Government loses face over Vatican and we lose faith

IRELAND
Irish Examiner

By Shaun Connolly

Saturday, February 18, 2012

GOD-hating, priest-baiting, loony leftie Eamon Gilmore secured a key plank of his evil secular masterplan to make us a nation of pagans by shutting down the Vatican embassy.

Except, of course, he didn’t. He made a perfectly sensible decision, but his big mistake was to lose control of the narrative surrounding it — which is always deadly dangerous in politics.

And so the agenda was driven, not by Gilmore, but by the religious right, who portrayed the move as a direct attack on their faith, and by hardcore liberals who saw it as a totemic victory against an old enemy.

Labour’s amateur-hour media presentation added to the confusion, with muddles over costings and when the Vatican was, or was not, added to the embassy hit list — so the overriding impression was left in many people’s minds that we have broken off diplomatic relations with the Vatican City State and are now at war with them.

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