Lies and cover-ups

Why the wrong-headed hysteria being drummed up against legal highs is putting lives at risk. Also, fresh revelations about Brendan Smyth’s trail of abuse shows just how deeply corrupt the Catholic Church really is...

Eamonn McCann, 18 Feb 2010

On January 29th a thug walked into my friend Ray Coyle’s Red Star shop on Waterloo Street in Derry and shot him three times. He was left lying in a splurge of blood. He had been selling “legal highs”. Two days later, a protest against the hoodlums, styling themselves Republican Action Against Drugs, drew about 150 local people – a hundred more than we’d thought might come and stand up to the gang. 

The yobs of RAAD have two things going for them. One, they are not doing anything the Provisionals didn’t do for years. An IRA front, Direct Action Against Drugs (DAAD) – not very creative in the acronym department, are they? – killed 11 people in Belfast in the early 1990s. Some who sent out those death-squads are to be seen on television these days talking with straight faces about their passion for peace. 

Two, hysteria about drugs – and recently about legal highs in particular – makes rational discussion impossible. From Prime Time to The Sun to every phone-in programme polluting the airways, dangerous, ignorant opinions are presented every day as high-minded concern for young people. 

Unrepentant Provisionalism combines with moral frenzy to create the conditions in which low-lifes can believe they have a mandate for maiming and murder. 

The revelation that Norbertine priest Brendan Smyth served in the Boston diocese in the 1980s casts new light on the grubby manoeuvres of the Catholic Church in seeking to protect itself from truth. 

Smyth conducted a rampage of child-rape across Ireland for 40 years before his arrest in 1994. The Norbertine Order and a number of bishops were aware of this odyssey of abuse and chose to sing dumb. Smyth died in prison in 1997. 

Now, a campaigning group, BishopAccountability.org, has named 70 Irish priests who served in the US and who face child abuse claims. Smyth ministered in Massachusetts, North Dakota and Rhode Island. Allegations were levelled against him in each location. As in Ireland, the US church covered up and moved him on. 

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