The Acquiescent Irish Press

 The Acquiescent Irish Press
       Two questions often asked of me by friends, did the Irish Press enable the atrocities of the Irish Catholic Church? and two, did the Irish Catholic Church thrive and flourish on fear?. At the time of the founding of the Irish State, the Irish Newspapers were greatly used by the Irish Catholic Church, with the direct support of the Irish newspapers, themselves, speaking for the Irish Catholic Church through propaganda. The Irish Catholic Church’s misanthropes, controlled the media through the power of the pulpit, like the Irish national newspapers, the regional newspapers, even the cinema and especially the radio and early RTE television. The Irish broadcaster organisation called RTE which was the primary sources of spreading the Irish Catholic Church’s propaganda, was in fact the propaganda arm of the Irish Catholic Church in which strict censorship and controls was asserted by the Irish Catholic Church. The receptive mind of the superstitious Irish was very limited, their intelligence at that time was small, but their power of forgetting and feeling ashamed were enormous. The real medium of direct communication was the Church’s pulpit, used locally and not the newspapers or other media outlets. 

    The Irish Catholic Church reckless disregard for truth, they organised a rigid, disciplined crew of sociopaths on a mission to rebuild a Catholic Ireland to their image, the anger and incitement to hatred, of sin, sex in general, having a good time, unwed mothers, their children, Irish writers, trade unions, the left in general the declamations that they the Irish Catholic Church would usher in a glorious reign of the Catholic Church to a young free Ireland, instead we had their disdain for democracy we saw in all of these things incipient fascism by the ultra right wing Irish Catholic Church, many of the Irish Bishops flaunting haughtiness with their lackeys and themselves displaying open authoritarian temperaments. 

  This Church's pulpit was a very effective propaganda tool for the Irish Catholic Church, after all, over 96% of the Irish people attended mass. Control of all the Irish newspapers was through the appointments of its editors which was put into the hands of Irish Catholic Church. They alone choose the editors with strong Catholic ethos and they the editors would blindly follow the Irish Catholic Church’s diktats. One of the secret head’s of the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda at the time was one Archbishop John Charles McQuaid a secret solipsistic anarchist, who set up a secret department within the Bishop’s Palace that dealt solely with Irish newspapers. The Irish newspapers had to spread the same message omitting from the Bishop’s Palace in Dublin. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid coordinated the whole of Irish Society so that it acted and read from the same hymn book as the holy mother church. Therefore Irish people could only read the slanted news as it was presented to them by the Irish Catholic Church. 

    Since the founding of the Irish Free State, the Irish Catholic Church established control or exerted direct influence over independent press organs. The President Eamon de Valera felt that the arts in Ireland were to be encouraged when they observed the "holiest traditions", but should be censored when they failed to live up to this ideal. The Irish Catholic Church regime was delighted by the President de Valera and they deployed the radio, press, and newsreels to stoke fears of a pending Communist uprising, criminal sins,  been committed by unwed mothers and their children, with others, even the rise of the liberal intellectuals, like the great Irish Writers, (over 1,600 books were banned), like  Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faolain, Oliver S. Gogarty, Walter Macken, Frank O’Connor, Benedict Kiely and many other famous International writers. Contrary to popular belief, James Joyce’s Ulysses was technically never banned in Ireland, but this was because it was never imported and offered for sale. In the eyes of the Irish Catholic Church these writers were corrupting the morals of Irish youth. 

    The Irish Catholic Church then channeled popular anxieties into political measures that almost eradicated civil liberties with a direct threat to the young Irish democracy. Irish Catholic Church thugs broke into opposing political party offices, trade union offices, and any left wing group that opposed the ruling Irish Catholic Church, by destroying printing presses and their newspapers. 

    According to  Anthony Keating, Senior Lecturer at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, UK. The Catholic Church in Ireland was particularly authoritarian and pessimistic about the Irish people’s ability to play out what it viewed to be their Irish Catholic mission, namely, to offer an Irish Catholic beacon of purity to a world otherwise sullied by sin. Ireland’s population was believed, by religio-nationalist ideologues, to have been partially corrupted by centuries of imperial domination and the temptations of modernity. It was reasoned therefore, that if Ireland was to achieve its potential of true Irish Catholic nationhood, its people required an unquestioned faith in the spiritual and moral leadership of the Catholic Church and the riddance from Ireland of spiritual and intellectual contaminants from within and without its borders.

    In reality the Irish Catholic Church understood the power and attraction of emerging technologies, such as film, loudspeakers, radio, and television, in the service of their propaganda. These new technologies offered the Irish Catholic Church leadership a means for mass dissemination of their ideological Irish Catholic messages. Guided by fears that the liberal left and their intellectuals, were eroded Irish Catholic morale and encouraging unrest, through union strife. The Irish Catholic Church authorities with their enablers in Irish Government Departments hoped that the threat of severe punishment and excommunications would reinforce efforts to insulate the Irish population from the Irish Catholic Church perceived enemies and their lies. 

   Yet it’s the Irish Catholic Church who were the destabilisers, of the young Irish Free State, the ones operating in a nefarious ways to undermine the Irish State hoping to turn the young Irish State into a theoretical Catholic State and have been doing so in Ireland for a few hundred years. 
    The enemy is invisible and omnipresent, said the Bishops of Ireland at the time. Central to this protection of the youth and people of Ireland was the importance of censorship of newspapers, periodicals and novels that were viewed by the Irish Catholic Church as carriers of sexual immorality and blasphemy. These publications were viewed by The Irish Catholic Church as insidious vehicles of mortal sin and corruption, that the vast majority of Ireland’s citizenry were too unsophisticated to resist. A concern alluded to by the Editor of the Catholic Bulletin, who observed, “the mind of England has been trained to criticise and think for itself; that of Ireland to believe and accept what it is taught” (Catholic Bulletin, 2,1928: 124).