Fundamental as anything

A WAKE UP CALL TO THE NATION! The headline over the ad in The Irish Times is compelling if nothing else.

ARE YOU AWAKE OR ASLEEP? it demands. I am pretty sure I m awake, but as I read on I become less convinced. Perhaps I ve really fallen asleep and started dreaming (or nightmaring ) my way back to an earlier Ireland. An Ireland of Supreme Court X cases, wife swapping sodomites and nuns-voting-by the-busload referenda
The people behind the placing of the ad are Human Life International (Ireland). Their message is simple enough: essentially, that this fair isle of saints and scholars, having held back the filthy modern tide for so long, is about to be overrun by heathens with subversive, trendy notions.
They don t quite put it like that, though. HLI (Ireland) are proud to host Austin Ruse (professional United Nations monitor) and Brian Clowes (worldwide pro-life trainer and researcher), the ad boasts. Hear Ruse & Clowes courageously and truthfully expose the anti-family, anti-God, anti-Life decisions being made at United Nations.
The evils the UN stands accused of promoting are not limited to abortion and contraception. No, there is much more where they came from: Sex Education! Divorce! Homosexual Practice! Radical Feminism! A veritable plethora of perversions are upon us. Gadzooks! What s a concerned citizen to do?
The ad outlines a few of the options. One is a special afternoon of prayer at Knock Shrine . . .culminating in a Mass of Healing for our nation. Can I, previously so ignorant of the wounds currently grieving us, take so much knocking on heaven s door, so quickly? Perhaps not.
First stop on the Call To The Nation Tour is at Dublin s Regency Hotel. It s time to spring into action.

Come the appointed evening, I rendezvous in the city centre with hotpress snapper Cathal Dawson. We leave in good time, fearful of the evening rush hour, and swing in to the Regency car park more than half an hour before proceedings are due to commence.
We aren t the only ones to arrive early. A small car in front of us is spluttering beneath the weight of the four nuns it carries. A pedestrian priest waves towards them, smiling unctuously. This, Cathal and I agree, is going to be a long night.
When we do go inside, we have no difficulty finding the meeting. The murmur of the rosary alerts us. The audience, which will peak at around 200, is predominantly old. A very few youthful faces contrast with the majority of over-fifties.
A woman named Theresa addresses the assembled throng. She seems to be co-ordinating the smooth running of tonight s gathering. To this end, she adopts that peculiar demeanour, part sweetness and light, part steely schoolteacher, which seems unique to religious activists .
She then introduces Patrick McCrystal. A wiry, bearded and bespectacled figure, he is the Irish director of Human Life International. His role is that of local warm-up man for the big, American attractions.
Like many of his fellow travellers he has evidently taken on board a few lessons in PR. Inclusive buzzwords and phrases like support for marriage, family, life and truth pour out. HLI, according to his testimony, is a prayer-based informational charity.
For all the niceties, though, there is no mistaking the message. McCrystal, like almost everyone else in the hall tonight, evidently feels under siege. The battle is going against the sealots. They want to strike back. Moral relativism is a dirty term around here; absolutism is the order of the day.
Deep down in our hearts each of us knows what is right, what is wrong, McCrystal says at one point. Each of us knows what it is to be a man, what is is to be a woman; what it is to be a husband, what it is to be a wife.
One suspects Pat wasn t first in the queue to see The Ladyboys of Bangkok come to town.
Our Lord said, Go and sin no more ; the Irish Family Planning Association says Go and sin more safely , he continues, voice dripping with sarcasm.
Next up is Austin Ruse. An American who s expensive-looking suit, trendy specs and immaculate grooming all give out reassuringly middle-class signals, Ruse is in fact President of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. He is also one of the foremost pro-Church lobbyists at the UN.
Ruse is slick. His speech is loaded with acronyms and technical terms, which imply knowledge of arcane politicking procedure, but is also leavened with folkish-wisdom like diplomats come from different worlds than we do . Radical feminists, in his view, can brook no opposition whatsoever. There are frankly strange ideas which pass for sophisticated thinking on the continent, he says, drawing appreciative murmurs from the floor.
He is a cunning Ruse. But he doesn t capture his audience entirely. Some of the more elderly begin to drift off, lost by his rapid fire delivery and the room s dodgy acoustics. He wins some waverers back, however, with his closing rhetoric in which he proclaims that in a battle between freemen and those who are enslaved the former always win. He then goes on to draw a parallel between the struggle he and his comrades are engaged in and the fight against Nazism. Hmmm. . .
Soon, it s time for a break. Many people make a beeline for the teas and buns on offer at the back of the room. Some hang around Ruse, bathing, groupie-like, in the reflected glory. Others crowd the tables on which various publications preaching tonight s message (or variations thereof) are displayed for sale.
For only #1 why not invest in Fighting Sex Ed in Catholic Schools (sample quote: If you pray and never give up in this struggle, one day you may find the sex education programs simply diappear from your schools )? Up the stakes to #2 and you can be illuminated by the wisdom of The Gay Agenda: A Christian Response ( We all are placed at risk by a society which socially or politically accepts active homosexuality ). For just # 2.50 get The Safe Sex Hoax ( Something that was catastrophic for the young happened in the 1960s. It was a revolution in social values. )
Suitably refreshed and stimulated the audience return to their seats for the final speaker, Brian Clowes. Clowes formerly served with the US military. It shows. He is the Stormin Normin of the night. Marshalling an incredible number of statistics of dubious provenance and even more dubious relevance (is the number of tobacco addicts in America really an indictment of that country s journey from the religious to the secular?), he is relentless and, frankly, disturbing in his virulent dogmatism.
On and on he goes, barking out his stats, and combining them with obnoxious showboating for the audience s benefit. When someone tells me they have a gay relative I ask them what do you mean? he exclaims at one point. Is that someone who is happy,or do you mean a sex pervert?
He also complains that the media are only too willing to communicate the fact that pro-life activists have murdered people, but not that abortionists have also done so.
Through all of this, though, it is one of Clowes earliest comments which echoes in the mind: Sometimes I m accused of being a little paranoid, he muses, before embarking on another attack on the devil s empty promises.
A meandering Q&A session, a final prayer for a bit of spiritual ballast and it s all over. The faithful file out, ready to take the battle to the non-believers.
Ugly, repressive, fundamentalist Ireland could be coming soon to a hotel conference room near you. Be afraid. Be very afraid. The killjoys are back in town.