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You are > Home > Beyond the Pale
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Purse strings may be key to Church reform
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
THE epitaph for Brendan Behan, the captivating bar-stool philosopher, mercurial writer and playwright who died prematurely more than 45 years ago from an excess of alcohol, has surfaced in a memo just released from the secret intelligence files of MI5 in London: “as an individual he is too unstable and too drunken to be dangerous”.
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The struggle between great memories and loss
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
ON SUNDAY morning in the seaside resort of Girvan on the Scottish Ayrshire coast I sat gazing in awe at ‘Paddy’s Milestone’, the rock ten miles out in the Irish Sea, otherwise correctly known as the Ailsa Craig.
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We may be on the hustings by summertime
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
ON MY return from a bitterly cold and wet Rome, the weather in Dublin was even bleaker.
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Winds of change from the Moy to the Tiber?
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
IN 1891 it was a tragic case of ‘Parnell versus the Bishops’. In 2010 the big confrontation appears to be ‘Martin versus the Bishops’.
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Bertie had God on his side... Apparently
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
THE bombshell news this Monday that George Lee had quit the Dáil and Fine Gael has divided a stunned nation which placed high faith in the former RTE economic guru when he won the by-election in Dublin South nine months ago.
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Mo–st remarkble Secretary of State
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
SUNDAY evening’s two hour Channel 4 television drama, Mo, a vivid reenactment of the life and early death from a brain tumour of Mo Mowlam, played by a feisty Julie Walters, was an inspiring and emotionally tears-wrenching portrayal of the personal and public impact of the most remarkable Secretary of State for Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
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Ulster Unionists behaving like Catholic bishops
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
BRIAN Cowen has every right to feel very concerned at the failure so far of Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party to reach agreement on the devolution of policing and security powers to the Stormont Government.
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A ’quake could yet shake the Church
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
THE humanitarian crisis in Haiti was commanding absolute attention for this column until I read the sensational frontpage headline in the Sunday Tribune – “Gerry Adams ignored two more rape victims.”
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All eyes on ‘Swish Family Robinson’
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
PREOCCUPIED with the ordeal of coping with the exceptionally prolonged bad weather marking the start of 2010, I was completely taken aback last Wednesday afternoon to receive a text message from Belfast which read: “A big scandal about to break here re the Robinsons”.
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‘Wee Cahal’ was a giant of a man
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
THE first week of a New Year always brings with it a reality check calling us back to the mundane imperatives of daily living after the euphoria and the excitement of the great tidings of Christmas and its winding follow-on. It is the inexorable change of the calendar that lands us in a new year and a new decade.
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New Year, new reports, new scandals
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
THE system of clericalism in the Catholic Church which we see swinging in the wind this Christmas was famously described by the late Bernard Haring as “ecclesiagenic pathology”. Roughly translated, it means pathological addiction to the Church as an institution.
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A moral abdication of accountability
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
AT the height of the Budget striptease of the public sector and the less well-off in society a prominent political correspondent bemoaned that the politics of the Catholic Church were infinitely more exciting than a drab Leinster House.
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If Murray can fail, who can succeed?
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
A LEADING theologian told me last week that it was his opinion that all bishops castigated in the Murphy Report into the cover-ups of clerical child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese should resign pronto.
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Bishops ducking and diving behind empty apologies
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
FAIR play to Enda Kenny in breaking a secular taboo about politicians censuring the conduct of Catholic bishops.
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Floodwaters wash away the cover ups
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
THE heavy floods in the south and west visited by Taoiseach Brian Cowen offer a torrential image of the choppy waters lashing the Irish Catholic Church as the Government prepares for publication on Thursday of the Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Archdiocese of Dublin.
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