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AN IRISH CATHOLIC priest has been found guilty of the rape and indecent assault of three girls between 1961 and 1987 in Australia.
A jury in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court yesterday found Finian Egan, 78, guilty of eight charges spanning almost three decades.
All of the girls were aged between 10 and 17 when the abuse took place, the court heard. Egan, who is now retired, had denied the allegations during the three-week trial.
Seven News reports that Egan was given permission to conduct Mass in Sydney and in Ireland in the late 2000s, despite a complaint by one of his victims which was upheld by the Catholic Church.
In a statement, Bishop David Walker of the diocese of Broken Bay expressed his sadness at the trauma and suffering the victims had experienced.
“We continue to pray for the victims, their families and our communities,” he said.
Finian Egan is a retired priest of this diocese, who does not undertake any ministry in the Church. I ask that he also be kept in your prayers.
Sexual abuse is against everything for which the Church stands for. The safety and well being of young people in our care needs to be our highest priority.
He urged anyone with information about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to contact police.
Egan is due to be sentenced on 16 December.
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Naoinra, Gaelscoil agus Gaelcholaiste are over subscribed soon after they’re built. Demand is there. The way it’s being thought in these schools is through total Immersion . I believe we are seeing a quiet revival of the teanga.
@Niallers:
I dont know how many times I have to repeat myself, but the solution is incredibly simple.
Change the bloody secondary level and primary level Irish curriculum. I did my leaving in 2013 and I speak for 95% of my classmates when I say i despised the Irish language. Could speak more German than Irish when I left school.
Instead of forcing it on people and making them learn nonsensical and absolutely ***** poetry or short stories they can’t understand, have Irish class be about speaking the language and simply learning it, not this ridiculous approach of getting students to secondary school with barely a sentence, and then throwing them advanced poetry and essay exercises designed for native speakers in some delusional attempt to convince ourselves we’re great at Irish. If it means making Irish non examinable, do it.
Problem has existed for decades and not a thing has been done to change the obvious and glaring problem, the curriculum itself. Token gestures like road signs in Irish or translating documents nobody will read for a nice headline just achieve nothing.
Wales already have a good system, we should just plagiarise that.
@Mr Phil Officer: We should remove it from exams, teach it properly and stop ramming things down our necks.
Stephen .. how is it rammed down our necks ?
I couldn’t agree more. But it isn’t only that that’s killing off interest in Irish. Look, however they teach new Hebrew speakers obviously works, and so does French. It’s not just how Irish is taught. What if learning Irish meant that you would travel to other countries and to cities to meet other single Irish speakers of your own age? Translators often do. They meet people in countries with a thriving economy. With upbeat music and innovative culture all around them. The rest of us might get to spend a month away eating mashed seaweed and being ranted at by older people. What teenager wouldn’t want that?
The system in Wales shares many of the same problems. Most Welsh young people have 12 years of compulsory lessons but no fluent command of the language when they leave. They do however have large areas in the West and North where Welsh is genuinely the first language and spoken naturally at both home and school.
@Suzie – not elective = rammed,. Simples.
Agreed. I’m doing my leaving cert this year and the course is just ridiculous to be honest. Our teacher is very good and makes it as much about actually learning the language as possible but the course is designed to be learned by heart and it isn’t right at all
And like their Irish counterparts, Welsh-medium schools are massively oversubscribed yet yield far superior results even among kids from English-speaking families.
John .. by that logic then you’re saying all subjects you were taught in school such as maths, geography, history. Anything that’s not elective is therefore rammed? ?
@Suzie Sunshine:
Irish is rammed down our throats. Maths and English aren’t because a) we all have a basic level of these subjects when we enter secondary and b) we can change levels if we wish. Point is when you do Irish or English you have actual knowledge of the subject to use
In Irish you have two choices
- Do Honours and like me learn about 50 A4 pages of stuff off by heart for the oral and written exams in order to pass
- Do Pass level and learn fewer and simpler pages of stuff in an easier exam, but its still stuff that will exit your brain the second you complete the exam
The choice is irrelevant anyway, whether you do Pass or Honours you haven’t a clue what you’re even saying or doing, just puking out phrase after phrase of boring text about a short story that consists of a housewife bitching about her husband for 4 pages (Not making this up, it was called Dis IIRC) or another descriptive story describing an upper class street filled with snobs that didn’t actually contain a plot (Forget the name of this one).
I did the exam 3 years ago, I speak for the majority my age, everyone who red thumbed my first comment is either one of the extreme minority of students who liked the course or is someone burying the head in the sand and thinking Irish is perfect and its all the students fault, which is bogus as as a student currently abroad its highly embarrassing telling people I speak only English at home, I want to actually be able to speak my own language.
To end my point, in the LC exam when a long Q came up the process was simple. Check what story it was about, and look for the key word you might have recognised e.g bron,athas. Once you spotted the key word you needed off you went writing about 3 pages of advanced enough Irish, which is laughable considering a) you didnt even understand the question, you just saw the key word and regurgitated the essays you’d learnt and b) You probably wouldn;t even know what you were saying.
I got a B1 in honours Irish btw, and I can say with absolute certainty I may as well be from Thailand as far as my Irish language skills go. That was 14 years well spent. 5 years of German and I was 20X better than I was at Irish as the German course actually taught the language, not BS literature. Currently on the way to (hopefully) be fluent in a couple years as I’m currently on erasmus.
Fact is any system that promotes this is completely broken, and it ain’t the teachers fault since its their job to get us good grades, if the curriculum doesn’t allow them to teach very basic and conversational Irish and forces them to hand you sheets of advanced literature essays in order to pass or do well it ain’t their fault,
@DonalC:
Point is when you do MATHS or English*
Compulsion
More people actually speak Polish than Irish in this country
@Dylan McKane:@Dylan McKane: Wait until Brexit then you will hear a lot more polish
Or a lot more English !
@Dylan McKane: Here is the source https://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0329/315449-divorce-rate-up-150-since-2002-census/
What’s the app called ? I might check it out. My neighbours are polish.
Sad people who cannot see the importance of preserving one’s language.
@Lita Campbell: It’s not my language, and judging from the fact that your comment is in English, it’s not yours either.
Ben .. whether you speak it or not .. it’s still our language.
Tir gan teanga, Tir gan anam.
How is it ours? Because we had some ancestors who spoke it? So what? If you want to speak it, knock yourself out. It’s nothing to do with me and I have no more responsibility to protect it than you have to do Euclidean geometry.
@Suzie – it’s my language if I say so, not because you or anyone else say so.
@techman – I’m guessing what that means and it’s BS. This country functions in its entirety in English : including the organs of State and our Dáil. QED.
It’s actually a quote by PH Pearse , who laid down his life so that you could express your democratic opinion. it says that a country without a language is a country without a soul.
Well said. I’m sure native speakers of Swiss, Austrian, Brazilian, Belgian, American, Argentinian, Canadian, Cypriot and Jamaican would agree.
Irish people living abroad have much more pride, respect and appreciation for their language, culture and history.
As a tax payer I’m happy for a proportion of the tax I pay to be spent promoting Irish. A lot of the negative comments regarding spending on Irish seem to be written by people with an axe to grind. If people were as interested in their kids being able to speak other languages as the claim to be we’d have plenty of kids growing up fluent in French, German and Mandarin. The same type arguments could be used against higher level maths, English and History. The point of an Education system up until 3rd level is to educate and create open minded adaptable people not purely to train people for some unspecified job
@Ed Cotter: That’s great Ed, you’re in the minority though and don’t force things on people. It’s called choice, it’s a right we all have and we shouldn’t be forced to learn it If we’re not interested. Religion is another waste of taxpayers money. If you want to learn it, off with you and good luck with it.
So, Stephen, stop shoving English down our throats. We may shove Irish down your throat, but at least you get to forget about it when you leave school. We have to put up with your language for our entire lives, as horrible a language as English is. And English is horrible. 20% English, 80% every other language, and without any proper grammatical system! Ugh!
@Brian Ó Dálaigh:
Brian you get todays award for the dumbest comment.
Ok facts. English is predominantly the only language people in Ireland speak every day. Therefore forcing every child to learn a language not really used is not in my mind s good use of resources. Most children leaving school aren’t fluent in Irish. They know the mechanics but are not good enough to speak it fluently.
Most TDs are law makers are likewise not fluent which means they cant actually read the Irish version of all laws which take precedence over the English one.
Every Irish person should learn the language but not to leaving cert. Every document should not be translated into Irish as everyone speaks English. This translation is another waste of money which could be better spent elsewhere for the general improvement of the country.
@Bunny Johnson: Don’t talk common sense here, we can’t handle it and you may offend a few proud Irish speakers. Irish was rammed down my neck, I hated it. Religion was rammed down my neck, hate that too and a lot of people in this country have the same experience.
When was the last time you had to use your knowledge of oxbow lakes, Sylvia Plath or anything you’ve ever been taught in religious studies. Maybe we should be only teaching children subjects and skills they’re going to use in later life but if we’re going to go down that road then there’s a lot more than Irish that is “not a good use of resources”.
Don’t forget sedimentary rocks
I wholeheartedly agree but this is a discussion on Irish. Paying for my kids to have netbooks which the school insisted on which came with Microsoft Office but the school didn’t actually teach them to use would be top of my peave list. Teach them square roots of imaginary numbers but not Excel…
I don’t agree that the idea that speaking English means it’s not a good use of resources to teach Irish. Whatever language we taught as a second language would not be the language children will use every day and there is quite a lot of evidence that teaching a second language at an early age has all kinds of benefits. I would argue there are benefits as regards understanding culture and interpreting documents and history, as knowing two languages gives you an understanding of how impossible it is to ever get a completely accurate translation of something and of how cultural, bias and language interact.
…the second language most people do, and with less effort, is French, not Irish. German now very popular too- and you’re far more likely to use those instead if Irish : that’s just reality.
If only the red thumb brigade could actually articulate their position , in English or Irish, eh.
How about this. it is unnecessary.
So is Welsh but they take pride in learning their language.
Good let the Welsh subsidise the Irish language as well.
In the scheme of things the money spent doesn’t even make a dent in the economy, even Wales can manage to organise the financial and educational necessities needed for their language to flourish, why can’t Incompetent Ireland the country who couldn’t even organise a concert in Croke Park manage to do something similar.
Because some people are interested in irish and try and force it on everybody else
@Mr Phil Officer: How many homes, would the money build and roads would it repair. How much of it, could be given back to the hard pressed taxpayers of Ireland. If you want it, go learn it and don’t force it on others.
Calm down Stephen, you could make the same point for cutting all the arts, culture and heritage funding but where would that leave us, culture-less like the Aussies were barbecue day is the national holiday, lose the language and we’d lose our soul becoming more European like.
A strong argument could be made when looking at the changing world particularly in Europe that we should be redoubling our efforts in remembering who we were.
@Imnotrodten: Well said. Your sentiments are similar to 98% of the country who just want to get on with their lives, converse through English, and allow the Irish fanatics to continue along their merry way and not bother us.
Mr Phil Officer. . Well said 100 %
We have some proud traditions in this country, our language been among the most ancient of them, it should be preserved.
Much of what children learn in school is unnecessary. You could argue English and Maths are the only subjects that are actually NECESSARY. Art isn’t necessary, music isn’t necessary, nature study isn’t necessary, poetry isn’t necessary, history isn’t necessary. That doesn’t mean these things aren’t BENEFICIAL. And there is a lot of evidence to indicate that learning a second language at an early age is beneficial. OK, it wouldn’t have to be Irish, but the cost of teaching anything else would probably be higher as many of the primary school class teachers wouldn’t be able to teach them, so the state would have to pay an extra teacher to say take each class for half an hour.
There is a wide middle ground between NECESSARY and pointless and the vast majority of subjects fall somewhere in the middle. I think it would severely disadvantage our children to stop teaching them a second language. Apart from anything else, learning a second language is a good lesson in how language works. It helps students to understand their own language and also teaches them that concepts are not universal. It also makes them realise just how hard it is to learn a second language and therefore less likely to look down on immigrants who might not be totally fluent in English. It is supposed to have cognitive benefits and in my opinion also helps students to get a better understanding of culture and history and of how difficult it is to interpret things from another culture or from history accurately due to language differences and language change. And it makes learning other languages in the future easier.
@Phil Officer : nonsense. We are more European already, your soul is not related to your language: it’s in your deeds & actions.
It’s some how ironic that the case for maintaining support for Irish language is written in English.
As every politician knows if you want a story buried release it in Irish i.e. when you have to make an embarrassing apology in the Daíl (Irish Parliament).
@Adrian Matthews: How is it ironic?
@Larry Doyle: I cannot figure why you need what The Irish Parliament is, if people to live we are making far too many changes for them. So few people who migrate Mae the effort to learn anything the language to they are moving to. There is one lad with huge job and has been here over 20 years but won’t speak Irish and he wants us to go broke getting his jail out of jail, how is that save? How disrespectful shows your host country?
@Jho Harris: ???????
Jho, one person not using Irish proves nothing. There are many German people who speak fluent Irish and visit Ireland once a year. They just like learning it. They didn’t have to learn it from bad teachers.
@Jho Harris: Hope your Irish is better than this drivel
@Jho confused typed Irish instead of English, I got confused but I really wasn’t to be attacked or have my comment was described.
Still makes no sense Jho
Foghlaim deich sentances úsáideacha a in aghaidh na seachtaine nó na míosa agus iad a chleachtadh le foghlaimeoirí eile agus beidh tú a bheith reasonsbly maith i ní den cúpla mí.
Learn ten useful sentences a week or a month and practice them with other learners and you will be reasonably good in a matter of a few months.
We should be changing the way it’s taught in school . It has to taught the same as ash as any other language is in school. . It’s a real shame that so many people just want rid of it altogether. It’s our language , we were forced to use English. . We should never forget the language this country and all it’s people once used..
Id rather forget it !
I finished school in 1983 hating Irish. Today certain terms that I have come into contact with through my children still manage to make me sweat and turn my blood to ice – Peig being one and the Tuisil Ghuinadach being another don’t even know if they’re spelt right and certainly still haven’t a clue that they are about. Something is seriously wrong when you leave school after 14 years as much of an non Irish speaker as you were when you started school age 4. What’s the point in wasting all the money. By the end of 6th class teachers know if a child has a flair for the language those children should be encouraged to continue with it as an exam subject while the other children should be able to do it as a conversational class. This really could make a huge difference. I mean our ancestors didn’t have to learn all the horrible bits and the language survived. The militant gaelgoirs have a better chance of re-igniting the language if it was a bit more flexible with its demands. And we really really don’t need everything translated into Irish especially when there are so many other more important services needed in this country. I’d rather my tax take was spent on healthcare or childcare.
What ever the actual cost is, and no doubt it would be difficult to arrive at an accurate number, there’s a lot of people who don’t want it known, I can think of a lot of more deserving causes than a dead language.
Maith thú a Chaoimhín, ach bheadh ionadh orm má dhéanann sé pioc maitheas, táid ann atá i gcoinne na Gaelainne beag beann ar na firicí. Bain cúis amháin dóibh agus tiocfaidh siad ar ceann eile.
@Criostóir: fair play having for having the language. …but with LC ’84 Irish I have no idea what you’ve just said. And, I’d wager, the majority of readers on here….
We, the Irish, shouldn’t be paying one cent for the learning of our native language. The thieves who stole it should be paying the bill. What we should be doing is estimating the cost of all the Irish citizens who genuinely want to learn the language to the point of fluency, and to be taught by the best Gaelgóirs that our Island has to offer, then send the entire bill to London. Anyone, who like myself has already paid through the face for my childrens fluency, should be reimbursed in full. This was theft through centuries of terror on my ancestors, and something that every Irish person should remember and embrace. This is not an anti-Sasannach or Rebel speech. It’s called paying for your crimes. No other country would let it go. In honour of our forefathers, our Kings and Queens, our Patriots and Martyrs, Éire in ár dhuasaigh.
…@Paul Culligan – ridiculous statement: like something from a Monty Python sketch…” what have the Romans ever done for us” etc….
So the three ‘crime- compensatory’ universities that the English set up in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, for the rape of that country’s heritage, is a comedy also? No wonder the empire has disintegrated, paying out for it’s woes. All that it needs now is the coup de grace, as the world laughs.
€1 is too much to waste on a language that the vast majority of people never speak in their lives after they leave school.O sorry I forgot the bit where we all say can I go to the toilet in Irish when we’re on holidays to show foreign people what Irish sounds like
@BigD The reason you know “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dti an leithreas” is because you used it in a practical context. This is how the language should be taught in its entirety. The method of teaching has been forced through by fluent speakers who assume the child was exposed to 4 years of home exposure prior when it needs to be taught like a foreign language because in reality that is what is is for the great majority at this time. I feel Irish adults need to put a bit of effort in and realize that we can unlock a lot of what we were exposed to in school. I believe most Irish adults would like to speak their native language fluently there is a belief that it would be too difficult and take too much effort to become proficient. I am just starting to study it again of my own interest and pace as my child will be going to a gaelscoil.
If you want learn irish in school thats fine.But if you don’t you shouldn’t be forced.It should not be compulsory
Irish is a nice hobby but your kids cant write software code in Irish.
Try learning a programming language and you’ll see how many obvious words and function names are already reserved. I found it very handy for coding unique variable names, saves time to use words you Know won’t be rejected by compilers!
@Fiona Fitzgerald: ..exactly … no computer compiler or interpreter in the world speaks Irish.
@Neuville-Kepler62F: You should have a look at the source code for http://www.logainm.ie. I’m talking about the comments of course, but that represents the same extent to which most code can be written in Spanish or German…
Hebrew was a dead language but was revived using Ulpan So use the Ulpan system
For a mathematician, Ed Walsh really has no clue how to use statistics to tell the actual truth in anything. Of course he deliberately does this in order to sensationalise what ever topic he is writing about. He is very good at using statistics to write a “alternative facts” that certain presidents world be proud of. I have read very little of his writings that couldn’t be pulled apart by some one with logical thinking and an open mind. I’m glad to see that has been done agian by Caoimhín De Barra.
Fake News
It’s sad that some people have no respect for our native language judging by some of the comments written about this article
@Tomás Ó’Caomhánach : sad that you can’t admit the failing of the custodians of the language : teachers and a crap curriculum. It’s taught in the abstract and that’s where it’s staying. Take Irish music by comparison : interesting, loved and increasing in popularity – yet no one is forced to learn it………and that’s the difference : elective makes it so. Compulsion kills anything.
I live in a village in a Gaeltacht area and whereas Gaeilge is spoken by a number of people in the village and it’s environs in their own homes it is rarely heard in the local shops, church or on the streets, is there a shame attached to our Native language ? ?. I hear other nationalities in our village conversing in their own language.
Looking down the comments, it seems that a lot of this debate is an indictment of our whole education system. Some people seem to think that learning things that they don’t use in the future is a waste. The point is that education gives you a basic skill base that can be filled in later. Knowledge is a framework:- missing bits make it harder to build. Conversely, seemingly random facts fill in gaps and make further learning easier. A list of things you need to know is job training, not education. The apparent fact that so many don’t even understand the distinction is worrying for the future.
Are you all Brits
In our area the Gaelscoil is not ‘oversubscribed’ or even close to it, in fact they make calls to local residents to try to entice parents to switch their children over. The problem is that to their own admission they do not teach English at all until year 3. That is completely untenable in a country where English is the language everyone can speak, it makes no sense to omit teaching English for the first 2 years, least of all because the children do not speak Irish already so they learn nothing either way. Perhaps if the entire thing was thought out better both methods (gaelscoil/gaolscoil :) or Irish language class) more Irish would be retained and those who choose to do it aren’t held back in English.
@Amy M:@Amy The Gaelscoil system makes sense in regard to language acquisition. Also teaching kids reading and writing later is proven to be more effective as is done in Scandinavia where it begins at seven.
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/school-starting-age-the-evidence
http://ncca.ie/en/Publications/Reports/Language_and_Literacy_in_Irish-medium_Primary_Schools_Report_on_consultation_and_seminar.pdf
Change all social welfare forms into irish. Simple
Irish people struggle to speak English don’t mind Irish language wasting money invest the into health and education
Níl aon teanga mar do teanga féin!
I take it this article is a shortened version of the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVeE4yrNKgs
im glad this article was posted, last time it was a nonsense!
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