The Trib by David Kenny

cheap commodity. Some of these new ‘friends’ explained that one of the main reasons they loved Katy French was because she made their jobs so easy.
    We were told last week that most people on the Irish social scene are almost impossible to prise a story from. French provided a refreshing alternative to the gossip writers by giving them what they wanted. It was a mutually beneficial relationship and one which was abused on both sides. Now, however, we are expected to believe all of these people were genuine friends to the woman.
    I don’t doubt some of the people Katy French met through the media became close to her. Paul Martin, the Irish Daily Mirror’s Showbiz editor, told the Breakfast Show on Newstalk on Friday that he and Katy concocted stories together, engineering photo shoots they knew would make the front page. They even went so far as to stage a reunion with her ex-fiancé.
    One paper took the decision to publish comments from a website message board which were critical of Katy French. The comments were slated by the journalist who described the piece as ‘disgusting’.
    The decision to close down the thread was praised. This piece of journalism characterised the week’s hypocrisy, coming from the same writers who laid in wait for Katy French to put her foot in her mouth. They who reserved column inches for the newspaper version of pointing and laughing at a personality they owned.
    One can only but wonder if these people who claimed they knew Katy French really believed she would value their fairweather friendship?
    The reaction of the red-top press to her tragic death has confirmed the stereotype. The only purpose Katy French served in most of their lives was to fill papers and make their jobs easier by being endlessly accessible. Professions of deep friendship and close bonds serve only to embarrass those who lay claim to them and insult the memory of Katy French. If French was even half as straight-up as she claimed to be, I am sure she would have appreciated honesty far more than faux friendship driven by guilt.
    As it became apparent last week that she was not going to recover, a friend asked me if I felt guilty about what I had written about Katy French a number of weeks previously. My responsibility to honesty will not allow me to deny I found what French represented unsavoury and unpleasant.
    I didn’t know her personally and did not bear her any malice. Am I deeply shocked and saddened by her death? Absolutely, and I pray for her and those who genuinely loved her.

J USTINE M C C ARTHY
Cloyne abuse report: one hand washes the other
    21 December 2008
    I t is being said that Cloyne is another Ferns. It is not. It is worse. What has been going on in Cloyne for the last six months is the Catholic Church and the Irish State colluding at the uppermost levels to suppress the revelation that the diocese’s elders were ‘vulnerable to be seen as complicit’ with predatory child abusers ‘securing new victims’. By allowing priests accused of raping children to continue to wear their holy vestments and dog collars, Bishop John Magee and his now-sidelined enforcer, Monsignor Denis O’Callaghan, were giving an access-all-areas badge to criminals hunting for fresh young flesh, to paraphrase the excoriating report which the Church and the State nearly succeeded in burying.
    When the game was finally up last Wednesday, thanks to local TD Sean Sherlock’s persistence in the Dáil on behalf of victims, the Church and the State stuck with their fantasy tales, putting their own self-protection ahead of the protection of children and the appalling anguish of people whose complaints were never prosecuted by agents of the State or the Church. Bishop Magee, propagator of a faith that cherishes the ‘little ones’, and Barry Andrews, the minister who is supposed to look after the nation’s children, could teach Pontius Pilate about washing one’s