Free Feckers by John Waters

grinned and said that, in fact, Ireland was now producing more computer scientists per capita than the United States. At the time it was seen as evidence of how out of touch Garret was, but within a decade, with the economy back in the black and Ireland rapidly revealing itself as the IT hub of Europe, Garret’s professorial pronouncement didn’t seem quite so nutty.
    In the long run, of course, it didn’t matter. With the benefit of hindsight, the difficulties of the 1980s were a minor blip compared to what happened in 2009. But the real problem about the Garret experience was that it would be a long time again before the Irish electorate would be able to trust the type of educated, sophisticated man who read books, listened to Mozart and would, later, write for the Irish Times . We became wary of talkers and thinkers, which is why, perhaps, we ended up with monosyllabic mediocrities and affable actors who never, ever get their shoes mixed up.

14 Bishop Eamonn Casey
    N early two decades on, Bishop Eamonn Casey’s ‘sins’, or at least the ones he was punished for, suggest themselves as the flaws of a good man. He had knocked up an American woman, Annie Murphy, who had given birth in 1974 to a boy called Peter. All things considered, he was a high-class kind of sinner.
    In May 1992, when Peter Murphy was seventeen, it all started to spill out. The Irish Times had been sitting on the story for weeks and eventually went with a partial version of it, mainly an element relating to Casey’s payment of some £70,000, said to have come from a diocesan account, to Annie Murphy’s ‘partner’ as a ‘settlement for Peter’. A couple of days previously, Casey had mysteriously resigned as Bishop of Galway, after the Irish Times made contact with him concerning the information it had gathered. Gradually it emerged: Annie Murphy had been the daughter of an American friend of Casey’s, who had come to Ireland on the run from a broken marriage, and had become ‘involved’ with Casey, who had been Bishop of Kerry at the time.
    The Irish people were stunned, and not purely because it was impossible to come to terms with the idea of a bishop having sex. Casey had been no ordinary kind of bishop. In an era of clerical austerity, he had been a breath of fresh air. Roly-poly of both body and spirit, with his mellifluous Kerry accent he caused people to smile when he started to speak. He was known to like big cars and to drive them fast, and to ‘enjoy a glass of wine with his meals’. He would go on The Late Late Show and sing ‘If You’re Irish, Come into the Parlour’ and tell jokes and talk and talk until the cows came home. Gaybo would be rolling around the floor.
    If he had not been wearing the purple rig-out, you would never have known Casey was a bishop at all. And yet, he was one of the most attractive figures in a Church that seemed to have forgotten about the necessity to convince people that religion was not entirely an occasion of misery. Casey had been one of the stars of the visit to Ireland of Pope John Paul II in 1979. He also seemed to do much more than other bishops of the kinds of things Christians were supposed to be doing: helping starving Africans and suchlike. As Director of the Catholic Housing Aid Society, he had been responsible for establishing sixty-five branches in the UK, enabling thousands of homeless people to find places to live. As Bishop of Kerry he had taken a special interest in developing services for young people. As chairman of the Catholic Third Word Aid organization Trócaire, he was a constant campaigner on issues affecting the poorest people on earth, frequently excoriating politicians for their failures. He had also been a vocal critic of the Reagan administration’s record in Central America.
    For many years, the Irish people had studied Bishop Casey and wondered what he was so happy about, and now they knew. And, although the idea of a bishop having sex was unthinkable, in another