The war to end all wars

The war to end all wars

One of my regular chores at home in the family pub was to leave some customers home each night. One of our regulars whom I befriended was a veteran of World War I. He was one of the two hundred thousand Irishmen who were said to have fought in the ‘Great War’. He was an amputee who got around on two under-arm crutches on which he swung with great dexterity. Our area was not a place where people easily spoke of their time in the British Army despite the reality that many men from the area had fought with British regiments in both World Wars or in the Crimean and Boer Wars of the mid and late nineteenth century. The postmen in the area were almost always ex-servicemen, usually having served in World War Two.

My friend occasionally spoke to me of the circumstances in which he lost his leg. It happened at Armatiers, as in the risqué song of that time; ‘Mademoiselle of Armatiers’. The proper name of this Northern French town is Armentiéres. It was held by the British and was a popular rest-centre for troops. The war was almost over and he was confident that he had survived the worst of it. In October 1919, a month before the armistice was signed, he was shot and badly wounded in the knee. The conditions were such that an amputation of his leg from the knee down was immediately essential. It was carried out in the field, using the equivalent of a tenon saw, without anaesthetic, and with only a daub of tar as an antiseptic. When he reached a hospital that could treat him properly, the amputation was carried out again. His leg was amputated so high this time that he could never wear an artificial limb. He suffered from phantom pains in the stump of his leg for the rest of his long life.

He spoke to me briefly about life in the trenches. One of the images that remained with me was his description of sanitary conditions for the troops. He told me that they would light a fire occasionally, when it was safe or possible. The fire served many purposes by warming chilled and fatigued bodies and heating food. It also functioned as a de-louser. The soldiers would remove their shirts and shake them over the heat of the fire or immerse them in clouds of smoke, in an attempt to remove the parasites that clung so easily to their huddled bodies.

Despite his harrowing experiences, my friend went on to marry and raise a family. He even played football with the lads when he was younger. He was allocated the role of ‘goalie’ and given the concession of being allowed to save with his outstretched crutches in place of diving. Swinging on his underarm sticks, he could serve a mighty kick to the ball on the ground and for this long kick-out he earned the nickname ‘poc’ or ‘pocan’. He was a strong man, made stronger by the constant use of his upper body as he pivoted on the crutches which helped him to adapt to the loss of his leg.

My friend was a very moral person. He set high standards for himself and carried himself with great dignity and character. He confessed to me though, that he once had told a lie and had never been found out. Like many others who headed for the recruitment centres of the time, he had lied about his true age. The recruiting people may have turned a blind eye to this deceit in their hunger for volunteers. It may also have been hard to tell the true age of a teenager who was tall and strong. Whatever the circumstances, it had a happy ending when my friend got his old-age pension at the age of sixty-three, two years earlier than he was entitled to. He did not protest!

Another resident of the town who used to work occasionally in the fields with my father spoke of the father whom he had never seen. He told us that his father was a sniper in the Great War. His story was told in a distant, unconnected manner as he recounted to his fascinated audience of children how his father had been shot in the branches of a tree from where he had been sniping. The story-teller seemed to think that it was somehow amusing that his soldier-father had climbed a tree, only to be shot dead for his trouble. ‘Imagine climbing a tree to be shot…’

There was also the troubling story of the local who had taken the “King’s Shilling” and enlisted. By accepting the shilling he had agreed by law to join up. He went off to spend his ‘earnest’ money and got drunk. In his inebriated state he began to regret what he had earlier done and promised. He fell to hatching a plan to extricate himself from his legal contract and decided on a brutal escape. He went home and fetched the small axe that was commonly used to chop sticks for the fire. He then placed his right index finger on the half-door and with one deadly swing he removed his trigger-finger and left himself useless as a combat-soldier.

The ‘No’ days of November

The ‘No’ days of November

I have never heard anyone refer to November as their favourite time of year. It is not a month that has obvious appeal. There is something transitional about this penultimate month. Maybe that is why we mark it primarily with rituals that remind us of the transience of life. It is too early to be thinking of Christmas and too late to attend to the tasks that are proper to autumn. There is little to do outside in the garden or in the fields other than wait for longer days in the New Year and dream of the joys of holiday-time. November is an in-between time; a ‘liminal’ or threshold time. This was expressed by the ancients in their belief that the membrane between this world and that of the spirits was especially thin around the seasonal marker that was known as Samhain.

The atmosphere evoked by a November landscape is one of melancholy. The fall of darkness in mid-afternoon presages the premature end that often blights the bright promises of daylight or of life itself. The greyness of November clouds as they hurry wind-blown across the sky suggests little in the way of silver lining. The thin, rising mists of morning and the dense fogs that refuse, for some time, to go away, throw blankets on our vision, turning our thoughts ever more inward, dampening our spirits and smothering our joy.

The landscape of November is one of rapid change. The stage-hands of nature busy themselves removing the props of autumn. A night of high wind and the back-drop of autumn leaf-art is swept into sheltered corners and piled up in compost heaps, leaving skeletal branches to face the winter unprotected. Those leaves that survive longest, fall like the last illusions of youth, inevitably, softly and for ever. Apple trees, burdened by their crop, brooding and bending like a woman in the last stages of pregnancy, give up their harvest to the fall and stand erect again as their wind-fallen fruit carpets the ground around to await the scavengers of winter.

The acoustics of November are muffled sounds on the ground and clear parting songs in the skies. The crunch of dry leaves underfoot or the snap of fallen twigs soon gives way to the squelch of mulched debris and dulled, mud-logged footsteps. If you are lucky or observant, you may see one of the defining images and hear one of the distinctive sounds of November; a formation of wild geese, honking their carefully choreographed way southward in perfect ‘V’ shape. As children we were told that if the geese happened to fly over a household, it forecast bad news. One member of the family would die that winter; the released spirit joining the migrating geese on the long journey to promised lands. Whatever about the folk-belief, the crisp sound of fallen leaves and the traffic of hurrying geese are warnings of cold days and nights ahead; of top-coat weather and of impending winter.

The sights and sounds of November combine as the bird-world congregates, on wires or in trees, in preparation for migration, or in bird-talk session, as they discuss season past and season present. The collective names given to these avian gatherings reflect the observations of centuries. A ‘parliament’ of rooks competes with a ‘murder’ of crows to caw and croak their complaints about bird-life and the ‘unkindness’ of raucous ravens that has gathered nearby.

The smell of rich autumn woodland in November carries within it the pregnant promise of continuity. Autumn-conceived mammals means spring-born cubs and calves with an optimum chance of survival as they face into next winter having grown strong through the summer. The rutting season has its own logic; the unchanging ways of life and of continuity. The smell of dampness is a November smell too. A freshly-flooded meadow gives off its cloying perfume in trapped droplets carried home on the back of unhurried cows as they head methodically to their parlour-stalls. In school cloakrooms, the rising steam from absorbent overcoats and caps seeps into the corridors and up the nostrils of vigilant teachers.

The thirty days of November are ‘no’ days. There is no warmth; no comfort; no sunshine or shade. There is no cheerfulness; no long days of abandon; no relaxation in the garden. There are no flowers; no delicate butterflies or buzzing, busy bees. There is no swelling fruit; no leaves unfolding; no messy births or hatching eggs. There is no shine – just sleety rain and flitting cloud and mushy snow. It is truly No-vember.

The reign of 'Good Pope John'

Fifty years ago on 28th October 1958, on the twelfth count, the Conclave to elect a Pope chose the man who has since come to be known throughout the Christian world as ‘good Pope John’ or ‘Il Papa Buona’. He took the name ‘John’, he explained because his father was called John and most Pope Johns in the history of the church had not had long pontificates. The name was a little controversial because the last pope called John XXIII had been an Anti-Pope. The new Pope was aware of all this for he had been a trained historian and a history teacher as a young priest.

He was born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo, in rural Italy in 1881. He was the fourth child in a family of fourteen. The domestic structure was that of an extended farming family. They made their meagre living by share-cropping. The future Pope was said to have remarked that their family was so poor that, ‘the children had no wine’. ‘There are three ways of ruining oneself’ he observed, ‘women, gambling and farming. My father chose the most boring’.

In his early days as a priest he had served as a Bishop’s secretary and as a teacher in the local seminary. During World War I he had been drafted into the Royal Italian Army as a sergeant, serving in the Medical Corps as a stretcher-bearer and as a chaplain. He put on the army uniform and, in what he later described as, ‘a moment of weakness on my part’, grew a fat, bristly moustache. After the war, in 1921, he was recalled to Rome, to work in a Curial Office. In 1925 he was consecrated Bishop and sent to Bulgaria as Apostolic Delegate. He took as his motto ‘Obedience and Peace’.

He later served in Turkey and Greece and in 1944 he was sent to Paris as a diplomat. 1953 saw him return home to Italy as Patriarch of Venice. A glimpse of the future Pope’s approach can be ascertained in an address he gave around that time. He said, ‘Authoritarianism suffocates truth, reducing everything to a rigid and empty formalism that is dependent on outside discipline. It curbs wholesome initiative, mistakes hardness for firmness, inflexibility for dignity. Paternalism is a caricature of true fatherliness. It is often accompanied by an unjustifiable proprietary attitude to one’s victim, a habit of intruding, a lack of proper respect for the rights of subordinates’.

Pope John XXIII was almost diametrically opposite in style, appearance and approach to his predecessor, the distant, ascetic Pope Pius XII who had appointed all but eleven of the cardinals who voted in his successor. Many people believed that John had been elected as a ‘papa di passagio’, a transitional pope. He was seventy-seven years old.

John XXIII’s personal warmth, his good humour and personal kindness captured the affection of countless people in a way his predecessor had failed to do. Once again he joked about his election to the papacy at such an advanced age. He was aware of the potential for cynical comment and exposure especially in the left-wing Italian press. He was a short man, overweight and heavy-featured, with a prominent, hooked Roman nose. He thought out loud saying that God surely knew from the beginning of time that he, John, would one day be Pope. Surely, he mused, ‘he could have made me a little more photogenic’. Despite these apparent physical drawbacks he became a media favourite because of his charism, his sense of humour and his exciting vision for the Church and for the world.

His sense of humour once led him to utter a famous reply when he was asked, ‘How many people work in the Vatican?’ ‘About half of them,’ he replied. He visited prisoners in a Roman gaol, telling them, ‘You could not come to me, so I came to you’. Another story told of how reporters descended on his bemused family following his election as Pope. One of his bachelor brothers looked unimpressed and a reporter asked him why he was so unexcited at his brother having been elected Pope. He replied that, in their part of the country, so many young men had become priests that it was, ‘bound to have happened sometime’. Good Pope John could also be emotional and tender in his dealings with crowds or with individual guests. Many recall his extraordinary capacity to establish an intimate relationship with tens of thousands without being mawkish. Once he asked the crowd in St. Peter's Square beneath his apartment window to take his caress home to their sleeping children.

Good Pope John could hardly have imagined the tide of change that has swept Europe and elsewhere since his election. He was part of that change but he was an unlikely liberal. His episcopal motto, ‘Obedience and Peace,’ does not suggest a radical outlook on life. What endeared him to people was his ability to receive them with grace and courtesy. Visitors often left his presence feeling that they were the important person rather than the Pope. He often greeted visitors saying, 'I am your brother Joseph' (Guiseppe was his second name). He was an eternal optimist too. His opening speech to the Second Vatican Council on October 11th 1962 contained the following pertinent words: ‘In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, nonetheless, the teacher of life. We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.’

The Van Gogh experience

When the infant child of Theodorus Van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853, he was given the name Vincent. It was a name that had been used in the family for several generations. His grandfather was called Vincent and he had an uncle called Vincent. As was traditional in Irish society at the time, the first-born son was called after his paternal grandfather. The name Vincent had, however, been given to a child that had been still-born, exactly a year before. It was not uncommon then, in Ireland, or apparently in the Netherlands, to re-use the names of children who had died as infants. Vincent’s family had a long tradition of artists and clergymen. His father was a Minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and he himself was to spend a period as a Church Minister in a poor mining district.

It has been told that Vincent’s still-born older brother was buried near to his father’s church and given a memorial stone. It read simply that here had been laid the body of Vincent Van Gogh. The story relates how Vincent used to pass by and read the stone with these or similar words carved on it every time he attended his father’s church. It apparently had a profoundly unsettling effect on the youthful Vincent. He inwardly shuddered as he read the stone-carved words that appeared to announce his fate. The experience of seeing one’s own name in such a context is sometimes called the ‘Van Gogh experience’.

I inherited my now late uncle’s name and I have only to go to Kilcurry graveyard to have my own Van Gogh experience and see my name on a gravestone. Recently, however, I had the pleasant experience of blessing a new extension to one of our local Primary Schools and part of the celebrations included the unveiling of a marble stone into which my name had been carved as having blessed the building. It was not an unsettling experience but I found it thought-provoking to think that someone had carved my name in such a permanent manner, and that I would see, each time I pass by it in the future.

These broody thoughts were perhaps provoked by the themes of the season. My priestly preoccupations this time of year revolve around the celebration of All Saints and All Souls Days and the celebration of Hallow-E’en that precedes them. November is remembrance time in the rhythm of the Church Year. Our festivals and rituals are not a morbid remembering but rather a wholesome way of dealing with the realities of transient life so that we can return to life with greater depth and intensity.

The turning back of the clock to ‘winter-time’ and the resulting darker evenings provide their own cue to such thoughts of transience. Outside, the first sting of frost and the drift of fallen leaves into sheltered corners are nature’s way of reminding us of the perennial cycle of life and death. The decay of another year is signalled by the dropping of nature-polished chestnuts, the frenetic acorn gathering of shy squirrels and the artistry of a leaf canopy painted from nature’s palette in shades of yellow, rust and ginger. At night, the spirits of Hallow E’en are chased away by the whistle and the sharp explosive sounds of fireworks.

Back inside the school building there were few such thoughts. The students went through their well-practiced paces with the exuberant joy of the very young. The most junior pupils looked on with a mixture of puzzlement and joy, even as they joined wholeheartedly in the singing, stopping occasionally to yawn or to throw themselves into some gesture of uninhibited participation. They were burdened neither with the weight of years nor with heavy thoughts as to what the future might hold for them. An invited guest confided in me that she found the scene deeply moving, making her want to cry both for joy in the present moment and in tearful anticipation of the realities of life that lay ahead of the children.

As we congregated around the tea and sticky-buns afterwards, the talk was of Recession and of re-structuring our expectations, individually and collectively. In the world of economics it seems that nothing is written in stone but rather in sand. A high tide can erase the carefully-constructed castles that we built in our summer days. A storm can wipe the slate clean of all traces of our plans and projections. It seemed as if we were imaginatively walking by a representation of our future prominently placed before our eyes in a manner that we could not avoid. We had our collective ‘Van Gogh experience’ and we too shuddered inwardly.

A question of riches

A question of riches

It was my first Halloween break from college. I had survived the first six weeks of term and now I was homebound. I fell into my previous routine and spent some of my time helping out in the family bar. It was a nervous time. The regulars did not know quite what to make of me. Could they curse in front of me like they used to do in such an unthinking way? Would I be the same person that they had known for the past six years as I served them drinks at all hours of the day and night? There was a lot of mutual sussing out to do.

At the end of a busy night my parents and I cleaned up the ‘shop’ as my late father insisted on calling it and we sat back to relax and discuss the day’s happenings. Eventually we got around to the subject of my new life as a seminarian in Maynooth. ‘So what are you learning’, I was asked. ‘Well’, I replied, “it’s a bit hard to explain”.

I told them that we were studying philosophy and by way of immediate explanation I said that one part of the course was called metaphysics. That required further explanation. ‘It’s the science of being as being’, I answered, repeating the stock, text-book definition. ‘What else do you study’, my father asked, hoping to move me off what was clearly incomprehensible to him. ‘We do history of philosophy as well,’ I added. On being questioned further as to the content of that, I told my parents that we were currently studying communism. ‘And I thought you went to Maynooth to learn how to say Mass,’ my father said, clearly confused by the strange ‘ologies’ that I was trying to explain to him and their relevance to my prospective life as a priest.

I had a bit of adjusting to do myself during that first term in Maynooth. Though I was clearly enjoying the experience of being at college and living away from home again, it had all been something of a surprise to me as it unfolded. I was astounded at first by the opportunities and the privileges that attending college brought. The amount of free time available to me as a student seemed outrageously generous at first. I had been used to working all hours and all seasons. In student life as I knew it then, I had a mere eighteen forty-minute lectures each week to attend and about six month’s holiday time throughout the year. I could not believe that people lived such charmed lives.

The philosophy that we studied as a prelude to the more religion-oriented theology of later years was certainly abstract at times but we had a very gifted teacher whose stated aim in life was to get us to think. He opened up our minds to questions and to possibilities that we had never entertained before. We were taught to ask questions and to think deeply about life as it manifested itself in the detail of our daily lives. After a few years of philosophy we graduated to theology. We began to study the scriptures and the laws of the church and the history of from where it had all emanated. It could be interesting, depending greatly on the particular teacher or lecturer, but it did not have the explosive power of the initial encounter with people and with theories that questioned everything to the point of absurdity and stripped life back to its bare meaning.

One of the effects of the current upheaval in the economic world is a return to questioning among the most affected. If securities can be so insecure and if banks, once considered solid and safe, are crashing like dominoes, then fundamental questions arise. Even religious ideas like the seven deadly sins get a mention occasionally as the effects of greed, corporate and individual, kick in. The uncertainty of life and of the material world has been highlighted by the sudden change from high economic growth to virtual stagnation. We appear to have gone from boom to bust in record time. The insecurity of it all has sent some people looking for answers to their questions and seeking security elsewhere.

The English poet Philip Larkin wrote a poem called ‘Church-going’. It tells of a visit he makes to a country church. He asks the question, ‘What remains when disbelief has gone?’ He speaks of a hunger within, for meaning and for purpose, that sometimes surfaces in times of crisis like this. The church, he says, is a serious place for serious subjects. It may even be considered, once again, as an alternative source of riches, not of the material kind. Meantime, Larkin writes, ‘It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is,/ In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,/ Are recognised, and robed as destinies./ And that much never can be obsolete,/ Since someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious,/ And gravitating with it to this ground,/ Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,/
If only that so many dead lie round’.

A County Louth Harvest morning

A County Louth Harvest morning

Driving across the harvest-shaved plains of Louth early one morning recently, my memories re-wound to another place and time when impressions of Autumn were first burnt on to the uncluttered tablet of my mind. The early-day mists were slowly lifting their veil, leaving beaded traces of their presence behind. A shock of whin-bushes on an uncultivated ditch wore white mantillas of finely-weaved cobwebs threaded with dew-drops. I was told at school by my fellow students that these morning dews were very powerful. One of their effects was that they could wash away freckles. I cupped my hands and caught a web-full of magic and smeared it all over my spotted face. The only thing that was washed away was my innocence. The morning vista, seen from the security of my car, appeared as an apparition of October past, a lost play-ground through which I once walked in rapt wonder.

Patrick Kavanagh was born in October 1904 and the month featured in some of his most finely-wrought images. In the epic poem called ‘The Great Hunger’, he spoke of October winds, ‘playing a symphony on a slack wire paling’. He associated the month with his father. What he wonderfully called ‘October-coloured weather’ seemed to remind him of the autumn of life as he had seen it unfold in the life of his late father. He wrote, ‘Every old man I see/ Reminds me of my father/ When he had fallen in love with death/ One time when sheaves were gathered./ That man I saw in Gardiner Street/ Stumble on the kerb was one,/ He stared at me half-eyed,/ I might have been his son./ And I remember the musician/ Faltering over his fiddle/ In Bayswater, London./ He too set me the riddle./ Every old man I see/ In October-coloured weather/ Seems to say to me/ I was once your father’.

As late as 1883, Pope Leo XIII started the practice of devoting the month of October to the Rosary. ‘The October Devotions’ became a fixture in the spiritual calendar especially for the rural Irish. For a few years, while we were still young and while my father was concentrating on farming rather than on life behind the bar, we used to say the Rosary in the evening time. We knelt on the oil-cloth covered floor with our elbows propped on about-turned, hard wooden chair-seats while our rosaries dangled underneath, teasing the kittens and amusing ourselves between ‘decades’. My father called the prayers with great speed, leaving no interval between the two stanzas of the Hail Mary/Holy Mary. It was the audio equivalent of a dog chasing its tail.

The prayer-baton was passed on from one to another with seamless contact as we took our turn, hoping that we would not forget the name of the ‘Mystery’; the number of prayers said and the text of the prayer. The beginning of the end was signalled by the recitation of the Litany of Loreto. This is a list of finely-crafted, poetic praise-names, titles and invocations to Our Lady. My father knew it off by heart. I was puzzled by the meaning of two of these invocations that happened to come one after the other. In my father’s verbal haste, ‘Mother most chaste’ sounded like ‘mother was chased’ and my childish, enquiring and shocked mind wondered why. ‘Mother inviolate’, the following invocation, was interpreted in the concrete imagery of childhood as ‘mother in violet’. Maybe, I thought, that’s why she was chased! Then there was the tail-end prayers or ‘trimmings’ as they were affectionately known. These were a set of ‘One Our Father and Three Hail Marys’, mostly for deceased relatives or for the contemporary concerns of the household. The ‘Hail Holy Queen’ wrapped up the prayer-package for the night.

What we lose in flowers during autumn, we gain in fruits and harvest. H. W. Beecher wrote, ‘October is nature’s funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming – October more than May. Every green thing loves to die in bright colours’. It was a month of conkers and sycamore seeds as I remember it. There was a belt of sycamore trees sheltering our farmhouse from the wind that blew in over the lake. We threw the winged seeds into the air and watched them fall, whirring like a helicopter with only one blade. Chestnut trees were uncommon so we valued them greatly and travelled to collect their polished fruit. With boyish bravado we notched up conquests until a beloved conker finally split and fell from its knotted cord. Nature’s spray of berries and seeds, fruits and nuts could afford to be generous.

All seeds cannot fall on fertile ground. Mellow autumn allows us to stock-take and to prepare. This is what autumn teaches as its flaming trees light up our way into darkness and winter cold.

When a bank goes burst

When a bank goes burst

On a cold Sunday morning, 16^th February, 1856, people passing along Hampstead Heath in London noticed a ‘well-dressed gentleman’ lying on a mound, as if asleep. This unusual sight in such a cold month excited curiosity in some of those passing by. Some people who moved closer noticed a small silver tankard that had fallen from his hand and lay nearby. A crowd soon gathered and the police were called as it became obvious that the ‘gentleman’ was quite dead. The police soon ascertained that he was an Irish Banker, John Sadlier. He had committed suicide. This was to prove not only a personal tragedy for the forty-something banker and his family but also for many thousands of Irish people as well.

John Sadlier was born near Tipperary Town in 1814. His family were wealthy by the standards of the time and place. He was apprenticed to a solicitor as a youth. He qualified and moved on to work in Dublin. Later, he moved to London and began a career as a parliamentary agent. Soon he began to try his luck in financial speculation. His initial success led him away from his chosen profession and he became a full-time banker. He returned to Tipperary and with his brother, he ran their highly successful ‘Joint-Stock Bank’. He appeared to have the Midas touch so farmers and smallholders from all over the area left their savings and dowries in the keeping of the trustworthy Sadlier’s Bank.

Banks make profits from taking in money and then lending it out at a greater interest than it pays out. Sadlier’s Bank took in lots of money but instead of lending it out to customers to finance the development of the farming industry, the bank found more exotic outlets for its loans. It invested in Italian, Swiss, Spanish and American railways and in many other ventures. On the reputation of the family bank and through his English contacts, John Sadlier was appointed Chairman of the London and County Joint-Stock Bank. Like many successful business and legal people, he set his eye on politics and was elected M.P. for Carlow in 1847. He later served as M.P. for Sligo. In 1852 he was one of more than fifty Irish Members who had been elected to the British Parliament, pledged to independent opposition, on a platform of support for the Tenant League. He also established a newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’, in Dublin in 1851 to put across his views to the public.

John Sadlier was a speculator and opportunist and when the prospect of a prestigious job as Junior Lord of the Treasury was offered to him, he defected to his political enemies along with a colleague called William Keogh and promptly made enemies of his erstwhile friends. In 1853 he lost a Court action taken against him by a Carlow elector who claimed that Sadlier had prevented him from recording his vote. Sadlier denied the charge but the jury gave the verdict to his accuser. He was forced to resign his post as Junior Lord of the Treasury. This was to be the turning point of his career.

He spent the next two years covering up from his former colleagues and acquaintances the trauma he was experiencing. It was during this time that he lost everything as his financial speculations went wrong and his political career hit the dust. Sadlier had been educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College. He was a solicitor, a politician, a newspaper proprietor and a defender of the Catholic Faith but above all he became a speculator in votes, land, railways and banks. He was, it seemed, a man of all talents. Ambition outweighed ability however, and Sadlier's disgrace as a politician and his failure as a speculator brought misery and shame to a great number of innocent people.

He tried to cover his tracks by forging shares in a Swedish Railway Company. He forged deeds of land that he was supposed to have acquired in Ireland. He forged cheques and other financial documents so successfully that no suspicion arose, yet, as to his true financial state. The end-game began when one wise investor checked out the deed of a supposed Irish property that had been given as security for a loan of ten thousand pounds. The house of cards began to collapse. Drafts from the Tipperary Joint-Stock Bank were initially not honoured in London but later they were again accepted. A troubled Sadlier brother, running the Bank back in Tipperary, telegrammed, ‘All right at all the branches. Only a few small things refused there. If from twenty to thirty thousand over here on Monday morning, all is safe.’ John Sadlier visited a Mr. Wilkinson in the City asking for help in his predicament. His financial friend had helped him before but this time the answer was in the negative. Sadlier’s reaction was to stride up and down the office pondering out loud on how, if the Tipperary Bank should fall, it would be his fault and it would be the ruination of thousands of people.

That night a distressed John Sadlier left his London home at midnight, telling his butler not to wait up for him. He took with him the small tankard that was found beside him the next morning, some knives and a phial of Prussic Acid. On Monday the news of his death reached Ireland. Country people stormed in to the towns, some armed with crowbars, picks and spades, thinking that if they could get in to the Branch Offices, they could recover their investments and hard-earned savings. Elderly people were confused and distressed. Some wept hysterically or prayed. The rich lost out too as Sadlier’s debts were revealed to be of the order of one and a quarter million pounds Sterling.

Though Sadlier had left intensely remorseful suicide notes reproaching himself for the ruin of others, he became notorious as the ‘prince of swindlers’. In his book, Manias, Panics and Crashes – a History of Financial Crises, Charles Kindleberger refers to John Sadlier as, ‘one of the greatest, if not the greatest, and at the same time the most successful swindler that any country has produced’. Sadlier’s story was to provide inspiration for Charles Dickens’ character, Mr Merdle in the novel called Little Dorrit.

This extraordinary story of the rise and fall of John Sadlier has its parallels in our own time of course. Its lessons on the fickleness of finance and of reputation and its commentary on the consequences and prevalence of corruption, greed and betrayal are remarkably contemporary, though it all came to head in Victorian Britain one hundred and fifty two years ago.

The power of example

The power of example

Ciaran was a good man. He was a very good man. In fact, he was so possessed of the ideal of goodness that, in the latter years of his teen-hood, he decided to become a priest. His goodness unsullied by the world, he made his unremarkable way through the priest-making factory until he eventually lost his name and became, to all but the initiated few, simply ‘Father’. He was protected from emotional upheaval by a gruff exterior; a shell from under which the soft-belly of his sensitive personality seldom emerged. He clothed himself in the spirit of the age and in the sartorial conventions of the time; black suit, black shoes; clerical stock or waistcoat and white, or in later years yellowing collar, around his bullish neck. It was as if he had been poured into his priestly outfit. He seldom emerged into public gaze without this protective scaffold. It was as if it kept him together. Even when he attended football matches, he kept protocol from under the sweaty, sometimes displaced, dog-collar that, in times of high excitement, swivelled under his swarthy chin and out of line with his Adam’s apple.

He was a good priest. An obedient priest. The people whom he served did not rave about how lovable he was but they recognised integrity and high standards. His manner was forthright and occasionally blunt. This was marked up to his credit when he confronted the British Army during his long tenancy in one of the North’s many cauldrons of conflict during the drawn-out and under-named ‘Troubles’.

Ciaran was never burdened with the clichéd label of ‘popular local curate’. He lived in the shadow of another who enjoyed such enthronement in the hearts of the people. He endured the domestic chaos and confusion that often accompany such a gift or charism and kept the parochial ship afloat at local level; balancing the deficiencies of a chaotic junior curate and an increasingly senile parish priest. His life became the living proof of the old adage that all professions are a conspiracy against the laity. If only they knew the human limitations with which he lived. His inner life and the domestic realities of his own existence often grated, but he allowed the friction to polish rather than to corrode.

Ciaran was a stiff character, after the mould of the age in which he was set. He did not allow alcohol to dissolve his reserve, but he mellowed in the warm glow of friendship. His holidays were taken with annual regularity among his class-fellows but the occasional lay-person was taken into his confidence, only if they had signed up, inadvertently or otherwise, to a set of Northern Catholic, middle-class values. He was self-deprecatory in humour but none the less insightful.

His clerical progress was snail-like but there was some evidence of a luminous trail. He endured the financial strain with the help of his ever-supporting family in the far North, while he hacked his way through the thickets of a more Southerly Ulster terrain.

He was a model of priestly life for me in my most impressionable years. The ‘youth priest’ or the ‘Father Trendies’ of those turbulent times meant little to me. I had skipped the usual teenage experience; going from junior seminary or boarding-school straight into the frenetic and multi-tasking world of commerce. Later as a student-priest I used to visit him in his new parish. He had acquired the requisite number of years of service and had been appointed, in late middle-age, to a part of the locality in which he had long worked and to which history had bequeathed the term ‘Lower’ during a division of parishes in the political past.

Ciaran was never of robust health, though he looked and sounded solid. He was given to a persistent chest complaint that shook him like an erupting volcano at times. He died as a relatively young man. The Bishop visited and preached at his funeral, referring to him as ‘Father Ciaran’ throughout. This struck me as somewhat false. He was not a first-name priest. Parishioners knew him and respected him as ‘Father Surname’ rather than by the first-name conventions of a later, more intimate age, into which he would not have fitted.

Before he died, he attended my ordination, little appreciating, and sadly less informed of the impact he had had on my slowly-emerging sense of self. He was invited to the post-ordination hooley and to the top-table, from which he gave a short and characteristically blunt, humorous and piercing speech. He told me simply, in the full gaze and hearing of an expectedly adoring public at an ordination that, if I lived long enough and behaved myself, that one day, like him, I might be considered worthy enough to be Parish Priest of that part of the once-united parish now known as ‘Lower’.

The pursuit of happiness

The pursuit of happiness

Money does not buy happiness, we are told, but as someone once added, ‘it helps finance the illusion’. Saint Paul reminded us in one of the most misquoted phrases of all time, that ‘love of money is the root of all evil’. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ as it has been phrased in the American constitution has always exercised the minds of humanity and lack of money and all that money can make available to us has commonly been seen as the chief barrier to happiness of life. The illusion is persistent. Money is equated with happiness. The message is that life is a lottery in which it ‘could be you’ and money could make you happy. People glibly speak of having, ‘a right to happiness’ often to cover up their own selfishness and the pain they cause to so many others in pursuing this bogus ‘right’. “As long as you’re happy” has become the mantra of justification for questionable behaviour of all kinds, even when that happiness is bought at the expense of so many others, especially fragile little ones.

We all know stories of individuals and families for whom money did not bring happiness. We have heard the stories of the ‘nouveau riche’, the recently wealthy, who make fools of themselves and bring only ridicule on themselves by their flashiness, shallowness and vulgarity. We have seen the effects of the ‘loads of money’ culture in the night-time faces of local lager louts and in the grainy footage of the security cameras that now necessarily sweep our streets for evidence of crime. The question of how we have been changed as a society by affluence or relative wealth remains to be properly investigated and adequately answered.

The Ireland of the middle decades of the last century has long been held up to ridicule. These social conditions from which we have so recently emerged have provided much fuel for critics, novelists, poets and playwrights. The society of that time has been held up to cruel scrutiny by a generation high on the righteousness that comes with hindsight. There is another side to the story of those times as a look at the crime statistics then and now reveals. Among other things, there existed a richness in the quality of community life back then which is conspicuously missing now. I wonder what judgement will history pass on our time of affluence, our biblical ‘seven years of plenty’ when it is held up to the light of judgement. These times of relative affluence, even as they appear to wane, are certainly preferable to times of poverty. As well as material benefits, many people now have a rich choice of work and career options. Nobody wants to go back to times of restriction and scarcity yet affluence often exacts a price and brings a poverty of a different kind in its wake.

Robert Service in his well known monologue, ‘Dangerous Dan Mc Grew’ has the hero speak of, ‘hunger not of the belly kind that’s banished by bacon and beans,/ but the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means’. The homeless of our own time and place are less likely to be those who do not have houses to live in but rather those who have lost a sense of what ‘home’ once meant. They are people whose lives have disintegrated because they have lost their families or whose families have lost them to the imprisonment of addictions of many kinds. Indeed, they may have the largest of houses or even a choice of houses and locations but no real sense of home.

We have been building and buying houses and neglecting to build homes. We are in pursuit of a happiness that remains elusive as a butterfly and find that we have captured a net full of stresses, anxieties and depression. Children often feel neglected by their busy parents, abandoned by their absent fathers, caught in the emotional crossfire of warring parents. ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Neighbours’ are more likely to be encountered on the television screen than at home or on the street. The luxury of innocence is missing from their upbringing. The symbolic and emotional richness of religious traditions that have been abandoned has not been substituted by anything meaningful, leaving a poverty of meaning and hope, a lack of direction or common purpose that sometimes leads to self-annihilation in suicide, a pollution by pornography and a crisis of identity which leads to fads and aberrations of many kinds.

Any society needs common beliefs, images and stories so as to hold together. Where each person insists on doing his or her own thing; claims everything as their right and nothing as their duty and blames everyone else for their failures, then society suffers. If the sickness which affects communities and society were diagnosed and tackled with the same vigour as the epidemic of Hospital bugs, for example, the results and the causes of the sick society might startle us. We can not continue to shift the responsibility for all that goes wrong in society on to government agencies, to teachers, social workers, nurses or others whose function it has become to pick up the pieces of our often crumbling communities. If we want the right to choose, then we ought to pay for our choices by taking personal responsibility for the effects of bad behaviour and for the fall-out from a consumer culture that ironically may result in eating us up.

Richness and poverty are not only measured in Euro or Dollars. Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as one who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nothing grows forever and as the economic growth of our time comes to a slow-down we may have only our cultural, community and spiritual resources to fall back on. Like business, we need to diversify to survive; to cultivate wealth that is not of a monetary kind if we are to find an approximation of happiness; a society that holds together and an affluence that is truly sustainable. We often say that our health is our wealth. A healthy community is a not inconsiderable form of wealth too.

It’s a funny old world

It’s a funny old world

The English writer G. K. Chesterton is often credited with the insight that people who stop believing in God do not cease to believe. Take away the supernatural and what you get is the unnatural. He wrote to the effect that those who no longer believe in something usually end up believing in anything and tolerating just about everything. He was speaking from experience as he had dabbled in the occult as a young man before settling into orthodox Christianity. Tolerance, he claimed, is the virtue of those who do not believe anything.

On browsing the bookshelves marked Self-Help in local bookstores, any observer can get a sample of the latest, most faddish therapies or the most popular gurus of the moment. It is curious that as some people have abandoned regular church-going and the practice of pious devotions, sales of candles have increased. As churches abandoned real wax candles for the fake, push-button, electrical variety, many people have turned their window-sills and shelves into veritable candle-racks. The use of candles, incense sticks and aromatic oils has made some homes look and smell like the local chapel following Sunday evening Benediction.

A glance through the columns of a local newspaper will assure you that superstitions of all kinds and magic incantations that are to be said ritually, are still alive, thriving in the spiritual vacuum. Some gullible people put their trust in lucky numbers to win the Lotto for them, just as others pay out good money to fortune tellers in a bid to put shape on their uncertain future. Even the ghosts of darker days have not quite gone away. Priests are regularly called to ‘bless the house for me sometime’ because the occupants are experiencing some kind of uncomfortable presence. It reminds me of the Connemara woman who replied to an anthropologist interviewer that she did not believe in fairies. She went on to add that just because she did not believe in them did not mean that ‘they aren’t there’.

Though heaven and hell have largely disappeared from the public consciousness, beginning way back in the 1960s, according to another English writer, David Lodge, the convicted criminals that tabloid newspapers love to parade are often consigned to ‘rot in hell’ by irate and presumably largely unbelieving readers. We have ‘neighbours from hell’ to remind us that hell can begin on earth and ‘holidays from hell’ to remind us that expectations of ‘paradise’ do not always live up to their glossy-brochured promises. The inheritance of Paradise as a reward for a life well lived has been replaced by the prospect of an expensive fortnight in Paradise Hotel or on Paradise Island in the present, as soon as the holidays can be lined up. The all-knowing Internet offers no less than twenty million ‘hits’ or pages of information that link the words paradise and holiday in their promotional material. The really virtuous, the supremely talented or the super-rich can perhaps look forward to a holiday home there or to retirement in such an earthly Eden. The reality seldom lives up to the promotional hype and the nearest we get to an earthly paradise is often found nearer home.

The drama of final judgement or saving one’s soul no longer troubles even the most sensitive of minds yet our society has never been more condemnatory or judgemental. We have high-cost tribunals that run for decades and investigative journalists shining the glaring light of judgement on every aspect of an offender’s life. We are encouraged to be non-judgemental in our approach to the trials and difficulties of life, even as so many people slump in front of ‘Reality Television’ and use their mobile telephones to pass sentence and judgement on the self-worshipping participants. The thumb signal that once determined the fate of Roman gladiators now determines the fate of those who take to the public stage, not with a traditional thumbs-down sign but with the button-depressing mechanics of text messaging.

Relics of the saints have been replaced by show business or football memorabilia as contact is sought with the alternative gods of celebrity culture. There is no shortage of adoring followers who are willing to paint, pierce or parade themselves in the team colours or with the logo of the sect. If you get tired of offering adulation to others, then you will be counselled to believe in yourself and all things will become possible. As Margaret, Lady Thatcher said wistfully on her unwilling way out of Downing Street and high office, “It’s a funny old world”.

The pursuit of happiness

The pursuit of happiness

Money does not buy happiness, we are told, but as someone once added, ‘it helps finance the illusion’. Saint Paul reminded us in one of the most misquoted phrases of all time, that ‘love of money is the root of all evil’. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ as it has been phrased in the American constitution has always exercised the minds of humanity and lack of money and all that money can make available to us has commonly been seen as the chief barrier to happiness of life. The illusion is persistent. Money is equated with happiness. The message is that life is a lottery in which it ‘could be you’ and money could make you happy. People glibly speak of having, ‘a right to happiness’ often to cover up their own selfishness and the pain they cause to so many others in pursuing this bogus ‘right’. “As long as you’re happy” has become the mantra of justification for questionable behaviour of all kinds, even when that happiness is bought at the expense of so many others, especially fragile little ones.

We all know stories of individuals and families for whom money did not bring happiness. We have heard the stories of the ‘nouveau riche’, the recently wealthy, who make fools of themselves and bring only ridicule on themselves by their flashiness, shallowness and vulgarity. We have seen the effects of the ‘loads of money’ culture in the night-time faces of local lager louts and in the grainy footage of the security cameras that now necessarily sweep our streets for evidence of crime. The question of how we have been changed as a society by affluence or relative wealth remains to be properly investigated and adequately answered.

The Ireland of the middle decades of the last century has long been held up to ridicule. These social conditions from which we have so recently emerged have provided much fuel for critics, novelists, poets and playwrights. The society of that time has been held up to cruel scrutiny by a generation high on the righteousness that comes with hindsight. There is another side to the story of those times as a look at the crime statistics then and now reveals. Among other things, there existed a richness in the quality of community life back then which is conspicuously missing now. I wonder what judgement will history pass on our time of affluence, our biblical ‘seven years of plenty’ when it is held up to the light of judgement. These times of relative affluence, even as they appear to wane, are certainly preferable to times of poverty. As well as material benefits, many people now have a rich choice of work and career options. Nobody wants to go back to times of restriction and scarcity yet affluence often exacts a price and brings a poverty of a different kind in its wake.

Robert Service in his well known monologue, ‘Dangerous Dan Mc Grew’ has the hero speak of, ‘hunger not of the belly kind that’s banished by bacon and beans,/ but the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means’. The homeless of our own time and place are less likely to be those who do not have houses to live in but rather those who have lost a sense of what ‘home’ once meant. They are people whose lives have disintegrated because they have lost their families or whose families have lost them to the imprisonment of addictions of many kinds. Indeed, they may have the largest of houses or even a choice of houses and locations but no real sense of home.

We have been building and buying houses and neglecting to build homes. We are in pursuit of a happiness that remains elusive as a butterfly and find that we have captured a net full of stresses, anxieties and depression. Children often feel neglected by their busy parents, abandoned by their absent fathers, caught in the emotional crossfire of warring parents. ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Neighbours’ are more likely to be encountered on the television screen than at home or on the street. The luxury of innocence is missing from their upbringing. The symbolic and emotional richness of religious traditions that have been abandoned has not been substituted by anything meaningful, leaving a poverty of meaning and hope, a lack of direction or common purpose that sometimes leads to self-annihilation in suicide, a pollution by pornography and a crisis of identity which leads to fads and aberrations of many kinds.

Any society needs common beliefs, images and stories so as to hold together. Where each person insists on doing his or her own thing; claims everything as their right and nothing as their duty and blames everyone else for their failures, then society suffers. If the sickness which affects communities and society were diagnosed and tackled with the same vigour as the epidemic of Hospital bugs, for example, the results and the causes of the sick society might startle us. We can not continue to shift the responsibility for all that goes wrong in society on to government agencies, to teachers, social workers, nurses or others whose function it has become to pick up the pieces of our often crumbling communities. If we want the right to choose, then we ought to pay for our choices by taking personal responsibility for the effects of bad behaviour and for the fall-out from a consumer culture that ironically may result in eating us up.

Richness and poverty are not only measured in Euro or Dollars. Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as one who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nothing grows forever and as the economic growth of our time comes to a slow-down we may have only our cultural, community and spiritual resources to fall back on. Like business, we need to diversify to survive; to cultivate wealth that is not of a monetary kind if we are to find an approximation of happiness; a society that holds together and an affluence that is truly sustainable. We often say that our health is our wealth. A healthy community is a not inconsiderable form of wealth too.

Content to be solitary

Sir Thomas More, now a canonised Saint, spent the last months of his life imprisoned in the Tower of London. His adult life had been spent immersed in the affairs of the world. It was an affair of a different kind that led him to famously clash with his master, King Henry VIII, on a matter of conscience. As a prisoner, he made good use of his time preparing for the inevitable, for he was other-worldly too. In a ‘Godly Meditation’ written while he was a prisoner in the Tower in 1534, he wrote, ‘Give me the grace, good God, to set the world at naught; to set my mind fast upon thee and not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths; to be content to be solitary; not to long for worldly company; little and little utterly to cast off the world and rid my mind of all the business thereof; not to hear of any worldly things but that the hearing of worldly phantasies may be to me displeasant’.

With these sentiments in mind I took off recently for my annual retreat from the ‘business’ and ‘phantasies’ of the world. I am generally content to be solitary but it is much easier to enjoy the solitary life when the surroundings are different, pleasant and stimulating. For that reason, I took myself out from under the ever-present blanket of cloud that is the Irish sky this summer and I holed-up on the side of a mountain in Austria. The ‘Sound of Music’ scenery, the long walks and the opportunities for exercise made the likelihood of getting ‘cabin-fever’ a little less. The prospect of even a little sunshine lifted the veil from my heart.

I took a room with a small balcony within which I could try to escape “the blast of men’s mouths”. These quarters became my ‘cell’ for the week. As wise old Abba Moses told his monks, ‘when you remain alone and in quiet, your cell will teach you everything’. My balcony, about two metres by one metre, was carpeted with artificial ‘graveyard’ grass; an unintentional reminder of mortality.

The grass on the slopes of the needle-sharp mountains is the ‘real thing’ and this time of year, it is being harvested as hay for winter fodder. This harvest-time is marked by community celebrations in which even the tractors go in procession, decked out and decorated with garlands and ribbons. The mountains dominate everything in the valley, including, it seems, the architecture and even everyday artefacts. The houses are tall and steep-roofed, and make good use of the wood from the pointed, tall pine trees in the local forests. The church steeple is one of the tallest, finest, thinnest steeples I have ever seen; Even the beer-glasses are tall and fine. The valley is a little like an outdoor Gothic cathedral, drawing the eye ever upward and skyward, if you can take your gaze off the window-boxes and overhanging profusions of flowers.

At ten to nine in the morning, the sun has climbed a mountain-side and makes its triumphant appearance over the summit on the Eastern skyline. The psalm that I am reading from my Breviary describes the sun, in a most memorable image, as, ‘coming forth like a bridegroom coming from his tent’. The clouds give way eventually and the mist patches dissolve. Looking out from the side of the valley, it is possible for a while to see clouds above and below; to live with one’s head in the clouds; to shake hands with a passing cotton-wool cumulus. The bells of the local Catholic Church ring out a rhythm to the day and from its ancient tower, they call attention to its timeless, tabernacled, tenant. In my cell I have established a pattern to the day; a routine that helps one day roll into another. This is a neat and ordered environment, conducive to putting shape on the dis-ordered interior life. Mornings are for matters of the mind; afternoons for exercise and exploration and evenings are for rest and absorption. I have managed to make my usual world ‘go away’ and I remain ‘content to be solitary’ in a strange place.

It is a different world and a long time to that of London Tower in 1534 and the circumstances in which More found himself. The only constant is the struggle of the human heart to replace the phantasies of fallen human nature with something better, something more redeemed. In another meditation, written around the same time called ‘A Devout Prayer’, Sir Thomas used an image that had become ever too familiar to him. He prayed that his ‘lukewarm fashion or rather key-cold manner of meditation’ might be replaced by ‘warmth, delight and quickness’ of spirit. His involuntary retreat from the world and the wisdom of his cell had clarified for him the inner dispositions or ‘minds’ that were most to be desired; ‘more’, he said, ‘to be treasured’ than all ‘the treasure of princes and kings’… ‘were it gathered and laid together all upon one heap’.

Getting to know you

In 1992 I began a course of study in Dublin that lasted three years. As with many life-events I did not expect the path of my existence to be changed by it. The course was a challenging one that involved staying and studying in Dublin for three summers and travelling to seminars twice a week there for the three-year duration. It has been said that friendships formed in adversity are strengthened by common experience and struggle. Time takes its toll on all friendships but I have remained in close contact with one of my friends from those days. Out of the dozen or so participants in the course, I became close to one of the group who was introduced to me as Hyacinth.

Hyacinth turned out to be male and African. In the course of our friendship we have discussed many differences and some similarities in our cultures and experiences. As the years went by and we resumed our usual duties as priests in our respective settings, I came to know some of his colleagues and more recently, his family. About ten years ago we began an arrangement that allowed a priest from his group to study in Dublin for a two-year spell and work alongside Irish priests including myself. Over the intervening years, six priests have spent time living and working in an Irish parish setting. We have shared a house; cooperated in pastoral assignments; discussed the ways of the world over many meals and began to see the same world through each other’s eyes.

There were periods of adjustment for both of us. The African ‘brothers’ had to adjust to the Irish weather and to the seasonal and erratic nature of our climate. The ‘rainy season’ in Ireland lasts rather longer than in Africa. Our ways of communicating can often differ considerably. The Nigerians, in this case, are given to up-front, direct statement. The Irish are known historically for giftedness with language, to the point where it is hard to pin down what exactly we are saying - or omitting. There is also the occasional problem of local usage, slang and accent. Hiberno-English is a very different language from the English of the text-book. ‘No bother’ needs translation just as much as the African, ‘no, please, thank-you’. I have had to learn the difference between ‘lettuce’ and ‘letters’ in African pronunciation and to cut out colloquial expressions that could be potentially misleading, like saying ‘this weather’ when I mean ‘now’.

The liturgy and pastoral practice of the Irish are foreign to our visitors despite the genesis of their faith in the work of Irish missionaries. The contemporary Western disdain for religion and embarrassment in its practice is in sharp contrast with the unashamedly religious outlook of other generations of our own and of the present populations of other parts and religions of our world. Gaelic sports need some explanation to nations that have been reared on soccer as does our Irish preoccupation with English League Football and our simultaneous disdain for the English National team. The central place of alcohol in our diet and in our social life is not shared by most Africans. Our villages are often centred on pubs while their social life revolves around the ties of family and community and the mutual obligations that bind them. Mobile telephones could have been invented for Nigerians. The constant need for connectedness and networking leaves them vulnerable to the charms of telecommunications companies.

‘The white man has the watch and the African has time’. Time is elastic for many of the Nigerians that I have worked with. It’s not an unusual trait to find that time and precision are mutual opposites in some people’s minds. It is only noteworthy when it affects everybody in an ethnic group. Our own more senior country relatives thought not in hours or days but in seasons. Contemporary western living has taught us the value of efficiency and productivity and we have collectively become time-conscious to a degree that can be unsettling. There is something of a parting of the ways between the Western mindset and that of the African, or those of developing continents, when it comes to how we use our time. The modern mindset of constant self-critical analysis; the search for excellence and best practice that we associate with the West are often lost on other cultures.

The foreign priests I have worked with see and deplore our waste and extravagance. They decry the growing coarseness of our culture and the neglect of community and family responsibilities. At worst, immigrants from other cultures treat the West as a giant honey-pot from which they can draw at will. This can have the effect of inciting resentment when a people’s hospitality is thought to be abused or when their generosity or credulity is stretched. Overall, however, I found that the non-nationals I met and worked with have been honourable and responsible. As we shared the experiences of growing up in our respective cultures it became apparent to me that many of the same social dynamics occur in all traditional societies. There is obviously much more that unites us than divides us. Issues around immigration, development aid and political malpractice will always be problematic for societies that are affected. The way forward is not one of insult or exclusion but of carefully and respectfully regulated mutual relations.

Getting to know you

Getting to know you

In 1992 I began a course of study in Dublin that lasted three years. As with many life-events I did not expect the path of my existence to be changed by it. The course was a challenging one that involved staying and studying in Dublin for three summers and travelling to seminars twice a week there for the three-year duration. It has been said that friendships formed in adversity are strengthened by common experience and struggle. Time takes its toll on all friendships but I have remained in close contact with one of my friends from those days. Out of the dozen or so participants in the course, I became close to one of the group who was introduced to me as Hyacinth.

Hyacinth turned out to be male and African. In the course of our friendship we have discussed many differences and some similarities in our cultures and experiences. As the years went by and we resumed our usual duties as priests in our respective settings, I came to know some of his colleagues and more recently, his family. About ten years ago we began an arrangement that allowed a priest from his group to study in Dublin for a two-year spell and work alongside Irish priests including myself. Over the intervening years, six priests have spent time living and working in an Irish parish setting. We have shared a house; cooperated in pastoral assignments; discussed the ways of the world over many meals and began to see the same world through each other’s eyes.

There were periods of adjustment for both of us. The African ‘brothers’ had to adjust to the Irish weather and to the seasonal and erratic nature of our climate. The ‘rainy season’ in Ireland lasts rather longer than in Africa. Our ways of communicating can often differ considerably. The Nigerians, in this case, are given to up-front, direct statement. The Irish are known historically for giftedness with language, to the point where it is hard to pin down what exactly we are saying - or omitting. There is also the occasional problem of local usage, slang and accent. Hiberno-English is a very different language from the English of the text-book. ‘No bother’ needs translation just as much as the African, ‘no, please, thank-you’. I have had to learn the difference between ‘lettuce’ and ‘letters’ in African pronunciation and to cut out colloquial expressions that could be potentially misleading, like saying ‘this weather’ when I mean ‘now’.

The liturgy and pastoral practice of the Irish are foreign to our visitors despite the genesis of their faith in the work of Irish missionaries. The contemporary Western disdain for religion and embarrassment in its practice is in sharp contrast with the unashamedly religious outlook of other generations of our own and of the present populations of other parts and religions of our world. Gaelic sports need some explanation to nations that have been reared on soccer as does our Irish preoccupation with English League Football and our simultaneous disdain for the English National team. The central place of alcohol in our diet and in our social life is not shared by most Africans. Our villages are often centred on pubs while their social life revolves around the ties of family and community and the mutual obligations that bind them. Mobile telephones could have been invented for Nigerians. The constant need for connectedness and networking leaves them vulnerable to the charms of telecommunications companies.

‘The white man has the watch and the African has time’. Time is elastic for many of the Nigerians that I have worked with. It’s not an unusual trait to find that time and precision are mutual opposites in some people’s minds. It is only noteworthy when it affects everybody in an ethnic group. Our own more senior country relatives thought not in hours or days but in seasons. Contemporary western living has taught us the value of efficiency and productivity and we have collectively become time-conscious to a degree that can be unsettling. There is something of a parting of the ways between the Western mindset and that of the African, or those of developing continents, when it comes to how we use our time. The modern mindset of constant self-critical analysis; the search for excellence and best practice that we associate with the West are often lost on other cultures.

The foreign priests I have worked with see and deplore our waste and extravagance. They decry the growing coarseness of our culture and the neglect of community and family responsibilities. At worst, immigrants from other cultures treat the West as a giant honey-pot from which they can draw at will. This can have the effect of inciting resentment when a people’s hospitality is thought to be abused or when their generosity or credulity is stretched.

Overall, however, I found that the non-nationals I met and worked with have been honourable and responsible. As we shared the experiences of growing up in our respective cultures it became apparent to me that many of the same social dynamics occur in all traditional societies. There is obviously much more that unites us than divides us. Issues around immigration, development aid and political malpractice will always be problematic for societies that are affected. The way forward is not one of insult or exclusion but of carefully and respectfully regulated mutual relations.

Good-Bye good men and women

Good-Bye good men and women

Many Irish people grew up with ‘Africa’ magazine as the only glossy publication in the house. It used to be said that the spittle-wetted cover of ‘The Sacred Heart Messenger’ was used in times of scarcity as a source of alternative lipstick but it was no competitor to ‘Africa’ or to ‘The Far East’ for coverage of exotic places and happenings. The latter magazine is the publication of the Columban Fathers. Africa did not seem quite as far off as the ‘Far’ east and though we were not familiar with fellow Africans or with their various cultures, we felt allied to them somehow through the work and stories of our missionaries and through our regular penny-drops into the mite-box at school. ‘Darkest’ Africa was a whole new world and we were to the forefront in developing it.

Legions of Irish sisters, priests and brothers offered their lives in the service of the ‘missions’ up to and during the middle decades of the last century. It was an option for every educated and serious young Catholic at the time. Little Ireland was taking on the world, determined to share its faith and its enthusiasm for spreading that faith. We even took on the conversion of colossal China, through the early work of the Columban Fathers, while they were still known as ‘The Maynooth Mission to China’.

I took a walk today through the demesne of the Saint Patrick’s Missionary Society, as the Kiltegan priests are formally known. Its Irish headquarters or mother-house is located in a very beautiful, secluded rural setting in County Wicklow, near the eponymous village of Kiltegan. My guide told me that it was once the home of a very rich Member of Parliament. It later passed into the hands of a wealthy tea-merchant from Newry, John Hughes, who donated it to the fledgling Society. It is currently a busy complex of buildings from which the Society is administered and to which some elderly missionaries return.

My mission to Kiltegan was to bring some visitors from Africa; two Nigerian priests who had trained or worked alongside the now ailing Missionary Father whom we proposed to visit. His illness has made him obviously weak yet he was strong enough to engage us in a long discussion on the state of the church and the world, to listen to the latest news from Nigeria and to guide us around the complex.

We began in the dining area where a table had been thoughtfully marked ‘Reserved’ for us. The buildings in this area are light-filled, airy and spacious but the apparatus of institutional life somehow invades. We drank soup from metal soup-dishes and scraped butter from our individually wrapped butter-pieces onto our spuds. Memories of past institutions and of washed-up canteen-food flooded in.

Afterwards we took a walk to the community graveyard. It is a simple area with rows of military-style, small crosses marking the graves of fallen comrades. I joked about graveyards being full of ‘indispensable’ people but I could not dispel the chill that pervades cemeteries, even on a summer afternoon. My guide wanted to introduce me to each of the characters interred in their same-size plots and to the life-stories that brought their paths to cross in far-flung places. Silently I wondered what it must be like to walk a graveyard that awaits you or to be living on borrowed time. It used to be said that an unexpected shiver was the result of someone walking on your prospective grave. I shivered for my friend as we passed the next available plot.

Along the way we met other people whom we knew or with whom we had mutual acquaintances. Ireland is a land of connectedness and it is that inter-relationship of peoples that is most comforting to return to. My friend knew that he would not be returning to the active life that he once knew or to the culture in which he had immersed himself in Africa. Even parting with him after a short stay became poignant. There was an inevitable air of finality about our leave-taking. How do you say goodbye to a man who is slowly saying goodbye to the world?

There is the added sadness for these men in the student-empty seminary buildings that once buzzed with activity and idealistic young life. The centre of activity has moved continent now and the Society has taken the decision to admit African students. A few have been ordained already and there are many in the training process. The spirit has blown ‘where it wills’ and the Irish valleys bear no vocational fruit these days. The harvest is elsewhere and the labourers are no longer overwhelmingly European. Irish missionaries, with the influence and goodwill that they generated for us across the globe are a disappearing brand. The loss is our