Your crowd want kids to learn about blowjobs and fisting, I’d prefer the message of peace.
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Society sponsored kidnapping. Everyone knew this was going on and were complicit in it. Like the lad in the interview above didn’t know what had happened his sister? Did it not occur to him to ask? The nuns had better things to do than lock up women whose families didn’t want them locked up.
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I know of a lady in my wife’s distant family who got pregnant young and went into a mother and baby home.
It turns out her Dad ran her from the house when he heard and the associated shame meant she ended up in one of those hellholes.
The story now centres around the power of the church that led this poor man to run his own daughter. The truth is that the father was a cunt who could have stopped it but decided not to do as to make things easier for him.
The personal responsibility of the family is often glossed over in all of these cases.
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In general the people got the religion they wanted. The churches were packed to capacity every Sunday and there was nobody hunting adults into mass. The priests and bishops came out of the same communities as the rest of us and got the same education.
The famine was a very traumatic event it goes without saying and its effects ran deep for over a century. So too did the land wars and land hard won for a family wasn’t going to be given up to some bastard child turning up at the door. That was only a part of it. There were other factors at play too. Like we wanted to differentiate ourselves from England after independence and what better way than to flagellate ourselves as Holy Catholic Ireland and to tut tut at the promiscuous Brits with their rubber johnnies and saucy postcards while we were doing the stations of the cross and ating manky bits of whiting of a Friday.
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Mass attendance went up significantly in Ireland from the 50s to the 80s, or something like that anyway
When we should have been turning away from the church in the style we had it we were turning towards it
The nuns were hardly the instigators of the kidnappings but they didn’t seem to have any difficulty with their roles as ‘jailers’. Keegan’s book focuses on a man wrestling with his conscience when faced with the realities of the laundries. Not enough people did this type of conscience wrestling obviously.
I think the harsh reality here may be that a sizeable chunk of the population felt that the girls got what they deserved. Not a very Christian position to take but despite all the religion going on we were not a very Christian country.
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The first time hing that got built in any new community was the church, before schools or shops.
A sizeable majority, I would say.
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Those that did viewed them as second class citizens, along with the poor child who of course had nothing to do with anything.
Once you view a group of people like that then all sorts of terrible behaviour ensues. Ask any black person, or even travellers.
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Started this today. It’s a good read, he’s an interesting character, can sometimes come across as too earnest but he makes that point himself a number of times in the book. Clearly am intelligent guy who didn’t see football as the be all and end all. Very clever with the chapter titles too.
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Any views on Trespass by Louise Kennedy? Heard her on Matt Coopers culture club tonight. Seems like an interesting lady.
It’s brilliant, you’d love it.
Her book of short stories also excellent
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Thanks. I’ve just ordered it. I enjoyed Milkman very much. I’ll read it on the holidays along with the new Inspector Quirke John Banville book.
Was that not Anna Burns?
It was indeed but this book Trespasses is also about 1970s Northern Ireland.
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Finished this tonight. It ends after he leaves Everton. I would have liked a chapter or two about his time at Tranmere. If I remember right, around that time they got to a league cup semi final and nearly got promoted to the Premier League so it would have been nice to read about that. Same with his foray into being a player - chief Executive. Overall, it’s a decent book that’s easy to read.
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Just finished Bono’s book. It’s very good, he’s a very good and engaging writer. Self aware to a point of getting defensive.
He does get towards overdoing the righteousness / Christian beliefs at times, but somehow always brings it back to a pretty even keel. He loves the people around him and is grateful for them.
Personally, I love the bloke. I think he’s a great man who’s done great things. So I very much enjoyed this book, which surprised me as I really thought it was going to be shite.
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Bob geldofs autobiography is a great book.
Learnings here seem to be that being an absolute cunt doesn’t neccessarily mean a man can’t write a decent autobiography.
I thought it was a super book. Really interesting and I came away liking him a lot more. Apparently the audiobook version is meant to be superb
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