It’s a bit much now to believe the Vatican is genuinely shocked by the revelations of abuse and cover-up.

The expectation that the Vatican will sort out the disarray in the Irish Catholic Church misses the point: the Vatican contributed substantially to the disarray and is itself hugely culpable for what happened.

(Pictured: Father Thomas Naughton who appeared today at Wicklow Circuit Court on charges of sexual assault. He was previously sentenced in 1998 to three years for abusing four young altar boys. Photo: Irish Times)

“We have taken bold , decisive and innovative steps to manage our way through this crisis. In all our actions, our concern has been to protect jobs, to provide a functioning banking system and to return this economy to the path of sustainable growth.

We have sought to do all of this in a manner that is fair and that protects the most vulnerable."

Budget 2010 already is an enormous triumph. Irrespective of whether its public sector pay cuts cause public sector chaos (possible), irrespective of whether gardaí defy the State (unlikely), irrespective of whether it causes the fall of this Government (probable but not now), Budget 2010 already is a triumph.

The cynical indifference by Irish Catholic bishops to the sexual abuse of children perpetrated by their brother priests is not the full story, by any means. The culpability of the leadership of the Catholic Church at the Vatican is part of that fuller story, as I hope to demonstrate.

Clerical child sex abuse is only a small part of the scarifying phenomenon of child sex abuse in Ireland.

The combination of the billions being handed to the banks, allied to the mounting unemployment plus cuts in social welfare and public service salaries probably will represent the largest transfer of wealth and income from society to a financial and corporate elite that has occurred here in centuries, certainly in generations, and it will change the character of this society for generations to come.

It was the lies that are the most striking revelation of the report on the Dublin Archdiocese. That is after the disclosures of the terrible abuse of probably thousands of young people over the years and the cover up of those abuses. But the lies from the mouth of an Archbishop, a professor of philosophy, later a Cardinal of the Church, the man who spoke of his counterpart in the Church of Ireland as being intellectually inferior, a finger-wagging moralist, the man who had a moral qualm about attending a reception hosted by Bertie Ahern and his then partner, Celia Larkin.

Just a few random facts, not that facts are much in use nowadays. Certainly not facts that contradict the line of the economic and political establishments.

Fact One: Ireland is a very rich country, one of the richest countries in the world. Even allowing for a deeper contraction in the economy here in 2009 than elsewhere in the EU, our per capita income is still at least 10 per cent above the EU average. We are better off than countries such as France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece and very much better off than all the 12 new member states.

Around the corner from Dublin Castle, on Castle Street, are the delightful offices of Dublin Civic Trust.
In those offices are the decorations and artefacts rescued from one of the old delights of Dublin - the Irish House, a pub that used to stand at the corner of Winetavern Street and Wood Quay, and which was shamefully demolished by Dublin Corporation in 1968.

AIB SHARES fell back a bit yesterday. At 12.30pm they were at €1.75, down by 2.8 per cent on the previous day, but hanging in there. They had been at €3.20 in late September, which was a splendid performance, given all the turmoil. After all, the share price had been at a miserable 27 cent back on March 5th, and the rally since then has been quite impressive, don't you think?

Pat Kenny's heckler on The Frontline last Monday night, Alan O’Brien of Bluebell in Dublin 12, was focusing on the wrong target. Kenny is not primarily to blame for his arrangement with RTE, under which he was paid close to €1 million per annum during the boom and is now paid more than €600,000.