Evening Echo News Feature: An interview with Sheila O’Byrne, Mother and Baby Home Survivor

“I think it’s disgusting,” says Mother and Baby Home survivor Sheila O’Byrne of plans to build an apartment block on the site of the Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry in Cork’s Sunday’s Well. “When a dog dies, it’s treated better and it’s buried better.” By Donal  O’Keeffe.

Sheila O’Byrne lives in a lovely house off Blarney Street. A Dubliner who has made Cork her home for 30 years, Sheila’s walls are covered in photos of family and friends, certificates and documentation of her considerable achievements, and samples of her poetry.

Sheila was 19 when she was sent to St Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home on Dublin’s Navan Road in 1976 for the crime of being pregnant. She hasn’t seen her son since he was a little baby, taken from her arms and sold by the nuns. He’d be 41 now, wherever he is. Sheila never married, never had any other kids. “Not after what was done to me,” she says.

“I was at a dance and went back with friends of ours, back to their place. It just happened. Nobody told us about the birds and the bees! When I found out, I was in shock. My Da idolized the ground I walked on, but he went mad.”

Sheila was sent to live with a family in Greystones, but she wasn’t happy there.

“You had these private couples who would take pregnant women in, and they were paid by the State. The mother of the wife was a midwife, and the plan was she would take my baby.

“This was arranged by the Monsignor in Sandymount. The medical, the religious, the State, all in it together, like one big co-op.”

Sheila sneaked out and cashed in mineral bottles for the price of her bus-fare. Then she discovered the buses weren’t running, due to a bad storm, and she had to walk the 20 miles from Greystones to a friend’s house in Clondalkin.

“I walked through fields and fields till I got there. When my friend opened the door, I collapsed in her arms with the exhaustion.”

From there, Sheila was sent to St Patrick’s on the Navan Road.

“Where else had I to go? I couldn’t go back home. There were no choices! Your family wouldn’t take you back. You were like a leper. A landlord wouldn’t take you in.

“You weren’t told that you had a right to keep your baby. They never told you. Just sign here.”

In St Patrick’s, Sheila had a little friend called Joyce, maybe 15 months old.

“I can still see her little polka-dot white and navy dress. The nurse came in to take her away, and Joyce was screaming my name. And I watched Joyce go, and I was telling her ‘It’ll be alright, Joyce.’

“And the nurse said ‘This’ll get you ready, Sheila, for when it’s your turn. Off you pop now, back to your work.’”

Sheila says she stood up for others, and got a few scars for it.

She recalls a young woman who came in, covered with lice. Sheila went looking for the woman who worked as an overseer in St Patrick’s, but couldn’t find her. So Sheila went into the kitchen and got a matchbox. Into it, she put two lice from the young woman’s head.

“Up I went to Sister ‘Rosaleen’ with the lice in the box, and do you know what she said to me? ‘They should be glad that we took them in.’ She never mentioned they were subsidised by the State, or they wouldn’t have taken us in at all.

“‘Go back to your work,’ says she, ‘I’ll see to this.’

“So the next day, I came down from the nursery. I used to get the food, because I’d look after the babies. I’d go into the kitchen and the only thing I was allowed say was ‘I’m here for the food’. Nothing else.

“And she comes down, (the overseer) and she says ‘Who went above my authority?’ She went into the kitchen and she grabbed the slops bin and the rubbish bin and she mixed them together and threw it on the floor. She started slapping me around, and smacked my head off the wall. Kept smacking the side of my head off the wall.

“I was pumping, my nose was pumping.

“She kept punching me. She said ‘You’ll pick that up off the floor’. I said ‘I won’t’. She said [of the blows] ‘You’re making me hurt myself.’

Eventually, two other women picked the rubbish up.

“We worked from dawn till dusk, from seven in the morning straight through. The only time we got a break was for Mass on Sunday morning.”

Looking at photographs of St Patrick’s, Sheila points to the chapel, the residential section – “Look at the bars on the windows” – and “the reject ward” where disabled children were kept. “Bring that to the reject ward.”

When Sheila went into labour, she was to “walk around the grounds. I was lucky the sun was in my favour and it wasn’t raining. I was left on my own. I could have died.

“One nurse, a real villain, she said to me, ‘You’ll pay for your sins now’.

“The doctor had to be called, I was having difficulty. Forceps. I was lucky I didn’t die. There was no anaesthetic, no ante-natal care, nothing.”

Sheila’s baby was born, and she wasn’t allowed to touch him.

“The only time I was allowed touch him, the nurse brought him up into the chapel for his christening. Just to hold him in your arms once, and then he was taken.

“My Daddy gave me the money to pay for the christening. And then do you know what Mr Priest says?

“He said to me, ‘Well, Sheila, if you haven’t got the money, there’s other ways we can sort this out’. And he reached over and he touched my left breast.

“I said ‘You’re alright, Father, I have my money. I’m paying in full.’

“And the nurse came straight in and took my baby off me. ‘Back to your work.’”

Sheila’s father signed her out, after a complete year. “Only for my Daddy, I’d never have got out.”

The last time Sheila saw her son, he was three months old. After she came home, she went to visit him in Sion Hill, in Blackrock. She wasn’t allowed to touch him.

“I said ‘I just came to say goodbye to you, and I hope everything will be alright. I can’t do anything.’ I was in bits.

“When I came home, it was back to normal. Nothing was mentioned.”

30 years ago, Sheila moved to Cork. For a time, she struggled with homelessness, working six days a week in CIT yet sleeping in parked buses.

Sheila has a replica of her old uniform, a white apron over a brown smock dress. She wore it at a demonstration in Tuam. Sheila has made it her life’s work to be a support to her fellow survivors. She says she’s outside Leinster House every Friday for the Tuam Babies, and the Magdalene Laundry and Mother and Baby Home survivors.

Sheila lives near the former Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry in Sunday’s Well, and feels the women in the mass grave there should be exhumed, identified by DNA, and given a proper burial. She says she is sickened that a place of such horror might be concreted over and have an apartment block built on it. She thinks it should be put to better use.

“I’d like to see flats for our Magdalene survivors, so they’re not living in squalor, or homeless. I’d also like to see a centre there, a training facility, and a museum of the experience of Magdalene survivors. And flats for the elderly and the homeless.”

Originally published in the Evening Echo on Thursday 18 January 2018.

A walk through Fermoy’s garrison past

The small gravestone still reads “Sacred to the memory of Jane, daughter of Edwd. and Maria Jennings, 39th Regt, who died Jan 31st 1869 aged 2.”

Across Fermoy’s military cemetery – behind Fermoy Soccer Club and the Famine graveyard – other children are remembered. “Bertie Gordon, Died 28th July 1898, aged 2. Thy will be done.”

“Sacred to the memory of William James The beloved son of Emily and Willm. Babbington 2nd Connt. Rangers Died 15th March 1885 Aged 16 months.”

“Emily Helena (indecipherable) Daughter. But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand.”

“Infant mortality would have been astronomical then,” says Dr Aoife Bhreatnach, “but what is doubly tragic is that a military family might bury a child here and then be posted to the other side of the Empire.”

Bhreatnach is a historian specialising in garrison towns and she shares a wealth of knowledge as we walk what was once Fermoy’s British Army barracks, and what is now sports grounds.

Fermoy’s modern history dates from 1791, when Scots businessman John Anderson purchased lands once belonging to the old Cistercian Abbey.

France’s failed 1796 invasion of Ireland terrified the British Government, and it sought land for military bases. Fermoy was an ideal location and Anderson offered them a free site.

In 1807 Rev J. Hall described Fermoy as “rising fast into importance and containing about two thousand inhabitants, besides barracks for as many soldiers. A few years ago, Fermoy consisted of only a few miserable huts.” At the height of Fermoy’s time as a garrison town, 3,300 troops were stationed there.

Bhreatnach paints a fascinating picture of life in a garrison town, with uniformed soldiers part of everyday street life. Troops paraded to Sunday religious services, marched to and from train stations and performed manoeuvres and reviews in public parks.

The British army was a vital part of the town’s economy. Barrack quartermasters purchased wholesale alcohol for the officers’ and soldiers’ messes, where copious amounts of wine, beer and spirits were served.

“Approximately half the accounts of McAuliffe’s public house on Barrack Hill were with the military,” Bhreatnach says.

Bhreatnach notes that from 1893 to 1903, 30% of the customers in Hickey’s, Fermoy, were military officers and senior NCOs. Hickey’s also supplied garrisons in Cork, Tipperary, Limerick, Waterford, Kilkenny and Kerry. The laundry of those clothes also proved a valuable source of income for charitable institutions such as Fermoy’s Presentation Convent.

In recent years, Fermoy Sub-Aqua Club recovered from the O’Neill Crowley Quay riverbed a quantity of pocket watches. They date back to an incident during the War of Independence. In September 1919, Liam Lynch and a column of Cork No. 2 Brigade I.R.A. – including Michael Fitzgerald – ambushed a group of British soldiers on their way to Fermoy’s Wesleyan Church (Now Avondhu Motor Factors).

One soldier, 20 year old Private William Jones, was killed, and another, Private Lloyd, was injured.

Private Jones was – reputedly – the first British soldier killed in the War of Independence.

Today, there is a monument where Private Jones died. It remembers Mick Fitzgerald, who died a year later on hunger strike in Cork Gaol. Fitzgerald’s death – and the subsequent deaths of his fellow prisoners, Joe Murphy and Terence McSwiney – brought global attention to the cause of Irish independence.

British forces sacked the town in retaliation and in reaction to the coroner’s inquest, which recorded a verdict of ‘Accidental death, unpremeditated’. The soldiers’ actions were highly co-ordinated but it was claimed “the men” had acted spontaneously.

Lieutenant Colonel Hughes-Hallett, posted in Fermoy at the time, recalled: (They) “proceeded to every shop or place of business of the coroner and the members of the jury… the jeweller’s (Barber’s), the Boot Shop (Tyler’s) and (Lombard’s) and the foreman of the Jury, etc, were all faithfully dealt with. Trays of rings and watches were soon being flung into the river. A chain of men… smashed bottles on the pavement, and drink flowed in a stream down the gutter.”

The Irish Times reported a later town meeting and a bitter exchange between Colonel Dobbs – representing the British army – and Mr Kelleher, vice-chairman of the Urban Council. Dobbs agreed to a request that he confine the troops to quarters, but – angered by the jury’s verdict – warned that he would not be responsible if they got “out of hand” again.

Dobbs: “You have not the pluck to say that (Private Jones) was murdered.”

Kelleher: “There is pluck enough in the town.”

Dobbs: “Why didn’t you come forward to assist, when the men were shot? Not a man, woman or child had the pluck to come forward and give assistance.”

Kelleher: “No one came near us when our windows were broken.”

Dobbs: “Damn the windows! You have got no industry, you are simply living on the army and but for them you would be taking in each other’s washing. When this thing happens and you lose a few hundred or a few thousand pounds, you come and cry for protection.”

The British army left Fermoy in Spring 1922. In August, in the midst of the Civil War, the Barracks were torched. Afterward, a member of the Urban District Council complained that the local authority lost £3,400 in rates and an additional £450 in special water rates. The financial loss devastated the town, especially in the first economically-depressed decades of the new State.

Post-Independence, Bhreatnach says, Fermoy used street names to put its garrison past behind it. “Barrack Hill became Oliver Plunkett Hill, Mess House Lane was dubbed Colmcille Street; New Barrack Street became Sheares Street and West Barrack Street was renamed Bridget’s Street.

“Erasing the military associations gave the town an opportunity to assert a particular form of cultural nationalism, prudently focusing on uncontroversial early revolutionaries (the Sheares from 1798) and ancient saints. Erasing one past allowed local communities to pay homage to another image of Ireland.”

Almost a century later, walking with Dr Bhreatnach across Michael Fitzgerald Park, Fermoy’s GAA grounds, formerly the British Army New Barracks, I’m struck how close to us and yet how far away our history remains.

Dr Aoife Bhreatnach tweets as @GarrisonTowns. irishgarrisontowns.com

Originally published in the Evening Echo, 29th December 2016

 

Direct Provision is no place for these families

“I do not tell him about Santa,” Cindy (not her real name) says, lowering her voice so her three-and-a-half year old son doesn’t hear.

“He hears about Santa from other children but I have to keep his expectations low. The presents he will get will come from charity.

“We are very grateful for the kindness but he cannot get his hopes up. I do not want to break his heart.”

It’s just before Christmas. Cindy and her son have met me for a chat in a hotel lobby in a Munster town. Over the fireplace, Christmas lights wink on and off. Cindy’s son, Aaron, shouts “Broken! Fix!”

Cindy stops him from going at the lights and tells me that she, her husband and Aaron have lived for the past two years in a Direct Provision centre outside of the town. Most locals are barely aware of the centre.

“Christmas Day is the same day as every day,” says Cindy. “The staff will not be there, so we have cold food they leave for us and the day is very long.”

Cindy is South African. Her husband, Joshua, is Nigerian. She was a supervisor in a marketing company in Johannesburg and her husband was a businessman. She says they came to Ireland because they faced persecution as Joshua was a non-national. She says they were attacked and threatened with murder.

Cindy and Joshua chose to come to Ireland because they didn’t need a visa and came here because they are Catholic and liked Ireland. On arrival, they applied for asylum. Their application was rejected because South Africa is not recognised as a conflict zone. They appealed the decision and their appeal was rejected. They have appealed again.

The cycle of rejection and appeal is a common story, although it is unusual for asylum-seekers to actually pick their destination as Cindy and her husband did. Most asylum-seekers are smuggled here and have no idea where they even are when they arrive in Ireland.

Cindy says that she is shocked at the levels of violence in the Direct Provision centre.

“There are a lot of fights. Gardaí call all the time. It is always women. These are desperate women suffering from boredom and depression. ‘Are you looking at my husband?’ Stupid stuff. ‘What are you looking at?’ Sometimes we fight over food. Like animals.”

As we chat, Cindy’s son shouts and runs around, ignoring Cindy as she tries to calm him. She is mortified by his acting out but then she tells me she is worried about his behaviour.

“He goes crazy here because he usually has no space. Because he spends all his time with us. One small room. This cannot be healthy.”

In another Direct Provision centre in the south, later the same day, I speak with a number of women who tell me that Christmas Day will be for them and their children “A nothing day. Less than a nothing day”.

Like Cindy, “Katherine” too is from South Africa. Similarly, she says her husband being a non-national led to their having to flee to escape persecution. She has two small children, a boy of four and a one-year-old girl. She alleges that the food in her Direct Provision centre is very poor.

“If we have chicken today, we have the same chicken tomorrow and the next day the same chicken in Uncle Ben’s sweet’n’sour sauce. Or if it’s beef on Monday, the same beef on Tuesday and beef stew with the same beef on Wednesday.

“Are we animals? Are we dogs that you feed scraps?”

She says she has not made a formal complaint for fear of being moved to another centre. Bad as she says things are, she fears her family being uprooted again. She claims that when the Reception and Integration Agency – the State body which oversees privately-run Direct Provision centres – inspects the facility, food quality improves dramatically.

I asked the Department of Justice – which is ultimately responsible for RIA – for a comment. I was told:

“RIA has a complaints procedure.. which resolves to deal with problems quickly and efficiently.

“RIA oversees a comprehensive and detailed inspections system of asylum seeker accommodation. Inspections are carried out by an in-house inspectorate within RIA and also by an independent company with expertise in fire and food safety.”

The problem is that people in Direct Provision have deportation orders hanging over their heads and most are terrified to complain.

Katherine’s friend “Jennifer” tells me to call her that, “like Jennifer Aniston”. She’s a young Muslim woman from Pakistan who fled her home because she married outside of her caste.

She and her husband fled under threat of a so-called “honour killing”. Jennifer has two boys. A three-year-old and a newborn.

Jennifer and Katherine are both Muslim and say that Islam doesn’t celebrate Christmas. However, they say they live in a country that has Christmas and they’d like their kids to enjoy that. “We want to belong in Ireland,” says Katherine.

“I have to ask,” I say, “because if I don’t, someone else will say I should have, but how did you both end up on an island that’s the last stop before America?”

“America?” says Katherine, misunderstanding my point. “We would not go to America!”

“Oh no,” says Jennifer, eyes wide with horror. “Not with what is happening there now!”

As they realise their misunderstanding, the three of us crack up laughing. It’s a rare moment of levity in grim surroundings. (Jennifer says she and her husband were smuggled here. Katherine and her husband came here from South Africa.)

“At the end of November there were 1,098 children in Direct Provision. The average length of stay in Direct Provision is around 2 years 9 months,” says Nick Henderson of the Irish Refugee Council.

“The Irish Refugee Council, along with various different organisations and individuals including the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the Special Rapporteur for Children, Geoffrey Shannon, and most recently Minister Katherine Zappone have called for an end to Direct Provision. In the interim, living conditions should be improved.

“We need a system that embodies the best interests of the child, allows for self-determination and privacy, is based on care and not profit, identifies and supports individuals with special needs and vulnerabilities, allows for independent complaints mechanisms and provides for the right to work.

“Saturday 10th of December, International Human Rights Day, was the anniversary of the direct provision allowance being introduced in 1999,” notes Henderson. “That allowance, €19.10, hasn’t changed since, despite inflation and the considerable increase in living costs. The Christmas bonus for people in Direct Provision was just €16.23 for adults and €13.26 for their children. Christmas can expose existing poverty in our society, not least for people living in Direct Provision.”

‘Temporary shelter’ is damaging people

Direct Provision was originally planned as a temporary solution to provide shelter for asylum-seekers for approximately six months but many people spend years in conditions which have been condemned by the United Nations and international human rights groups.

Direct Provision gives asylum-seekers their bed and board and it prohibits them from working. Asylum-seekers get €19.10 a week. Children get €15.50. Asylum-seekers are not eligible for free third-level education.

Currently we have 4,300 people in 34 Direct Provision centres across the State. A third of them are children; 55% have been here for five years, 20% of that for seven years or more.

Direct Provision centres, which include former hotels, hostels and a mobile home park, are run by private contractors who receive about €50 million per year in State funding.

Until now, parents have not been allowed to cook for their children and many say they have lost their sense of independence. Sue Conlon, formerly of the Irish Refugee Council, notes that some children in Direct Provision – crammed into close proximity with adults (and not just their parents) – are seeing things they should not see and are replicating behaviour they should not understand.

“We have created a system which infantilises adults and sexualises children,” she says. “This is a recipe for horrors.”

Ireland has warehoused asylum-seekers in Direct Provision centres since 1999. Direct Provision was introduced as a temporary, six-month, solution at a time when annual asylum applications were 10,938. Applications peaked in 2002 at 11,600.

Last year we had 1,448 asylum applications.

In EU terms, Ireland has a lower than average number of asylum applications per head of capita. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Ireland received 1.4 asylum seekers per 1,000 population between 2010 and 2014. The EU average is 3.5 per 1,000 and, over the same period, Sweden received 24 applications per 1,000 population.

Ireland only accepts approximately 5% to 6% of asylum applicants upon first application. The European average is somewhere between 26% and 28%.

Ireland remains the only country in the EU, other than Lithuania, that does not allow asylum applicants access to the labour market at any stage during the asylum process.

A number of prominent figures, including the former Supreme Court judge Catherine McGuinness, have predicted that a future Taoiseach will end up standing in the Dáil and publicly apologising for damage done by the Direct Provision system.

We should demand dignity, kindness and respect for all

In August of this year, an asylum-seeker from Korea, a woman in her thirties, took her own life in the Kinsale Road Direct Provision centre, which houses 200 or so people. She was the mother of a six-year-old boy.

“She lived in the same block as me,” one woman, a fellow asylum-seeker, told RTÉ’s Brian O’Connell in the wake of the tragedy. “Lovely lady, very private, and didn’t choose to mingle with people. It was obvious that she had issues, but she chose to remain private about them.

“Lively. A real live wire,” she says of her late neighbour’s son. “He interacted very, very well with other children. Very sweet and loved his mum dearly. And she loved him as well. You could see. When it came to her son, you could see how much she loved him.”

That little boy is now an orphan and in the care of Túsla.

“Depression, sometimes, is within and you carry it wherever you go. Certainly your circumstances can and might exacerbate a situation you already have,” the dead woman’s neighbour told Brian O’Connell.

Brian O’Connell points out that 90% of asylum-seekers will have suffered from some form of depression. O’Connell notes that sixty-one asylum seekers, including sixteen children under the age of 6, have died in Direct Provision centres between 2002 and 2014. That is, he says, out of an asylum-seeker population during those years of just over 50,000.

If, like many of us, you don’t know the Kinsale Road Direct Provision centre, it is – as you drive out to Cork Airport – on the left-hand corner immediately before, and beside, the Bull McCabe’s Bar. If – as an Irish citizen – you are interested in meeting our guests, the men, women and children living in Direct Provision, the residents on Kinsale Road are always delighted to get visitors.

All you need to do is call to the gate and talk to the security guards. Tell them that you’d like to meet some of the people who are living in our country as our guests. If they turn you down – and they almost certainly will turn you down – then ask to make an appointment.

(The usual excuse is “privacy concerns”, which is an interesting line of argument when some asylum-seekers are forced to share bedrooms with total strangers.)

Please think about bringing gifts of toys or books when you call. Santa will always do his best for the kids in there, but Santa never turned down a kindness either.

As Irish citizens, as tax-payers, we all pay for the Direct Provision system and – as we are responsible for it – we surely have a duty to make sure that our guests are treated with dignity, kindness and respect.

Originally published in the Evening Echo 28th December 2016

Visiting the grave of Saint Nicholas on Christmas Eve

 

Santa Claus by Thomas Nast (1881)

Today I visited the grave of Santa Claus.

The first thing to say, of course, is that Santa Claus does not – and cannot – have a grave, because Santa Claus cannot die and Santa Claus never will die. Santa is – as every child knows – a magical being, given life and strength by the power of belief.

Santa lives in the North Pole and once a year, at Christmas time, he sails the night sky in an enchanted sleigh towed by his flying reindeer. The most famous of those, of course, is Rudolf, whose shiny red nose has saved the day more than once. This Christmas night, and every Christmas night, Santa will visit every child in the world and he will do so as long as children believe in him.

I always wonder, though, if Santa gets a little tingle when he stops to deliver presents to the children of Thomastown in County Kilkenny. Maybe he takes a wistful look over toward Jerpoint Park, to the ruined Church of Saint Nicholas. After all, that’s where he’s buried.

Before Santa became Santa, he was a human being named Nicholas, a very long time ago. He was born, more than one thousand and seven hundred years ago, on the 15th of March in the year 270 in what is now southern Turkey.

Nicholas was the son of wealthy Christian parents and he was a very religious child. When he was very young, his parents died in an epidemic and his uncle, who was the local bishop and also called Nicholas, took him in and raised him. In time, Nicholas was ordained a priest and years later he too became a bishop. He became renowned for his generosity and his secret gift-giving.

Interestingly, he attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325, which was convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine, and which would set in stone what would become universally accepted as the details of the story of Jesus Christ.

Legend has it that Nicholas – who believed that Jesus was co-eternal with God the Father (meaning Jesus existed with God and as God since the beginning of time) and was thus as divine as God – became so angry at the heretic Arius – who contended that Jesus was created by God and thus less divine – that Nicholas punched him in the face. Later years obviously mellowed Santa…

(Other details were added to the story of Jesus at Constantine’s insistence.

According to the English writer Alan Moore, Rome was “a city divided by different theological factions, the largest and noisiest probably being the early Christian zealots. Then there was the cult of Mithras, which was smaller but which included the bulk of the Roman Military. Finally there was the cult of Sol Invictus, the Undefeated Sun, which was relatively small but very popular amongst the merchant class.

“Constantine’s posse came up with a composite religion to unite Rome: Christianity would incorporate large chunks of Mithraism, including the stuff about being born in a cave surrounded by shepherds and animals on the 25th of December, and would make concessions to the cult of Sol Invictus, the Undefeated Sun, by sticking a big Sun-symbol behind the messiah’s head in all the publicity hand-outs. This is politics.”)

During his lifetime, tales of Nicholas’ great kindness spread and with them rumours and tall tales of miracles he had performed. It was said he saved three young women from shame by giving their impoverished father dowries, which Nicholas may have thrown down the chimney.

He was said to have saved Myra from a famine in 311 by performing a loaves-and-fishes miracle with a ship cargo of wheat.

He was even rumoured to have resurrected three murdered children.

Being human, Nicholas eventually got old and – at what would have been at the time the incredibly old age of 73 – he died on the 6th of December in the year 343.

But that was only the beginning.

His tomb became a popular place of pilgrimage but – and this gets gruesome, so adults look away – in 1087 Italian sailors seized half of St Nicholas’ skeleton and brought it to Bari where those remains lay today in two churches, one Catholic and one Orthodox Christian. Venetian sailors later claimed the remaining fragments of the skeleton and brought them to Venice, where the church of St Nicholas was built.

 

The Tombstone of Saint Nicholas, Newtown Jerpoint, Co Kilkenny

However, there is another legend about Saint Nicholas.

It is said that two 12th century crusaders brought the remains of Saint Nicholas as far away from danger as they could, to Ireland, effectively taking him to what was then the ends of the Earth.

It is believed that the remains of Saint Nicholas were buried at the Church of Saint Nicholas in what is now the lost town of Newtown Jerpoint, two miles from Thomastown in Co Kilkenny. The grave’s stone slab is carved with the image of a cleric with the head of a knight behind either shoulder, said to be the two crusaders.

It is a historical fact that Norman knights took part in the Crusades and the Normans in Kilkenny were well-known as collectors of religious relics.

Who really knows?

What’s important is that in death, Nicholas became bigger than a man, bigger even than a saint.

Nicholas became a story.

And everyone knows that stories get stronger every time they’re told. And if it’s a really simple story, a really powerful story, like a story about a man who secretly gives gifts and wants nothing in return, well, a story like that can become magical.

The story of Nicholas grew as it spread, gaining power as it went. In Europe, it bumped into Martin Luther’s legend of the Christkind – a magical version of the Baby Jesus who gives gifts to children – and absorbed it.  In Britain, it met the story of Father Christmas (think Charles Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present) and absorbed that too. In the Netherlands and Belgium, Saint Nicholas became Sinterklaas, where he’s celebrated still.

By the time the story reached the New World, Sinterklaas was Americanized to Santa Claus and in 1823, the publication of “A Visit From St Nicholas” (“‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”) gave new impetus to the legend.

In 1863, the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa as a portly, white-bearded gentleman giving toys to children and the picture was almost complete. The North Pole, the elves, Rudolf, Mrs Claus and all the other details grew from there.

Contrary to persistent urban myths, Santa wore red and white long before Coca-Cola portrayed him in those colours. In fact, Santa as we know him, in his white-trimmed red suit and cap, appeared on the cover of “Puck” magazine in the first years of the 20th century.

Given life by the power of belief, Santa Claus has come to be the embodiment of Christmas for millions of children around the world, a magical being of great joy and kindness.

Even as he races around the world to reach every child this Christmas night, when Santa comes to KiIkenny, perhaps he will find the time to stop at the ruined Church of Saint Nicholas to pay his respects to the man he was before he became Santa.

Happy Christmas.

Donal O’Keeffe

One year on, it’s clear Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum was about a lot more than marriage

“There is no equivalency between marriage and sodomy and those who seek to make them equal are only codding themselves and others.”

So began a letter to The Avondhu in March 2015. The writer – a regular “family values” correspondent whose ultra-conservative Catholic views would make a board meeting of the Iona Institute  look like Sunday brunch at the Playboy Mansion – was scandalised at the then-imminent marriage equality referendum.

God was quickly brought in to back up her argument because, presumably, there’s little the Almighty can’t be rolled out to justify. “God is not mocked,” she wrote. “We need only to see the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to know that God will not tolerate homosexual behaviour.”

“Since it is a grave sin, we cannot support sodomy under any circumstance… In Ireland for the past twenty years, in particular, we have been drip fed the homosexual lifestyle.”

TV soaps, apparently, have been to the forefront, “softening up the nation with their carefully crafted  scripts so that our acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle, that which is so opposed to God’s laws, has taken a ‘soft grip’ on the minds of the people”.

(At the time, I asked the human rights campaigner and leading member of Yes Equality Colm O’Gorman if “the homosexual lifestyle” mainly involves, as I’ve long suspected, liking Abba. “Pretty much,” he replied, drily. “That and really, really nice shoes”.)

The Avondhu’s correspondent, however, warned “any opposition to the ‘gay lifestyle’ will earn us the term(s) homophobic, intolerant, ignorant and old fashioned. While many may be bullied into silence, Christians are called to witness to Christ and to speak the truth, uncomfortable though it may be….

“We could never have envisioned that in 2015, Ireland would be asked to vote sodomy into the Irish Constitution and be deluded into calling it marriage.” The correspondent saw this as part of an agenda she called “The new ‘Human Rights’”.

It really is a fantastic screed and it breaks my heart not to re-produce it in full. (Sodomy is mentioned three times – and five times in a follow-up letter – leading me to conclude that some people really do seem to spend a lot of time thinking about sex.) It is indeed, as the author said, “homophobic, intolerant, ignorant and old fashioned”. It is also deeply offensive, not just to anyone who is gay, or to anyone who has gay family and gay friends, but also to anyone who just wants to live in a republic of equals and an Ireland of warmth and kindness.

It is also, in hindsight, a lot more honest than much of the dog-whistle stuff about children peddled by the No campaign. The letter spurred some —

Please read on in my column in The Avondhu

Column: Welcome to the Oval Office, President Trump

I had a sandwich and a coffee in the Amber service station in Fermoy a few weeks ago. At the table next to me was a group of children, eating chips and enjoying the lack of adult supervision. Four boys and two girls. I’d say the oldest of them was ten. I paid no heed till I realised that they were discussing politics.

“Guys!” said a boy who had until this point been throwing ketchup sachets at one of the girls, “Imagine if Donald Trump actually won!”

“Oh my God, Donald Trump is such a racist!” replied the girl.

“If Donald Trump wins it will be The End Of The World,” said the other girl with grim certainty.

“Um,” said a boy who was stacking his chips one on top of the other in a lattice formation, “You know Donald Trump won’t be the actual president of Ireland, ‘cause that’s like President Higgins’ job?”

(From the murmur of approval which greeted this remark, I suspect Michael D would get a warm reception from Fermoy’s under-ten community, should ever he stop into Amber for a feed of chips.)

“If Donald Trump gets to be The President Of America,” said the little girl, keen to return to the apocalypse, “That’s like he’s The President Of The World!”

“Oh my God that would be SO horrible!” said the boy stacking chips. “Donald Trump is like the Worst Person Ever!”

Beside them, I thought, given we have such clued-in children, then at the least the future of this country is in safe hands.

Mind you, they wrapped up their discussion by having a competition to see who could eat the most sugar, so perhaps their political insight should be judged accordingly.

Personally, I don’t know if President Donald Trump will be The End Of The World but I do think there’s a terrifying possibility that not alone will he be the Republican candidate, I think (and the bookies say I’m wrong) there’s a good chance he might well become US president.

I get rocks thrown at me every time I say this, but I think Hillary Rodham Clinton is a godawful candidate. Every time she points at an imaginary person in the audience, I hear a voice saying “Welcome to the Oval Office, President Trump”.

Clinton is the very epitome of the political establishment against which Trump has built his seemingly-unstoppable insurgency campaign. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion —

Please read on in my column in The Avondhu

What might rape culture look like in Ireland?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines rape culture as “A society… whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalising or trivialising sexual assault and abuse”. Wikipedia adds: “Behaviours commonly associated… include victim blaming, sexual objectification, trivialising rape, denial of widespread rape, refusing to acknowledge the harm caused by some forms of sexual violence, or some combination of these.”

December 2009:

“I just wanted to support him, just let him know he was not alone,” said Father Sean Sheehy, then-parish priest of Castlegregory, Co Kerry, after he joined a group of up to fifty people as they queued in Tralee Circuit Criminal Court to shake hands with Danny Foley.

Foley (35) had just been convicted of sexually assaulting a young woman a year earlier. Foley – then employed as a bouncer – had met his victim (then 22) at a Listowel nightclub and bought her a drink. After drinking it, she became incapacitated. (Later, she remembered trying to stop Foley from removing her clothing.)

Gardai found her in an alleyway, beside a skip, naked from the waist down, semi-conscious and covered in cuts and bruises. Foley was crouching over her. Foley told the Guards, “I came around here for a slash and I saw yer wan lying on the ground.”

CCTV footage showed Foley carrying her to the alleyway, so he changed his story, saying that she took off her trousers and asked for sex.

The jury convicted him. In his sentencing remarks, Judge Donagh McDonagh said Foley’s allegations about mutual sexual acts were designed “to add insult to injury” and “to demean and denigrate her further in the eyes of the jury and the public”.

Foley got a seven year sentence with the last two years suspended. (This being Ireland, he was out in three and a half years.)

Father Sheehy said “it seemed to me an extremely harsh sentence”. He went on national radio to extol Danny Foley’s decency.

Of Foley’s victim, Father Sheehy said: “I don’t want to make any judgment on her at all, but obviously the whole situation must have been embarrassing, for the police to happen upon them and what-not. She’s the mother of a young child as well and, you know, that in itself doesn’t look great.”

Please read on in The Avondhu

 

O Lord, give us a fresh election but not just yet #GE16Part2

54 days since the election, it seems clear that, for some, the real focus is on the next election, writes Donal O’Keeffe  

You’d want to be brave to comment on the ongoing discussions to form a government, seeing as the story twists and turns on a daily basis, but 54 days – and counting – since the election, one thing at least is clear: for some in Dáil Éireann, the last election isn’t half as important as the next.

It looks – at the time of writing – like the talking will go on well past the (presumably) scheduled next failure to elect a Taoiseach. With the Labour Party suddenly talking about talking about going back into coalition – and whither the Greens and SocDems? – it looks like this uncertainty could stretch out for weeks more.

Latest polling suggests an immediate election would only yield another hung Dáil (and cost €40 million we don’t have). The Independents might well suffer if the electorate thinks again about electing a hodge-podge of sole traders, what’s left of Labour can’t be too confident either and Sinn Fein and Fianna Fáil would rather wait. O Lord give us a fresh election, seems the prevailing opinion in political circles, but not just yet.

Please read on…

Nobody wins unless everybody wins – Why Springsteen’s championing LGBT rights is no surprise

“Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them.” 

So wrote Bruce Springsteen last week, explaining his decision to cancel his concert in Greensboro, North Carolina. 

North Carolina had just passed House Bill 2, which – as Springsteen noted – “the media are referring to as ‘the bathroom law’. HB2 – known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security – dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use.

“To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognising the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress…”

Those of us who know him would expect nothing less from Bruce Springsteen.

After all, this is the man who, four years ago, told the world of his decades-long battle with depression. I genuinely believe he did so for no other reason than to help de-stigmatise something which afflicts millions of people.

Please read on in my column in avondhupress.ie

My #GE16 opinion column: For the want of a vote, the election was lost

The game of “what if” is as old as humanity and we all know from an early age how the smallest of things can have the most profound of effects.

“For the want of a nail, the kingdom was lost” goes the old proverb, “For want of a shoe the horse was lost; For want of a horse the battle was lost; For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost – All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.”

As we close in on what politicians like to call “the only poll that counts”, we are beset on all sides by opinion polls and they all seem to point in broadly the same direction. Micheál Martin is having a good campaign – shame he doesn’t have a party; Enda is defying the lowest expectations in the history of politics – just about; Gerry Adams is proving he has a foot of clay on either side of the border; support for the independents is up and Labour is facing extinction.

If the polls are right, we can expect a hung Dáil. We could be looking at Fine Gael propped up by a hodge-podge of independents, or Enda Kenny’s nightmare scenario of a Fianna Fáil/Sinn Fein coalition or even a grand coalition of the two civil war parties – Fianna Gael.

At the time of writing – just before the final TV debate – it’s impossible to predict a game-changer in such a tight campaign.

Perhaps Joan Burton will find her voice and remind Labour’s critics that they did some good in office, too. Perhaps those who were never prouder of their country than they were on the day we voted for marriage equality will remember that it wouldn’t have happened without the Labour Party.

In the first TV debate of this campaign, Micheál Martin goaded Gerry Adams to such a degree that Adams snapped “Would you ever fff… go away and catch yourself on.” Perhaps Micheál will irritate him the rest of the way and this time Gerry won’t go with the second phrase to pop into his head.

Perhaps Enda will manage to actually top the astonishingly smug smile he gave on Sunday when he was asked if he stood over calling some of his own constituents “All Ireland champion whingers”. He did stand over it, he said. Some of them wouldn’t know sunshine on a sunny day. By the next morning, he said he had meant people from Fianna Fáil.

Sometimes, in the age of opinion polls, it seems there’s hardly even a point to voting. It’s important to remember, though, that opinion polls are only snapshots and in politics – as in every walk of life – the smallest thing can change everything.

It’s also worth remembering that at the start of the week of the 2011 presidential campaign, all of the opinion polls suggested only one likely outcome: President Sean Gallagher. Then, in the heat of a live television debate, Pat Kenny read out what appeared to be a tweet from Sinn Fein, claiming to be about to produce a smoking gun on donations to Gallagher. Rattled, Gallagher stumbled badly.

At the time, Ken Curtin (nowadays a candidate for the Social Democrats) tweeted it was an ambush worthy of General Tom Barry himself.

Next morning, Gallagher went on RTÉ Radio 1, flailing all around him, and got into a row with businesswoman Glenna Lynch (coincidentally, also a Social Democrat candidate these days). Things went from bad to worse for Gallagher and, by the end of the week, Michael D. Higgins was given the largest mandate in the history of the State and elected the 9th President of Ireland.

In the game of “what if”, perhaps there’s a world where an RTÉ researcher paused for a second and thought twice about passing the so-called “fake tweet” to Pat Kenny. For the want of a tweet in that world, perhaps President Sean Gallagher is doing a perfectly good job in the Áras (even if some of us did raise an eyebrow at his pre-election “pro-business” intervention).

No matter what the polls say, a day is a long time in politics and it would be a fool who would rule out what Harold Macmillan called “Events, dear boy”.

The smallest of things can change everything. For the want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. For the want of a vote, the election could be lost.

That vote is still in your hands.

Donal O’Keeffe