Eideard

Xi Jinping kicking a Gaelic football at Croke Park in Dublin
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Ireland’s reputation as a technology hub is a big draw for China, the Chinese leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping said at the end of a three-day visit, his only European Union stop on a world tour. Speaking at an investment forum Monday with some 350 companies, Xi said Ireland’s history, scenery and culture had impressed the Chinese people.

But he made clear the country’s clout in hi-tech and emerging industries, largely due to a low corporation tax rate that has lured Silicon Valley heavyweights, was a key factor.

“Ireland is strong in software development, ICT and biotech medicines and other hi-tech industries…We give top priority to the new generation of IT and bio-tech,” Xi told delegates via a translator Monday, adding it would be the priority for future trade between the two countries.

“Ireland is a country that is strong in trade and services and this bodes well for our co-operation,” he added…

“They are hungry for technologies, things are changing so fast. Ireland is such a small country but we have lot of small and medium businesses with great technologies,” said Jo Cheng, head of analytics at Dublin-based Idiro Technologies, which she noted, had been approached by two Chinese companies in recent months for the first time.

“Ireland is the (European) headquarters of so many massive technology companies like Google, Facebook, eBay. There is a reason why they’re here,” said Cheng, a Chinese national living in Ireland…

His fascination with Ireland dates back to his first trip to Dublin in 2003 when he was a provincial party secretary…”I recall my first visit to this country in 2003. At that time one Irish person I met said to me an Irish saying that is good things often come in small packages and that person said that is us, that is Ireland. We believe Ireland has so many good things to offer,” said Xi Sunday evening.

Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who will visit China next month with a trade delegation, added that the countries had a lot to offer each other, despite the differences in size…

Xi, who visited the United States last week and moves on to Turkey Tuesday, began his Irish stay at a high tech zone near Shannon airport that inspired the building of a similar zone in Shenzhen, the pilot project of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms…

Beijing has followed with interest Ireland’s transformation from a developing farming economy to one that attracted international technology and drug companies, and is now showing first signs of rebounding from an economic crash…

Eire closed the loophole style of taxation years ago and has committed to a good education through college level free for its citizens. Two things that don’t stand a chance of getting through our ideologue-governed Congress.

Though specifics didn’t come up, I imagine the likelihood of real investment of Chinese companies in Irish firms won’t have to pass through the sort of Cold war vetting that is inevtiable in the US or the UK.

Will they continue to send the weekly checks?
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Catholic Ireland’s stunning decision to close its embassy to the Vatican is a huge blow to the Holy See’s prestige and may be followed by other countries which feel the missions are too expensive – and useless, unproductive.

The closure brought relations between Ireland and the Vatican, once ironclad allies, to an all-time low following the row earlier this year over the Irish Church’s handling of sex abuse cases and accusations that the Vatican had encouraged secrecy…

“This is really bad for the Vatican because Ireland is the first big Catholic country to do this and because of what Catholicism means in Irish history,” said a Vatican diplomatic source who spoke on the condition of anonymity…

Over time, this will be seen as only the first of many departing a seat at the foot of the papal throne.

Dublin’s foreign ministry said the embassy was being closed because “it yields no economic return” and that relations would be continued with an ambassador in Dublin.

The source said the Vatican was “extremely irritated” by the wording equating diplomatic missions with economic return, particularly as the Vatican sees its diplomatic role as promoting human values…

Promoting human values? Only if your values are stuck into the 14th Century, your concern for your flock is cemented in 19th Century politics.

Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina Coyne
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The poet, peace campaigner and president of Galway United football club Michael D Higgins is poised to become Ireland’s next president after rivals conceded defeat in the most fractious campaign in the country’s history.

The Irish Labour party candidate was on course to win at least 40% of the first preference vote. Of the first eight constituencies to declare, Higgins was leading in seven of them.

The 70-year-old enjoyed a late surge of support, putting him well ahead of the former frontrunner Seán Gallagher. Martin McGuinness, whose candidacy turned the spotlight on his past as the IRA’s chief of staff and his role in many prominent atrocities during the Troubles, was almost certain to come third.

Leaders of other parties and rival candidates conceded on Friday afternoon that Higgins was on course to win the presidential contest. Micheál Martin, the leader of the main opposition party, Fianna Fáil, congratulated Higgins on his performance “which will see him elected the ninth president of Ireland”…

Sinn Féin appeared to acknowledge the damage that his IRA legacy had inflicted on McGuinness’s bid. He had hoped to achieve about 20% but may only get around 15% – the same as the party polled in February’s general election…

The main party in the current government, Fine Gael, had a disastrous election. In Roscommon, the early morning tallies reported that in some ballot boxes there were only four votes for its candidate, the Euro MEP Gay Mitchell. The party also appeared likely to suffer another loss in the Dublin West byelection, caused by the death of Ireland’s former finance minister Brian Lenihan. The Irish Labour party appeared poised to win the seat.

Bravo. In a land with many political currents represented in a democratic election, Higgins’ victory is significant in size and breadth.

Ireland stepped up its battle with the Roman Catholic Church over child abuse Sunday, with Justice Minister Alan Shatter vowing to pass a law requiring priests to report suspicions of child abuse, even if they learn about them in confession.

The Catholic Church regards information learned in confession as completely confidential. But under the law proposed by Shatter, priests could be prosecuted for failing to tell the police about crimes disclosed in the confession box.

Shatter said in a statement through a spokesman last week that priests’ failure to report what they learn in confession “has led sexual predators into believing that they have impunity and facilitated pedophiles preying on children and destroying their lives.”

The minister’s comment to a local radio station Sunday comes after the Vatican rejected Irish accusations that church leaders sought to cover up extensive abuse of young people by priests in Ireland…

“In a spirit of humility, the Holy See, while rejecting unfounded accusations, welcomes all objective and helpful observations and suggestions to combat with determination the appalling crime of sexual abuse of minors,” the statement says…

Released July 13, the 421-page report into the handling of abuses in the diocese of Cloyne demolished claims by the Catholic Church in Ireland that policies it put in place in 1996 had enabled it to get a handle on the problem.

It also accused Bishop John Magee, who was responsible for policing abuse in his diocese, of not backing the policies himself and failing to take action against abusers.

Time is long past for churches to be removed as a law unto themselves, superseding the law of sovereign nations. And, yes, that includes the question of paying taxes like any other corporate body.

Thousands of people marched for peace in Omagh one week after the murder of constable Ronan Kerr in the Co Tyrone town.

The mass rally was a powerful demonstration against violence in a community which suffered the infamous 1998 bombing by dissident republicans that killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins…

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams warned against sheltering those responsible arguing that the political landscape had changed since the days of the Troubles.

“Don’t be fooled into thinking that you are helping the IRA,” he said, “The war is over.”

Dissident republicans opposed to the peace process were blamed for the booby trap device that exploded under the policeman’s car on April 2. The same extremists are believed to be behind a 500lb van bomb police discovered near the border town of Newry on Thursday.

The Omagh rally attracted support from across the community and was attended by friends and relatives of the murdered officer. And while the march was not party political, organisers said it was intended to send a message of support in the peace process.

Gareth McElduff used Facebook to co-ordinate the rally and said it demonstrated the widespread support for the Kerr family.

He added: ”Although these are major, major setbacks in the peace process, hopefully the amount of people that is going to come out today is going to show everybody that we want peace in Ireland again and we don’t want to go back to the Troubles.”

Many in the crowd held posters carrying a picture of Pc Kerr’s face, with the words: ”Not In My Name.”

All power to the people. Stick the terrorist fools back into the cesspool from whence they came. The young copper who was murdered was a nationalist and a republican – willing to fight for change through political action. Unlike the cowards who killed him.

Andrew Madden is one of a relatively new breed of Irish celebrities who would just as soon be less well known. He was among the first people in Ireland to go public about being sexually abused by Catholic clergy — one of those who set off the intense bout of soul-searching that has racked the country lately. When I met Madden last fall in Dublin, the early rumbles of the collapse of Ireland’s economy were shaking the country, and throughout much of a pub lunch he talked about the failures of the government and the banks. It was only later, once we were driving around his old neighborhood, past the pebbledash house where he grew up and where his parents still live, that he began to talk about his childhood. As we sat in his car in front of Christ the King Church, where he spent much of his youth as an altar boy and a choir member, he outlined the four years of torment he suffered in the late 1970s at the hands of the Rev. Ivan Payne, one of the infamous serial sex offenders among the Irish Catholic clergy whose stories have transfixed the country over the past year and a half…

My afternoon with Andrew Madden might serve as a snapshot of what Ireland has been through lately. The country is preoccupied with the fallout — personal, social and political — from the crash and burn of the Celtic Tiger. But beneath that, and in a way connected to it, is a more primal pain: one deeper, lodged in the bones, maybe. The phenomenal economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. But as the economy has crashed, the Irish have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state relationship that was and in many ways still is, as quite a few people in the country see it, perversely antimodern.

Of the various crises the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one — wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of children by priests and other church figures — has affected Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted so aggressively. The Irish responded to the publication in 2009 of two lengthy, damning reports — detailing thousands of cases of rape, sexual molestation and lurid beatings, spanning Ireland’s entire history as an independent country, and the efforts of church officials to protect the abusers rather than the victims — with anger, disgust, vocal assaults on priests in public and demands that the government and society disentangle themselves from the church…

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Thousands of people have marched in what is intended to be the last Bloody Sunday march in Londonderry.

The marchers started from the Creggan area walking behind a banner carried by the families which read “vindicated”.

They completed the route begun in 1972 – the march usually stops at Free Derry Corner, but instead went all the way to the Guildhall. Organisers said they believe the annual event should come to an end following the publication of the Saville Report.

A statement said the protest was no longer necessary after the inquiry exonerated those who died in the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings.

It was signed by the majority of the victims’ families.

Some relatives of the victims have called the proposal premature. They broke off from the parade at William Street and finished their march at Free Derry corner.

Earlier, hundreds gathered at the monument for the wreath-laying on the first Bloody Sunday anniversary since the publication of the Saville Report…

Fourteen people lost their lives on 30 January 1972 when British paratroopers opened fire on a civil rights march in Derry’s Bogside area…

Tony Doherty, whose father Paddy was…killed on Bloody Sunday, said he supported the ending of the march.

He added: “The vast majority of the families felt that what we had brought about, what we had achieved on 15 June, with the Saville Report as an exoneration, with the words of David Cameron, with apology and accepting political responsibility for the atrocity of Bloody Sunday, that it was now time for us all to consider moving on.”

Perhaps it’s time for some of the newspapers that supported the lies of various British governments over the years to declare remorse for their complicity. The way in which society as a whole learns of political events depends so much on the ideology of the owners of the media.

Collaboration is still a crime.

A Waltham-based group that has been chronicling the US clergy sexual abuse scandal has released the names of 60 to 70 accused priests it says were born in Ireland or are of Irish descent who came to the United States and were reoffenders.

The group, BishopAccountability.org, demanded that Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston and Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence immediately make public the names of any credibly accused Irish priests who have worked in their dioceses.

By revealing the names, the group said it hopes to highlight the issue of immigrant Irish priests who are known pedophiles and whose histories of alleged abuse have long been “outsourced’’ to the United States…

“Bishops [in Ireland], just like bishops here, have been moving accused priests around, even though they know they are dangerous,’’ said Terence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org. “Unfortunately the places where they put them include our own backyard. So the Irish crisis, basically, has become our crisis, too.’’

Standing before the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, members and supporters of the group said the Irish scandal is deeply linked to the US abuse crisis because priests trained in Irish seminaries are systematically sent to serve in America, including clergy with long histories of abuse.

They also called on Prime Minister Brian Cowen of Ireland to recognize his country’s responsibility to inform the American public of all child-molesting clergy from Irish dioceses and religious orders who have immigrated to US dioceses.

RTFA. No surprises. No real solutions offered by the church.

The sickest part remains politicians both sides of the pond who maintain their collusion with the Catholic Church over the crimes.

Two Irish bishops have offered their resignation to the Pope, after a government investigation highlighted a cover-up of child sex abuse by priests in Ireland over decades. The announcement on Friday, Christmas Day, increased the number of resignations of church leaders over the probe to four.

Bishops Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field said that they hoped that their resignation might “bring the peace and reconciliation of Jesus Christ to the victims/survivors of child sexual abuse”.

There was no response from those who have been said to suffer sexual abuse at the hands of those implicated…

More than 170 cases of abuse have been found to have been covered-up by Dublin church leaders. Incidents began to be revealed in 1995 but many records were hidden until 2004.

The cases came to light after Andrew Madden, a former alter boy, made public the abuse he suffered at the hands of priests and the church’s attempts to buy his silence in the mid-1990s.

Isn’t there some kind of deal where Christians say they have to be forgiven?

I mean – outside of whatever lawsuits are filed.

The Irish Republic’s strict abortion law is being challenged in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The legal action has been brought by three Irish women who say the effective ban on abortion in Ireland violates the European Convention on Human Rights. All three have travelled to Britain to have abortions.

The Irish government has engaged two leading lawyers to argue its case that the country has a sovereign right to protect the life of the unborn…

The Irish constitution was amended in 1983 to include the “Pro-Life Amendment”, which asserted that the unborn child had an explicit right to life from conception…

Almost 140,000 Irish women have travelled to Britain over the past 30 years to have abortions, our correspondent adds.

The struggle for individual freedoms, for the right to choose how you order your own life, will not go away. Whether dealing with draconian law in Eire, Shari’a or Torah courts in the Middle East, the inevitable conflict lies between those who choose to rule on behalf of theology versus individual, collective and social rights grounded in liberty and freedom of choice.