I think this frank discussion with James Joys & Peter Devlin on Irish religious doctrine, the haunting power that geography dictates to music and everything else from Sun Ra to human weakness is the finest, and perhaps most important, piece we've ever published.
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"The denial, and the will to ignorance is probably the most extraordinary aspect about Ireland. But it’s hardly ignored, it’s actively suppressed. Lately you’ve had dead babies in a septic tank in Galway, which only forms part of a much larger scandal of systematic abuse and oppression by powerful institutions who’ve imbued themselves with an unquestioned moral power over swathes of vulnerable people they were meant to be sheltering. Abuse by paedophile priests, and the cover-up by bishops, most of whom who are still working in the church is another huge scandal that never seemed to reach any kind of remotely acceptable resolution.
The creeps have ecclesiastically shuffled back to the cold recesses of their churches presumably with some personal assurances from God that all will be well after a few fucking hail Marys. But by ‘God’ we might mean the less-than-celestial Irish government and rather earthly Vatican regime. It’s such a mind-boggling model of corruption that implicates politics, journalism, culture, religion and their institutions, and it’s allowed one a glimpse of a particular kind of dreadful awesomeness where the last decade has seemed like one long nauseating moment where so much collusion over so many years suddenly came to light. And it’s blinding, hard to comprehend in terms of scale, and you think of the millions of people who feel a genuine, meaningful devotion to that religion, and how that may have shaken their faith, betrayed their trust, and maybe how it’s strengthened it."
Read the full interview
