Has that ever stopped Toibib?
While I enjoy a bit of pedantry as much as the next person, is this argument really worth the hot air expended on either side?
The insufferable Peadar Toibin's latest would-be publicity stunt / culture casus belli is whinging that Dublin City Council's Winter Lights, which have been around since 2018 and were never called Christmas Lights, aren't called Christmas Lights.
(These aren't the city centre street Christmas Lights which are, and have always been called, Christmas Lights. They're in addition to those lights)
Michael Nugent and John Hamill discuss on Newstalk - linked in below article
As usual, follow the money.
A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic followers.Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 (£322,000) in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 (£322,000) in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
Politicians want the least amount of change they can possibly get away with. So that (if anything at all) is what we will get.
@Hotblack Desiato I'll believe once I see a significant number of schools, i.e. the number in proportion to the demand, change patronage as a results of this. I'm not holding my breath just yet.
@smacl it's not the same as the current divestment approach - well, at least, what @Peregrinus is talking about is not.
e.g. Remember the "divestment" exercise a few years back in the Malahide area (the one with no Christmas, no uniforms, no school outings(!) and no grandparents allowed in the school(!) if they dared change, according to the FUD the teachers shamelessly distributed to the kids to bring home, and parroted in public meetings) ?
There were 8 RC primary schools in the Malahide area, with easily enough demand in the area to fill one ET and possibly two.
Result - no change - because no individual school could secure a majority for change. First past the post system.
Proposed district led approach - patronage in proportion to demand - at least one school changes, even if there is no majority in that specific school. This is proportional representation…
But the whole notion that you can only have your constitutional and human rights respected if enough of your neighbours agree, really needs to be binned once and for all.
Also this process is, like Malahide, still wide open to FUD campaigns from the RCC and god-bothering principals. Meanwhile parents who've never had their kids attend an ET know little or nothing about them.
P.S. - there is a school patronage thread, this is kinda a funnies thread
The only way round this may be to group schools into districts and say right, the school patronages here are going to be distributed according to parental preference in the district as a whole, so if 40% of the parents prefer Catholic patronage then about 40% of the schools will have Catholic patronage. And, to acheive this, we are going to give some schools new patronage models, even if that's not the preferred model of the parents whose children go to those particular schools.
While this would seem like the fair and logical way of working, it is pretty much the same idea as the existing divestment approach which has failed utterly. I'm not sure the political will exists to do much more than give this cursory lip service while preferring to kick the ball down the road for another decade or so. Change will happen when politicians feel their chances of staying in power are compromised by failing to act on this issue. While we're much closer than any time in the past, I'm not sure we're quite there yet.
I think you put your finger on the problem here. The Catholic church is grossly over-represented as a school patron, relative to the wishes of parent, but it's still a more popular patronage choice than any other. Thus, at the level of the individual school, there are very few Catholic primary schools where the number of parents wanting (say) ET patronage exceeds the number preferring to retain Catholic patronage. I think that's the rock on which previous moves to reduce the number of Catholic-patronised schools foundered.
The RTE story linked above mentions factors like "misinformation . . . claims that they would no longer be able to celebrate occasions such as Christmas or Easter or use Irish greetings such as 'Dia Dhuit’" as being at least partly responsible. In a perverse kind of way, this is somewhat encouraging. Ten or fifteen years ago, schools stayed in Catholic patronage because it was the most popular choice; now, those wanting schools to remain in Catholic patronage, have to try and shore up their situation by aggressively promoting Trumpy lies like this. I get the impression they'e on the run. As support for Catholic patronage gets weaker and weaker, there may be more and more schools where a majority of parents will seek a switch to other patronage models.
Or, maybe we shouldn't wait for that, or rely on it. if you take the view that the patronage of each school should be determined by the patronage most popular with the parents, the patronage that is most popular nationally will always be grossly overreprsented. It's the first-past-the-post problem, basically.
(I should add; I think the problem here is well-understood in the Dept of Education. I suspect, or perhaps I just hope, that the reason they are conducting this survey is to get data for a new approach to partronage change that can get around the barriers presented by dealing individually with each school.)
Looking forward to the outcome from this one. My guess, rather cynically perhaps, is that it will show bigger demand for multi-denominational education across the board, but not enough for any given school to actually change. It would be great to see multi-demoninational educational school places available in rough proportion to the demand out there, both for primary and secondary. Interested to hear that 90% of our primary schools are already co-ed which I'm entirely in favour of.
From the report, it seems clear that the survey is being run by, and for, the Department of Education. It has been welcomed by Educate Together and by ETB Ireland; I think if they had any concerns about either the people or the motivation behind the survey I think they'd be raising them.
I don't know anything about a survey being run by or for Aontú. If there is one, I don't think this is it.
So, I heard on the radio something about a survey being run by Aontu to move towards more 'multidenominational' schools in Ireland. I think it's this: https://www.rte.ie/news/education/2025/1104/1541998-primary-school-ethos-survey/ , however, I don't see Aontu mentioned in the article. Having Aontu do anything related to legislation ahd religion, is basically asking the fox to census the henhouse, they're just running-dog lackeys of the RCC.
Is Aontu running this survey? It seems like there'd be some opportunity to reduce indoctrination in schools, but as always in Ireland, there'll be a report and who knows if anything will happen.
In the latest "Celebrity in trouble over sexual and other misdeeds, needs a career redemption fast" move, Conor McGregor has found god:
Funny article in the Irish Times:
https://archive.ph/djBmi
(both taken from the McG thread)
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/yoga-student-claims-he-was-discriminated-against-after-being-banned-from-studio-over-alleged-outburst-on-his-opposition-to-christmas/a877936192.html Alright lads, which one of ye did this?
Well this is a new angle, makes a change from the usual "children whose grandparents may at some stage have been within 2000km of Chernobyl" schtick…
"We'll sell on what we can to make money for ourselves, and dump the rest in a ditch somewhere"
Ah, the conspiracy theory view of history. Fun, but not to be relied upon.
Far from signing the Vatican concordat as a quid pro quo for ZP support for the Enabling Act, Hitler saw the concordat as a way of eliminating the ZP, which he considered un-German, and an obstacle to his ambitions.
Under the Weimer republic (and, previously, under the German Empire) the Catholic church dealt separately with each German state in relation to its own position and interests — tax treatment, treatment of Catholic schools, etc. Historically this suited the church, since the national government was generally fairly anti-Catholic, whereas at least some of the states were not, so they could get better deals, more often than not, at state level. The ZP was founded (a) to resist anti-Catholic policies at national level, and (b) to suport federalism and the distribution of powers to state governments.
Under the Empire the ZP was generally the third largest party in the Reichstag and acted as a swing party, supporting whichever of the two biggest parties seemed at the time to be less anti-Catholic and/or more federalist. This involved a degree of ideological flexibility, since the party had to be ready to support both conservative and liberal governments, as the occasion required; this is what the name "Centre Party" pointed to. It played a major role in founding the Weimar republic, ensuring that it had a federal character and providing a number of Weimar chancellors.
All of this was anathema to Hitler. He didn't like federalism — it was the polar opposite of the ultra-centralised leadership that the Führerprinzip called for. He loathed the Catholic church, which he regarded as both Jewish and internationalist. And he particularly loathed the ZP, which he saw as the political arm of the Catholic church active in German politics.
Once the Enabling Act was passed, federalism was dead in Germany. The Catholic church then had no choice but to deal with the national government, something it had always sought to avoid doing. The Concordat was proposed by Germany, the intention being to persuade the church that its interests were best secured by making a treaty directly with the national government, rather than by being represented in the Reichstag by the ZP.
The tactic worked. With the ZP effectively bypassed, it had no continuing rationale. It dissolved itself on 5 July 1933. Its deputies continued to sit in the Reichstag as non-party deputies until the elections in November 1933, in which they were not permitted to stand.
Tl;dr: the Concordat was not a favour or concession to the Centre Party, to secure their support for the Enabling Act; it was the complete opposite.
Odd, isn't it.
[Ohnonotgmail] It is very easy to blame Catholic priests for the ills of the world when they get involved in politics. Particularly so when the president of a country is a Catholic priest who was a fervent nazi who supported the holocaust. I refer, of course, to Josef Tizo, president of Slovak Republic in WW2. His predecessor was also a Catholic priest, oddly enough. Must be something in the Slovak water.[Hotblack] Incidentally they never mentioned in history class in my Catholic school that the parliamentary votes of the Catholic Centre Party (led by a priest) were essential in order to give Mr Moustache absolute power.
[Ohnonotgmail] It is very easy to blame Catholic priests for the ills of the world when they get involved in politics. Particularly so when the president of a country is a Catholic priest who was a fervent nazi who supported the holocaust. I refer, of course, to Josef Tizo, president of Slovak Republic in WW2. His predecessor was also a Catholic priest, oddly enough. Must be something in the Slovak water.
[Hotblack] Incidentally they never mentioned in history class in my Catholic school that the parliamentary votes of the Catholic Centre Party (led by a priest) were essential in order to give Mr Moustache absolute power.
The German lad's name was Fr Ludwig Kaas and he provided Hitler with the support of his ~80 or so parliamentary deputies in the March 1933 vote for the Enabling act which provided Hitler with dictatorial powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Kaas
A few months later, in July of 1933, Hitler, completely co-incidentally, negotiated and enaced the Reichskonkordat treaty between itself and the RCC, confirming a bunch of things including church control of schools. It remains, I believe, the only piece of Nazi legislation still in force in Germany today.
Hotblack, as you say, this interesting footnote was missing from my history classes too.
This is bizarre
https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2025/08/15/sophie-toscan-du-plantier-gardai-awaiting-results-of-tests-using-advanced-dna-collection-method/
Jared Bradley, M Vac Systems president and chief executive, travelled to Ireland last month and spent a week examining various exhibits gathered by gardaí as part of the original investigation into the French film producer’s murder.Posting on Instagram in advance of his trip, Mr Bradley said: “Praying for a fantastic outcome. If what I believe will happen actually does, it will be MASSIVE for us in a whole host of ways. Please pray for us.”
Jared Bradley, M Vac Systems president and chief executive, travelled to Ireland last month and spent a week examining various exhibits gathered by gardaí as part of the original investigation into the French film producer’s murder.
Posting on Instagram in advance of his trip, Mr Bradley said: “Praying for a fantastic outcome. If what I believe will happen actually does, it will be MASSIVE for us in a whole host of ways. Please pray for us.”
Pray for what, exactly, though? That his company gets lots of publicity out of this and hits the big time?
Irish Wake Amusements makes for an interesting read on this topic, where Irish wakes were a source of all sorts of unusual behaviour. Brendan Kennelly also had a rather bawdy take on it in Moloney up and at it. Must see if I can dig up my copy.
@freespirit I have one reservation in that the responses did not allow for a neutral response, it made you pick sides. Life is too short to have a considered position on every topic. So I try to speak out on just a few.
@peregrinus all extremist ideologies seen to moderate with time, except when they revive, as Islam has since the Wahabis. If Islam moderated again a lot of heat would go. Christianity otoh has been there, and is tamer than before. Would I have escaped or remained in harsher times? I'm not sure. So has Communism imho. I don't have a theory that explains resurgence, although eternal oppression is probably a key or the key determinant.
Meanwhile in the Waterford Wake Museum (the newest of several excellent museums in the city and all well worth a visit)
I wonder what sort of grave (hur hur hur) punishment they had in mind?
I'd suggest that democracy will be impaired where the information on which the voting population bases their decisions is severely restricted and deeply biased in favour of a single side of the argument. If a persons morality is solely informed by religious doctrine from a young age for example, and arguments against that doctrine are strongly discouraged, the status quo favouring the church's position of power will tend to be maintained through demoratic process.
It's clearly not true to say that in 1950s Ireland a person's morality was solely informed by religious doctrine. Your morality is conditioned by the totality of your formative experiences; nobody learns to share their toys or not to bite their little brother or to take their turn through listening to homilies in church or seeing holy pictures in the classroom, but these are foundational moral lessons. And, while I agree that social and cultural conditions can sustain and reinforce particular moral views and marginalise others, this certainly isn't something that only happens, or particularly happens, with religously-grounded moral views.
In order to make an informed decision, we need to be able to openly and critically examine both sides of the argument equally. I would argue that this was not the case in Ireland in the 1950s.
Granted. But, again, this isn't something that only happens under the influence of religion. It's often the case that people offering moral or political perspectives that are challenging to the currently dominant consensus find themselves marginalised, and we don't get to hear their voices, or we only get to hear what they say mediated through people who disagree with it, or we are ourselves conditioned by the dominant consensus not to hear, or not to accept, what they say.
Currently, I would also be concerned that having the much larger part of our traditional and social media controlled by a tiny minority of powerful people who do not have a popular mandate constitutes a serious impairment to the proper functioning of a democracy.
You mean one smug consensus to which we must all conform has been replaced with another, and our democracy is as impaired as it ever was, just in a different way or in a different direction? Yeah, that's strongly arguable. And you could argue that domination by a church is actually the lesser of two evils; a church at least puts forward a framework of beliefs and values with which you can engage, which you can criticise and which you can reject in whole or in part. But an oligarchy is motivated solely by the desire to maintain its own power and wealth; that's actually much harder to defeeat through argument over beliefs and values, since it's not a position that depends on any particular beliefs or values.
I'd suggest that democracy will be impaired where the information on which the voting population bases their decisions is severely restricted and deeply biased in favour of a single side of the argument. If a persons morality is solely informed by religious doctrine from a young age for example, and arguments against that doctrine are strongly discouraged, the status quo favouring the church's position of power will tend to be maintained through demoratic process. In order to make an informed decision, we need to be able to openly and critically examine both sides of the argument equally. I would argue that this was not the case in Ireland in the 1950s. Currently, I would also be concerned that having the much larger part of our traditional and social media controlled by a tiny minority of powerful people who do not have a popular mandate constitutes a serious impairment to the proper functioning of a democracy.
You don't see a problem with people being told which way to vote from the pulpit, by an organisation which claims that defiance of its doctrines leads to eternal punishment?
I do see a problem with that, but not a problem that amounts to an impairment of democracy. In a democracy, people vote on the basis of the considerations that seem best to them, and a decision to vote in a way that they think will maximise their chances of wings, harps and fluffy white clouds in the next life doesn't become undemocratic just because you disagree with their views about wings, harps and fluffy white clouds.
I come back to the point I made earlier — does it impair democracy if people vote against the death penalty, or for tougher gun control, or against racial discrimination, because their religious beliefs suggest that these policies are good and desirable? Is democracy only impaired if their religious beliefs lead them to support policies that Hotblack opposes?
We can’t argue, can we, that the referendum which adopted a constitutional ban on abortion was less democratic than the later referendum which removed it? Or that the referendum which affirmed a ban on divorce was less democratic than the later referendum which removed it?
I think we can distinguish between two separate, but often overlapping, problems:
First, democracy versus pseudo-democracy: a country may have the appearance of democratic institutions and processes, but they may not actually work. This could be because they are subverted unlawfully (e.g. faked election results) or because they are intentionally degraded (gerrymandered constituencies, legal or practical restrictions on voting) or because they’re just not very well-designed to begin with (the UK and US voting systems) or because their efficacy is undermined by external factors like e.g. state control/oligarchic control of the media.or of social media.
The second problem is genuinely democratic mechanisms being used to enact antidemocratic measures. Democracy is generally understood to involve more than just free and fair elections; it involves upholding the rule of law, and upholding fundamental rights and liberties, especially political liberties. For example, a law stripping Jews of citizenship and voting rights, or banning an opposition political party, or restricting the freedom of the press, would clearly be antidemocratic; it doesn’t become democratic merely because it is enacted by a democratically elected parliament or endorsed in a democratic referendum.
The two problems will frequently overlap, because a government or a party that is seeking to undermine the principles that sustain democracy — say, free speech, or the right of access to the courts — is not going to have any compunction about directly undermining democracy. And then you have a vicious circle — democratic processes and mechanisms are degraded in order to secure the passage of measures which themselves further degrade democracy.
Right — back to theocracy in Ireland. I don’t think democratic processes and mechanisms were degraded in Ireland in order to secure the passage of socially illiberal legislation on censorship, contraception, divorce, abortion, etc or to secure church control of schools or hospitals. It wasn’t necessary to do so because these measures did in fact enjoy broad popular support. And I don’t think the measures adopted, offensive as them may have been on other grounds, were themselves measures that degraded democracy. (Censorship can be a tool used to degrade democracy. but I don’t think it was so used in Ireland; family planning manuals may have been banned but Das Kapital was not.) It may be deplorable to live in a country that won't grant you a divorce, but it doesn't make your country not a democracy.
So, yeah, to the extent that Ireland was affected by theocracy, I don't think it was an antidemocratic or undemocratic theocracy to any significant extent.
We can't. What we can say however is that a constitution should be a living document that reflects the consensus position of the majority of its citizenship. This position changes and evolves over time and as such, the constitution should be (and is) ammended accordingly. Historically, Ireland was a deeply religious, largely monocultural society, where attitudes were heavily informed, some might say controlled even, by church dogma. This is clearly no longer the case, where attitudes to issues such as women's rights, freedom of religious expresion, gender, sexual orientation and bodily autonomy rest more on fundamental human rights and egalitarianism than religious doctrine.
In my opinion, the problem of undue influence remains, but today this rests more with popular and social media and the related mechanisms through which people inform their opinions. Interesting article here on the relationship of populism and pseudo-democracy, in this case in Hungary. Nothing new of course that those seeking political power manipulate public opinion by whatever means at their disposal. The question remains whether you accept the distinction between democracy and pseudo-democracy, and if so, how you distinguish between the degrees of the two?
I don't think it is a reasonable comparison, in terms of the degree that religious doctrine constrains the actions and freedoms of the individual, to consider Iran and the United Kingdom to be similar theocracies.
Oh, sure. Theocracy (like democracy) is a spectrum; countries can be more or less theocratic. I think the most you could say about the UK is that it’s constitution has some theocratic elements and, honestly, they're pretty token elements. The UK and Iran are not similar theocracies. They do both exemplify a particular form of theocracy, where religious institutions are given a formal constitiutional role in public affairs. But that's not the only, or even necessarily the most significant, way in which a country can be theocratic.
While organised religion exerts a varying degree of influence in many democracies, I would only consider that society to be a theocracy where that influence was somewhere between dominant and exclusive to the point of being inescapable. Perhaps the comparison between Iran today and the influence of the Catholic church in Ireland in the 1950s might be a bit closer to the mark ;)
Perhaps. But, notably, constitutionally not much has changed in Ireland since the 1950s. We’ve eliminate the constitutional provision which recognised the Catholic church as “the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens” and also recognised the Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Quaker and Jewish communities. But we have retained provisions acknowledging that public worship is due to God, committing the state to reverence the name of God and to respect and honour religion, and requiring religious oaths for certain public offices. And while the influence of the Church in Ireland today is a shadow of what it was in the 1950s, this isn’t really a consequence of the amendment of Art 44.
Nothing wrong with religion having an influence in any democratic society once that influence is proportional to its active membership and representative of the preferences of those people. To my mind, the litmus test for a democracy is whether it actively and directly involves its citizenship in the more important decisions that directly affect them. The same-sex marriage and abortion referenda are good local examples of this.
That’s kind of the point. The influence of the Catholic church in the 1950s wasn’t really the outcome of including those pietistic constitutional provisions; it was a representation of the views and values of an overwhelming Catholic citizenry. It was democratically sustained. We can’t argue, can we, that the referendum which adopted a constitutional ban on abortion was less democratic than the later referendum which removed it? Or that the referendum which affirmed a ban on divorce was less democratic than the later referendum which removed it?
Arguably the most powerful form of theocracy is the one which rests on popular support, and which is democratically endorsed. But it’s also the one which is most easily displaced, if you can win the democratic argument.
I don't think it is a reasonable comparison, in terms of the degree that religious doctrine constrains the actions and freedoms of the individual, to consider Iran and the United Kingdom to be similar theocracies. While organised religion exerts a varying degree of influence in many democracies, I would only consider that society to be a theocracy where that influence was somewhere between dominant and exclusive to the point of being inescapable. Perhaps the comparison between Iran today and the influence of the Catholic church in Ireland in the 1950s might be a bit closer to the mark ;)
Nothing wrong with religion having an influence in any democratic society once that influence is proportional to its active membership and representative of the preferences of those people. To my mind, the litmus test for a democracy is whether it actively and directly involves its citizenship in the more important decisions that directly affect them. The same-sex marriage and abortion referenda are good local examples of this. In Ireland for example, we have had forty ammendments to our constitution based on the decision of the people since 1939. In the USA over the same period by comparison, they have had six.
