 |
Colm O'Gorman - 'One in Four' Victim Group and Amnesty International |
[I highlight a photo of Colm O'Gorman because of his role as founder of one of Ireland's largest Victim groups 'One in Four', his present position as head of Amnesty Ireland and, not least, his statement in March 2006 that false allegations of child abuse against Catholic priests did not constitute a problem!]
The following is a extract from a discussion on the Spiked-online website in December 2015 that followed an article by Mike Hume entitled "The Year We Forgot What Free Speech Means". I am concentrating on a debate between myself [Kilbarry1 AKA Rory Connor] and an Australian Jack Richards. The debate ranges over the meaning of human nature, the colonisation of Australia, the Aboriginals and "White Guilt", Social Darwinism, Islam, Christianity and Humanism - and of course the role of the Catholic Church!
I start with a quote from Jack Richards directed at another participant, humanist Carl Barjer:
"Homo sapiens are animals, very clever animals who can make telephones, computers and rockets, but animals none the less. All animals herd with their own, mark out their territories and defend them, they protect their own gene pool, and as Muslims clearly demonstrate, hide their women away like precious possessions so they won’t be tainted by the blood of other tribes. Only complete fools like you, blinded by idealistic and ridiculous ideologies, believe that the lion will lie down with the lamb and we can all be one big happy family of “humanity”. That’s just such rotten bullshit and dangerous bullshit. Every pack has its dominant male and female and a pecking order and if you aren’t prepared to fight, lie and steal for yours you’ll get nothing. And that’s exactly what you’ll deserve."
This is Social Darwinism (although I don't think the term was used in the discussion) and it's not something I would normally sympathise with. However faced with the kind of leaders we have today in both Church and State, it's an ideology that I can at least understand!
Another unkind comment from Jack Richards follows regarding Australian Aboriginals:
"Everything in this country was built by whites: every road, railway, farm, bridge, house, dock, drain, power grid, airport, mill, factory every last endeavour of every kind. The Aborigine have contributed nothing. They are virtually unemployable and are a huge and costly burden on society. In 1990 there was a paper on what they cost us over and above the welfare available to all Australians. That was 25 years ago and between Federal, State and Local Aboriginal specific programs we were spending an extra $41,000 p.a. per person. I know that paper well - I wrote it and did the research when I worked for a then Federal Cabinet Minister."
Debate with Jack Richards on Spiked-Online website
I replied to him as follows (December 2015)Kilbarry1: First reply to Jack Richards
I agree with a lot of what you say, while being dubious about the way you say it - but then I wouldn't describe myself as a "dominant" male. For an example of the way a community can self-destruct by adopting a lunatic variety of idealism, see my article on the decadence of the Irish Sisters of Mercy
The Sisters responded to bogus allegations of child abuse (including child murder) by apologising to the false accusers on the basis that they must have suffered great pain in order to make them say such things. The apology was supposed to "heal the pain" but surprisingly it didn't - even after the Sisters repeated it on numerous occasions. After they paid £20,000 to the parents of a child who died decades before, the parents accused a nun of murdering the baby by burning holes in its legs with a red hot poker. Try Googling the newspaper headline:
"HOT POKER WAS USED ON LITTLE MARION.. NO CASH WILL GET HER BACK; I THINK MY BABY WAS MURDERED AT THE ORPHANAGE, SAYS PAYOUT MUM."
The present position is that the Merciful Sisters blame the Irish Bishops for their problems. Their rationale may be that the Bishops made some (albeit inadequate) efforts to defend themselves - including a couple of successful libel actions against false accusers.
Jack Richards: First reply to Kilbarry1
I once read that the number of Irish children who were molested by the Catholic Clergy in Ireland actually out-number those who were not.
Is there anyone in this world who is not an hereditary victim? Before about 1975 no-one believed that victimhood could be inherited - but indeed it can.
My whole life has been miserable and agonising because of my inherited victimhood - and so far I haven't received a cent in compensation nor an official apology from the British Government! Bastards!
You see I am the direct descendant of 10 Convicts transported to New South Wales. I'll forget about most of them who were just English thieves - even though one was a 14 year-old boy sentenced to death, along with his mother, for burglary in 1786 in Somerset. They hanged her but he received a reprieve and just got 14 years transportation. He spent 2 years on a hulk in Portsmouth Harbour and then shipped out on the "Neptune" with the Second Fleet in 1789. When it arrived in Sydney over a third of the convicts had died from mistreatment and starvation.
But my real claim to victimhood dates from 1803 when Mick and Kathleen arrived in chains from Cork, Ireland. They'd taken part in the uprising of the "United Irishmen" and were thrown into the dungeons of Dublin Castle. They both got 7 years and their crime was "Taking an Illegal Oath".
The British Government robbed me of my heritage, my culture, my language and all my relatives! I've never gotten over it!
I often think that if it hadn't been for the stinking British invaders of Ireland and their barbarism I'd be sitting in O'Reilly's Pub in Cork, drinking Guinness, singing laments in Gaelic, dancing without moving my arms and saying "to be sure to be sure" in a broad Irish brogue.
Instead of that luxury, here I am on the other side of the world enduring an Australian summer a few hours drive from the white-sand beaches on the Pacific Coast and being forced to drink Carlton at the local Pub and listen to Country and Western music on the juke-box and suffer all the horrors of living on a huge island full of useless stuff like all those Herefords grazing my paddocks, the iron, coal, gold, silver, copper, uranium, lead, bauxite etc and living in a country that rates only 2nd the UN's Human Development Index.
I think the British Government should compensate me for the huge personal and cultural losses my family has endured.
Kilbarry1: Second reply to Jack Richards
"I once read that the number of Irish children who were molested by the Catholic Clergy in Ireland actually out-number those who were not.
Is there anyone in this world who is not an hereditary victim? ..."
The reason you heard that is probably because we have about 10 separate Child Abuse "Victims" groups in Ireland, almost every one of them funded by the Irish State and literally every one of them founded after our Taoiseach (Prime Minister) made a public apology to "Victims of institutional abuse" in May 1999.
Of the 10 groups, FOUR were involved in allegations of child murder against the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy. The first claims related to real children who had actually died but later ones referred to periods when no child died of ANY cause. Re the latter, I coined the phrases "Murder of the Undead" and "Victimless Murders". (Google will complete the phrases for you in Ireland and hopefully in Australia as well).
The leader of a FIFTH group wrote an article in the Irish Times in March 2006 explaining that some people believed that false allegations of child abuse were being made against Irish priests but "fortunately" that did NOT constitute a problem. A few months previously, two men had been convicted of trying to blackmail a well-known Irish priest, by threatening to make a false allegation against him but perhaps this gentlemen had "forgotten". His mistake was forgiven however as, a couple of years later he was appointed executive director of Amnesty International in Ireland.
The leader of a SIXTH group declared in a public outburst on national television aimed at a Government Minister that he had been "raped, buggered and beaten" in an industrial school run by priests of the Rosminian Order. The leader of a RIVAL "Victims" group unhelpfully pointed out that he had specifically denied this and praised the Rosminians in a radio interview years before. (The two leaders were involved in a difference of opinion as to how large sums of Government money for Victims should be spent).
The leader of a SEVENTH group was involved in a furious row with his own members regarding Compensation funds the group had received from Religious Congregations. He said he had come into his office one day and found a knife stuck in his desk etc
Possibly the remaining three (or so) Victims' groups are credible OR maybe they are just small and I don't know much about them.
Kilbarry1: Second reply to Jack Richards - Continued
For those who want to check out the gory details:
(A) In 2006 I attempted to summarise false allegations of child MURDER (in particular) directed at the Catholic Church. The link is here
"Letter to Sunday Tribune Re Child Killing Allegations"
I explained at the time that "If someone accuses you of child abuse 30, 40 or even 50 years ago there is no way you can clear your name. However if the same person claims you killed a child and no child died at the time, then this says a great deal about your accuser's credibility."
At the time I composed the article, I had forgotten about the claim in the UK Daily Mirror (11 October 1997) that a Sister of Mercy had murdered a baby by burning holes in its legs with a red hot poker. One reason I forgot, was that the Sisters of Mercy were so "compassionate" to the accuser that they failed to sue. (The editors of The Mirror employ very high powered lawyers to protect themselves against libel actions, BUT they also realise that decadent imbeciles represent to threat.)
(B) The current executive director of Amnesty International (Ireland) wrote in the Irish Times on 29 March 2006 that "In the past few months a number of commentators have suggested that grave injustice is being done to priests falsely accused of child sexual abuse. Such suggestions rightly concern fair minded people, but remarkably, no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest that false allegations are being made or that the rights of those accused are being abused.”
Just two months previously, two brothers had been convicted of trying to blackmail a priest Father Michael Kennedy by threatening to accuse him of child abuse. I believe that Fr Kennedy is a relative of THE Kennedys so it is remarkable that Mr O'Gorman had forgotten about the case (or maybe didn't consider it significant?)
(See my article on "Colm O'Gorman" Note the paragraphs headed "Colm O'Gorman, Nora Wall and Amnesty International" and the following one.)
(C) Very handily, there IS an easily available video of the man who denounced a Government Minister on national TV for ignoring his own experiences of rape at the hands of Rosminian priests. Check out the Comments section of the Spiked article "No Justice in a Year of Moral Crusades" by Luke Gittos. The video is one of two posted by "holliegrieg justice" and I replied to him.
[See my recent article "Recovered Memory in Ireland - and Allegations of Child Abuse" for video of Victims' group leader denouncing Government Minister]
(D) The saga of the Victims' charity "Right of Place" and the dispute about the use of its funds WAS actually covered by another Victims' group "Alliance Support". The resignation of the Right of Place founder is dealt with here
and there are several background articles on the Alliance Support website about the affair.
[Alliance Support website is no longer operative.There are a number of articles about "Right of Place" and its founder Noel C. Barry on The Shame of Ireland website here. See also Comment below ]
On a related matter, several Irish Bishops were also accused of being paedophiles or conspiracy to defend paedophile priests but I won't bother you with THOSE gory details here. (As per normal, the claims were nonsense. ) However that is just Ireland. Perhaps accusers and their Child Abuse Victims' groups are more credible in Australia?
Jack Richards: Second reply to Kilbarry1
When I was 6 years old I was abused by a Sister of the Good Samaritan. The old bitch flogged me into unconsciousness in a beating that lasted for about 2 hours. She broke two canes on me and finished the job with a third. When my father complained, rather forcefully, to Mother Superior and showed her the 40+ "stripes' I had from the ankles up - including two across the face - she dismissed it as being necessary discipline. Later than night the Parish Priest, an Irishmen as they all were in those days nearly 60 years ago, rang my father and threatened to have him charged with assault for accosting the nuns! That was my last day in a Catholic School.
I am of the view that there were many genuine incidents of brutality and sexual abuse carried out by the Clergy in those days, and up to very recent times, who were protected by the Church and the police and judiciary. But it wasn't just the Catholics as the current Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse in Australia shows - they were all in it. So far they've nailed Catholic Priests and Brothers, Anglican Ministers, Salvation Army, Seventh Day Adventists, Methodists, Baptists, Jehovah Witnesses and Jewish Rabbis. It seems that any organisation that had unfettered access to children had its quota of paedophiles. From what has been revealed during the course of the RC, most of the "abuse" was homosexual in nature - especially in Catholic institutions.
Having said that, I recall that in the 80s and 90s there was an outbreak of "repressed memory" syndrome when literally thousand of people suddenly remembered being abused by their fathers who all seemed to belong to Satanic Cults. There was an epidemic across the USA, here and the western world generally - and 99.9999% of it was bullshit. Now it's called "False memory syndrome" because the ideas were planted by zealous "psychologists" who attributed all psychological disorders in later life to childhood sexual abuse. Some American enthusiasts wrote a text book on the "symptoms" of childhood sexual abuse and one of the symptoms, believe it or not, was "failure to remember sexual abuse"!
What's happening in Ireland is starting to remind me of the witch hunts of the 16th-18th Centuries and the epidemic of denunciations during the Purges in 1930's Soviet Union. All these accusations need to be looked at both sympathetically and with much scepticism because there's a very good chance they're not true. If there're large sums of money involved the credibility of the accusers must be proportionately reduced. But it's not just money that provokes denunciators: there's all that kudos and sympathy and victimhood to be milked. For some people, being a victim is the high point of their otherwise worthless life and they really get off on it. Human nature is a strange thing. I live by the theory that if you trust no-one you'll never be disappointed. I have met far more compulsive liars, frauds, swindlers and conmen than I have honest men. Indeed I can't remember ever meeting an honest man or woman.
I might add that for a few years I worked in a Government department investigating theft and fraud. It was often surprising that the people we caught stealing were very well educated, held high positions, and didn't need to steal - and often the theft was so petty. For example, one very senior Civil Servant was caught for stealing the tyres off a Government owned vehicle. For the price of a set of tyres - about $600 - he lost his job and was fined double their value plus has a life-long conviction for dishonesty.
But some people are such accomplished liars that, had I not known they were as guilty as sin and had the evidence of it, I'd have believed their denials. I got one woman for stealing a computer and a printer. When interviewed she denied it, of course, and was so terribly indignant that we'd accuse her! What she didn't know was that we had CCTV film of her loading the goods into the boot of her car. So after her swearing on the life her children that she was innocent, and quite convincingly doing so, we showed her the film.
One major investigation had to do with a Religious School. In Australia non-government schools get subsidised for every student they educate. I forget the exact amount but it was about $2,600 per student per year and the schools have to complete a census upon which the grants, capital and recurrent, are made. In any event, the Principal of the school - a very religious man who insisted on praying for us at every opportunity - had been fudging the census and claiming for 30-40 children who did not exist and pocketing the money for himself. This had been going on for some years. Again, he was a very convincing fraud and liar and, even when confronted with damning evidence in his own hand-writing, he denied having done it! He was so convincing in proclaiming his innocence that a Committee of supporters was formed to defend him against our "false accusations" and "racist" attempts to persecute an honest man. He kept up his charade until the day of his committal hearing in the Supreme Court - then he confessed, admitted it all, and pled guilty when the Prosecution offered to drop a couple of charges.
Never trust anyone, no matter how honest and convincing they seem, and you'll never be disappointed.
Kilbarry1: Final reply to Jack Richards
Regarding your last sentence, I really think that you are TOO cynical. I know some very decent human beings who - nevertheless- would not be too scrupulous about twisting the truth to get an increased Government grant or insurance payout. I probably wouldn't do either myself but that is partly because I have poor communications skills; on one occasion when I had a genuine insurance claim, I handled it so badly that I know they suspected me of fraud!
Re your first sentence I know a lady who was very badly battered in kindergarten - by a female SECULAR teacher who later was admitted to a mental hospital. My friend also said that the woman could be very nice outside class but should never have become a teacher.
This discussion could go on forever. I believe that the overwhelming majority of paedophile claims are false. In Ireland members of "Victims'" groups hardly ever raise objections when their leaders make transparently false allegations - of child murder for example. (The only thing that seems to arouse their ire, is controversies about money). I assume the reason they don't complain is that their own allegations are equally spurious - and they are making them for financial reasons.
I know less about Australia but I recall a case a few years ago in which the head of the Vincentian Order was arrested amid huge publicity, for supposedly molesting a student 20 years previously. He was released when he was able to prove that he was not on the Australian subcontinent at the time in question. (If he had been, perhaps he would have been convicted?). There was a similar case in Cornwall, Ontario (Canada) when a number of nutcases accused practically every prominent citizen of the town of belonging to a paedophile ring. NATURALLY this included the then Bishop and it's not entirely unsurprising that he had not been Bishop, nor in the diocese, at the relevant time.
There have been several allegations against Bishops in Ireland, some so ludicrous that they embarrassed our anti-clerics. I summarised them here:
8 Falsely Accused Bishops - The Innocent Who Merit an Explanation
Note that three former Archbishops were accused. There are only four Archbishops on the island of Ireland so I await an allegation against the Archbishop of Tuam (present or past). Cynicism is the daughter of Hysteria and cynicism is all we will be left with when this wave of hysteria finally runs its course. REAL victims of child abuse will find it very difficult to be taken seriously then.
CONCLUSION: "Stolen Generations" of Children?
Jack Richards is no friend of the Catholic Church and Ireland has no real equivalent of Australian aboriginals. However some of what he says about the supposedly "Stolen Generation" of aboriginal children does resonate in this country. I am thinking about the allegations of "child abuse on an industrial scale" in residential schools and also the hysteria about the Tuam babies supposedly buried in a cess pit.Jack Richards writes:
In 1962 I attended a public school in outback NSW [New South Wales] with a large Aboriginal cohort. There was a half-caste girl who was captured and carted away by welfare. She lived on the banks of the Lachlan River in a hollow under a sheet of corrugated iron. Being a "yella fella" she was rejected by the (racist) full bloods. She stank to high heaven, had head lice, scabies, impetigo and was malnourished - but the worst affliction was an untreated suppurating ear infection that had become fly-blown. You could see the maggots crawling in the oozing pus. She was about 10 years old and was regularly molested by bucks of all ages. She was taken away to the Far West Children's home - a hospital in the salubrious Sydney suburb of Manly where she was treated for those diseases as well as her gonorrhoea. About a year later she came back.
She's still in the same town and is now an Aboriginal activist who claims to have been "stolen"!!!!! Her life was saved, she was cured of loathsome diseases and parasites and brought back to health from the edge of death, and yet she claims she was carted away by evil whites; indeed she was "stolen" from a loving family! The truth is, her mother was a drunken whore who'd sell herself for a bottle of beer and her father was unknown and no-one in the tribe gave a shit about her. The only people who did were the white welfare officers. .........
You see, the truth is a bit hard to confront. Like that girl I knew at school 53 years ago, it would be a very difficult thing to admit that your mother was a drunken prostitute who had no idea who your father was - just some anonymous white drifter who paid his shilling - and that your "tribe" didn't want you or care about you. It's much easier to believe that evil whites stole you so as to remove you from your "culture" and drove off your father who really loved you.
Well perhaps the aboriginal girl's very difficult childhood provides at least a partial excuse. But what about the Irish journalists who publish allegations of child murder at a time when no child died, or the politician who brings down a government by inventing a tale of a conspiracy between an Archbishop and an Attorney General to protect a paedophile priest?
