Time for a new Tribunal

Eamon de Valera once said that if he wished to know what the people of Ireland were thinking, he had to simply look into his heart. Today, the politicians prefer to rely on polls to know what the people are thinking, while de Valera’s role as a moral grandstander has been largely usurped by my colleagues in the media.

Both polls and pundits are mired in the same miasma, however, and it is one in which our politicians languish also. What people “think” typically means what they think in passing about an issue of the moment. Public “opinion”, and how to predict, reflect and marshall it, is the core concern of both pundits and politicians. Less considered are public values.

Interview with playwright Michael Harding

Michael Harding was going to be a priest. It was the era of Vatican II, of liberation theology, or worker priests pursuing social justice.

The church, he thought, was the place to be.

He was already, by passion, a writer. Aged 14, he was given a manual typewriter by his uncle, and knew that was all he wanted in life.

But there would be plenty of room in the new church for a writer.

So, in his mid twenties, after a few years working as a teacher in a open prison, he returned to college, to Maynooth, as a seminarian. He was no innocent.

For Prospect, on ‘mental reservation’ and Irish culture

My letter from Dublin in the current issue of Prospect:

If there were a phrase to capture the year just passed in Ireland, and perhaps the Celtic Tiger era that preceded it, it must be “mental reservation.” This was the process by which the former archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell, misled people about his handling of abuse complaints against the Catholic church, without apparently offending his conscience. …

It was perhaps surprising how much outrage this generated, given the totemic role of mental reservation in Irish public life. In 1927, having provoked a civil war in part over his refusal to countenance an oath of allegiance to the British king, Éamon de Valera re-entered the Irish parliament and took the oath. Later, though, he denied he had taken it. “I signed it in the same way as I signed an autograph for a newspaper,” he said.

Abuse, institutions, and plays: Michael Kennedy’s ‘Skinners’

“I was a convicted criminal at the age of two.” Michael Kennedy, a costumier by trade, has a story to tell.

“I was found wandering in Killenaule, Tipperary.”

Soft-spoken and gentle mannered, Kennedy spent his working life backstage at the best theatres and opera houses. But that’s not the story.

“My mother had died, and my father went to England. I know nothing of that.”

Kennedy has costumed stars from Jose Carreras to Leonardo DiCaprio. Peter O’Toole was a good friend. But despite a career in the theatre, he never wrote. Now, with that career behind him, he has returned to the story of his childhood, and sought to put it front of stage.