MUSINGS AND MEANDERINGS ON THIS AND THAT by Donal Kennedy

It showed the public holidays of various countries in Europe. Republican, secular France and the Lutheran and other Protestant countries had breaks from work on what Catholics called Holy Days when the Faithful were obliged by their Bishops to attend Mass. Ireland shared only Christmas Day with those countries, but the citizens were given a break from serving Mammon only on ” Bank” Holidays  and St. Patrick’s Day, once a National Holy Day but now merely a marketing stunt for Diageo, a multinational alcohol combine. So much for the supposed subservience of the Irish State to the Bishop of Rome.

Retirement and good health have given me time to appreciate, enjoy and reflect on my surroundings. And to compare England, where I’ve lived these past 52 years and Ireland where I lived for almost 23.

I’ve come to love many English villages, prettier by far than most in Ireland, churches and cathedrals of outstanding beauty with beautiful well-tended ancient churchyards, open to the public and with friendly, knowledgeable guides, set in fertile acres, and proclaiming centuries of comfortable occupation.

The churches and cathedrals predate “the Reformation” but the Church of England cherishes them and they are the focus of communities, many of whom are unbelievers, and they are a credit to all. I’m no expert on liturgical music or art, and as a Catholic am pretty ignorant of Scripture, but I examine with interest the plaques to local worthies, such as a couple of landowning generals who were churchwardens in one church and a landowning colonel who fought in Burma and Britain’s first Chinese War in 1840. So he was a drug pusher for the East India Company in the first Opium War. A couple of years ago

a British trade delegation visited China during November, and their hosts, seeing poppies on all their lapels, thought they were pushing their products with more aggression than subtlety. Other plaques commemorate nimble and flexible notables  who served with equal commitment the regimes of both Bloody Mary Tudor and her sister Good Queen Bess, and saved their necks from the axe and their skins from the fires and passed fortunes and survival skills on to their descendants.

The churches all have flagstaffs on their towers from which, on certain days ,the Union Flag is flown. And where the churchyards have war memorials the same flag seems to fly every day.

It’s a world away from Ireland, where the ravages of invasions, “plantations”, persecutions, and engineered depopulation can be seen in much of the  country.

Few Irish Army officers are landed “gentry” and no Catholic clergy hold benefices from great magnates. And nobody who fought (or even spied) for Ireland were canonised nor included in a Calendar of Saints

 Most of Ireland’s churches and abbeys were smashed during repeated wars and persecutions, most castles similarly and few farmhouses of any antiquity survive. Whole communities were buried with little ceremony and without headstones and often with no indication that anyone had lived there.

There are few Catholic Churches even two centuries old. None fly the Tricolour and none have plaques commemorating men or women who fought or  worked for Ireland or hungered for justice for her.

Our President has only one birthday and few citizens know when. There’s no Trooping of the Colour nor Beating Retreat, no Military Tattoos. Even Republican paramilitaries rarely had tattoos.

Whereas in England Church, State, property and media “are all in it together.”