In Ireland right now, you can distribute coffee to people, you can give them takeaway pints of beer or you can you can fly to Brazil and South Africa and return without having to quarantine.
One thing that you cannot do however, is distribute Holy Communion, even to sick, dying or elderly people who have no other visitors to their homes.
You cannot do it in areas where the infection rates are low. You cannot do it in a crowded donut shop. You cannot do it in areas where state broadcasters host ‘impromptu’ parties and take photos to brag about their immunity from the law.
In this bizarre climate, stories are now emerging of priests receiving harassment from the Gardai after being reported for distributing Communion to people.
The Irish Independent has reported a priest in Dublin as having been visited by the Gardai after a small number of Catholics arrive for Communion:
They came through the main body of the church, received communion, and left through a side exit. There was no congregating.
The priest then spoke about Ireland’s inept government and their inconsistent approach:
You hear a lot about the mental health cost. This was something for a small group of people for whom receiving communion meant a lot. Every group is trying in some way to keep in contact with their core community – to care and look after them. We were trying to help our core group.
You can have over a hundred people in a small supermarket or congregating in a queue for a takeaway coffee. But you cannot allow people to come individually to their parish to receive communion. It seems this is what the Government wants.
There have been other reports of priests being reported to the Gardai for individual instances of distributing Communion.
By comparison, not a single member of the Irish government publicly condemned footage of hundreds of Muslims cramming into a Mosque in Dublin recently and at least one major Mosque appears to evade punishment for allowing crowds in for Friday prayers by simply putting up a still image on their webcam feed.
With Easter approaching, the increasingly despised Irish government are determined to clamp down on any dissent or criticism towards their shambolic pandemic efforts, these seems to include Catholics in particular.
People should not take this discriminatory stance lying down, they need to ramp up the public criticism, they need to start emailing and calling TDs and they need to make it known that this incompetent government does not have the backing of the public so long as they allow exemptions for such unnecessary events as sport and the news while limiting funeral numbers and something as innocuous as individual instances of the reception of Communion.
Collins was a huge fan.