Better than a kick in the old town-halls

My recent cartoon in Private Eye (see two posts down) has generated a few comments, both positive and negative on their letters page. A first for me! Amongst us cartoonists it is seen as a bit of an accolade when your work causes such a reaction that people write in. I have posted them below for you to read.

And here's my latest one from that issue.

furthermore...

And the Irish government has just passed an anti-blasphemy law!

Sickness

This is my latest cartoon from the current issue of Private Eye. The 3 decade long child abuse scandal in the Irish Catholic Church is a vile, vile tragedy. I personally do not think apologies and payouts are an adequate response to the way the Church covered up this abuse to protect it's reputation.

"It was reported that more than 300 children were sexually abused by priests between 1975 and 2004. However, church leaders did not report the cases to the police in order to avoid tarnishing the church's reputation and assets. " (presstv.ir)

This is on top of the scandal of the institutions run by The Catholic Brothers between 1940 and 1970 where "More than 3,100 people testified before the commission over the years and more than 800 priests, brothers, sisters and laypeople were implicated as abusers." (catholicnews.com) 25,000 children were in the care of these institutions during this period.

My cartoon is a bit of light humour directed at this scandal, but in a way, I hope it reveals something of the seeming nonchalance with which the Church and probably the Irish government accepted these abuses at the time they were occuring. Thanks to Private Eye for publishing it.

Happy New Year!

At this time of year my thoughts turn slowly, as do most people's I should imagine, like a sated hippo, inevitably, like a goose with an interesting pamphlet, to time travel. It's natural isn't it? We want to turn the clocks back to those heady years that some people (idiots) call 'The Noughties', when Tony Blairs was PM, house prices rose by 200% a second and, best of all, Crowded House got back together. We all wish we could travel back in time don't we? But can you 'Take The Weather With You'? The answer is of course, no. Are you stupid, Crowded House? Perhaps you should have dedicated your time to inventing a time-suit with massive weather-proof pockets, Crowded House, instead of focussing on being completely awful. Personally, I would like to go back to when I had my last doctors appointment and ask for double the amount of cream.