Another own goal for RTÉ as it mocks those who pay its licence fee
BACK in 2011, RTÉ accused a priest of raping and impregnating a Kenyan teenager. The makers of the Prime Time programme Mission To Prey showed complete contempt for the priest’s protestations of innocence and rejected his offer to take a paternity test. The accusations were utterly untrue, the priest sued for libel, and the broadcaster, or rather the licence payers who fund it, shelled out at least €1million in damages and costs.
A report into the scandal later blamed the astonishing abandonment of all basic journalistic procedures on ‘groupthink’ – a smug liberal consensus that the Catholic Church was an institution so abhorrent, so damaged and so despised by their sneering urban cohort that there was pretty much nothing too vile or too calumnious to be said about the faith or its priests, whatever the truth.
Sinister
But it went beyond just attacking the princes and priests of the Church. ‘Groupthink’ also held that the poor, cowed, superstitious peasants, rattling their Rosary beads, saying their Angelus and shuffling to Sunday masses, needed to be enlightened and liberated from the medieval clutches of this pernicious creed. The national broadcaster would open their eyes to the folly of their dumb faith and drag them, kicking and screaming, towards bland, homogenous secular modernity.
But, after it cost it a sevenfigure sum and a king’s ransom in journalistic credibility, the broadcaster conceded ‘groupthink’ was a bad and sinister thing and should be eradicated.
That’s gone well now, hasn’t it? It’s hard to imagine a better example of that same groupthink, alive and well nine years on, than the consensus that approved a ‘sketch’ on the New Year’s Eve Countdown Show portraying God as having raped and impregnated a Middle Eastern teenager. Once again, here was the national broadcaster mocking and disregarding the views of the poor, ignorant, deluded peasants – you know, the ones who pay the licence fee? – so as to pitch for the approval of a smug, snickering, metropolitan elite. Never mind that a few rural God-botherers would go berserk; think of the ‘likes’ on Twitter from the leftie luvvies.
There was so much wrong with that sketch, of which little had to do with the core beliefs it derided, that I scarcely know where to start.
Leaving aside the gratuitous attack on the faith of the 85% of the population who identify as Christians, it was a classic bullying exercise.
The schoolyard tyrant is a coward who avoids a dangerous opponent, picks on a victim who won’t hit back, and does so for the applause of the clique he wants to court. All boxes neatly ticked. Christianity is a much safer target than, say, Islam, because extreme Catholics don’t tend to storm newsrooms with automatic weapons.
It’s also far safer to sneer at Christianity than at any of the untouchable, unmockable dogmas of these times. There was little chance of a sketch poking fun at transgenderism, for example, or obesity, or Black Lives Matter. In a rare ‘Pope is a Catholic’ shocker, Atheist Ireland has scoffed at suggestions that the sketch was ‘ blasphemous’, as there’s no such thing as blasphemy in Irish law. No, instead we’ve got ‘hate speech’ and ‘cancel culture’ to punish, with criminal sanction and career-ending opprobrium, anyone who offends against the modern sacred cows.
But even the atheists had to concede that jo king about r ape and underage sex is unacceptable, however otherwise defensible the item.
In their gleeful haste to take a vicious pop at the Catholic Church, t he broadcasters responsible clearly calculated that the unpleasantness of the joke about the forcible impregnation of a teenage migrant would be more than absolved by the worthiness of the finished taunt.
Their penance might have been a few dozen complaints, a minor slap on the wrist, but it would have been worth the discomfort to rattle those dumb peasant cages. And social media would just love them all the more for their heroic martyrdom.
The Twits were out in force to defend the sketch, with profoundly stupid and shamelessly exploitative references to the child victims of clerical abuse.
If the likes of Twitter even bother to acknowledge Islamist atrocities, such as the weekend slaughter of more than 100 people by jihadists in Niger, it’s to point out that these extremists don’t represent ordinary Muslims.
Yet those abusive priests didn’t represent ordinary Catholics, the people saddened to miss Christmas Eve Mass, who couldn’t hold proper church funerals for their Covid dead, who cherish the twice- daily Angelus bells on their national broadcaster.
The people who have just discovered exactly what their national broadcaster secretly thinks of them and their faith.