Scandal after scandal have rocked the Roman catholic church both here and abroad.
The latest one involving the resignation of bishops in Chile for yet another awful sex abuse scandal.
The church have been shown in Ireland and worldwide to be guilty of systematic cover up of child abuse
and the relocation of known child abusers.
Then when compensation was required for the Irish victims, the church conspired to limit it's liability
by lobbying political allies ( Take a bow Michael Woods FF you rotten scumbag! ) to limit the church's losses by making the Irish taxpayer foot most of the bill
while cynically moving it's assets into offshore trusts so they were no longer accessible.
Effectively they made the victims pay their own compensation through their taxes.
And even though the church were meant to pay a certain small amount of the total bill, much of even this small portion remains unpaid.
Now the head of this VERY rich foreign religious organisation that has quite literally been screwing us for decades and decades,
is gracing us for a 30 hour visit in August 2018.
It is estimated that the visit will cost 30 million. 40 million if we take into account the cost of the state providing security for the pope and his privileged entourage.
This works out at about 1.3 million per hour of his visit which will include just two public appearances, one in Dublin and one in Knock. These will amount to just a few hours out of the 30. I estimate most of the rest of the time will be taken up with travel, eating, resting and no doubt some private church business.
Now given that compensating for the child abuse this organisation perpetrated and then systematically covered up over decades has cost us a fortune to date and that they have not co operated fully in releasing requested files on the sex abuse scandals, and that this organisation is sitting on a veritable mountain of riches, is it appropriate for the beleagured Irish taxpayer to be underwriting this visit in any way? Especially at a time when 40 million would be much more appropriately targetted at housing some of the homeless or paying for a few more frontline nurses and hospital beds here in Ireland than using it to provide an ephemeral 30 hours of comfort and security for a rich and powerful fatcat heading a global religious organisation that can well afford to underwrite it's own propaganda excursions itself!!
Let Rome pay for this nonsense! It's time we stopped pandering to Religion.
