In June of last year, the Conference of Religious in Ireland told an Oireachtas committee that the constitutional protection for private property should be changed, writes Kevin Myers.
CORI proposed that local authorities be allowed to buy, "at cost price", land that was due to be rezoned for housing, to prevent speculators making windfall profits. The local authority could then control the price of housing by selling the land to builders. Profits from such sales could be kept by the State and used for social housing.
CORI added that the accumulation of exorbitant profits through land speculation when so many people lacked basic accommodation was "morally blameworthy". While the right to private property was important, it was not absolute and should carry a greater degree of social responsibility. CORI's director, Seán Healy, said: "We believe these proposals would go some way towards restoring the balance between property rights and the common good, a balance that has been lost in recent years and that needs to be secured for the future."
CORI then proposed some utterly spiffing theories about how this could be done. For example, with the Constitution amended, new laws could be introduced to allow local authorities to purchase land on a voluntary or even compulsory basis. Land rezoned from agricultural use to housing use could thus be bought by the authority at its original price, plus a small margin for the owner.
Brilliant! Eighteen months later, CORI is threatening legal action because Dublin councillors have effectively actually taken its advice, and intend to rezone Church land to build non-commercial, affordable housing. This robs the land of precisely the kind of value which, when in non-Church hands, CORI would no doubt denounce as "morally blameworthy". The secretary general of CORI, Michael Drennan, has responded to the council's proposals by accusing it of trying to devalue institutional property and to obtain the land at less than market value. He warned that CORI would have no option but to test the constitutionality of such proposals. That being so, I think we should take CORI's advice from last year, and change the Constitution.
Now, the last time I wrote about CORI's ruthless defence of its capital assets, I referred to its members as being largely "wimpled and dog-collared pensioners". Well, the outcry over that term - incorrect alone in that nuns only figuratively wear wimples these days (and more's the pity) - was quite predictable. My remarks were "offensive" was the anguished bellow - but, of course, not inaccurate.
Usually, whenever you hear the "o" word, it probably means that no other argument is available, and those who resort to it are falling back on their "wounded" feelings as a protection against something they really don't want to hear. This is infantile stuff: "Don't use bad words in my hearing or I'll cry". The truth is that, for the most part, CORI's members are clerics of pensionable age. That is, they're old, and if you think that their age is irrelevant, especially when they own so much land while they lecture us on our duty to the poor, then you know nothing about human nature.
Hypocrisy is always odious, flagrant hypocrisy nauseating, and pious, canting sermons from the rich elderly about how others should come to the assistance of the needy young are simply unendurable. That is precisely what CORI has specialised in over recent years. Through the mouthpiece of the rather tiresome Seán Healy, CORI has been lecturing us repeatedly on our need to pay more taxes to help the poor. Yet at the same time, it has participated in the vigorous defence of the assets of its members against the legal action for damages by alleged victims of clerical child-abuse. Indeed, it facilitated the successful argument that the State should carry the bulk of the financial burden resulting from such claims. And now CORI is going to battle, in the courts if need be, to protect its lands against rezoning for affordable housing, though this is the very development which it has been urging on other landowners.
Seán Healy told the Oireachtas last year that there were 48,400 households, or around 130,000 people, on local authority housing waiting-lists. These presumably would mostly consist of young families. Apparently, CORI's members would prefer to hold on to their land and, in time, have it rezoned for maximum profit, rather than permit it to be used to create economical housing for these desperate young people.
Moreover, much religious land is currently used for playing fields. Not merely are CORI's members hoping to make vast profits out of the rezoning of such real estate, they will be depriving increasing numbers of pupils of the facilities to play sport - even as obesity becomes the major health affliction of Irish schoolchildren.
In recent years there has been a loathsome baying of the mob at any mention of the Catholic Church. The truth is that most priests and nuns did their religious and secular duty to the Irish people, selflessly and honourably, often at great personal sacrifice themselves. The good name of innocent men and women has been freely tarnished by many terrible, unjustified allegations. But merely because one acknowledges that huge debt does not mean one accepts their right to have two sets of moral standards - one for themselves and one for the rest of us.
So, CORI, looking after your own self-interests is fine, for it's what we all do. But there is a price to be paid for it. You forfeit the right to lecture the rest of us. So zip it, Seán, all right?