The Game is Up

    The now diminished figure of the Pope, stands on the centre stage of this gigantically built altar complex in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, speaking down to the huddled, sparsely populated masses below, his amplified voice is echoing in the vastness and emptiness known and loved by generations of Dubliners as the Phoenix Park. In support of their Pope, Francis is flanked by various fanatic followers, like Cardinals, Bishops and Priests. The depiction of the crowd is also highly stage-managed by R.T.E State Television and the main stage is camouflaged with papal paraphernalia. 

    The front segment of the crowd are other Priests, Nuns and dignitaries, all cheering and clapping in unison. The elevated viewpoint of the R.T.E State Television camera has the effect that the grandness of the occasion is not matched by the sparse crowd, vast areas of the main Dublin park lie empty. But also, by filming from high above, the people gathered in the Park remain, in the eyes of the viewer, an anonymous mass whose purpose that day was to support their Pope. The problem was that every time the R.T.E State Television cameras pulled away to look at the crowd, the Roman Catholic Church was already crumbling, and the indifferent Irish people could finally see it. 

    By the time the Pope was making his inconsequential speech, the game was up. Fear could be seen if one looked at the images transmitted live on R.T.E State Television. Even the propagandistic R.T.E State Television couldn’t hide the fact, that there were few of the 500,000 attending the Papal Mass. It slowly dawned on the producers that the crowd was terribly small, less than 130,000, when considering that in 1979, that crowd was 2.5 million people attending the same event. 

    All that tax-payer money spent by the Irish State, and millions more by the greedy R.T.E State Television, hoping to sell the rights to a flop. A few minutes into his final blessing from the Pope on the artificial stage and the insincere and meaningless speech. The insignificant Pope spoke with a hollow voice, a very small section of the crowd started hissing. It was an unusual sound that crept from the back of the crowd, but couldn’t be heard towards the front row. It was like a near silent wave crashing into a stone shore, crying to be heard. The sound of his Irish and International crowd booing and hissing in condemnation finally reaches the Bishops, even the Pope is aware now, R.T.E State Television cameras captured the facial expressions, which is now one of disbelief. 

    This was after all Catholic Ireland, or so they the colourful, Bishops who were dressed in ostentatious clothing with their gold bling decorations. The Bishops appeared fully conscious of the virtue of their gayful finery, parading and mincing across the open stage as if in a fashion or drag show in Paris. The Bishops thought, by bring this vintage Holy Pope, in dazzling white, they assumed, he would knock some sense into these heathen Irish masses. For a brief moment, the sound coming from the frightened Bishops was so high pitched that it had the characteristics of a panic. The R.T.E State Television cameras started shaking, they as part of the coverup were stunned. All that tax-payer money spent, needlessly, a good all Ireland GAA Final had a far bigger crowd and was more lucrative, as would any pop concert by any second rate acts, who could pull in bigger crowds, we Irish love the craic. 

      The signification of the sparse crowd in these moments caught by R.T.E State Television cameras are important, as if to signal that the Irish Catholic Church was dying, coming to a bitter end, the game is over. The Bishops haven’t quiet got it yet, even after the two most recent referendums, the Same-sex Marriage Referendum and The Abortion Referendum, both carried by nearly 70% approval by the Irish People. Everybody knows, except the Irish Catholic Church that the two recent referendums was really a referendum on the Irish Catholic Church and they lost. 

    But the Roman Catholic Religious walls, were falling in front of their very eyes, it’s as if the Pope, Bishops, and Priests and now the audience know this, that the final curtain is about to fall, and won’t be raising anytime soon, if ever. R.T.E State Television cameras searching for appropriate subjects and paid righteous talking heads speaking in tongues, propagandists trying desperately to put a positive spin on a sinking churchtanic. 

    The era of Catholic Ireland is dead and gone and is to be buried with McQuaid in his crumbling crypt, in St Mary's Pro-Cathedral, Dublin. Yet shivering prayers nor fasting, will never heal the wounds of decades of torture, rape, murder and clerical malfeasance, nor continuing to hide the thousands of murdered children, disposed off, flushed into many a septic tank, at all Religious run Institutions in Ireland. The mothers, their children, worked and were starved to death, are dead and gone, but not forgotten. Tuam has gone about the world like an ill wind, it’s name forever tarnished and associated with a septic tank. This is not the time to pray, but weep at the religious deception, the clerics deceit is coming to haunt and shame the living. 

    But their corrupt god will not be coming anytime soon to save them from their final accountability their eternal ignominy. The tears on every raindrop of the crying children will be seen carried on every incoming tide, their stories will be told, rediscovered as to why that their blood was shed. For this cruel Catholic Ireland, the real patriots died, Emmet, Tone, Markievicz, Ceannt, Connolly, Plunkett, Collins Pearse, MacDiarmada, Casement and many more, and for what, for the illusions of the brave. We can’t return the years again, we mustn’t,  but we can ensure that the tens of thousands of vulnerable children, their grieving mothers, both living and dead, their raped daughters, tortured and brutalised sons, will never relive the horrors what was romantic Ireland. What about the Irish Catholic Church and it’s religious retributions?, let’s bury it and them, finally, and after true accountability, lower it into its grave, and teach it’s history to future generations so that it can never raise its ugly head again. 
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    To my Mother, Brothers, and Sisters, who I never met, but knew about, who have died in such horror places to which I was born, and incarcerated for 18 years. To the tens of thousands of children and their Mothers who couldn’t make it or fell by the way side, I haven’t forgotten, nor will I, I will be your voice to speak truth. Now I must continue my endless search to find my Mother, Nora, my Brother, Carol;- other Brothers and Sisters I have no name for. I will rescue them and others, to many to count from their mass graves at the back of many an empty Religious run Institution, now overgrown, haunted with the stench and grief of many brutal memories they left behind. My family and others were all brutalised as was I, all in the name of a sick cult. Owen Felix O’Neill