Leave Darren Clarke alone!

My my, hey hey. Go away for a few days and you can miss a whole shitstorm. Maybe you’re better off that way. Our new fangled prissiness has reached such epidemic proportions that it really is very hard to abide.

Take the controversy that erupted last week about Darren Clarke. The Dungannon-born golfer had just powered his way to a brilliant and emotionally charged victory in the British Open. It was, at the age of 42, the finest achievement in a wonderful professional career. In the aftermath, Darren partied into the wee small hours and beyond. He did a few interviews where he was not at the top of his verbal game. And in response, a load of sanctimonious gits thought fit to denigrate him.
What a load of shit.

In the cold light of day, Darren himself might feel that he’d have been better off to have had a decent night’s sleep after his extraordinary win. But this was a never to be repeated moment and he was entitled to go with the flow. He stayed up all night drinking? So what. To stand in condemnation of his fondness for a pint is to miss the point entirely. Darren Clarke is a brilliant golfer, one of the greatest natural talents in the sport. And this was the moment when all the rich promise of years of graft finally came majestically together.

Golf is a game that requires fantastic reserves of judgement, cool, concentration and calculation. Anyone who has ever looked down the fairway and tried to gauge if they need a three iron or a five will tell you. Every shot is a challenge – in particular on a links course, in a high wind, with the effects of rain also coming into the equation.

Tiny fractions of milimetres variation in the point and angle of contact of club and ball can make an entirely disproportionate difference in the end result. And that’s just on the straight shots. At the highest level these guys learn how to execute a fade, so that they can do it ten times in a row, playing the ball sweetly to the left knowing that it will gently swing back to the right, where the intended target is – avoiding trees, bunkers or other hazards along the way. They know how to draw it too, going right to come left and hoping to get and extra fifteen or twenty metres length as a result.

They know how to stop a ball dead or deliver enough back spin on a wedge to go beyond the flag and back. Or they can chip and run with such delicacy that they measure the distance to within a margin of error of less than one percent. It is extraordinary when you grasp the physics of it: the torque, the leverage, the propulsion, the smack of club on ball, the height of the trajectory, the calculation of the effect of wind and hill and slope and bobble all playing into the difference between a great shot and a disastrous one.

How do truly great players lose it? Padraig Harrinton is currently playing like a shadow of his former self, plummetging out of the world Top 50. And, on the stats at the Open it is currently largely down to putting. I know this might sound a touch obscene, but the hole is tantalisingly small. Hair’s breadth calculations come into slotting the ball in and if your confidence is down or you’re feeling rattled, then the putts don’t fall. The game is played in your head too. It is a test not just of power and precision. It is a test of will, of mettle, of nerve, of focus.

Which is what makes the hoo-hah about Darren Clarke all the more thoroughly absurd. He stood up to the test magnificently. All the gears had remained well oiled over 72 arduous holes. The head was together. The swing stayed constant. The decision-making was par excellence. The self-belief never wavered. And yet a bunch of plonkers felt it was their right to start pissing on him in the c
elebratory aftermath.

I can hear the same killjoys suggesting that the Chilean miners shouldn’t have celebrated being hauled out of the mineshaft after 69 days, that they should have been down on their knees praying. But you know what? We haven’t yet arrived at a moment where you have to do everything according to some tee-totallers version of the book.

The attitude of the anti-alcohol crusaders is arrogant and bullying. They come across as one-eyed in the extreme, desperate to impose their own anxieties and phobias on the rest of the world. Fact is that a lot of eminently reasonable people like a drink. And a lot of people get a lot of pleasure from alcohol. It has its pros and cons but what in this mad, mad world doesn’t?

The week’s other interesting imbroglio involved Enda Kenny and his savage condemnation in the Dáil of the Vatican, in response to the Cloyne Report on the sexual abuse of children. It was by far Enda Kenny’s finest political moment. Over 12 minutes he lacerated the institution of the Roman Catholic Church for placing its own position of privilege and power before the well-being of the children who had been abused by its officers. And he insisted that from now on, the civil law of the Republic will always take precedence over canon law or any other evasions attempted by the religious.

The tone of direct confrontation with the Vatican was by any standards quite remarkable. He opened by repeating the accusation in the report that the Vatican had attempted to frustrate an enquiry by the Government of a democratic State not thirty but just three years ago. He described Ireland’s complete abhorrence of the attitude of the Holy See. He talked about delinquency and perversion. The rape and torture of children being downplayed. And the Church’s brazen disregard for the protection of children.

And he declared that from now on, it will be an offence to withhold information on suspected child abuse. In response, in a move that is also unprecedented, the Papal Nuncio Giuseppe Leanza has been ‘recalled’ by the Pope.
This is the beginning rather than the end of the row. Legislation being prepared by the Government will require a priest to pass on any information gleaned in the confessional in relation to cases of child abuse. Already, the Church has made its position on this clear, with a senior Church official, Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti telling the newspaper Il Foglio that the Vatican would never accept
legislation which requires a priest to break “the seal of the confessional.”
It is a fascinating argument, which puts the role of the Roman Catholic Church and its arrogation of the right to absolve people of their guilt even for the most heinous of crimes via the confessional under new and long-overdue scrutiny.

This is an extraordinary power for any institution to claim as its own, but the Catholic Church believes that it alone has this capacity to forgive on God’s behalf. Once you begin to consider this issue seriously, you have to take a position on what is one of the essential pillars of the Catholic Church’s sense of privilege. For if the Church does indeed have this power, derived directly from the Creator, then surely it is something that is above and beyond civil law in any jurisdiction?

It comes down to this: do you believe that a priest can absolve an individual of the guilt for a crime like murder or the sexual abuse of a minor? And can the one who confesses step out of the confessional knowing that he or she is unburdened of any remaining need to atone for what has been done, other than the prescribed penance? If you believe in Catholic doctrine, if you accept the bona fides of Holy Orders and the powers the sacrament confers on priests, if you believe that lesser ‘sins’ an be cleansed, then the answer has to be yes.

But if you believe instead that “no, this cannot be the case, someone who rapes a five year old and does it repeatedly cannot walk out unburdened in that way, they must face the necessary civil process of trial and punishment as well”, then you must follow through and repudiate all of the above, and see the special qualification, claimed by the clergy, to intervene between the individual and the ‘divine’ and to forgive people their crimes for what it is: a tissue of superstitions, delusions, illusions and falsehoods.

As for forcing priests to divulge what is told to them in the confessional – my instinct says that no matter how absurd I might find the institution, under present circumatances the relationship between priest and penitent remains a privileged one.