Not that I agree remotely with the governments approach to water, what the heck does he mean he doesn’t know who is going to pay for that 42% ‘lost’ water? Sounds to me that if Irish citizens are only using 58% of the water going through our system then we are already pretty prudent with our use of it. Secondly, would they not use the funds from the water charges to repair the leaky system and improve its efficiency? What about the money from our original taxes, the 1.2 billion it apparently cost us to run such a wasteful system, could we not use that to repair it? What’s that enda? No we can’t? Yeah, we all know why. Failed banks more important than people! Idiot.

The Catholic church has sent out a very strong message to everyone that it considers itself above the law of the land again.

When will the Catholic Church realize that they should have to abide by the law of the land the same as everybody else in the country? Surely if somebody were to tell a Priest in Confession that he/she abused children, that Priest couldn’t in all conscience couldn’t just let this pass without doing something about it? I do not understand the thinking behind this Confession Box confidentiality. Surely there are certain situations whereby if a person is a danger to society they should be reported to the relevant authorities to deal with them……………..having said that I can’t see many paedophiles or murderers or rapists etc telling a Priest what they did, to be honest I’d say most people who commit these crimes are totally without a conscience, but in the case of that happening it shouldn’t be up to the Priest to act as judge and jury and subsequently by doing this allow this person to go off and commit the same crimes again, God it beggars belief.

Doesn’t Gavin O’Reilly have enough already?

It’s a bit of a red herring – people do not confess to child abuse in confession – so the likelihood of it happening is extremely slim anyhow. Secondly, most of the time you have no idea who is talking to you in the confessional – and I don’t think the abuser is going to leave his name and address. Thirdly, from a pastoral point of view – in the unlikely event of someone confessing in confession to these crimes, the proper approach would be to get them to talk outside of the confessional – thereby making a report to the authorities possible. While we’re at it – why not argue that ALL serious crime be the subject of obligatory reporting by the Priest? The reality is that this idea of imposing mandatory reporting is just another effort to embarrass the Church and does nothing to genuinely tackle the issue of child abuse. It’s a red herring and resolves nothing unfortunately. It would be better putting resources and energy into treatment programmes and proper policing – why not legislate to insist that no prisoner convicted of crimes against children or sex crimes, would be entitles to the 25% remission unless they willing engage in treatment while in prison?