I came across a video a few weeks ago from a mediocre Irish band from Dundalk, who were talking rubbish about religion. It was clear that they were not impressed: “We hate Imams as well.”
“I shudder to think of what sort of a fella would say ‘I want to be an Imam when I grow up.’’’
“All the mosques could be made into pubs. A mosque would make a great pub.”
“In 15 years all them people are going to be gone. I effin’ hope so.”
“There is kinda like a new age bunch of people being super Muslim now, effin twerps.”
That is horrific. To speak like that should surely have the human rights groups, the equality groups, and the long arm of the law, raining down hellfire on you in modern Ireland.
Direction
In fairness to them, they weren’t talking about Islam, imams and mosques. I misheard. They were talking about Catholicism, priests and churches. Thus, there was no bru-hah-hah about it at all.
It feels very different when you replace the words, doesn’t it? Directing such hate towards Islam and something foreign to Ireland sounds like that which would be described as “far-right”. It would, in all likelihood, be construed as hate-speech. It would be unacceptable except maybe to a small minority. And rightly so. It is what we call stereotyping. It is what we call bigotry. It would be even called xenophobic.
But hate towards the Catholic Church, towards priests, towards Catholics in general. This has become the acceptable bigotry. Even readers of this paper are partially immune to thinking the anti-Catholic bile that pervades polite discourse as hate-speech and bigotry.
It can be spewed out without a second thought and it will be promoted on soft-thinking media outlets without any hint of a repercussion. They deserve it, they think, because it has become the respectable middle-class prejudice.
Our sister was stolen by the Catholic Church and we don’t know whether she’s alive or dead”
It isn’t hate speech when it is somehow deserved, when there is a cosy consensus amongst a certain smug portion of society.
The band in question, from Dundalk, have a history of Church-bashing (I won’t give them the publicity by using their name). Being interviewed in Hot Press a few years back, there are hints at family reasons for the hate. “We’ve known about the evils of the Church our whole lives,” says one band member. “Our father was Protestant and our mother was Catholic. Our sister was stolen by the Catholic Church and we don’t know whether she’s alive or dead.”
Hate
Yet, they equally admit, “We were lucky enough that we didn’t go to church growing up”, so it is hard to find what exactly is the first-hand reason for the venom. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and accept that someone associated with the Church did something bad towards them and their family. But, in any other walk of life, when talking about any other population group it is not permissible to extend from the individual to the wider social group. That is generally called bigotry. Sometimes it is called racism.
“We absolutely and wholeheartedly despise the Church,” another member adds. “After all the Catholic Church did to this country, I feel priests should be afraid to walk around the streets. The evils that they committed are unimaginable.”
Bravery in Ireland today would be taking on the zeitgeist”
Ireland’s proposed law on hate speech would render what the band says about the Church and priests criminal for sure. But even under current laws, where hate is defined as needing incitement to violence, the band is treading a very fine line.
Maybe when calling priests ‘twerps’ they should listen to Fr Dominik Domagala when asked “Why did you become a priest, and how did it happen?”
“To which I typically provide a quick and insightful response: ‘Well, it’s complicated.’ Indeed, the journey of anyone who has chosen to enter religious life and priesthood, is intertwined with mystery, great expectations, discernment, and a sense of unworthiness. It is a path filled with questions and a search for answers, some of which emerge only after a lengthy exploration.”
Or maybe they should read about Mill Hill missionary Fr Declan O’Toole (31) of Headford, Co Galway killed in Uganda after a peace meeting in 2002 when he was ambushed and shot dead at point-blank range by a lone gunman. Or Kenyan native, Fr Victor-Luke Odhiambo, who had studied in Dublin, shot dead in South Sudan. Or Fr John Hannon from Killula, of Newmarket-on-Fergus, Co Clare, brutally beaten to death in Kenya. Or 57-year-old Irish priest, Rufus Halley, murdered in the Philippines by a gang of men in 2001, having been there since the 1960s to work in dialogue and conflict resolution between Muslim and Christian communities.
There are plenty of priests and nuns who admit to living in fear, in their homes, or walking down the street.
Bravely, they tell Hot Press, “Our father was very anti-authority, and I suppose our brothers and sisters were too. In school and everything, we were anti-authority as well. It’s no sweat off our backs to challenge stuff.”
Priests, and religious in general, are bottom of the food-chain in Ireland these days. These tough lads are not attacking authority. It is clear that they never fell under the authority of the Church. Their stance is not brave. It is cowardly.
Bravery in Ireland today would be taking on the zeitgeist rather than being cosily aligned with the liberal-establishment viewpoint. This band is not railing against authority. It is very much part of the social and cultural authority that seeks to choke diversity of opinion from the melting-pot.
Bravery
These brave lads choose to go after the one section of society that is most maligned in modern Ireland. They don’t see individuals. They don’t see the lives many priests and religious have led, whether here in Ireland, or in some of the poorest parts of the world, giving everything for others. They see only what they read in the popular press and hear in their bunkered social circles.
They are not pushing boundaries. They are living through the past and hiding behind today’s prejudices and bigotry. They are not taking on authority. They are punching down. But they don’t realise it because they live in an echo chamber that tells them what great fellows they are.
They arrive clinging on to the coattails of present-day populism dressed up as rebellion, living through a reductivist and historically illiterate understanding of the past. Like their fellow-travellers, from further north, Kneecap, they are ‘bobo’ – bohemian bourgeois – dressed up as a singing political statement. They think they are at the cutting edge of reactionary politics, but the truth is they are in the soft centre.
This band from Dundalk aren’t old enough to know what Catholic Ireland was like”
It is far braver, for reasons that this band and their ilk regularly demonstrate, to choose to be religious or a priest today in Ireland than it is to dress up in the clothes of middle-class respectability masquerading as rebels.
This is the Ireland of today. It is a country still defined by Catholicism in only that it is post-Catholic resentment that determines how the country talks and thinks. For the many who are struggling to find meaning in its absence, they find only satisfaction in being anti-Catholic. For all their bravery, they are imprisoned by their imagined bitterness, seeking validation from their fellow-travellers in an echo-chamber of small-minded bullying.
This band from Dundalk aren’t old enough to know what Catholic Ireland was like. It was well on the road to extinction by the time they were out of nappies. It is a good while since they were teenagers but appear to be in a state of perpetual adolescence all the same.
It is becoming a staid truism to say ‘you wouldn’t say that about Islam’, but it is a sad truth in Ireland today. It isn’t acceptable to talk about any other identity group in this manner. To be honest, if a band wants to talk like that, in a shallow, ill-informed and uneducated way, it doesn’t really bother me. But if it is fine to talk about priests in this manner, then let’s be consistent and speak about every identity group through prejudicial generalisations without consequence.