WHO OWNS IRELAND'S PAEDO-FILES? THE POPE OR THE PEOPLE?
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THE CARDINAL, THE ARCHBISHOP AND

THE HISTORY OF DUBLIN’S PAEDO-FILES


I have said it before and I’ll say it again: the troble with the Irish is that they have no sense of history. No one in Ireland believes that the Papacy once stole Ireland. It tore it , root and branch, red in claw and tooth, from the native pagan peoples, and gave it to the Anglici-planters, once called Norman-French-English Christians but now called Irish. The theft has come back to haunt the Papacy’s liege people.
Take the row over the files relating to clerical paedophelia in the Diocese of Dublin. On week ending February 2, Cardinal Connell (ex-Archbishop of the Dublin Diocese), sent his lawyers into the High Court to prevent his successor Archbishop Diarmuid Martin from making free with files compiled while Connell was in office. Archbishop Martin has been trying to satisfy demands for openness and candour with respect to the plethora of cases of paedophelia which has plagued his diocese.
Professor Colum Kenny of the Dublin City University (Sunday February 03 2008), described the matter as follows:

Cardinal Connell's court case is not just an insult to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. It is a hammer-blow for the Catholic Church in Ireland. Laity and priests will be appalled that he took the case, due in court tomorrow.
Claims that many of the hierarchy are quietly supporting Connell will disgust (but hardly surprise) most citizens. Irish Catholics have watched the hierarchy make a shambles of the child sexual abuse scandal, and have waited in vain for inspiring initiatives from their bishops.
The gardai should take note. Cardinal Connell is well enough to get involved in a High Court dog-fight over sex abuse files. So he is well enough to be prosecuted if he has covered up paedophilia. The gloves are off. It is past time to investigate the bishops and to charge any who may have helped criminals to evade justice.
Colum Kenny's impatience with the hierarchy is most welcome, and I am sure that he would agree with me when I say that Cardinal Connell's stance is not all that it appears to be.

Cardinal Connell , I would have thought, is fighting for something more than some files that may or may not cause him to appear in an unflattering light. As a pre-Reformation country that has not too long ago struck down the Special Position in Bunreacht na h-Eireann -- a status shared with the East Timorean Constitution -- the legal rights of the Church over the State have never been tested. It is one thing to borrow a constitution, write it up, and tell the world that , like good Americans, we also have a 'written constitution'; it is another thing to give those words meaning.

Anyone who has listened to John F. Kennedy (on YouTube) spelling out the American position on the ‘absolute separation of Church and State’ will soon know what I mean about imitation and creation.

Take for instance the notion that in our written constitution we have a 'Separation of Powers'. It has been my experience that no such things exist except in places where it does not matter. The Catholic Church in Ireland is obviously and unquestionably the most single and pervasive power in the state, and nowhere does it abide by any separation of its power. In so far, therefore, as it informs the secular state it also subverts it from executing its secular duties. Hundreds of charities, for example, which total some 25 billion euros each year, remain unregistered and unpoliced by secular powers; in Foregin Affairs ,which serves the Church on such a broad front, maximum discretion is guarded with respect to church interests; in Education, we have seen the appalling dependency of the State on the so-called magnanimity of the Church to provide education; in Justice the whole treatment of paedophiles and the distortion of the whole Criminal Justice System everywhere in favour of the Church, is also aparent to anyone who wants to know. At the top of all these areas, no such Separation of Catholic Power exists except on paper, and no assertion of secular standards are possible as long as that obtains.

In the present case , concerning the disposition of clerical files relating to pedophelia, of course Mr Michael Woods and his generous committe should have negotiated these matters with an eye to the secular rights of the Irish people and not , as has been the case, with an eye to doffing the cap to the most powerful empire in the world.

In Ireland it is not generally realised that the pre-Reformation Catholic state still persists in its absolute hegemony over any secular status the Republic of Ireland flatters itself it enjoys. I think this is what Cardinal Connell is intimating, but few people know the scope of his claims.

That we are down the years still talking about such things is but one indication of the church's powers over the secular powers , that Cardinal Connell disagreed with the former Minister for Justice Michael McDowell as to real status of canon law in the Republic mahy be regarded as another, but more importantly than these is the everyday power the Cahtholic church exercises over ordinary people in all the dioceses and parishes throughout Ireland as well as all those institutions that make up the Republic. In this regard one does not have to talk at lengh about secret societies, whether Opus Dei or the once hated but now prodigal society of Freemasons, one does not have to point out the power of Jesuits , Redemptorists, Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans, etc., etc., or their influence over the political parties, the media, the police, journalists, the profession of lawyers and judges, the civil service, the hospitals, the unions, and all the ethics committees that ever existed in Ireland. Their ubiquity is obvious to anyone who knows anythng about Irish society.

By freely offering the files for scrutiny, Bishop Martin adroitly avoids the public issues which are paramount to defining the nature of the Republic vis-a-vis the RC Church. Appearing as the cooperative agent of Rome, while retaining hegemony, whether real or imagined, over the Republic is the best strategy, especially when the country is not in the mood for hierarchical claims.

In all began in ancient Ireland, in the foruth century to be precise. The Christian church had just turned into the official alter ego of the Roman Empire at much the same time as St. Patrick was pushing Christianinty against a pagan wall in Ireland.

Then about 750 or some time thereafter a document known as the Donatio Constantini made its way into Canon Law. One rarely comes across the IRISH discussing such a document -- simply because they mostly never heard of it. Nevertheless, this document was important for two things: it was the greatest forgery ever perpetrated on the Christian World and it claimed Ireland as Fief of the Roman See.

Even though Ireland had many a holy Roman sandle on its neck, it was never became a colony of the Roman Empire. There were those who wished it had been so -- for it might have benefitted from that great division of Roman labour that made the Empire famous. But this was not to be: the Irish were Gaelic-speaking pagans with their own religion and a priesthood called Druids.

On foot of this unknown document , the Donatio Constantini, Pope Adrian IV -- the Enlglishman-Pope -- decided in 1155 to draft a letter to his compatriot Henry 11. And in it he more or less gave Ireland away. Henry 11 became the ‘Lord of Ireland’ by Papal consent. Of course , a few centuries later Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland and down to 1922 Ireland was attached to the British Crown. The question of course the Irish should be asking themselves -- for one can be sure Cardinal Connell has asked it -- is: was the Vatican’s original claim extinguished by the unilateral acion of Henry VIII? And , of course, the answer is ‘No; it wasn’t’.

Everyone knows that the Free State Irish expelled the British and claimed the island for the Irish, that non-Gaelic brood of British, who over the centuries attached themselves to pagan soil with hoops of Catholic steel.

So, does the Vatican actually still own Ireland? Is it in international law a residual Fief of the Vatican? And what , if anything, have the two constitutions (that of 1922 and that of 1937) got to say about it.

As I have already said, the Irish never really had a sense of history, so, surprise, surprise, neither of the constitutions say anything about the claim of the Donatio Constantini -- not even that it is a forged document -- or about Laudabiliter 1155, the document that sold out the Gaels and started a war between the Norman Christians (now Irish) and the Gaelic pagans (rubbished with the Mammoth for over 500 years). Indeed, it was Laudabiliter that brought the present race of Irish hither. Initially, they were a go-between the Gaelic pagans and the Pope’s and the King’s joint armies. That’s why they were called ‘the middle nation.’

While the 1922 Constitution which, for the first time in Irish history, gave birth to an Ireland owned by the ‘middle nation’, it says nothing of either its shady past or its anti-Gaelic history. The 1937 Constitution (De Valera’s Bunreacht na h-Eireann), remains silent about such an ancient claim, while everything from the Preamble to the Social Directives supports it. People say that Dev gave the Constitution first to the Pope (notwitshtanding the words that ‘we the People of Ireland give to ourselves….bla,bla,bla ) and it came back with an inscription of a Special Position allotted to the RC Church. The RC Church enjoyed this Special Position up to quite recently when, by consent, it was struck down to appease the howls of the Northern Irish. It was never called into question as a constitutional concept, but that does not mean that ,had it remained, it could never have been so. Indeed, such a ‘might-have-been’ is most striking in the present situation, where Cardinal Connell claims privilege above and beyond all the other Constitutional provisions.

To the wider point, as to the ‘ownership’ of the Republic of Ireland, the Irish State (the Free State or the Republic) has never asserted its hegemony on behalf of the people over the RC Church and if no one else knows about it, I suggest that Cardinal Connell does. Shooting the British was one thing, standing up to the holy Romans is quite another day’s work for a people who -- let us admit it -- were called into being by the Roman Church in order to transplant the Gaelic pagan population!

In practice, and on a more practical level, all political parties in Ireland know whom they serve -- the Church or the people. In the recent decision to defray the debts accruing to clerical paedophiles, the matter, whatever one may otherwise think, was settlede by an obvious expression of solidarity/sovereignty of the Church over the State and over their victims. The important thing was that the decision was made without any party or Parliamentary dissent. It ranked well with those other tell-tale and silent decisions which never appear to trouble Irish intelligence -- such as the decision to give Bunreacht na h-Eireann to the Pope before the people, the decision to ratline Nazies, to dispose of children in the ‘50s to Americans, to invite thousands of Poles over their quota into Ireland -- two further measures of social engineering thought through by the Catholic Church without one word of comment as to their prorpiety in Parliament. Further, the whole process of criminal procedure, which took from the people the moral right of public condemnation, was engineered in favour of the Church. The same necessary scepticism must now apply to the files respecting those files in possession of the Archbishop of Dublin.

What Cardinal Connell is calling into question is a pre-Reformation power. Put another way, if the Republic of Ireland was really a modern secular state or an ‘independent’ state, or, indeed, one that had in spirit as well as in words a ‘Separation of Powers’, if, indeed, it shared any of John F. Kennedy’s convictions as to the ‘absolute’ separation of Church and State, then it would not be dithering as to whether it should seize files relating to the commission of crimes. The AG's office and the DPP’s office and the Gardai would simply get on with it and treat clerics the same way as any other persons suspected of crimes should be treated.

But this ,as we all know, is not the case. The State's anaemic institutions constantly needs either permission from the Church itself or from some High Court Judge to do its job. The notions in the 'written' constitution, therefore, that 'no one is above the law' or that law should be administered fairly and the like are, like the doctrine of the Separation of Powers, a lot of words, mostly used in imitation of other civilisations rather than sustaining any Irish convictions.

It is a pity, but authentic societies cannot live indefinitely on the art of borrowing. Invariably, inevitably, they have to grow up…. Just like those other countries who show them the way!

Seamus Breathnach

www.irish-criminology.com