Some of the throng disappointed, they seemed to be hanging on for dear life, needing a miracle to stop the catastrophe that was starting to enclose them.  I know a lot were there also for Dave but the familiar faces who line the front benches of Catherine’s were still there hoping and praying they would not be left out, there was a desperation about them.  These were not the same star struck Catholics of 50 years ago led by enthusiastic, energetic priests.  It all had the deathly smell of putrefaction about it.  I am so, so sorry Dave, you were one of the last in your line.

It has taken me a couple of weeks to get over Dave McGarry’s death and judging by the amount of e-mails and comments received, I would guess his death has disturbed a great number of people and him a Catholic priest whose stock as a group of people has been lowered considerably over the last few years.  It just shows you what affect you can have on people if you are honest, decent, humble and above all, one of the people you are trying to help.  Everybody I have ever met thought the world of him.

However time moves on and while Dave’s memory lingers longer than most, there are lots of things happening in this great big world of ours that suggest 2013 could be a cataclysmic year for the people who are Dave’s antithesis, those that are dishonest, not decent, conceited and above all live outside the lives of normal people.  These in the main are politicians and those of that ilk.

Anyway and to try and change the tack slightly of this piece, I have been having another few visits to Dublin, which if you approach it from the right angle is a very fine city indeed.  This luxury of visits has only been allowed to me because of my free travel pass granted by their gracious majesty, the Irish Government, this being only given to me after they had considered my advanced years and decided I can be no harm to anybody and therefore let me roam about for nothing on their whim.

Last Saturday, spouse and I visited the Abbey Theatre once more for Frank McGuinness’ adaptation of James Joyce’s short story The Dead from his book The Dubliners.  An excellent production which has been sold out throughout its run.  We were lucky to get tickets but I have to confess to a little insider dealing.  McGuiness taught my daughter at UCD.  The performances of  Rosaleen Linehan and Lorcan Cranitch, as mother and son Malins, stole the show.  Two wonderful actors and so I am told two very nice people indeed.  The whole direction was wonderful, interlaced with the songs and music of Thomas Moore but if there was to be a second run, I think possibly the ending needs a coat of looking at.  I saw it again last night courtesy of the theatre’s internal television but I still cannot decide whether it is the writing or the acting which leaves one to think that improvement might help.  However I am one voice and everybody on both nights seemed completely happy with what they saw.

On Wednesday, I was back again in my role as General Secretary of the Connaught Rangers Association, an Association formed to uphold the memory of that great regiment of the British Army, from the West of Ireland, that fought with valour in all campaigns from 1793 until 1922 when it was disbanded when Ireland gained its Independence.  I had been invited by Lar Joye, the Curator of the National Museum at Collins Barracks in Dublin for the opening of a French Government inspired exhibition of 300 years of a French/Irish military relationship.  It had originally been exhibited at Les Invalides in Paris and lifted lock stock and barrel and stuck into a small space in Collins Barracks to celebrate the recent elevation of Ireland to the Presidency of the European Union.

I went to see it from a historical context and what it could be all about.  300 years of a military association is an awful long time in military history and my fears were immediately confirmed.  It was offered by the French Ambassador, an educated lady who made her every word stand out clear and she told a few rugby jokes about Clermont Ferrand.  The response was by Jimmy Deenihan, the Irish Cultural Minister, he of the broken nose, who muttered words for 10 minutes which nobody could either hear or understand, par for the course for an Irish cabinet minister I would say.

The audience consisted of about 300 typical first nighters, several senior Irish Army and Air Force officers and one or two giants of men from the French Army with a surfeit of medals on their chests.  The first nighters are a typical bunch of people, dressed to the nines, able to talk on any subject without listening to what the subject is about and really there for the free food and drink that is synonymous with these occasions.  The French were paying for this one so the quality of both looked good.  I sum it all up as garrulous gluttony.  It shows how interested they all were in the purpose of the evening when only about 10% went forward to look at the exhibition.

The show, straight from Paris was of course en francais with little pedestals giving an English translation in very small script.  It was obvious that it had been cobbled together in a hurry, the whole thing was poor and by its nature very small.  This incomprehensible military association between the two countries was what I could not get my head round.  The organisers had hung their hat on the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745 when the Irish Brigade, commanded by a chap called Butler, I think, helped save the day for the French and in the process lost 700 men.

But you cannot hang your hat of 300 years association on nine hours of one battle when 20,000 men were killed 267 years ago.  There was little else, although the Irish Brigade lasted in one form or another until about 1820 with Irish officers in the main leading French allied soldiers, who were eventually knocked about something awful by Wellington’s Connaught Rangers in the Iberian Wars.  There was nothing else for the last 192 years except for individual acts of bravery by Irish men and women which had nothing at all to do with military association.  In the Great War 1914 – 1918 the 350,000 Irish men who volunteered were not there fighting for France but for little Belgium amongst many and other causes but certainly not France’s  I meant to ask Deenihan where was the Irish military association in late 1939 and early 1940 when Hitler was grinding France under his heel, where was Mr DeValera’s thoughts on military association but old Jimmy was at the back of the hall laughing and joking as only politicians can in this day and age.  I felt sorry for Lar Joye for having to be curator of this political crap and bring it to his museum but he has bosses as well.  It was all a very tenuous hook onto which to hang a very oversized political hat.

I was glad of the dross, it allowed me to get away early and back to the Abbey I went, as the audience was entering their seats for last night’s performance and from a seat in the foyer I watched the show on the the internal television system.  Not only watched the show but watched the young staff clean up after the crowd and bring the front of house back to normality.  They were a pleasure to watch and if all young folk were like them, the world would be a far better place.  Congratulations The Abbey Theatre once again.

One final word of congratulation goes to Irish Rail or Iarnrod Eirenn, if I have it spelled correctly.  I have been up and down to Dublin many times in the last year and every time the train has arrived on time but more importantly it has always reached its destination in time, the coaches are warm and comfortable, the snack trolley is attentive and regular and Connolly Station is always a pleasure to arrive at and then onto the jewel in the crown which is the yet to be completed Luas, a tram arrangement that whisks you about the main parts of Dublin without fuss and again in comfort and with great frequency.  It is an absolute pleasure to congratulate public transport working properly and efficiently.

When I am relaxed with nothing pressing, one of my favourite pastimes is people watching.  I watch them in bus queues, at railway stations, on trains, in shops, in fact anywhere there are people and I’m not busy, I’m watching.  Not from any lascivious or sexual pleasure, just watching and making up stories in my head as to why they are there, how they are dressed and what are their plans for the next few hours.  I have notebooks full of these little vignettes, they are handy to have.  I always think that I will introduce some of them into the novel I have always promised to write but probably never will.

It is quite amazing if you spot one or two people together and something about them triggers something in your mind, how you can blithely write away a few hundred words afterwards when you have time and space about how one person held her hand or stood the way he did.  Where you send these people or what you think about them has nothing at all to do with reality.  The person you see, you could send to the moon as an astronaut whereas in fact the person is probably just desperate to get home and put their feet up after a hard day’s slog at work.  It does not matter too much the sex of the person either it is just this intangibility, this spur in the way they act or behave that sets off trains of thoughts.

Take the other night in the Abbey Theatre, I had my day’s work long done and I was waiting for my daughter in the foyer of the theatre after the show.  It was a packed house as is every performance of their current production, Frank McGuinness’ adaptation of James Joyce’s short story The Dead from his book The Dubliners.  It was a cold night and the audience had come well wrapped up in several layers and an overcoat which they had left in the cloakroom.  The show finished with much chatter, it had gone down well.  They formed an orderly queue at the hatchway of the cloaks when I noticed this lady come walking over in my direction, she stopped at the corner of the coffee bar no more than two yards from me and whispered something to the gentleman who was with her.  He, clad in tweeds and with hush puppies on his feet ambled over to the file of people waiting.

The first thing I had noticed as she walked through the crowd was her hair, it was magnificently cut and styled, a thick lustrous head of hair that was smoky blond in colour and as she was taller than most, this fine coif could be seen above the throng.  By the time she had parked herself at the corner of the bar, her whole figure came into view.  She was wearing knee high slim black leather boots with a possible 3″ heel, encasing a slender pair of legs clad in black tights but it was her dress that struck me.  A green sheen of a dress, cut and tailored exquisitily but there was something about it, it wasn’t new, it had been worn on many occasions.  It was in a style that was popular 30 or 40 years ago, short sleeves, a round neck and a hem that finished a couple of inches above the knee.  The lady could have been any age between 45 and 70, whatever guess would have surprised me if was told and she did not quite fill the dress to its potential.  She might have lost a few pounds since she bought it but you could imagine how well she would have filled it when new.  Her whole ensemble, boots, dress and hair would have been enough singularly to have raised a look of admiration but the whole together was something else.

The remarkable thing was that while every other person in the audience of nearly 500 were wearing many layers, the only thing between this lady and her maker was this little green dress and obviously some fine lingerie.  Her face and neck with nary a line to be seen was subtly made up, a fine chiselled jawbone and interesting laughing eyes, all topped with this wonderful head of hair.  She would honestly have stood out in a Rose of Tralee line up and she two or three times the age of those girls.  She stood there totally relaxed, absolutely confident in herself as she waited for her man.

He took the coats and shuffled back over to her, he looked 15 years older at least but could have been the same age.  He was very attentive, helping her on with her black coat which had fur trimming at cuffs and round hood.  She was not phased by the hood, she pulled it over her coiffure without fear of disturbing it and then decided to pull it down again.  The gentleman still attentive held her bag as she belted up for the cold night.  This lady was no chicken as I have intimated but she had the mind, look and body of a young hen and this man knew it, so attentive was he.  They trotted off into the cold night air and this is where the blitheness of writing comes in.  Were they or were they not attached?  She seemed to permit his company rather than welcome it but she was probably far better and happier with her own.  He was for his age, perhaps too attentive, was he trying too hard?  He might have thought himself on a winner.  But all this is the stuff of novels and so far I had just faced reality.

I waited for my daughter, the foyer by then deserted and we set off in the direction of Talbot Street, our destination an oriental restaurant.  We had not gone 100 yards when she said to me “did you see that woman in the green dress”.  “I did” I said sadly and continued with my thoughts.

On the 29th August 2012 I wrote a blog on the dangers of fluoridation of drinking water in Ireland entitled Bad Teeth or Cancer, Bone Disease and Brain Damage, That Is the Question?  Helen my wife met our TD (Member Of Parliament in Ireland), Mr Frank Feighan and started regaling him with the dangers involved in the process.  He asked her to write to him.  She did and followed that up with an identical e-mail which I give below.

To Frank Feighan TD

Frank,

I spoke to you at the Remembrance Day Service at King House about getting the Irish Government to stop putting Fluoride in our water.  The easiest explanation of the damages this practice leads to is best summed up in a blog posting my husband, Paul Malpas, did on the subject a few months ago.  The link is here

To sum that article up:-

1. Hydrofluoro silicic acid(H2SiF6) is a poison under the Irish Poisons Act 1982 which the HSE (Health Service Executive) feeds into our water supply at the rate of 2,000 gallons per day.

2. It contravenes all human rights legislation.

3. Every country in Europe is of the opinion that its small advantages are outweighed by its horrific side effects and therefore no longer use it and have not done so for 20 years.

4. It is known to cause kidney problems, it affects the thyroid gland, causes bone disease and increases the risk of cancer.

5. An 11 year study by the United States Environment Protection Agency says “the body of evidence over the last 11 years indicates a causal link between fluoridation and cancer, genetic damage, neurological impairment and bone pathology.  Of particular concern are recent epidemiology studies linking fluoride exposure to lower IQ in children”

Could you please try to ensure that the Irish Government in the form of the HSE stop this poisonous practice as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely,

Helen Malpas

Within a week we received a reply back from Mr Feighan to say he had passed our warning on to the Ministry of Health.  Today we received the Minister’s reply addressed to Mr Feighan who has passed us on a copy.

Mr Frank Feighan                                                                                                                                                                              Dail Eireann                                                                                                                                                                                        Leinster House                                                                                                                                                                                    Kildare Street                                                                                                                                                                                      Dublin 2

Dear Frank,

I wish to thank you for your recent letter on behalf of Ms Helen Malpas, 5 Wooden Bridge, Boyle, Co Roscommon, concerning water fluoridation.

Water fluoridation and the use of appropriate fluorides is a major plank of public health policy in Ireland in the prevention and management of tooth decay.  The Health (Fluoridation of Water Supplies) Act, 1960 provides for the fluoridation of public piped water supplies.  This is acheived through the addition of hydrofluorosilicic acid (HFSA) to the water.  The complete and rapid reaction between HFSA and water produces hydrogen ions (which are removed through a process called buffering), silica (sand) and fluoride ions.  Consumers do not come into contact with HFSA as water from the tap contains fluoride, not HFSA or fluorosilcates.

Countries with water fluoridation schemes include the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia and New Zealand.  Water fluoridation is less common in Europe, where fluoridated salt is often available as an alternative, although some populations are supplied with naturally fluoridated public water.  There have been no EU Commission statements or rulings from the European Court that have defined water fluoridation as being contrary to EU or international law.

Water fluoridation is one of the most widely studied public health policy initiatives in the world.  The Irish Expert Body on Fluorides and Health, which was established in 2004, monitors new and emerging issues on fluoride and its effects on health and related matters.  More information is available on the Expert Body’s website, www.fluoridesandhealth.ie.  It advises that the balance of scientific evidence worldwide confirms that water fluoridation, at the optimal level, does not cause any ill effects and continues to be safe and effective in protecting the oral health of all age groups.

I trust this clarifies the matter for you.

Yours sincerely                                                                                                                                                                                    James Reilly TD                                                                                                                                                                                  Minister of Health

Mr Reilly naturally tells a few porkies in this deceitful letter.  The countries he mentions do have elements of fluoridation programmes but they are shrinking quickly eg In the UK 10% of water is fluoridated.  The naturally fluoridated water for example in London is 900% less than the poison that is pumped into the Irish system.  Recent studies in New Zealand say that fluoridation has more ill effects than good.

I am no chemist or water engineer and what I would like is for you experts to tear Mr Reilly’s arguments to pieces.  I would love to know what kind of water he drinks.

As my water engineer who fits my water filter said on his last visit, “we all have good teeth but were all  dying of cancer”.  Why cannot we all look after our own dental health, after all we are all big boys and girls now.

Since June 2011 I have been saying that because of the uncomfortably undue haste with which the previous headmaster at St Bede’s College in Manchester was relieved of his responsibilities at the school and with the arrival of the inadequate Mr Daniel Kearney, appearing over the hill like the US cavalry with all guns blazing and bugles blowing, beating out the rhythm of old time discipline for all and it being the only answer to 21st century liberation in education, I have realised that there is something drastically wrong with the foundation of the school and the retrogressive moves with regard to its management.  There is also something seriously wrong with my opening 102 word sentence but I had no way of shortening it.

Under Byrne, with his hard work but jaundiced eye, the school had built itself up into an establishment of prominence.  A place where, although abuse occurred, a tight lid was kept on it and where eventually nearly all clerics were weeded out and where the lay staff enjoyed year after year of increasingly better results.

For most staff it was undoubtedly a place to work and enjoy working.  This ethos continued under Michael Barber, with a slight blip in 2010 which was soon corrected in 2011 but unfortunately he had been shown the door during the exams.  The staff however still retained that belief in themselves and their abilities to march on improving or at least stay on par with the previous year.

So then came Kearney with his Opus Dei righteousness suggesting a form of religion and discipline that was 100 years out of date.  He was ably backed by the nodders who make up the Board of Governors and the scheming chairman, Monsignor Michael Quinlan, who with nothing to do in his front row parish of St Winifred’s in Heaton Mersey decided to interfere at Bede’s, backed up by his acolyte, the now defunct Fr Timothy Hopkins.  In a play that I have just written about St Bede’s in the 1950s and 60s, I say that when you bring up discipline into a first line form of control, you diminish authority.  But there was Kearney spouting it in the first few sentences in his address to parents from the new head.  He had lost the plot in the first few weeks.

The Quinlan, Kearney, Hopkins triumvirate were like a team of saboteurs that had been wired up wrong.  Whatever did not need fixing, they fixed.  The staff management system that had worked perfectly well for years was now discarded, now young inexperienced teachers, with a penchant for applauding Kearney every time he farted, were promoted and the tried and tested heads of department, were quickly winnowed out.

You could see how quickly Mr Kearney soon lost touch with the dressing room, to use a footballing parlance and you could soon see what all this managerial manoeuvring was all about.  A cost saving that was purely about cost cutting and no heed at all in what it would do to the quality of the product.  If these three had been in commercial management, they would have been removed quickly.  One thing you must not do if you intend to remain in a niche position in the market of education is to regress on quality, cut cost by all means but find other ways than dumbing down the end product.

It became obvious immediately, when Quinlan and Kearney invited Mancini’s young Light Blues into the College and allowed the school to become a finishing establishment for young footballers, a craft well known for its lack of academic vigour.  It was all about money and nothing else mattered but they still gathered in the hard earned bucks of captive parents who had no choice but to keep paying for this diluted quality that they had not signed up to.

Mr Kearney , in a year, with his grossness of management had knocked the school back 30 years in academic achievement.  The staff, once excellent, had lost their appetite of going that extra mile for pupils to stretch themselves and at this level pupils need stretching.  They just sat the year out, mumbled and moaned and did nothing, because basically they are not that type of person.  When it comes to rocking the boat, teachers as a breed, might as well stay on dry land.  They do not know how, they have not got it in them to say “Fuck off” when imbecility happens above them.  Look at Duggan’s antics in the 1950s and 60s, he was allowed to do as he pleased, the staff just watched, perhaps in amazement, but just watched.  There was only one or two men in my 60 year experience of the school who had the nerve to say that, they were not backed up by others and were quickly removed.

To show how badly the school has performed under Kearney et al, this week Performance Tables issued by the Department of Education were issued for last summers public examinations.  These tables were sent to me by a disgruntled teacher who can see that St Bede’s College is on the road to perdition, unless something extraordinary is not done.  Sacking Daniel Kearney and that shrew of an assistant, Sandra Pyke, might be a start but that will not happen under this Catholic fundamentalism that has raised its head.

Go here  http://www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/schools/performance/school.pl?urn=105594  to look at St Bede’s performance.

The important line is the results for A*- C grades this year under “Year on year comparisons” and you will notice a 12% drop in performance.  This drop from 91% to 79% brings it into line with good non fee paying local authority schools and not at all in line with the top knotch independent schools where it had been.  Parents might now be asking why fork out the spondulicks when the quality ain’t there.  Definitely St Bede’s has been dumbed down to save cost and to allow in Mancini’s unfortunates.  To keep to footballing parlance, its like a Premier League side after being relegated into the First Division, parting with their best players and cutting wages.  It is easier to live in the First or even Second division, the club will get by and it is not that hard work is needed.  Why stretch yourself, why go that extra mile, fuck the parents and the pupils for that matter.

Ireland is in the shit and has been for several years now, brought on by a combination of avaricious developers, scheming bankers, indolent public servants and corrupt and not so bright politicians who in just ninety years of self-determination have delivered Ireland from colonial rule from Westminster to colonial rule from Brussels,  which has decided to tax the bejabers out of middle and lower class Ireland to pay back the loan the European Bank had given, to shore up the political and economic system of  the country that had been left in tatters by the previous Fianna Fail government.  With a few hundred thousand not even able to now pay their mortgages on property the Dail has been told to levy a Household Tax and on the back of that a Property Tax, followed by a Water Tax.  There seems to be no boundaries to the taxes that are looming up to pay for something that the poor people of Ireland had nothing to do with in the first place, whilst the politicians, high-ranking civil servants and bankers sit back with not a frown on their countenance, easily comforted with massive salaries, even bigger pensions and the years spent free-loading when times were good.

The Irishman and woman are now about to be shackled into a straight jacket of taxation that can only bring one result, civil unrest and all that term historically brings with it.  Our bewildered and intellectually unable politicians are bowing and scraping to this European elite as though their lives depended on it and are bringing in a taxation system and means of control that is both unconstitutional and illegal.  Even Enda Kenny are beloved Taoiseach said the same twenty years ago when the then Fianna Fail government tried to do similar in 1994, he stood in the Dail and said “It is morally wrong, unjust and unfair to tax a person’s home… even unconstitutional”.  Surely a man cannot change his mind on such a basic point unless of course he has been got at.

To try and avert this covert control from Brussels, a group calling themselves The Common Law Society of Ireland have organized themselves to try and roll out the various truths in the matter and make sure the people of Ireland know what is happening to them.  As they say, they are non-political, non-denominational, non-anything.  They just want to work with the law of the land to make these people in the Dail realise that they cannot cross the law for their own particular political ambition.  In their researches and their investigations they have realised that even the legislators in the Dail do not understand the full implication or meaning of the Tax and just rubber-stamp any idea that is put to them.  Even the wording of the Household Tax document which is the document that all other taxes will be dumped on was drafted by an American and our poor TDs have just nodded it through.

The people in the Common Law Society of Ireland realise that the poor TDs are just nodding puppets but understand that they also have to pay these taxes and admittedly protected by their present salaries now might not always be so and therefore want to also educate them just as much as every other citizen of this country.

So on Saturday myself and my guiding light drove down to Westport some 60 or so miles across Roscommon and Mayo countryside and as I drove my mind went back to the last great disruption in Irish civil life, that of the Land Wars of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s which brought about 25 years of civil unrest in the country and which originated in the countryside I was passing through.

In those days the lot of the tenant farmer was very tenuous and he could be evicted on a whim, leaving himself and his family landless and homeless with nowhere to go but to another country where any outlook could be equally grim.

With a similar world wide depression then as we have now, the tenant farmer could not pay the high rents being asked by his in the main absentee landlord and being enforced by his land agents and a lot of families were forced out of their holdings.  Out of all this devastation there arose a group of men, a deradicalised Michael Davitt, an earnest and fair Charles Parnell, a landlord himself but a fair-minded one, John Dillon, John Redmond and others.  They could see that the harder the ruling classes, backed up by policemen, the army and the land agents enforced their law, the harder the people fought back, causing the killings and murders of some of the perpertrators on this wheel of confrontation.  It was only leading one way and that was unthinkable.

These men, the founders of the Land League realised there must be another way and that was through the law.  In the beginning of this now political and legal struggle, it was found that the use of the boycott principle was an effective and legal method of dealing with landlord excess.  This principle was named after Charles Boycott an English landlord and land agent in Mayo, who had become the bane of his tenants by rigidly adhering to his rights no matter the circumstances.  However this legal route the Land League took was long and arduous and it took over 20 years of hard legal slogging, including time in prison for Parnell and his friends but in the end the rights of the individual won out and the Irish tenant farmer became the master of his own destiny by using  mainly peaceful and legal pressure to right a wrong.

That is all the Common Law Society of Ireland want, they are a group of men seeing an unfairness in the system getting together and by legal and fair means hoing to persuade the legislators that it is the wish of the people not to be taxed so severly nor in such a manner.  They are in it for the long haul and they will not be diverted from their path but of course as with every great cause, they need help to bring it to life.  Help from me and you, the ordinary people of this land to persuade the members of the Dail that their course is not correct.

On Thursday this week there is a test case on this subject in the District Court in Westport, Case No 2012/12340P where the local council having threatened a local man with proceedings have themselves been brought to Court along with Cabinet Ministers and all involved in the Local Government Household Charge Act 2011 by the threatened man who is saying that it is illegal and unconstitutional to force anybody to make a declaration in the manner asked for under the Act.

To read more about this fascinating battle between David and Goliath, google Phil Hogan – High Court Summons and visit attackthetax.com website and even the Common Law Society of Irelands website.  There is lots to read and lots yet to be done