Tag Archives: Patsy McGarry

From top: Patsy McGarry;  This morning’s Irish Times

‘Last week too it was erroneously claimed that the Data Protection Act 2018*  – which implements the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – meant the commission could no longer abide by provisions of the 2004 Act which set it up, and stipulated that documents it accumulated must be placed beyond public access.’

Irish Times Religious Affairs Correspondent Patsy McGarry

No grand conspiracy to protect those responsible for mother and baby homes (Patsy McGarry, Irish Times)

Meanwhile…

Katherine O’Donnell, of the Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR), tweetz:

Quick thoughts on the Irish Times coverage of Repeal the Seal…

1. Portraying adopted people’s and public anger at repeated Government. declarations that records would be sealed for 30 years as a misunderstanding of the bill and Government’s good intentions.

2. Blaming ‘hurt & upset’ of survivors on survivor/activists and academics protesting the system whereby adopted people are denied the name their mothers gave them and personal data – is to refuse to hear the empowered voices of survivors demanding their human rights.

3. Accusing activists and particularly academics of ‘wilfully’ misrepresenting the Bill and Commission and deliberately and unnecessarily upsetting ‘those people affected’ is not merely wrong (and injurious) but dangerous to fostering informed respectful public debate.

4. Sustained a very unusual level of ‘inaccuracies’ in The Irish Times is troubling e.g. 2004 Act does not in fact seal archives – Magdalene Inquiry wasn’t based on this Act. etc. Failure to ask critical questions – such as isn’t it illegal for Commission to destroy a database?

Good reporters editorialising on behalf of Government is a betrayal of journalistic standards –  we need them to continue to hold power to account. Coverage in The Journal and Irish Examiner was so much better.

Finally – we would not have achieved any justice measures won (so far) without the level of engaged and informed debate on Twitter. I’m looking forward to Irish Twitter continuing to listening and  informing each other, debating and critiquing – we have an ongoing job to ensure justice.

McGarry, eh?

Earlier: This New Position Has Huge Implications

maryWe may never know.

President Mary McAleese’s remarks that the Catholic Church is in denial about homosexuality, because many of its priests are gay, were analysed with exquisite detail by Patsy McGarry, of the Irish Times – and author of McAleese biography First Citizen – and a bewildered Seán O’Rourke on his Today show on RTÉ R1 this morning.

Bless the innocence.

Sean O’Rourke:“She’s also telling the paper, or did tell them that a very large number of Catholic priests are gay.”

Patsy McGarry: “Well, this is not new. I mean, in 1997, in March of 1997 she wrote an article for The Tablet, which is the Catholic monthly published in the UK, in which she made the very same point. This was before it was even mooted that she might be a candidate for the Presidency at all, all that happened later on that year…She was talking really about Ireland but, also generally speaking, about the phenomenon, as she knows, that then, of the very high proportion of priests who are gay.”

O’Rourke: “How does she know?”

McGarry: “Well, I mean she’s an acute observer of people, I expect. I never asked her actually why, how she knew..”

O’Rourke: “But I’m just wondering is this based on empirical evidence or her own observations. I mean when she says ‘it isn’t so much an elephant in the room but a herd of elephants’.”

McGarry: “Well there are books, and have been books in the United States, particularly one in 2000 which estimates that half the priests in that country were gay, produced by a former priest himself Daniel [unintelligible]. There have been other such books as well. I mean it’s an understood phenomenon where the church is concerned. One book estimated that a third of bishops in the world, Catholic bishops are gay.”

O’Rourke: “And of course there was that controversy of course last year and there was a report presented to the former pope about allegations of a gay lobby within the Vatican itself.”

McGarry: “That’s true and…in fact there’s a story in the paper today about a Swiss guard who talks about his experiences in the Vatican when he was a Swiss guard there, about being approached by various people, up to and including, a cardinal, for sexual purposes.”

O’Rourke: “So it’s not the only issue, that Mary McAleese has been outspoken and going contrary to the church’s teaching. I mean, I think it’s a long time ago, even before she became president that she tangled with them on the whole question of women priests.”

McGarry: “Yes, it’s true but to go back to the original theme, Sean, she has a strong record when it comes to gay people. I mean when she was in Trinity College, as a professor of law, back in the mid-1970s, she and David Norris set up the campaign for homosexual law reform. And when I wrote her biography in 2008, I talked to her about how she became interested in this issue. And she said when she was a young student in the Seventies, she met a young man in California, when she was on a student job, who was a gay man who was not on the gay scene, didn’t want to be on the gay scene but he lived a very, very lonely life and she was very moved by his experience and it excited her interest in the situation of gay people. And, as president, she also addressed this issue in the context of youth suicide, particularly where young men were concerned.”

Listen here

Earlier: You Could Always Leave?

Pic: Passionists.org