Here’s former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern talking in the Irish Examiner about the criticisms levelled at the bishops in the light of the Murphy Report:

I mean it’s difficult for them all. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I mean they are all saying different things as far as I can see. Some of them are saying they are going to wait and see the priests in the diocese. Others are saying they will wait to see what the public will say. Over the next week or so, we will see where it goes. Most of the focus seems to be on the man in Limerick. A lot of the others are old and effectively retired anyway.

Oh, poor chaps. It is difficult for them, isn’t it? Having their reprehensible behaviour made public must be tough to cope with. You know, it’s them we should feel sorry for. This all happened years ago and now people want them to be held accountable? What are we thinking? People go on and on about the victims but why is nobody thinking about how hard this must be for the bishops?

And the old and retired ones – sure leave them in peace. They’re just auld fellas now. Who cares if they helped priests rape young children in the past? Thankfully Bertie is around to set us straight. The horrible little prick. A man employed by the Sisters of Mercy before he entered political life. A man who agreed to a deal which saw the taxpayer most liable for the compensation that the religious orders should have paid. A man who is trying to tell us what’s going on at the moment is ‘difficult’ for the bishops?

Give me fucking strength. Yet this is the kind of attitude at the top of Irish political life which has allowed these kinds of crimes to be committed – and it’s not as if he doesn’t have plenty of previous. Aside from Enda Kenny which of our political leaders has said that the bishops should resign? Disappointly, to me at least, Eamonn Gilmore said it was a matter for the religious orders, as did the Taoiseach, but why has nobody apart from the leader of Fine Gael condemned these men outright and said that they should not continue in the roles they currently hold? Why am I not surprised that the Minister for Education is more concered about how he is perceived amongst the catholic zealots than doing what is right?

Technically you might say that politicians have no business interfering with the running of a religious order – but did the religious orders do us the same courtesy? No they did not. For years they ruled Irish life, and Irish people, without any mandate whatsoever to do so. What we did or how we did it was none of their business yet they poked their nose in every which way they could. Why should we now sit back and let them behind technicalities?

Willie Walsh was on the radio today crying about how he was in no position to judge anyone for their behaviour. I’m sorry, but if a man of god can’t judge someone who rapes a child then what is the fucking point? It’s not for god to judge the actions of that person, it is for us and for the courts to judge. As it is with the bishops who were part of the cover up.

Politicians, and especially the leaders of the parties, need to stand up to these people and say they should not continue in their current positions, that they should be prosecuted for withholding evidence of crimes, for enabling crimes to happen. They knowingly sent men to places where they knew they would abuse children. Why the fuck are we pussyfooting around them?

Most likely nothing will happen, but for fucks sake say it. Those who don’t are, like so many, afraid of the backlash from the faithful. Maybe if they grew a set of balls they might just earn the respect of the rest of us.

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Update: Brian Coward defends the vatican, from where on high the cover-up began and who refused to cooperate with the commission. This is the leader of this joke of a country, remember.

The full text of his statement to the Dail can be found on Irish Election.

I despair.

As the faithful go to mass today – and I’m sure poor attendance will be because of the rain, nothing else – what leadership has the Taoiseach shown in the wake of the Dublin report?

People want to see criminals prosecuted, whether they’re priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, lay people, Gardai who failed to act or anybody else who was involved in this huge conspiracy against the people of Ireland.

Brian Cowen says “I believe that just as there must be no ambiguity about the fact that all institutions and individuals are answerable to the law of the land, whatever their status, it is for those institutions and their members to determine the appropriateness of any individual to hold ecclesiastical office”.

Coward. He is afraid to criticise the church. He is afraid to say that those who perpetrated crimes against young people, those who covered them up, those who enabled vicious paedophiles to rape their way from parish to parish, are not fit to hold office in a church.

If a Fine Gael TD was discovered to be a child rapist, you can be sure he would say it. If the head of the Boy Scouts of Ireland was a paedophile he would say it. Would he not openly question the suitability of members of the Teachers Union to hold office in their organisation if it were discovered that they had spent decades abusing children then covering it up? Of course he would.

Yet when this country needs leadership, when we desperately want somebody in power to speak out against an organisation that has been guilty of the most unconscionable crimes, Brian Coward won’t do it, because he is afraid. Afraid of the church, afraid of the backlash from disciples of the church, the brainwashed masses for whom this is an irrelevance because the church can do no wrong.

He is pathetic. A spineless yellow-belly who has no right to supposedly lead this country. He is saying that we have no authority over these men … and let us remember that is all they are. They may have a collar and parish but they are just men, subject to the same laws as any of us, and if we had been involved in the kind of crimes and cover-ups the church has been we would be prosecuted and jailed. They are not special, they have no higher place in society, they are just men, yet Coward allows them to maintain the falshehood that they live on some kind of pedestal.

He is allowing them to continue the kind of behaviour that has led to this appalling mess. He is condoning their behaviour. The Taoiseach. The leader of the country. He is a disgrace.

Ireland is broken and will stay broken as long as those in charge have no will to make things right. And those of you who go to church today and put money in the plate, you are complicit. Shame on you.

So yesterday NAMA was passed. We don’t have money to pay for cancer vaccines, hospitals, old aged pensioners to buy a bit of wood for the fire, but we’ve got €54bn to bail out property developers and gamblers dressed as bankers. We all know this. It’s no surprise.

We know our friends at the Green Party are super serious about their role in all this. Senator Dan Boyle Twittered his way through the legislative process, keeping us bang up to date with how close we were to being fucked. How proud he was to have taken part and to be at the forefront of Government 2.0.

The Greens are a touchy bunch though. Responding to a message I sent to them on Twitter accusing them, quite rightly I should add, of being humourless cunts and suggesting after the next election they would be a bit fucked, I got the following reply:

From you, sir, that’s a complement. Are you branching out now into political punditry? Or just threat-levelling?

Leaving aside the new invention that is ‘threat-levelling’, isn’t it sad that people who publicly represent the government don’t know the difference between ‘compliment’ and ‘complement’? No wonder we’re in the mess we’re in when halfwits like that abound.

However, the Greens are not really the issue, despite being a pack (a very small pack, a packette, perhaps?), of power-hungry, grasping cunts. We could count on our leader, Brian Cowen, to capture the public mood and calm things down, couldn’t we. He would settle our nerves, wouldn’t he? He’d make us feel better like any good leader would. Yes.

This, on the day that NAMA was birthed through the septic minge of this government, is what he gave us.

Bravo, fatso. Bravo.

From today’s Indo:

Boris Yeltsin got so drunk during a 1995 visit to Washington that Secret Service agents found him a few hundred feet from the White House clad only in his underwear and trying to hail a cab because, he explained, he wanted a pizza.

Fantastic. That’s a man we can all admire. Forget politics, forget protocol, forget dignity. He just wanted to get absolutely cunted and eat a pizza.

Can anyone imagine Brian Cowen, clad only in a pair of Rab C Nesbitt-esque Y-fronts, pissed out of his mind, scrabbling around the grounds of Áras an Uachtaráin desperately holding his mobile in front of his face trying to work out how to use such a contraption to call the nearest branch of Dominos from a Double Meat Frenzy?

Ok, maybe Cowen is a bad example.

RTE ran a news story on Monday night about the prankster who hung portraits of Brian Cowen in the National Gallery. It was a legitimate story covered in many other places.

Brian Cowen - fat, humourless cunt

Cowen and Fianna Fail had a meltdown though and rang RTE to complain. They demanded the story be removed from the RTE website, and it was. They demanded the clip of the news item be removed and it was. They demanded it be removed from the archives, and it was.

They also demanded an apology be made on air and it was. Pathetic stuff from RTE, truly spineless, but then this is the same organisation that allowed that wretched cunt Beverly Flynn to get away without paying back all the money she owed. No balls whatsoever.

FF’s action , however, was bullying, pure and simple. You’d think if Brian Cowen was going to be embarrassed by something it’d be by what a shit Taoiseach he is and what a bunch of useless cunts he’s supposedly leading in government. Let’s face it, in the history of the state this administration will go down in history as the worst ever. Incompetent, lying, hapless, ineffective, crooked, self-important, reprehensible cunts the whole lot of them.

This is a spectacular own goal by Cowen and by Fianna Fail. When you thought their stock couldn’t get any lower they amaze you with something like this. It could even have been a great chance for Cowen to show he’s got something about him by laughing it off as the joke it is, but instead he’s made a huge mountain out of what should have been a fairly small molehill.

He looks like a contemptible bully and when the government are demanding that Cathal Goan, RTE’s Director-General, be sacked over something like this when they’re humming and hawing over a crooked bastard like Michael Fingleton and his multi-million salary and pension payments then it tells you everything you need to know about them.

They are dirt, pure and simple, and these are the people that are supposed to get us out of the mess we’re in? Jesus Christ, we’re seriously, seriously fucked here folks.

This is a story that deserves as much coverage as possible because it just shows where Fianna Fail and Brian Cowen’s priorities lie. Public image is more important than real issues.

But what’s left of the public image now is something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe with an stick, and gag while you were doing it. And you know what? It’s fucking marvellous to see him and them make such complete and utter cunts of themselves. They look like prize fools and it’s fantastic. The public should see this side of him and his snivelling lackeys.

His head needs to be photoshopped onto the most hideous pictures you can find. Can we make it a meme?

Who can produce the most horrible, foul, ugly picture of Cowen? Come on Blogopolis, you know you can do it.

Gavin has been doing some digging – it makes for very interesting reading.

Mr Shit? Let me introduce you to Mr Fan.

Click for slightly bigger.

On a serious note he might need a Ninja or two around him. I’m sure there are more than a few people who wouldn’t mind kicking Brian Cowen’s head in right now.