Posted by Jim on March 10, 2015
by Niall O’Dowd
New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan the target of Irish ire like never before. Photo by: Getty
There was a not so quiet revolution in Irish America last week, one that should not go unnoticed.
Four different Irish American groups, most notably the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), America’s largest Irish Catholic group, ripped into Cardinal Timothy Dolan regarding his CNN interview comparing Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
This is not your father’s Irish America!
AOH President Brendan Moore deserves great kudos for speaking out. The AOH is an organization that, in general, is deeply reverential to clergy and especially cardinals.
Moore, however, was obviously deeply upset by the Cardinal’s flippant comparison and didn’t pull his punches.
He knew that Cardinal Dolan had no earned authority on this issue, has never been known to speak out about it, and when he eventually did, he spoke in the most patronizing fashion.
Dolan’s remarks were plain wrong. A five minute study of the history of Ireland would reveal that the IRA never claimed religion as their motivation, rather theirs was a nationalist demand. A second grader would have figured that out.
Unlike his revered predecessor, Cardinal John O’Connor, who knew and understood the Northern Irish issue better than any prelate anywhere. Cardinal Dolan has no track record whatever on addressing the Northern conflict.
Moore stated: “The fact is that, unlike ISIS, the Irish Republican Army never used religion to justify its resistance to Loyalist sectarianism and/or British misrule.”
Father Sean McManus, a doughty fighter for civil rights in Northern Ireland for a generation and founder of the Irish National Caucus and originator of the MacBride Principles, was hardly holding back either.
McManus embodies the term “turbulent priest” and Dolan must have been smarting as Fr. McManus said the Cardinal’s statement, equating the IRA to ISIS was, “Profoundly ignorant, totally irresponsible and lacking all credibility.
“It is sadly consistent with a man who for 40 years never opened his mouth about the oppression of Catholics in Northern Ireland.”
What was extremely interesting about the intervention of Michael Cummings, a leading figure in groups such as the Irish American Unity Conference and AOH was how he did not hesitate to put the boot in on the various clerical scandals once taboo for Irish American Catholic groups to mention.
“…Given the church scandals in Ireland it takes a brave man to cite the Irish Bishops for anything save incompetence, arrogance and “narcissism” to quote Taoiseach Enda Kenny.”
Paul Doris of Irish Northern Aid was equally outspoken. “With the revelations of the past few years against the Catholic Church in Ireland I believe it would be more productive if Cardinal Dolan spent more time on that instead of opining on matters which he seems to know little or nothing about.”
Whew, heavy stuff and certainly a new departure for many of the Irish organizations which are conservative at the core.
Cardinal Dolan and his church depends in part on large donations and support from Irish Americans and many of those Irish Americans would find his take on the Northern troubles deeply troubling. There surely is a lesson here in this.
One wonders what John “Dagger” Hughes, the great Archbishop of New York and a Tyrone native who fiercely defended the Famine Irish from prejudice and the “know nothings,” would have made of such blather by one of his successors.
Not much I’d wager.
Posted by Jim on March 7, 2015
New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan is deservedly a tremendously popular figure within the Catholic community and the Irish-American community as well. It is therefore both disappointing and distressing to read his most recent (CNN, March 3) public comparison of the Irish Republican Army with ISIS.
In his statement last month (New York Post, Feb. 17) the Cardinal commended the leadership of Ireland’s bishops for condemning the IRA during the period referred to as The Troubles. One needs to wonder if The Troubles might have been avoided or diminished had those same Irish bishops spoken out to vigorously condemn long-standing institutionalized discrimination in employment and housing in the north of Ireland. How different things might have been had those same bishops stood shoulder to shoulder with their people during the civil rights campaign in British-occupied Ireland, for if they had they would have witnessed first-hand the routinely brutal beatings meted out to unarmed, peaceful demonstrators at the hands of the sectarian Royal Ulster Constabulary.
The fact is that unlike ISIS, the Irish Republican Army never used religion to justify its resistance to Loyalist sectarianism and/or British misrule. Cardinal Dolan’s statement (“everything they were doing was a perversion of everything the Church stood for”) appears to be contradicted by the heroic utterances and activities of many Catholic priests, among them Alex Reid, Des Wilson, Raymond Murray, and Denis Faul. Indeed, Cardinal Tomas O Faich (Thomas O’Fee) was consistently criticized in the media and elsewhere for his “excessive” closeness to militant Irish republicans.
Fortunately, we are into a new era in which the armed struggle has been replaced by a solid determination to make the political system work. Primary focus must now be placed on the fulfillment of the aspirations engendered in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, and there is so much that we can partner with Cardinal Dolan in working to achieve. Together we must look to a future in which all of Ireland’s daughters and sons can share in the blessings of equality, justice, and peace.
Brendan Moore
National President,
Ancient Order of Hibernians in America
Posted by Jim on March 5, 2015
As written in ” Ireland Calling”
One of the many tragic ironies of famine stricken Ireland is that as people died of starvation, thousands of tons of grain that could have saved them was instead shipped out of the country.
How could such a seemingly perverse and inhuman policy be allowed to continue?
Unshakeable belief in Free Trade
The answer lies in the political and economic beliefs of the British ruling classes at the time. The Whig government of Prime Minister Lord John Russell had an unshakeable belief in free trade. They were opposed to anything that would distort the market and damage the balance of supply and demand.
This was an approach enthusiastically enforced by Charles Trevelyan – the Secretary of the Treasury and the man in charge of famine relief in Ireland. His main priority, far above that of feeding the starving, was that there should be no interference with free trade. If landowners could earn more for Irish produced grain by selling it in England or in Europe rather than making it available to the destitute in Ireland then so be it.
This caused enormous resentment in Ireland and was even too much to take for some of Trevelyan’s own administrators. In the summer of 1846, the Commissary General Sir Randolph Routh, urged that Irish ports should be closed to prevent the export of grain.
Trevelyan flatly refused and wrote back saying: “Do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports, perfect Free Trade is the right course.”
“Serious evil” to export food
Routh stood his ground and again insisted that it was essential to close the ports. Otherwise more than 60,000 tons of grain that could be used to feed the starving would instead be shipped abroad. He said was a “serious evil” to export food in the middle of such a crisis.
Trevelyan, with the full backing of the government, would not be moved. He replied: “We beg of you not to countenance in any way the idea of prohibiting exportation. There cannot be a doubt that it would inflict a permanent injury on the country.”
From the outset, the Irish were left in no doubt as to the approach to be taken by Trevelyan. He made his position clear as soon as he came to office by closing down the depots providing maize for the poor which had been set up by the previous government of Sir Robert Peel the year before at the outbreak of the famine.
He wanted there to be no free hand-outs to the poor.
Trevelyan increased public works
Instead, he increased the public works projects, ensuring that that the starving would have to work to earn some money if they wanted to be fed. These work projects were carefully designed so they did not interfere or compete with private enterprise. Therefore they were confined to areas such as building roads and walls, or repairing fences – the kind of projects that would not interest businesses as they would not be sufficiently profitable.
All these works were financed out of local Irish taxes. The cost to the central Treasury was to be kept to a minimum.
As the death toll mounted in September and October, the clamour for the government to provide more help grew so strong it could no longer be ignored. The Belfast newspaper the Vindicator captured the national mood in this article published on 3 October 1846.
“Give us food or we perish,” is now the loudest cry that is heard in this unfortunate country. It is heard in every corner of the island – it breaks in like some awful spectre on the festive revelry of the rich – it startles and appals the merchant at his desk, the landlord in his office, the scholar in his study, the minister in his council room, and the priest at the altar.
“Give us food or we perish.”
It is a strange popular cry to be heard within the limits of the powerful and wealthy British Empire. Russia wants liberty, Prussia wants a constitution, Switzerland wants religion, Spain wants a king, Ireland alone wants food.
Trevelyan reluctantly tried to help
Trevelyan reluctantly accepted that something would have to be done, although his heart wasn’t really in it. He tried to buy corn abroad as Sir Robert Peel’s government had done the year before with admirable haste, but it proved hard to find. The European harvest had been low that summer and there was very little surplus available. America had supplies but attempts to ship it to Ireland would be hampered by the coming winter which would freeze the trade lines of the American rivers.
Severe winter increases death toll
In the meantime, the public works schemes designed to give the poor the chance to earn money for food were running into difficulties. There were delays in getting them started due poor administration and once they did get going there were further delays due to lack of equipment and skilled engineers to oversee the work.
Then, as everyone thought things could surely get no worse, one of the severest winters for years set in. To add to the death toll from hunger, and famine related diseases, many labourers on the public works schemes collapsed and died from exposure.
Meanwhile the government continued to dally, the starving continued to die, and the ships laden with oats, wheat and barley continued to sail out of Irish ports.
Posted by Jim on
as reported by WPIX
The former Archbishop Cardinal Edward Egan died at 82 years old Thursday afternoon in a Manhattan hospital.
The cardinal was pronounced dead at NYU Langone Medical Center at 2:20 after going into cardiac arrest, according to Katherine Greenwood of the Archdiocese of New York.
Pope John Paul II appointed Cardinal Egan as the archbishop of New York from 2000 to 2009, and was made a cardinal in 2001 after the death of Cardinal John O’Connor. He served as the spiritual leader for many New Yorkers after the September 11 terror attacks, presiding over funerals and anointing the dead, along with holding prayers for justice.
In 2014, Egan also led the procession at the funeral for Avonte Oquendo, the Queens boy with autism whose remains were discovered on a College Point beach.
Egan is remembered as a financially savvy leader who was unpopular at the time for closing parishes and enacting cost-cutting measures that are now regarded as tough but necessary measures.
He was succeeded by Archbishop Timothy Dolan and was retired as archbishop in May of 2009 at the age of 77. Dolan asked for people to celebrate his life and priesthood, saying in a statement on his website:
“Thank God he had a peaceful death, passing away right after lunch today, with the prayers and sacraments of his loyal priest secretary, Father Douglas Crawford, in his residence at the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. He was rushed to NYU Langone Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at 2:20 pm this afternoon.”
He continued living in Manhattan and working with the Archdiocese and the Vatican after his retirement.
Posted by Jim on
CARDINAL CONFUSION by Mike Cummings
In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on NEWDAY, Cardinal Archbishop Dolan made an unfortunate reference to the Irish Republican Army comparing them to ISIS.
First, the IRA never claimed their armed resistance to British terror was in the name of God. It may come as a surprise to the Bishop Dolan but the depiction of the ‘N. I. conflict as religious’ has been a useful spin provided by the British which never had a basis in fact. Second, most military experts, even British ones, would disagree with his comparison of ISIS with the IRA. The casualty figures for 30 years of conflict, although no consolation to anyone, show the British and their loyalist thugs had more in common with ISIS in that the majority of their victims were innocent civilians. Third, the machinery of British murder and injustice is amply documented by Anne Cadwallader in her book LETHAL ALLIES. I commend it to the Bishop. Would he deny the right of self-defense against such murderous mayhem? Fourth, he cites the periodic condemnation of the IRA by the Irish Bishops as constructive. Far from it. While no one expects clergy to advocate violence, they are obligated to speak out and condemn injustices as did Pope John Paul at Drogheda in Ireland and Paul VI at the U. N. Ever since the 19th century when Bishop Moriarity of CO Kerry condemned the Fenians stating that for them “Hell is not hot enough nor eternity long enough” the Catholic Bishops have at best been silent on British atrocities like the Dublin Monaghan bombings and at worse instruments of British oppression.
In his defense, the Cardinal may be unfamiliar with the Irish conflict. There is no record of his voice speaking out against the discrimination against Catholics in jobs, housing and voting or in favor of the MacBride Fair Employment Principles; or in support of the Hunger Strikers; in protest of the murders of attorneys Patrick Finucane or Rosemary Nelson or indeed the killing of nearly 1000 Catholics whose deaths have yet to be investigated or in opposition to current cases of injustice like the Craigavon 2. Like many other Bishops he may have hid behind the U. S. National Conference of Bishops who, in turn, hide behind the Irish Bishops.
Let’s not forget that it was Bishop Philbin of Belfast who forced Mother Theresa out of town because of her work for the poor. Voices of reason, justice and non-violence like those of Fr Des Wilson, Fr. Joe McVeigh, Fr. Raymond Murray, and Fr. Denis Faul were isolated and marginalized as being too close to the poor. Given the church scandals in Ireland it takes a brave man to cite the Irish Bishops for anything save incompetence, arrogance and “narcissism” to quote Taoiseach Enda Kenny.
Michael J. Cummings
