NO MOPERY HERE (not) ! by Perkin Warbeck

‘Is it Kick the Prods Week in The Irish Times (sic) ?’ screeched the heading over a missive in that calm cloister of civilised whispers , the Letters Page of The Unionist Times (November 2).

Eh?

The writer was a lady from Twickenham, UK and by all accounts the reason why her bloomers had assumed the Chubby Checker pattern was on account of stuff she had been reading in The Papist, oops, the Paper of Record which ‘was grossly insulting to the Church of Ireland, of which I am a member’.

Eh?

Whatever could she have been on about, at all, at all?

Could there be a (gulp) Most Oppressed Prod Ever (M.O.P.E.) competition being run in (gasp) The Unionist Times ever since Roy Foster, former Prof of Irish History for Toffs in Oxford, was recently on about, and in the same organ, the fate suffered by the M.O.P.E.s south of the Border down Wexico Way. Even long, long before “No Frontiers’ became a hit, albeit minor, for Mary Black.

(Could the Fosters, Roy and An Bahnríon A. be politically related, perchance?)

Could the letter writer of the laddered nylons have been referring to a piece which had appeared in TUT on the Tuesday before (Oct 25)? The author of which was the retired environment editor of The Unionist Times.

-A Modest Proposal for St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral: Pope should revoke ancient claim of Christ Church as Dublin’s Cathedral.

Wha’!?

Was Frank McDonald, Bachelor of Arts, actually advocating the storming by the Papal Hordes (including the Swiss Guards of the helmets with the cute purple ostrich feathers,   spear-like halberds and fetching skin-tight yellow, bule and red stipey leggings and codpieces ) and regaining Christ Church from the Filchers of Five Hundred Years ago?

Prima facie evidence from the heading might well have suggested such; but closer inspection revealed this to be not the case, at all at all.

So, time to settle, petal.

Phew.

Or, rather, Phewey , Dewey.

Being the week that’s in it the above heading which begins with ‘A Modest Proposal’ is actually every bit as misleading – and obviously Miss leading as the infamously previous heading of the Chicago Daily Tribune of November 3, 1948 which read:

-Dewey Defeats Truman !

And which a triumphant Harry S. Truman, still in the heat of Hell’s Kitchen, held aloft as he cracked wise:

-That ain’t the way I heard it !

Which uncannily presages the reaction of the gullible reader who proceeds to read the TUT article:

-With a year to go before we mark the quincentennial on Oct 31, 2017, of Martin Luther nailing his demands for reform on the door of All-Saints Church in Wittenberg, the time has surely come to settle a historical anomaly unresolved for the past 200 years – the inherently ‘temporary’ status of St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin.

Hmmm.

Beard-stroking time. Such as might have been indulged   by Sitric Silkenbeard, the Viking chap who actually founded the cathedral, after a pilgrimage to Rome in 1028.

Is the author suggesting that, erm, the Papes should ditch both their ‘Pro’ prefix and their claim for the return from the Prods of the Papish Cathedral which was, erm, borrowed by Fat Harry in 1539? Read on:

-One would wish that the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin could simply designate St. Mary’s as Dublin’s Catholic Cathedral. But if so, he would have to petition Pope Francis to revoke the 12th Century papal designation of Christ Church as the metropolitan cathedral.

(Now, here’s the kicker)

-Both of them are reasonable men and must see the sense of making this long overdue move.

Ah, so. Translated from reasonable, sense-making TUT-speak, this would seem to indicate that if someone had borowed a copy of – say, at random – Frank McDonald’s best-selling book ‘The Destruction of Dublin ‘- from a Dublin City Library, or even two copies , more to the point – shortly after its publication in 1985, and who couldn’t be arsed returning it, can now be declared the legal owner of same?

Hmmmm (2).

Could, one wonders, Frank McDonald have been (gasp) unaware – and he to be an environmentalist with an artchitectural bent, with a particular interest in public erections – the reason for the apologetic position of the forelock-tipping Papish Pro-Cathedral in a saving-your-presence-sor side street with its meek back to the Main Drag of Dublin City?

No, for he himself unapologetically reminds his readers of the reason:

-Catholics were not permitted under the Penal Laws to erect churches on any main street in Ireland.

Hmmmm (3).

There is much more of this sort of snow-drift prose but one oyster-eyed sentence contains a pearl of a phrase which is possibly worth highlighting (in CAPITALS) as it maybe even embodies approximately what The Unionist Times is all out and about.

-I well remember going to mass there on Christmas Day in 1996 with my parents, siblings and our extended family. It was the Mozart Mass in C, and EVEN IF YOU DIDN’T BELIEVE IN WHAT WAS GOING ON AROUND THE ALTAR, the music was so wonderful and the Palestrina Choir’s heavenly voices so uplifting that we all left feeling spiritually renewed for the Christmas Dinner.

An insertion of a little diversoion might not be out of order at this juncture:

In a recently published tome on The Supreme Court south of the Black Sow’s Dyke by Ruadhán Mac Cormaic (also of The Unionist Times parish ) he quotes Colm Toibín, Bachelor of Arts, not at all dis- approvingly

-The Byrne Case was the legal equivalent of taking the Union Jack down from the Mast of Dublin Castle.

(The Byrne Case involved a Wicklow lady who sued the Dept of Post and Telegraph as a result of injuries sustained after falling into one their trenches, in 1965. Up to to this the State was considered like the Crown – a carry on from the British Regime –rooted in the idea that the Crown was sovereign and could do no wrong, that sorta thingy).

Which insertion brings us back to the title of the Frank McDonald article, which references ‘A Modest Proposal’.

Now, AMP is not associated with one of the two cheek by jowl (gulp) Church of Ireland Cathedrals in Dublin’s unfair city, but rather with the other one – St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Which is passing odd, rather.

(Curiouser and curiouser that the Church of Ireland should have not one but two big borrowed buldings so contagious one to the other: would probably not occur were another Franchise, Franchise McDonald of the Golden M Arches involved).

It would appear that the Sir Ronnie Flangan look-alike Colm Toibín had not poked his bald Brooklyn-bound head inside the Union Jack bedecked / Vitualler’s Vestry of St. Patrick’s C before making the above observation.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, (borrowed from the Papes in the Year of our Lordships , 1557) of course, is associated with Dean Swift and by extension, Gulliver’s Travels.

Two of the Parts in that novel are devoted to the Lilliputians and to the Land of the Houyhnhmns.

The latter was the land populated by horses, and The Perkin’s inner deconstructionist, has always fancied that Dean Swift was not slow in drawing on the depirvations visited upon his beloved cathedral by O’Cromwell when that knave stabled his horses in the nave of same.

The Lilliputians were, of course, the little folk whom Gulliver encountered. But, what relevance might they have had with St. Patrick’s Cathedral?

Fast forward, gadzooks, to a court case in Dublin in October 2016, when a 76-years old former lay volunteer in the Church of Ireland was sentenced to jail for the ‘rape and molestation of 14 boys’. Among the various venues where these numerous acts of depravity were committed , was – mirabile dictu! – St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Now, the term Siamese Twins is derived from Chang and Eng who were born in 1811 near Bangkok, conjoined at the hip.

In TUT-speak, such Siamese terms as, say, Compulsory and Leprechaun are conjoined at the hip; as, indeed, are Papist Clergy and Child Abuse.

Odd, therefore, that there was, in the account of this case in The Unionist Times, a somewhat noticeable absence of the two words inscribed on the plaque of Dean Swift on in St. Patrick’s Cathedral – si, si, the S.I. words:

-Saeva Indignatio.

Otherwise, we might even have had a thunder clap of a knuckle-rapping (gasp) Editorial requesting, nay, DEMANDING that the borrowed cathedral of St. Patrick’s be handed back to its rightful, original owners lest more defilements be perpetrated, going foward.

Or, erm, possibly not.

To conclude: in The Unionist Times of this very day, there is a droll, tongue-in–the-cheeky piece by its Relgious Affairs Correspondent and acclaimed thigh-slapping comedian, entitled:

-In a word: Reformation.

Patsy McGarry, Bachelor of Arts (for it is he !), scribes:

-Be very afraid all you Papists out there. Current or lapsed or both. not because the 500th Anniversary celebratio….sorry, commemorations of the Reformation are almost upon us…..’

Houyhnhnm.