Last week saw the publication of yet another tedious report on the alleged threat of the far right in Ireland. If you’ve read one of these self-referential rants, or any of the regular mainstream media outakes from one of the characters on the NGO and EU and British Home Office and billionaire-funded “left”, you can save yourself the bother. A 1948 Beano comic differs little in intellectual content or imagination from a more recent issue.
What is of interest perhaps is that a large part of this tiresome gig – which included a series of seminars hosted by Maynooth University – was sponsored and funded by Crosscare.
Crosscare was founded in 1941 and is the main conduit of social services under the auspices of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin.
I emailed Crosscare in October 2021 asking them why the organisation was involving itself with the seminars under the rather unacademic banner of STOPTHEFARRIGHT. Capitals included, indeed mandatory, given the nature of the event and the participants.
A factory meeting in Leningrad in October 1938 might have been similarly themed STOPTHETROTSKYISTZIONISTFASCISTS. You get the picture.
A Chara,
We note that Crosscare was advertised as part of the promotion of a recent seminar held in Maynooth under the above title.
We were wondering under what charitable objective would Crosscare’s association with such a politically oriented event be designated?
Is mise,
Dr. Matt Treacy
Of course, they did not respond. Maybe whoever received the email was unaware of the seminars. Perhaps it is the case as with other ostensibly Catholic agencies – as was highlighted the other day by my colleague John McGuirk with regard to Trócaire – those with overall responsibility for the agencies are not aware that they are in fact being used for political objectives?
I also contacted the Irish Research Council with a query regarding the academic merits and “value for money” that qualifies projects for funding. They were at least kind enough to respond, but when they passed my query to the “award holder” I received no response. The Research Council grant was part of New Foundations. It is difficult to see how a series of left-wing seminars contributed to “enhancing civil society” or creating a “better world”, but sure what would I know.
As John points out with regard to Trócaire, and the same applies surely to the project sponsored by Crosscare, the objectives of the activists involved are not only as the Charity Regulator points out, nothing whatsoever to do with the stated aims of the agencies involved, but arguably diametrically opposed to the ethos of those under whose patronage some leftist activists are operating.
That is certainly the case in regard to the “Resisting the Far Right” thingy. The authors are clever enough in this context not to focus on abortion by name as a defining feature of the “far right” – although it is clear that one of the seminar participants Aoife Gallagher of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue agrees that pro-lifers are to be regarded as part of the ‘For Roysh’. Unlike the British Home Office, of course.
Another participant in the seminars which informed the report was Mark Malone of the Far Right Observatory, a strident abortion supporter who previously accused Lucinda Creighton of seeking to ‘regulate women’s bodies’ and have “Christian fundamentalism as a cornerstone of state lead reproductive health care” because she opposed abortion. He’s also railed against the Catholic Church having “anything” to do with healthcare,
However, this Crosscare-funded report does focus on “familialism” as one of the characteristics of the far-right. Familialism has become a leftist pejorative term for what the authors themselves quote a minor leftist academic as constituting “a form of biopolitics which views the traditional family as the foundation of the nation and subjugates individual reproductive and self-determination rights [of women in particular] to the normative demands of the reproduction and the nation” (p.24).
That surely includes the Catholic Church in Ireland? Is the Church not supportive of the ‘traditional family?’ Was not the Catholic Church opposed to the legalisation of abortion? So why are Dublin diocesan funds being given to these people to attack one of the foundations of the beliefs, if not of the people who work for Crosscare, then certainly of those Catholics who contributed over €1.5 million in donations, legacies and collections to Crosscare in 2020.
So what do the authors of the report want to see happen? Well, they are offering their “free” report – which is not free because it is paid for by other people including the taxpayer and people who contribute to Crosscare Church collections – to participants in the seminars in the hope that “action” will ensue.
Specifically they wish to see a “more militant state” policy against the “far right.” Which is a term that perhaps requires some “interrogation” given the clear sympathies of Assistant Professor Barry Cannon who was largely responsible for the report. As indeed does the report’s isolation of “authoritarianism” as one of the defining features of the far right.
Why is this you ask? Well, simply for the reason that Cannon – who has written admiringly of the disaster that was the “Bolivarian Revolution” – is an open admirer of the former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and is obviously sympathetic to Latin American leftism which is inextricably linked to the Castros of Cuba. Said Castros, of course, not only tick all the boxes with regards to authoritarianism – as they enjoy their seventh decade of one party and indeed familial secret police enforced dictatorship – but who would also surely qualify with their record on the murder and torture and internment of gay people as “homophobic”?
Which is another Mark of the Beast, unless of course you get a racialist western relativist pass because BIPOC are not supposed to have the same human rights as their late Victorian university cossetted missionaries.
We are not responsible for the destructive ideology of the far left. They are entitled to transmit that peaceably the same as everyone else, although of course they do not apply such tolerance to others. What we ought not be responsible for is paying for the transmission of that ideology which they themselves openly celebrate as being in favour of the destruction of the values of many of the people who fund them.
Let the Woke billionaires and the EU Commission and the spooks pick up the tab, if they so wish. They have also succeeded in capturing many of the state funded NGOs who wet their beaks on the taxpayer’s tab. We do, however, have some control over where our voluntary donations are going. Perhaps take a leaf out of the Charity Regulator’s book and let them know.