BELFAST (NORTHERN IRELAND)
Belfast Telegraph
March 17, 2018
By Alf McCreary
This is St Patrick’s Day, and one hopes that people will celebrate wisely rather than too well. It is a sad irony that some of the greatest drunkenness and disorder from students takes place in what we call the “Holy Land” area of Belfast.
There is nothing holy about such self-indulgent behaviour, or about the blatantly sectarian way in which St Patrick has been hijacked by some die-hard republicans on the edges of the various parades.
St Patrick is the patron saint of Protestants as well, and hard-line republicans who use the Irish flag in the name of St Patrick ought to remember that. So much for Sinn Fein’s hollow mantra about “respect.”
St Patrick, that austere, godly and lovable fifth-century saint, would be distressed by the deep divisions in our society today, and he would be particularly saddened by the shadow which hangs over one major denomination of the Christian Church he established in Ireland so long ago.
He might also be distressed by the secularisation of society, but he would be most deeply hurt by the continued scandal of clerical child sex abuse in the Catholic Church.
This has surfaced again recently with the revelations of the evil and heinous abuse by the paedophile Newry priest Fr Malachy Finnegan on Church premises in the Dromore Diocese and in St Colman’s College where he had been a teacher and, for 11 years, the President.
This scandal only became public recently after it emerged that the diocese had paid a six-figure sum in compensation to one of the abuse victims.
One bizarre aspect was that the tombstone of Fr Finnegan, who died in 2002, was removed from the graveyard under the cover of darkness. This reads like something out of a lurid Dracula novel rather than as disturbing and real facts of only a couple of months ago.
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