In this Webpage we need to do three things.

First of all we need to say something about our understanding of The Sociological Imagination as well as what it means in Irish terms. A first and second year undergraduate’s acquaintance with writers like C. Wright Mills, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim and others is presumed.

We then give an example by way of an Extract from A Description Of The Criminal Justice System, 1950-80

And while bibliographies of every hue and description are readily available on the website these days, we nevertheless direct interested persons to a select Bibliography

Sean: But where to begin – that’s the question. Maybe we can reserve the obvious questions and go by way of Spinoza and try and establish what Sociology is not? But let’s stick to The Sociological Imagination. How would you characterise it?

Seamus: In a nutshell I suspect it means making an effort to think in ‘cobwebs’ rather than thinking‘ linearly’ -- and allowing that cobwebbed thought-process to sink into the social landscape, particularly into the native Irish social landscape. Our present concern, therefore, is by way of invitation to think in cobwebs. A detective thinks in cobwebs but a lawyer by and large doesn’t. By this is meant that when one thinks about‘ law’ or any aspect of it, one does not think causally as a lawyer does, or proceed to prove this point or that point within a legal context, which goes to the veracity of what the lawyers in criminal matters call the ‘ actus reus’ and the ‘ mens rea’. And in fairness to the lawyers, they are often induced when introducing a persuasive text to lead on with more than one example. In other words, when proving a point by reference to case law; they ought to do so by referring to more than one solitary case. And of course they invariably refer to reams and reams of them, depending upon the nature of the argument and the importance of the matter in hand. In this way one’s arguments are shored up by reference to more than one authority, but by a nexus or a ‘cobweb’ of such authorities. Thinking in cobwebs about social matters signifies contemplating several social lines of enquiry at the same time concerning the topic in question. Being interested in ‘’this point’ and ‘’that point’, lawyers are, as we all know, generally concerned to think in terms of linear causation, or what used to be called‘ billiard ball causality’. And whether the matter be one of precedent, factual argument, testamentary rules or credibility, the causal line of authority goes by way of consensus, first to the Judge of trial, then by way of appeal to a similar but higher authority, and, in our time, to a similar and higher authority in Europe.

Sean: Before proceeding further, what do you mean by what you call ‘cob-web’-like thinking? Can you demonstrate its particular significance to me?

Seamus: Certainly. But I should say that despite the many inferior works that claim a ‘sociological’ perspective and the like, there is no real mystery about thinking sociologically. In many ways it is the same as thinking like a detective, rather than like a priest, a lawyer, an economist or a psychologist. Much can be made both of the subject matter about which a sociologist thinks as well as the manner in which he thinks about it. The real difference, if you accept the difference in how a detective thinks from others, lies in the sociologist’s social concerns. Accordingly, being concerned with social issues, and because he works on the notion, whether by induction or conviction, that all such phenomena have a social cause or origin, he becomes habituated to a practice that we identify as sociology – and that is why we call him a sociologist. Now, how he thinks thereafter is best served by thinking like a detective and by making constant comparisons as well as historical reviews of his material. In this sense you can see the relevance of the reference to ‘cobwebs’ and to detectives. Moreover, whatever science one embarks upon in a systematic way, it will become apparent – to most people at any rate – that value judgements have to rest upon something prior to themselves, not just in time, but in scope, in depth and above all else in historical integrity. So, whoever you are, if you want to appraise something, or, indeed, comment on it, or, indeed, open your mouth, without a philosophic base, your underwear is bound to show. Let ten men speak for five minutes in the Dail – thereafter they may as well sit down, for their interests – nay, their character – is perfectly apparent. And if you got them to admit their Bank Balance, their Date of Birth, and the number of people in their immediate family, coupled with the accent, you might come to believe that you know everything about them. As to examples, the best think to do is to read Weber’s work, especially The Protestant Ethic for his particular use of the Ideal Typical Construct. You could equally read Marx’s Work or Durkheim`s work, or, indeed, have a gander at Michael gnatieff’s treatment of John Howard in A Just Measure Of Pain. We will have recourse to Ignatieff again ( See WebPages 14 and 15), but for another purpose. Here you will find a very skilful analysis of Howard’s personality, the approach to which you will observe examines his times, his psychological makeup, as well as the social environment and attachments he makes, the significance of religious (Quaker)-cum-penal notions, and all with a critical eye to the contemporaneity of such a confluence of values. Here you have a rather neat and compelling nexus (‘cobweb’) of social relations examined in a sociological manner and an expert assessment made of the man and the reformer.

Seamus: Of course, but as conceived by Mills and other sociologists it can be conceived in several ways. As I said it practice it means conceiving of things in cobweb-fashion. Of itself it is best understood as an appeal to philosophy -- a philosophy that necessarily includes a view of the philosophy of history. Why is this? All sociologists – Mills no less -- know only too well that one cannot understand the parts unless one can configure the whole. The great contributions made to economics and the manner in which Western democratic States are run is grounded to a great extent on a consensus derived from a macro (or total) view of economic phenomena. In other areas, a similar notion of the ‘whole’ makes partial policies meaningful and invariably makes it necessary for the sociologist to trace its way back to some view of history. So, even in works like A Description Of The Criminal Justice System, 1950-1970, a local matter seeking comprehension, or The Last Of The Betagii, the last execution of a woman in Ireland, the phenomena attaching to both items are, on the one hand traceable to a work-a-day totality, but their further significance must be seen in their respective histories. This, I think, is one way in which C. Wright Mills understood the Sociological Imagination. In this respect he makes it plain that human beings cannot be understood apart from the social and historical structures in which they are formed and in which they interact. This led him to great types of analyses. In The Power Elite (1957), for example, (with some whiffs of Thorsten Veblen’s The Vested Interests and the Common Man some forty years earlier) he talks about the levels of power in American society. Under the power elite, two others prevail. At the bottom are the masses: these are unorganized, ill informed, and powerless; they are controlled and manipulated by the power group. Mills depicts how the disorganized masses (in America) are not only economically dependent and exploited but are quite removed from the very organizations, which hold the key to power.

Sean: And his sociology?

Seamus: He placed great emphasis on sociology as a discipline, particularly on what I might be permitted to call the societ - isation of personal problems. I think what he meant by this came from an understanding that when we speak of nature, we tend to forget that we are – qua humans – part and parcel of nature, human nature; and that, therefore, what befalls us personally -- and our personal reaction to adversity -- is the legitimate subject-matter of social enquiry. This disciplinary viewpoint – although obviously different from other disciplinary viewpoints -- is every bit as valid as the study of law, economics, theology, mathematics, etc. The great difference is that when one considers what befalls oneself as the subject- matter of social inquiry, one is quite likely to fall into the quagmire of egoism and -- even worse – boredom.

Seamus: Were it not for philosophy, Sociology would – it is true -- be the most fractured of the social sciences. As such, it is not easy to advance well-established truths on its behalf without controversy. Having said that, however, there are Dictionaries, Handbooks and Websites dedicated to sociology as a discipline, as well as websites dedicated to separate and individual sociologists. Suffice it for our purposes in criminology, if we say something about its three most popular advocates, Durkheim, Marx and Weber. Why we have specified these three may well pose its own problems, to avoid the worst of which might I recommend the following Socio Site (Www2.fmg.uva.nl/sociosite), not just because philosophs like Habermas and Adorno, Horkheimer, and Popper, anthropologists like Malinowski and Levi-Strauss, and social historians like de Tocqueville and Foucault, and a host of others refreshingly find themselves thrown into the common sociological heap, but an interesting and convenient bibliography and online reference that attends them all. There is also a useful sociological timeline since 1600, not to mention a rather unexpected introduction to the extensive and lamentably overlooked sociology of crime by Ferdinand Toennies. Toennies. According to Mathieu Deflem at (Deflem@gwm.sc.edu; www.mathieudeflem.net, and at http://www.cas.sc. edu/socy/faculty/deflem/ztoen.htm) Toennies published no less than 34 works on crime (22 papers, three books, and nine review articles) and 17 related methodological papers on criminal statistics. Moreover, Toennies had worked on his criminology for some four decades – which gives him a prominence that is all too often forgotten with his theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesselschaft. Although isolated in the 20s Toennies became a respected criminologist. ‘With Georg Simmel and Max Weber’ says Deflem, ‘he founded the German Society for Sociology in 1909, serving as its president from 1922 until 1933 when he disbanded the association in protest against the rise of National-Socialism. For these reasons alone, this site is well worth visiting and is highly recommended for its online references as an addendum to any shorter bibliographies compiled.

Sean: Is there any simple way to begin to understand sociology as a discipline?

Sean: But this is just a beginning – right?

Seamus: Comte wanted to discover the series through which the human race was necessarily transformed. Now Darwin would never use that language, but he was doing something similar in another way. Both men were concerned to understand how civilised Europe evolved – particularly from a family of apes. Darwin’s work resulted in the Ascent of Man and we are widely aware of his findings, which (except for Catholic Ireland and the fearful side of America) are accepted by the scientific community one way or another. Comte’s widespread work, on the other hand, is neither so well known nor so acceptable. Comte’s answer came in the form of what he called The Law of Human Progress, according to which each branch of the known sciences purportedly passes through three stages, hence The Law of Three Stages. These stages not only parallel individual human development, but just as we are passionately devout in childhood, critical and unaccepting in adolescence and positively philosophic in manhood, so, too, do all our sciences pass through three definite and separate epistemological phases. The first is the Theological or fictitious state, which gives way to the Metaphysical or abstract way of knowing, which in turn gives way to the Scientific or positive way of knowing. Now these conditions of consciousness or ways of knowing are cumulative in that each stage is reached only after a period of entering, realising and destroying the stage prior to it (not unlike the Hegelian dialectic, perhaps). In the first or theological degree, men seek and are content with supernatural causes for phenomena that they cannot explain. First and final causes are ascribed to all kinds of things and anyone brought up in religious belief will appreciate the firm adherence to the supernatural cause, a cause without sensual extension, human understanding or philosophical discourse. The supernatural belief is invariably dogmatic. Religion resists the limits as well as the onset of further human understanding. In the second phase, the metaphysical state, abstract and personified forces are posited as the driving and creative forces of the universe and its phenomena. And, eventually, in the final or third phase, absolute answers are abandoned as vain and, indeed, unnecessary, and are replaced more realistically with their laws, that is, the invariable relations of succession and resemblance.

Sean: In some ways it is helpful to regard Comte (with Saint Simon) as a founding father – if sociologist’s belief in such things as ‘fathers’. But to ransack a man’s imagination one must study him in his time, in his ambitions, efforts, and successes as well as in his limitations and failures. For this a critical faculty is required as well as a comparative facility. Otherwise we cannot know how others like Marx, Weber and Durkheim, who had an even greater influence on the discipline, differ from each other – which is really why I asked if you regarded the discipline as one sociology or a collection of sociologists’ writings?

Seamus: I think sociology is better regarded as both. There is what such writers have in common as well as how they differ from each other. Sean: What, if anything does Marx, Weber and Durkheim have in common?

Seamus: Well, for one thing it seems to me that they all owe an extraordinary debt to Hegel. Durkheim and Marx took from his ability to align logic with world events and, indeed, an objective world dialectic that carried things historically and necessarily forward. Further, his treatment of logic, for example, was brilliant and his explanation of explanation. Also extraordinary was the manner in which former philosophers were (according to himself) encapsulated in his own ingenious schema. Others did not overtly make such a boast, but it lies implicit in Marxism. Then there is the theory of universals. Hegel managed to extend and re-categorise the Kantian modules or categories through which, like rose tinted glass, Kant claimed we invariably reason. Categories such as quantity, quality, modality, etc. Hegel, supporting a special allocation and significance to what he calls the more ‘sensuous universals’, reads the philosophy of history as a logical process, that is, a process of development that is historical and dialectically necessary given its ontology to date. In some ways the logical necessity in history is a quality of all sociological writers, at least of the grand theorists. Moreover, Weber, like Hegel, cannot be easily pigeonholed into either the "materialist" camp of the Marxists or the "idealist" camp of the traditionalists. When you pit Weber alongside Marx and Durkheim, it seems that Weber in some ways is not a sociologist, but rather a social psychologist.

Seamus: Sometimes differences are more a matter of focus than anything else. In Durkheim and Marx the overriding interest is on the mediation of society downwards, whether the mediation be through hierarchical norms, which makes him so attractive to the Americans and the Irish and any other Western religion you can find, or through class, which made Marx more attractive to those developed countries in which the class formation was well delineated or, as the case may be, was threatening to become so, Weber stayed with the subjective ordering of everyday reality and announced differentia rather than similarity as the goal of sociology.  You must remember that Max Weber’s sociology conceives of social action -- the science of social action. As such it serves as a refreshing counterpoint to the sociologists of structural-functionalism, and in some ways hearkens back to some of the ambivalence in Hegelian philosophy. Where Hegel saw ‘Napoleon on horseback’ as a symbol of the Universal Spirit, Weber is interested more on Napoleon’s rational behaviour and less on the Universal Spirit. The universal spirit, by the way is the universal version of history, and it is most interesting that ‘spirit’ and ‘history’ sometimes coalesce, such that when one thinks about it, there is little or nothing between them. Similarly, where Marx focuses on the ‘material’ mode of production, and historicises it accordingly, Weber focuses on the ‘ideal’ or the ‘ideal typical’ type of production and examines the rational possibilities humanly sprung within an historical ensemble. Durkheim, on the other hand, focuses on what he specifically defined as ‘the social fact’, the collective or the ‘social norm’ and, as we have demonstrated in his theory of Crime and Punishment, he sees human history developing as a tree grows. Notwithstanding this conspectus, he is apt, at the same time, to depict moral history as between two (unsatisfactory) polarities, the primitive and the modern. These respective notions are easily separated when we think of the overall focus of each thinker. One of Durkheim`s main concerns, following Comte, concerned Social Cohesion and how it is preconditioned in antiquity and more importantly concurrent with the industrial revolution. Marx’s concerns are focused on the creation, structure and trajectory of conflicts surrounding the phenomenon of social class. No one appreciated the preconditions of capitalism or the release of power concurrent with it more than Marx, and yet sometimes in his analysis of Ireland one wonders if the was fully aware of its merely stratified. Of course, Ireland was part of Britain then and the real social and religious makeup of Ireland was to change utterly with the emigration of some 50,000 Protestants from the Southern State. Nor was he wrong in predicting an early ‘revolution’, but he could never conceive that that ‘revolution’ was one towards the far right. In speaking of these men one could well feel guilty about not mentioning Proudhon, who, more than any other, comprehended the weaknesses in Marxology, and I am still uneasy about treating Marx as a sociologist simpliciter. But putting aside these considerations and shortcomings we can agree with Weber when he predicted that "socialism would in fact require a greater degree of formal bureaucratization than capitalism” – a statement, which still remains, uncontradicted. At this juncture I would like to pose some concerns of my own. These are as much by way of hypothesis as they are of affirmation. I can’t imagine what Marx would say to this kind of observation of Weber’s were he still alive, but I feel that the focus on bureaucratisation takes us somewhat from the dynamism of action which was so trumpeted by Weber. But he wasn’t the only sociologist of action – Marx (if we admit his as sociologist) was also a sociologist par excellence. Indeed, some contemporary nations hailed him with forgivable predictability as one who relished in the notion of arma virumque cano. That said, however, the end of revolution does not turn simpliciter into bureaucratisation but also into a bifurcations of internal and external forces. What was implicit has and becomes more explicit in the forms of crime ordinary and crime political. Just because the revolutionary forces have left the paddocks of the Nation State – this does not mean that the world has emptied itself out of its historical forces, such that all we will be concerned with hereafter is the inordinate number of pins we annex to the infinite pagination of human applications, or the digitised storage of them. This trite description of Weber’s bureaucratisation may help to imagine its savage otherness in the relationship of citizens of the world to the world. Already we see crime ordinary and crime political poised apart as if reflecting each other in a Bush/Blair/Bertie Ahern coalition. Already, too, crime ordinary has let slip its leash into the streets, domestic violence rages, soccer hooliganism leaves off where personal vendettas and impartial riots begin, and mental aberrations enough to kindle a more expanding profession of psychologists than that of the medieval priesthood. On the political front Anglo-America has created in a few unwise yet pushy decisions a totally unstable and crime-prone world, as if crime, to meet the new configuration of political aggression, now assumes an international character and resonates the same arguments even when locally defined. Far from the dead hand of bureaucratisation, we see the very pro-activity of corporate corruption and personal alienation as never before. It isn’t a matter any more whether our governments are corrupt or not; it’s only a matter of when and how we find out about their corruption. The Americanisation of world politics carries a new aggression to areas that no one could hitherto comprehend. Moreover, the oft quoted soft words like ‘democratisation’, ‘freedom’, ‘women’s liberties’ pale into their opposite when we consider that for all the blather about democracy, one man in the guise of Clinton and Bush, can suddenly, unimaginatively and unpredictably, rearrange the world In this personal characterisation of American and world change, what we see is the materialism since the Spanish Civil war revisit the world as a whole. And how we see it is in the silent and stealthy manner that most European and other countries have taken on the role of Governor for the US. We watched Tony Blair drop everything domestic and run around the world for Mr Bush and even after waging an unjustified war, still persisted in defending the world’s new Caesar. And we are grateful for Bush as well for indicating like never before where Irish charm left off and Bertie Ahern’s governorship of Ireland began. Other countries, of course, have followed suit. And the eventual and messianic role of the Christian Church in returning Caesar was most instructive. The American Bishops, notwithstanding the fact that the Pope ‘came out’ (not too loudly) against the war on Iraq, punished Massachusetts (no doubt for their enlightened policies on clerical paedophiles) and others by returning the enfant terrible to office yet again. From without, from political and international attitudes, we find the new power-materialism resonating in the streets, as if an old fascism, the terrible offspring of the Christian conquest, was making a comeback.

Sean: That analysis is rather messianic in itself. No one doubts but that the constant conversation between what is within and what is without confirms itself anew with each generation. We might more appropriately take up this question again when we come to talk about Sinn Fein/IRA in this context in 13.b. Crime And Irish Politics Might I hearken back to what you said about Weber’s use of the Ideal Typical construct? How useful do you think it is to Weberian sociology?

Seamus: The ideal typical construct is a brilliantly contrived simplicity and it represents an intensification of logical integration at the centre of many of Weber’s demonstrative arguments. It is the inference made syllogistic or, in other words, the logical representation taken to an approved logical completion, from which it is easier to retreat somewhat to demonstrate the probability of several hypotheses. But this does not mean that it is more real – on the contrary, it is meant to be abstract and in some ways unread; for in this way it allows Weberian analysis to focus upon and articulate a spectrum of social reality, to allocate categories to it, to formulate hypotheses about it and generally to know it by comparison with other competing formulae. It proceeds on the lines we have mentioned, not as to their truth but as to their plausibility. It is enlisted in aid of our understanding of sociology and the thought- ordering process of empirical reality In some ways I think Marx uses it to delineate the modes of production in history: only with Marx they are never represented as ‘ideal typical’ but as time and modes-of-specific-production.

Sean: Give us an example, an Irish example, of what you mean?

Seamus: All Irish Catholic marriages are the marriage of the Priest and the Nun. This statement could be developed into a good example. The ideal typicality of the marriage between a Priest and a Nun specifies their shared beliefs and conventions over any other historical input into such a relationship. It assumed a relationship existing despite traditional fears and the sacral hierarchical allocation of counter-values to the notion of sex and reproductively. These exaggerated notions in the Priest and in the Nun have at once to be negotiated by a non-secular institution and sacra mentally fixed not so much by the State as by the RC church. And in our ideal typicality of the union we have gone the full 100% to promote our examination of the difficulties involved for the parties. How do they negotiate sex, for example? More particularly, how do they negotiate enjoyable or pleasurable sex, when they are traditionally against it entirely? When it is anathema to them? How do they view and educate their children? How many children with the couple have? Who decides on this matter? Must the traditional wife submit to the traditional husband and accommodate his wishes? Are these things meant to be pleasurable or dutiful? Must the priest be consulted? And why is the Nun not consulted at all? And so on, and so on….

Seamus: Because, contrary to what you say, we know precisely how people behave or ought to behave -- people in authority and people who forever declare their intentions by way of ritual and sacred declaration. I don’t just mean the priest who takes vows of poverty and obedience and remains blind to the wealth of the institution he belongs, or the Judge who swears to uphold the Constitution, but has already made his more devotional vows to Opus Dei, or the Banker who declares for accountability and transparency but has entered a secret cabal to exploit his customers, or the Policeman who swears to act without fear or favour and has put his name down in the party and clerical register, looking to give favours to those who will favour him, or the teacher who claims to be one with the sisterhood , but has run down to the Labour Court to squeeze some advantage out of it behind all their backs. I mean taking people at their best, at their ideal typical. And from this we know approximately what matters would bother such persons. Surely, every wife would like to know that she is going to have children, how many she is expected to have, how they are to be educated, fed, etc.? Of course she would, but we also know in the ideal typical type who makes these decisions and how they can affect the typical believing Hausfru. The use of the ideal typical concept as a sociological tool is probably best seen in Weber’s use of it in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In many ways it’s use presupposes a cultural and/or a philosophical underlay. It also presupposes a critical faculty, which, with its philosophic remigrations, is negatived because answered in religion.

Sean: Are you saying that the methodology surrounding the ideal typical concept affords one the opportunity of either a philosophic or a religious background?

Seamus: No. You must understand that philosophy only becomes possible in a culture where religion is no longer accepted as a holdall dogmatic answer to contemporary problems. The ‘choice’ as you call it calls to mind the chalice that one has to consume either pears or apples; but philosophy only becomes objectively possible in that society which has reached the stage of religious questioning, the one following the other objectively.

Seamus: I notice that you didn’t ask: Is the ‘Protestant Ethic’ the antitithesis of the ‘Catholic Ethic’? Is that because you believe the Catholic Ethic – whatever it is, -- is not action or work-oriented? One might do well to remember that the antithesis in Weber’s Protestant Ethic is not polarised between Protestantism and Catholicism or a society so persuaded, but between Puritanism and a traditional type of society, that is (by comparison only) a society that is guided and swayed by customary habits of thought. Such a society – as in the Irish instance – may well become weighed down with such customary habits of thought and suffer from it by way of a particular form of paralysis about time and consciousness. Indeed, Joyce’s description of Dubliners is a perfect example of such a society -- one that is almost un-rescue-able! But that does not say that a colonial Protestant society is not also by deviation from the parent culture, given more or less to rely upon customary habits of thought. And in this connection one might well recall the practice of Maria Edgeworth’s father, who, as Landlord, was more apt to reward those who had ideas of improving upon their responsibilities rather than submitting to the needs of long-rerm tenants or to the more sentimental or traditional norms or attachments. (I have to say that notwithstanding this ever so interesting analysis, I am still a hopeless traditional sentimentalist in all these personal respects! And I understand the communists – at least the ones I knew in post-protestant Denmark – to be of a similar mind. The Protestant Ethic to work or the communist influence to over humanise the work place did not, in other words, either impress them. In defence all I can say is that in some respects I differ with C.Wright Mills in that, as I have said before, what is personal is not always social, and what is social is not always personal – at least as far as validation is concerned. And even to the present day I am still drop-dead grateful to my parents never to have contemplated sending me to a public school.) As it happened, and in fairness to Whitaker and Lemass, there had been some prodding of that paralysis since the mid sixties (when, incidentally, the incidence of crime takes off and Irish individualism is in the ascendant), so that the grants from Europe made an enormous stir in Irish paralysis. As one might imagine, the initial social costs of these injections were – and are -- violent and unprecedented. Look at the number of ‘corrupt ‘ and ‘corrupting’ institutions we have. There are far too many of them for them not to have a social cause or a fundamental rearrangement of the values at the base of our social consciousness.

Seamus: Maybe. But the universities are of primary importance. What, indeed, do you think universities are for, if it isn’t to mediate knowledge, opinion, science and understanding to an otherwise witless people. In the case of Ireland and sociology, the reverse happens. The universities are here to stop enlightenment being mediated. They are – and have been ab initio the Free State -- owned and managed by the RC church and, through the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and other similar bodies, they repress enlightenment in order to propagate the faith, their faith. There is no Harriet Martineau in Ireland who wants to make sociology an established academic discipline, but there are innumerable Buttiglione-types infesting the universities with the knowledge of the gospel. Against this medieval knowledge there is nobody I know who wants to marshal Comte’s ideas of the historical and social sciences into some order to which the intellectual repository of Irish life can relate. From my own certain knowledge the largest college in Dublin, DIT (The Dublin Institute of Criminology), with ambitions to become a university, never quite rose to distinguishing the social from the natural sciences, without which guiding light there can only be the administration of the asylum. The U.S., with an even worse grasp of history than the Irish, has come to appreciate something of the discipline of sociology. So, the application of this or that sociology to Irish concerns is already prefigured by the bigger concern of Ireland concern with the discipline as a whole… Ireland’s (The RC church’s) attitude to sociology is the same as it was to the Jews. “Don’t let it in, then you don’t have to deal with the consequences.”

Sean: Well, what about Marx? Marx and Engels had much to say about the Irish.

Seamus: It is true that Durkheim, coupled with the American Talcot Parsons, became the most loved by Maynooth and the Irish. Why? Because on the face of it, America rather than Europe was chosen by the Church to learn something of the social sciences. One couldn’t surrender to the Protestant ethic, could one? Or the brilliant Scottish social scientists? The RC church despised Marx more than they despised Darwin and Freud. So, what were they to do? At least Durkheim was safe and their infant Republican State would be protected from the ravishing questions of a Marxist type of sociology. And if such an animal as an Irish-type-sociologist appeared on the scene – and several to my personal knowledge did – they hadn’t a hope in hell of passing through the Jesuit filters in the universities. So, they emigrated, never to return to the chim -emerald oil of Saints and Saints. Moreover, and quite significantly, once you ignore Durkheim`s atheism, you almost have an Aristotelian holdall for Catholicism, at least not as anyone without a keen sense of criticism and history would notice. And who in Ireland had either! Durkheim, remember, was a Jew --- and compare in terms of belief what the Jews borrowed from Zoroastrianism with what the Christians borrowed from the Jews, and you will see the continuation of the Judaic-Christian way of being in Durkheim. You might well argue that Marx was also a Jew. True, but Marx was not a repository of Judaism as was Durkheim. On the contrary, Marx – as the Americans say – was something else. Both Durkheim and Marx were, of course, devout atheists. But once the Sociologists SJ debunked Durkheim`s atheism, they could and did quite easily adopt the rest of Durkheim`s thesis, and harnessed it in toto to the Christian weal. It then became a kind of improved version of Thomas Aquinas – a cheap if clever way of moving the RC church into modern times, especially when the move came from America through Parsons and others! Much of Durkheim is quasi mediaeval in outline, especially his conscience collective – and that’s why all the Jesuits were instant Sociologists, and every Irish university is weighed down with departments of holy roman spies. That, in effect, is what an Irish university is – they are planning on another New Golden Age, when the Irish will yet again deliver to Europe everything that Europe has long discarded. And these days even TCD is in on the act and operates the same as UCD, UCC and UCG – all unfortunate replicas of Maynooth and all green in thump and craw.

Sean: Is Weber, therefore, the real challenge in our time?

Sean: Aside from these more superficial differences in respect of the application of sociology – or any particular brand of it to Irish life – is there not a much more fundamental difference to be perceived in its resistance in Ireland? Isn’t it more important to highlight its absence in the warp and weft of Irish life than to try and delineate how this and that sociologist’s thought effects Irish development?

Seamus: This is true – but absences are hard to point to. It’s like trying to recall an experience that you are not conscious of. The modern developments of the industrial revolution, which Durkheim and Marx addressed, do not appear to be part of Irish society in such measure that any of their concepts or analyses are directly applicable. And, while one could compare Northern and Southern Ireland for a resonance of the Weberian Protestant Ethic, one feels any such analysis would get bogged down in tribal antagonisms before it could be developed. This is not a simple way out of the necessity of such comparisons, but if you remember what it was like before the Republic got its ‘tiger’ from Europe, most mention of the Protestant Ethic was designed to make a tribal statement that rarely countenanced the debilitating or class consequences of progressive Northern industry.

Sean: Let us try to be more specific then -- How is the Sociologist epistemologically different to that of the other social scientists? Does the real difference between the sociologist and others rest in the method or in the subject matter employed by the Sociologist? And is it not these differences that highlight the influence the discipline has – or ought to have – on Irish society?

Seamus: How one thinks (as between lawyer, economist, philosopher or sociologist) is every bit as defining as the nature of the concerns of these respective disciplines. Between the traditional manner of thinking of the lawyer and the sociologist there is hardly a meeting point, especially if we remain with practical matters. The sociologist doesn’t particularly want to know about this case or that – unless, of course, it is such a one that stands so central to so many social concerns that it cannot be denied as an object of great sociological merit from the outset.

Sean: Like the trial of Socrates?

Seamus: Exactly, or the trial of Oscar Wilde, the Piggott Forgeries in the Parnell case, the case of Roger Casement, etc., etc. Or, today, for the younger folk, the trial of Michael Jackson, their idol. His trial for them is one of enormous import. It has to do with the nature of trust and betrayal – not in the ordinary or Treasonous way, but -- by way of affection. Perhaps a bit likes the trial of Socrates also. I know there is no comparison between Socrates and Michael Jackson, but I only know it in the Biblical way of academia. I do not know it otherwise. As a matter of fact the control or responsibility over the ‘beloved following’, the ‘adoring flock’, is not just Socratic, but resonates in the contempt for parents in the ‘60s, the establishment’s fear of Elvis and the Beatles, especially John Lennon, and the special position of the RC church world wide, not just in the confessional but in education and amongst children generally. These other trials, easily distinguishable from the trial of Socrates, are nevertheless cases in point: and to some extent they have more than a tinge of Victoriana about them which keeps them in a kind of category of their own, and not just because they have to do with Ireland. At a later date we have Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and a host of criminal as well as civil cases, which mark out this or that domain as typical. It isn’t just these cases, which, because of their public hype, cannot fail to become causes celebre. I was thinking of the historical meaning of the fourteenth century case of Alice Kyteler (See Webpage 2.c. Alice, the Irish Witch), the social and sociological implications of which to my mind have never been examined. Or a ton of nineteenth century – or any-century cases. Or, indeed, the case of the last hanging of a woman in Ireland, that of Mary Daly, of Doonane in 1903. Here we have the Holy Family on trial (See Webpage 10.1 Last of the Betagii). While the criminologist has a more particular concern for these matters – most of which are better left to a crime reporter – the sociologist of law is more at home if he has wider and deeper fish to fry. It is just that having referred to these matters, we need to retract from the diversion you have created by the mention of ‘the trial of Socrates’. The sociologist is more concerned to know how criminal and civil law originated, how is the law administered. Much of Rawls’ concerns with ‘distributive justice’ would be of sociological concern. How do the incidences of criminal and civil law compare and contrast with each other over Irish time? How do they compare internationally? And what is a civilising function? In other words, what is the meaning of the criminal/civil ratio? The criminologist is, of course, a sociologist with an interest in criminal matters – what is made criminal and what is not? Who is punished, and who is not? And what does it mean that if you are a Northern Terrorist you can sign up to an agreement (the NI Agreement) and walk away from murder? What kind of a society condones such things while, at the same time, punishing people for making love in public? What kind of a society is it that pays compensation for paedophiles that are amongst the richest and most privileged and the most powerful people in the world? What kind of a Criminal Justice System do they think they have? If I say to you that you can get off with murder in Ireland – all you need is to be a member of a political party. How would you feel? Maybe we should stop asking what kind of a society Ireland North and south is – or is – and asks more pertinently, at what stage of civilisation

Sean: Two things. Your concern with linear thinking is not just confined to the lawyer, or even the psychologist or the priest, but to anyone who does not think sociologically. Secondly, for the most part you consider history, sociology and culture in terms of an Irish historical personality, don’t you?

Seamus: Taking the second point first, when we speak of the creation of an Irish historical personality; I feel it must be in terms of Anglo- America that we think. And when we speak of Sociology and Irish law, they as disciplines must be in terms of that personality. In this respect, then, our first concern should be with what C. Wright Mills has called the Sociological Imagination. We might bear it in mind that a Sociological Imagination is not simply God’s gift to sociologists. Far from it: philosophers, economists, psychologists, novelists and house painters may also be blessed with it. But in general it is best understood as a discipline and distinct from those other disciplines whose domains differ from the domain of sociology.

Sean: Even the philosopher?

Seamus: It is true that the philosopher, who perhaps because of the richness and historical content of philosophy, is more apt to embrace sociological concerns than those who think linearly. But this does not necessarily mean that he thinks sociologically. Having said that, however, it is quite apparent that had sociology not solved some outstanding matters of a philosophic nature, the discipline would be much less attractive or convincing. Again, it is up to the philosopher to speak for himself. Remember, most clergymen study philosophy for considerable periods, but this does not make them either philosophers or creative thinkers. It makes them priests and sometimes theologians. In some respects Aquinas (and, to a lesser extent, Aristotle) have nothing of a sociological dimension about them? The problem with thinkers in the biblical tradition is that they deny any primacy to history. They prefer biblically fixed reflective man to that of the historically reflective man. As you can see, Aquinas and even Dante -- a faithful recorder of the scientific notions of his day -- are both a long way removed from Darwin, from Marx and from sociology. Nor am I saying that either Darwin or Marx is a sociologist. Both to my mind, being special, stand outside the sociological conspectus.

Sean: Can a theologian think sociologically?

Seamus: Of course he can – in the same way as you or I can think mathematically as we walk down the street, wondering how to measure the height of this house, that gable end or that church, from facts and angles measured and calculable by us without the use of a ladder. And if we have accustomed our minds to thinking in this mathematical way, then, with some training and industry, we will over time become mathematicians. Bearing the Kantian distinction (between synthetic and analytic knowledge) in mind, sociologists become sociologists in much the same way: and it is unquestionably preferable if the apprentice has a natural proclivity in the direction of his chosen avocation, or – what is much the same thing – if he is convinced that he has. It is on this point that C. Wright Mills speaks of the 24-hour sociologist as contrasted with part-time or professional others. One has to admit that there are such persons, people like Socrates, Bernard Shaw and Beethoven, who, where the pursuit of knowledge is concerned, are not perturbed in the slightest by the downpour of the Athenian rain, or the late hour in which a book must be read, or the unperturbed fascination and formulation of musical shapes and sounds, keys and cadences, eve before one note is committed to paper. These are all 24-hour-a-day men.

Sean: Convincing as this argument is, isn’t there something missing? Isn’t it somewhat absurd to think that while most sociologists are atheists – the founding fathers at any rate -- our sociological departments are all in the hands of orthodox theologians, Jesuits in fact, who are hardly in the habit of thinking sociologically, are they -- whether they do so 24 hours a day or not?

Seamus: Well, I’m already on record for calling them Holy Roman spies, so you’re question is somewhat misguided, except for this. Obviously there are people in this country who think that theologians are sociologists or can be competent ones. I do not. There was a time when they even convinced themselves (or the public, more like) that they were Marxists – and not just in Cuba! If we consider the end of theological thinking and the end of sociological thinking, we can see the error in such thinking. Remember it wasn’t until quite recently that men discovered “ that the best study of mankind is man”. In the sociologist’s case, it is social man, or society. In the hands of the theologians, the best study of mankind is and ever will be God. These two quite separate and different orientations create a great social gap – a gap that has been remedied elsewhere by civil and secular society at large, but which has been crippled in its development here by the religious. (Most of this argument is apparent from webpage 2. History/Anthropology) In antiquity the Greeks were concerned largely with Mathematics, in the middle Ages the focus turned to Theology, and in our time it looks to Sociology and the related social sciences. The RC church had its heyday in the middle ages, but unfortunately continues where it can get a foothold and, indeed, impairs development wherever it can. In Ireland it is – and has been for far too long -- firmly in areas in which it is totally incompetent and has remained in usurpation with impunity and without any resistance – childcare is but one of such areas. The Bible was the blueprint for Christian knowledge, and you know how scientific (and productive of material things) that made the Irish! In effect we couldn’t scratch to keep ourselves warm. But prayer? Did we pray! We must have prayed for upwards of fifteen hundred years without changing either our minds or the tune we prayed in. And to what avail? Just to make some barren Roman celibates monstrously wealthy in the world at large! Generations of old, young and gaunt, have long since gang-aft-agley into the earth… for what? On one level, and even to the present day, the Catholic mind cannot come to terms with science; it finds science (apart from a Timony Tank) anathema; and: getting Opus Dei into all the Technological Colleges is as near to science as the faltering if grasping medieval mind can come. Fetishistically owning the technological colleges for the Opus and CORI is at one level as near to science as the Holy Roman mind can come. By stuffing the place with ex-priests and ex-nuns into the most responsible academic lacunae, frustrates any sense of secular society, but it also frustrates any hope of progress. And remember, in the Irish case, apart from the imports (Jackie Charleton again), we are talking about mere technology – never science. At another level, our distance from Sellafield is as near as we physically get to what science can do for good and ill: and, by the same token, we are fetishistically not one bit apprehensive of it. Why? Because, in our holiness (and infernal simplicity), we do not understand science. I do not want to go back to the example of Galileo to fix the Irish quandary with religion and science. Suffice it to say what is known to any Irish sociologist who is in the least speculative and in the least honest and in the least concerned is that the Catholic mind’s reaction to science is totally reactionary and since the time of Galileo has remained that way in Ireland ever since.

Sean: Maybe we’re not that great at science, but how is it possible that a theologian cannot think sociologically. For years the Jesuits have been calling themselves sociologists. Indeed, there is – or was – hardly a college in the country where they did not set up camp and control the social sciences through all those Sociologists SJ.

Seamus: Precisely!

Sean: Precisely what? Are they not as qualified as anyone else to know and impart sociological insights?

Seamus: No.

Sean: Why not? Is it because they are celibate -- because they have no experience of woman, or the world of family life through woman? Is that the reason?

Seamus: I don’t think you should set the intimate experience of woman at nought; it is not to be underestimated, even as an epistemological means of communication. And when compared with celibacy, it is to be positively asserted --- for the first time, let me add, since the burning of Adam Dubh O Tuathaill by the gangs of Holy Romans, which is a thousand years ago. Did you ever hear anyone in Irish life actually exhort the wonders of sex? Ever? I’m over sixty and I never heard anyone in public life actually say ‘I love sex with a woman’. It’s beyond the Catholic lexicon. So, can I join my most pagan forebears and reiterate the glory of simple sex and the horror of celibates and other self-castrati.

Sean: I’m sure these are important original observations you make, and that you suitably delight in them; but could we get back to the business at hand? Why do you say Theologians are unqualified to be Sociologists and own a private department of their own in all our would-be universities?

Seamus: No; but in itself it is a very good reason for claiming that they are inadequate and possibly unhealthy as well. And if not unhealthy, at least they are biased – and must be so in their judgements. Moreover, they make very bad role models for young healthy Irish men. They are secretive, mischievous, celibate, un-forthcoming, political, manipulative, solitary and misogynist. Imagine being celibate, as a young man in your twenties? Then celibate again as a young man throughout your thirties. Year after year you forego the natural bent of your mind and body. It’s absolutely vile. And then throughout every year of your forties, you remain celibate, probably sporting a cilice or flagellating yourself and others to keep away the desire to consummate the common clay out of which we are all made. And there you stand, defiant to the end, with your prick in your hand, whistling at the wind and making your mind take turns it never dreamed of … And then, more of the same throughout your fifties, your sixties and until life’s fearful fret is finished…. Don’t tell me such a man is healthy. Don’t tell me such a man is the captain of your ship, the light of your universities, the father of your nation. Please don’t try to inspire me with the utter nonsense of the Holy Roman Imperial project. Like Ossian, Adam Dubh O Tuathail, Joyce, Edna O’Brien, Dermot Morgan, I cannot abide the bullshit! I am much too pagan to embroider these endless nonsensical snares of the Mediterranean myth. It is unfortunate that they have been introduced so universally into Irish life, such that the social sciences cannot breathe. No wonder the suicide rate is so high among young men, if these are their role models!

Sean: Ok, Ok. I am just trying to figure out why you say that a Theologian who masquerades as a Sociologist is a fraud –

Seamus: Not only that, but he must needs convert everything he touches into a shelter, a hiding place for himself, wherein he can practise his mental gymnastics on an unsuspecting and uncritical subject. However shameful it may be to exclude what I would consider as a ‘proper regard’, either spiritually or sexually, for the other half of the human race – and claim to have universal truths – it is not the main trust of my argument. As I have said the theologian has no questions to ask of the world the answers to which he does not already know. He knows all about how it is made. His job is essentially one of propaganda, that is, of spreading the truth about the Gospels and the Bible. His greatest enemy is the philosopher (Kant, Nietzsche, Voltaire, and the Sociologists) as well as the scientists (like Darwin and Marx). These are his enemies for the basic reason that they question what the theologian believes he and the Bible has already answered with certainty. For the theologian God and God alone made the world. Moreover, God is the sovereign Lord of Heaven and Earth and of all things, including the holocaust, the Tsunami disaster, and the aids epidemic. Moslems have a God as well, but they have the wrong God, so those who know true truth about God, the real God, the Christian God, must penetrate East Timor and elsewhere. Moreover, only the communities with the Christian God are allowed to have and to use weapons of mass destruction. Their job then, even as defined by their Church, is one of propaganda, and when – as with the Jesuits, for example – they happen to think for themselves and disagree with the Order, then they are expelled. In this very real sense individual men who are Jesuits (Sociologists SJ) are not free to hold this or that conviction; they are essentially members of a body which already believes in a set store of knowledge and their receipt and agreement with such knowledge, coupled with their oath of obedience, is a sine qua non of their membership of that Order And when they disagree, then they have to leave. It’s as simple and as savage as that. They are, rather, repulsed from the body of the Order, as heretics or other forms of banished rejects. These days, due more or less to the laws provided by secular humanists, more conciliatory pursuits are provided and ex-religious are fixed up in reasonably respectable but not too noticeably central jobs – maybe as Teachers in colleges like DIT, UCD, UCC and even TCD. It is here that the Opus and CORI spring into action. These days they are all over the place in Ireland, especially within the Civil Servants, the Dail and Seanad, the Bar Library, and other places close to and oscillating under the long shadow that is cast between the poles of power enjoyed by Pope and Prince, by Bishop and Minister, by Episcopal and Parliamentary secretaries. Rarely do they leave to become sociologists, simply because such prominent (and in the eyes of both the hierarchy and, ipso facto, the Minister for Education, dangerous) pedagogic positions are reserved for the orthodox theologians, such as the Jesuits and the like. The free confederacy of open minds is, therefore, anathema to the Irish mind and is nowhere present in any Irish ‘university’. But if, for argument’s sake an ex-religious did become a sociologist, a necessary adjustment in his thinking would be required. Now they would have to accept --a bit like Galileo – that God is not the centre of the universe -- but rather that society is. In other words, the sociologist is concerned to enquire into a domain of knowledge, which asserts that reality is primarily sociocentric, whereas the theologian is dogmatically concerned with spreading his received knowledge about the certainty of a Theo-centric world. The one is quite contrary and for most upright purposes irreconcilable and mutually exclusive.

Sean: I see the distinctions you are making -- a socio-centred world is quite apposite a God-centred world in ways that cannot be denied by mere words or descriptions. If I believe in a supernatural force – much less a supernatural personal God – I cannot explain phenomena, social or personal, in terms of such a supernatural force as well as in social terms, for both not only contradict each other, but conflict with each other with respect to the manner one ought to proceed in one’s enquires as well as the type of solution one seeks to arrive at. I know what you are saying and I cannot fault it. I just think it needs enormous embroidery to sell to the ordinary man. Remember the common man has had the pulpit in his ears time out of mind. He cannot hear new things and he certainly hasn’t the time to think for himself. The most one can say about Ireland is that because class has never been realised, the common man is equidistant from the pulpit as are the more privileged stratified groups. And while this has a false equality about it, in that being equidistant means simply that – it does not mean that the message is elevated to the higher order of class-consciousness or those materialist concerns that define class-content. On the contrary, the message is pre-capitalist and, by definition, more primitive. When class dawns and class-consciousness follows, the equi-distances of the church gives way to further aisles and absences, to hardening interests, secret societies gathered outside the church and removed to the sacristy and other venues set by the Bishops, the Army and the King, if there is one. But while the distances between the classes grows, the subject matter of their concerns becomes more materialistic and more real, such that the equi-distance of a former religious age – as the Irish still experience in their parishes – is seen and known and acknowledge in a body of thought and consciousness that knows it to be more simple and primitive – a state in which they, the unprivileged groups, see themselves as exploited, as against the privileged groups gathered around the polarities of power who enjoy the spoils , sacred spoils, of their exploitations. Which makes one think, sometimes, that established truth is not more than the beefed up repetition of eternal lies by those who have the wherewithal to repeat and repeat and repeat the same old dead Biblical arguments. By the way, what do you mean by ‘upright purposes’?

Seamus: Like any good common-law or cannon-law lawyer, one knows one can twist and turn anything into its Protean opposite very easily, and the clergy are gifted in this cannon-law tradition of twisting things as they please. They are so adept, indeed, that I am sure there will be a body that will convince themselves that God and Society are -- and always have been -- one and the same thing, and that the Bible actually confirms it. Certainly the Irish clergy can say and get away with anything – and I think I know how and why they can do it. Some of them, despite the defectors at Uxbridge, even claimed Marx for the Christian cause, and they have bandied Joyce about as well. To my mind none of it is upright or authentic.

Sean: I don’t like being sidetracked but I have to hear why it is that you think you know why people – especially the clergy – can say anything in Ireland and get away with it?

Seamus: It’s a question of time?

Sean: This should be good! What on earth has time got to do with it?

Seamus: Interesting that you should say ‘what on earth?’ The words themselves have a time dimension to them and while the original meaning of the expression I can’t immediately fathom, I bet it has something to do with ‘What on Earth – and not in Heaven’ or ‘What on Earth –and not in Hell, in Space, in Other Time’ or something to that effect.

Sean: This gets better! You’re pulling my other leg now, aren’t you?

Seamus: No. Heidegger (and Wittgenstein) had this idea about the absolute origin of words and the irreplaceable notions that then attach to them. From this we know the obvious fact that time enters our behaviour as judgment, in that whether we are totally conscious of it or not, we know mortality in the various degrees to which age affects us. The child doesn’t really care about his parents. If you take a two- or a ten-year-old, give him plenty of ice cream and make their lives as comfortable as they were, they are apt to assume you as their parents and not so gradually accept you as such. The life force in the young is really strong and focuses forth, as if there is no death or mortality in sight. Children in this sense also move between rooms; they never quite move between countries. So, you see, one has to be adult, educated and refined to suffer the real sense of loss when someone close to us dies. A child is immune from this. It is only the more humanised adults – those who feel what has gone behind and what is in store -- who feel the full brunt of mortality. So, too, to confront another culture can be a trial and an ordeal for cultured adults. Children just move their toys and their dollies into the next room and are really enamoured at their new environment – not totally or forever, but in general!

Sean: What on earth has that to do with an explanation of why people in Ireland can say the most outlandish things with impunity?

Seamus: Because the Christian religion is the dominant mode of thought in the Republic of Ireland (and Northern Ireland as well), there is a this-world/next-world polarity always at work. And since the next world is valued sometimes moreso than this world, those who share the same or a similar this-world/next-world syndrome can understand irrational things said about this world with this polarity of worlds in mind. In this inexplicit way they understand them to be rational.

Sean: Examples! Examples!

Seamus: During the Great Famine when Irish people were eating grass to survive, do you know what John O Donnell -- the brother of the broth-of-a-boy himself -- said ?

Sean: No, what did the brother of the broth-of-a-boy say?

Seamus: He said: “ I am proud to belong to a nation of people who would rather starve than steal” And not too long ago didn’t our own wee President say something unusual about Protestants and Nazis, at a commemoration ceremony of the Nazi Holocaust victims no less. The difference between both statements is that the first was false poppycock arising out of religious poppycock, while the other was true poppycock arising out of being momentarily and not intellectually moved.

Sean: Elaborate, please. I thought there might be some truth in her statement, but it was otiose to compare Northern Protestants with Nazis.

Seamus: Well, which is the more otiose, her comparison of Northern Protestants with the Nazis, or her ignorance of the part played by the Catholic church in the Holocaust and after – despite the number of Catholics who were also sacrificed, as in Dachau! She seems to be unaware of the fascist origins in Franco’s Spain and the treacherous role of the Spanish Catholic Church in bringing back their pit-bull general to sort out the anarchists. Trust the RC church to betray the people! Moreover, President McAleese seems singularly unaware of the measures taken by the RC church to repatriate the Third Reichers. Something else: it is curious that no one so far as I am aware has mentioned anything about the Catholic church in Austria. Under some misleading sense of sanitation, a crowd called ‘Juventum’ – or some such name – went out during the 30s and 40s and took the children off the gypsies on ‘moral’ grounds – in very much the same way as the Nazis – and refused into the seventies to allow the children to know or contact their parents. And if it hadn’t been for the revelations made by Stern, who eventually took up the case of the Austrian gypsies, we would never have known of this. I remember a full television programme about it and the shocking similarity in Catholic attitudes at the time to those of Nazi Germany. It was only after a great struggle with the Catholic authorities that Stern Magazine broke the obdurate back of Catholic resistance to releasing any identifying papers for these children – then adults. What business the Catholic Church had in treating people so callously is only part of the picture of its imperialist and immoral mission. It’s a pity Mrs McAleese had not seen this account of the Catholic church in Austria before she condemned our -- and her --Northern Protestant liberators!

Sean: I expect that it must have been quite painful for the Protestant Northerner, to have to hear that from a Roman Catholic