DISCLAIMER:
If you are reading this out of mere curiosity or because you are consumed by wild outrage after fake news journalists like Eilish O’Regan told you about us, then unfortunately you’ve come to the wrong place.
Catholic Arena are not a ‘group’, we didn’t organise or attend any protest, and we didn’t take any photos. Stop reading the mainstream media and learn to think for yourself or do your own research.
If you’re aghast that we shared an image of someone else’s protest with a matter of fact tweet about when and why it happened, then perhaps you can lobby your greatest Minister for Health ever Simon Harris to crack down on Twitter when you are busy lobbying him to oppose other forms of free speech. Thanks.
Disclaimer ends.
In a call in interview with Dublin’s 98fm on Tuesday, Senator Neale Richmond spoke of his disdain for the prolife protests involving three small white coffins outside Holles Street last weekend. The member of Fine Gael, a party not particularly known for their charity towards the weak, expressed his disgust at those who ‘prey on the weakest and most vulnerable in our society’. Listening to this phrase, there was a momentary shock that Neale might have grown some sympathy for the aborted unborn but of course, Fine Gael do not do either irony or self awareness.
Neale is typical of the immature and disingenuous approach employed by so many Irish people when it comes to abortion.
In a laughable video posted just before the referendum, Richmond posted a video entitled ‘A quick message for the lads’. ‘The lads’ were Irish men seen as being too thick to understand the complexities of abortion and who would be better off allowing themselves be shamed into voting Yes by a fellow absolute lad. Sure, under Neale’s party, the bais are the ones committing suicide, forming gambling addictions and unable to afford a home, but we can trust him on this one. Whether or not these were the same ‘Lads in the gym voting yes’ that Leo Varadkar is pals with, who knows. His condescension aside, Neale asserted with a straight face that ‘it is about the tough cases, it is about rape, it is about fatal foetal abnormality’. Fine Gael of course, went on to legalise abortion on demand and in the process they did indeed vote for hard cases of a certain kind. They voted explicitly in the Dail to allow for abortion on grounds of disability, gender and they voted explicitly to make sure that babies being aborted would never receive pain relief or be assisted if they were born alive during an abortion that had gone wrong. I wonder if the lads in the gym told Leo that they were voting for that.
This week’s firestorm over a protest outside Holles Street Maternity Hospital has been typical of how Ireland has avoided discussing abortion both before and after the Repeal the 8th referendum. Instead of discussing how many babies are being aborted, for what reasons they are being aborted and what procedures are being used to end their lives, Irish people would prefer to discuss any other issue instead. Tuam, miscarriage, clerical child abuse, the Vatican’s wealth. In the same way that Pope Francis was held responsible not for the unceasing charity of the Capuchin Day Centre that he visited during his trip here last year, but for Irish society’s 10,000 homeless, so too did this protest get spun by the media as one of malice and malintent, one that could only be discussed in terms of absolutely anything apart from abortion itself. It was one in which one could never acknowledge the stark meaning behind the three white coffins. And one which, as John Waters said about the 8th referendum, brought up every single axe that anyone ever had to grind with anything.
So let’s talk about abortion in Ireland.
Not the Church, not events from a century ago. Abortion in Ireland in 2019.
In a tweet in March, only weeks into Simon Harris’s abortion regime, the Twitter account Doctors for Choice intimated that there were already 900 abortions performed. Other estimates since have suggested that we could be looking at 12,000 by year’s end. Each abortion costs €450 in doctor’s fees. In January 2018, Leo Varadkar launched the referendum to remove the right to life from the constitution by stating that abortion would become ‘safe, legal and rare’. The first is a misnomer since an unborn child always dies, the second yes and the third, absolutely not. In the same speech, Varadkar stated ‘We can’t introduce abortion in any circumstances without a Yes vote, we can’t do it in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, we can’t do it in cases of rape or incest, we can’t do it in the case of a child who becomes pregnant and doesn’t want to become a mother’. Referendums where people have been supplied with false information are neither binding nor final. Repealers spent 35 years campaigning since the referendum of 1983 and now they are demanding that prolifers desist from speaking out. As usual they make the rules, because if the rules are fair, then they do not win. There are not 1,000 of such ‘hard cases’ that they spoke at length about, a month. What there are, are 1,000 cases of unborn children being terminated. Unborn children who are as alive and as valuable as those lost through miscarriage, still birth and other tragic circumstances. The Yes voters from 2018 may have voted to remove every constitutional right that the unborn child had, but that does not take away from each and every one of them having the right to life throughout their 9 months in the womb. After spending the 5 months before the referendum mocking unborn children, deriding them as clumps of cells and referring, as Clare Daly did on Prime Time, to miscarriages as a ‘heavy period’, we are now meant to believe that these same people are sensitive to any discussion on the issue to the point of hysteria. This sensitivity is probably sincere, but we can imagine that it probably has more to do with having their media created echo chamber bubble burst for the first time than with actual offense.
The reason why Irish people are so shocked by lingering opposition to the current abortion regime is because they were so uninformed in the first place. When Irish people say, ‘We had that discussion, it’s time to move on’, what they really mean is, ‘We voted for hard cases like Leo told us and we joined in with the memes on the Ireland Simpsons Fans page and had a great time getting locked at the Repeal party in May in Dublin Castle, don’t make me think anymore than I have to’. No discussion was ever had, there are still people who have no idea about when an unborn child gets a heartbeat, organs and limbs. There are still many who have no idea that every unborn child lost all of their rights to live when the 8th Amendment was removed. That includes those lost to miscarriage and stillbirth, not just the ‘unwanted’ ones. And still there are many who have no idea that abortion involves removing a living being from the womb with forceps, after piercing its heart with poison or scalding it mercilessly with saline. Bodily autonomy and my body my choice are two of vast array of brainwashed catchphrases that come to mind as inadequate when one thinks of the viciousness such a practise.
Joseph Sobran once noted that liberals who call themselves ‘prochoice’ throughout the years could never quite bring themselves to condemn forced abortions in China. The same goes for any other inconvenient story of abortion. There was no outrage from the Irish public outside of prolife circles when a story broke about a healthy baby reportedly being aborted in Holles Street on misdiagnoses of an illness they never had, not a single Repeal campaigner expressed sorrow. Those parents were left to mourn on their own.
When stories emerged from the United States about Kermit Gosnell, not a single Irish Repeal campaigner commented on the gruesome story of what had happened, and specifically as to how the infamous abortion doctor had killed several women and given the babies that he aborted a far more traumatic burial than anything suspected at Tuam. Gosnell was protected to the last by the pro abortion media. From the official court report on Gosnell:
Matijkiw wrote that Tina Baldwin showed her to a freezer in a “lab” on the second floor.
Inside she found “3-4 large plastic
containers with blood-colored frozen contents, wrapped in blue chux.” She described a
“red fluid spilled/frozen on the floor of the freezer.” Chicken pox vaccines were stored in
an ice tray above the containers of bloody fetuses.
Not only did Gosnell keep fetuses in a fridge that they were leaking from, but he also kept their severed feet in jars as trophies. He snipped many of their spines after they had been delivered alive to let them die slowly. If you do not believe this, as Irish people seem to have trouble doing with anything related to the grim reality of abortion, search the web and you will easily find the photographs. I cried at the images of those snipped in the spine and wished that I had not seen them. I wonder if those who cried at the images of the three empty wooden boxes outside Holles Street will do the same. This is what has been brought to our shores, not compassion, not care, but death. That is what was being protested at Holles Street.
The prosperity which the Irish met for the first time in the early 1990s and 2000s coincided with three cultural shifts, the legalisation of divorce, the abuse scandals within the Irish Catholic Church and unprecedented immigration. As they got rich all of a sudden, the Irish came to some strange conclusions about how. Rather than correctly observe the dependence of the Irish economy upon the American and wider European economies, the Irish conflated each of these above events with one another. And in the midst of it all, they concluded that anything contrary to those things was the reason why they were not wealthier sooner. When warned during the 2000s that the party would not last forever, the Irish listened to their politicians and bankers who said that it was perpetual, it was destiny, so enjoy it. When it all fell apart, they threw themselves into progressivism to salvage a taste of that modernity. The Roman Empire never ended it moved East, the Celtic Tiger never ended, it just put on a Repeal top.
This is why they have to hark back to the Church repeatedly.
Progressivism has made the average person more miserable, eroded the family unit and brought about countless problems with drugs and self harm. We squandered our economic freedom with greed and now the supposed sexual freedoms are going the same way. You don’t become happy by sneering at your ancestors or by starting at Year Zero and without asking what effect certain ways of life have had upon previous generations. One of the first things that Fine Gael did in their efforts to redesign Ireland was remove History as a core subject from the Junior Certificate, an Irish people who know their History are a threat to the tabula rasa, carpe diem philosophy of the airheads who currently treat running a nation as if they are on a reality tv show. Edmund Burke once said ‘I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases’. A nation is yours to preserve and pass on, not to allow you to be consumed by hatred for your perception of past misdeeds while you allow so many to go homeless, to emigrate, to become addicted, merely repeating the cycle that you claim to have broken. Irish people would be best worrying about how they deal with their own problems in 2019 rather than those of people in the 1920s.
Abortion is happening in Ireland. Protest is a realistic part of abortion everywhere. Banning it won’t stop it, to borrow an argument. That abortion is happening in a Maternity Hospital rather than in a clinic, means that Simon Harris is attracting protests to a building where women who are having a baby or hearing tragic news should be left alone. Either he relocates them from the Maternity Hospitals and to special clinics, or people who are content to turn a blind eye to human lives being intentionally ended by forceps, syringe or saline next door to where women are delivering their newborns can get used to turning a blind eye to protests against the aforementioned practises.
Irish people patted themselves on the back for finally having the conversation last year. Neale Richmond’s ‘lads’ appeal was not a conversation. Memes are not a conversation. Reading Joe.ie is not having a conversation. Satirical articles are not a conversation.
Asking what happens in an abortion, asking how many abortions happen, asking WHY protestors are so upset, asking what is done with the bodies of aborted Irish babies (something we still don’t know).
That is having a conversation.
The party in Dublin Castle, just like the Celtic Tiger, couldn’t last forever.