Dean Victor Griffin

The week after Dean Victor Griffin was called "Paisley" in the Dail Mary Holland was on Saturday View with Brian Lenihan. She told him that this was just the start, that this was what the Amendment campaign had unleashed, that there would be more. Michael Mills of the Irish Press has been speaking very passionately on the same programme over the past two months about the Amendment and what it is going to do to our society. Michael Mills is speaking for many people when he says that the Amendment is going to do a great deal of damage.

Most people in this country now believe that our politicians have degraded democracy, have rendered the Dail useless and powerless, have made a mess of the public finances. These opinions are not new. So that when Dean Victor Griffin mentioned them in a speech on May 18 nobody could have been surprised.

Nor could anybody who has been watching events carefully over the past six months have been surprised by the reaction. Several politicians including Gemma Hussey, Gay Mitchell and Nora Owen attacked Dean Griffin. Gay Mitchell, according to the Irish Times, linked Dean Griffin's remarks to "methodical sniping at the institutions of the state by a small band of Marxists who have their own sinister purposes."

Dean Griffin was further attacked in the Sunday Press by Proinsias Mac Aonghusa in his Gulliver column. "Although not a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, Dean Griffin appears to view Irish affairs from a jaundiced and unionist point of view at all times," wrote Mr Mac Aonghusa. In the Sunday Independent on the same day Des Hickey remarked that the "controversial" Dean Griffin remained "incorrigible".

If a Catholic priest or a Catholic bishop had made the same remarks about politicians as did Dean Griffin there would not have been an outcry, nor insulting remarks.

In the few days leading up to the vote on the Amendment, according to several Fine Gael TDs, the representations stopped coming from SPUC or PLAC for the TDs to vote for the Fianna Fail wording. In the last few days, the pressure came directly from the priests. The local priests phoned to put pressure on the TDs to vote for the Fianna Fail wording.

No one has mentioned that this is "ignorant and insensitive and potentially damaging to democracy" as Gemma Hussey said of Dean Victor Griffin's remarks.

And it is going to be even easier to attack Protestants when the Amendment is passed.