Removing religious influence from Irish Hospitals - The Current Situation,History and How to remove it

Straight out of the Cork Independent comes the following quote, anecdotal perhaps but it illustrates a point that is big news.
http://corkindependent.com/20130808/...at-S70357.html

Admitted under her gynaecologist in a very well regarded religious-ethos hospital, she was in a serious condition and needed an emergency termination. A member of medical staff pulled the husband aside and advised him, in an undertone, to seek a transfer to another hospital in another part of the country, immediately, because he could not guarantee that she’d be given the lifesaving treatment she needed in this hospital, because of its religious ethos. She was transferred to a hospital three hours away by ambulance, and, after being treated as required, made a full recovery.

   

The hospital is not mentioned but with the hulabaloo in media reports one does not have to delve deep into the web to place where this might be (although a number of inferrences could be drawn as to what hospital it could be ). Some of Irelands medical and healthcare establishments are in the clutches of a predator, one that is dying a slow and thankfully agonising death, the catholic church. Fr Kevin Doran ,a priest on the board of governors at the Mater hospital has indicated that the Mater will not perform any abortions as to do so may clash with the ethos of the hospital
http://www.broadsheet.ie/2013/08/07/...really-maters/
(Quote via Irish Times)

“The Mater can’t carry out abortions because it goes against its ethos. I would be very concerned that the Minister [for Health, James Reilly] sees fit to make it impossible for hospitals to have their own ethos.”

   

Illustrating how far their Ethos goes

The three members of the board of Dublin’s Mater Hospital were key to the decision to stop trials of the drug for lung cancer patients.
They objected because female patients who get could get pregnant would have to take contraceptives under the treatment.
The subcommittee of the board – including Fr Kevin Doran – were delegated the task of examining the conditions attached to testing the drug.

Dorans comments come in the wake of the death of Savita Hallenpalavar and others not afforded the treatment. Savita's husband, Praveen was allegedly told that an abortion could not be performed as Ireland was a catholic country. Ireland has a bit of a history though on the topic.

1951 and the Fine Gael lead government collapsed as Dr Noel Browne attempted to pass a bill allowing free maternity care much to the chargrin of John Charles Mc Quaid who subsequently kicked up a storm on the issue. Mc Quaids stance was that firstly the government could not interfere with how a family raised its children and secondly the bill would then lead to the legalisation of contraception and abortion, two positions vehemently opposed by a church who at the time were widely abusing children. Religious influence has since sought to fight against the X Case, euthanasia and stem cell research amongst numerous other topics. The churches position on maternal care is ironic given that some Catholic hospitals supported symphysiotomies until relatively recent years.

The church fought tooth and nail to establish an influence in medical schools over the course of the 20th century (http://www.medicalindependent.ie/142...tough_medicine) seeing a Protestant influence as being contrary to the wishes of the population and being a danger to their position as top dog in society threatening their stranglehold on Ireland.

The Catholic Church’s increasing influence on the administration of hospital care lasted well into the 20th Century and during the 1930s, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Edward Byrne, demonstrated the extent of the Church’s power.

When he discovered that there were plans to merge Harcourt Street Hospital, which was under Protestant management, with St Ultan’s, a multi-denominational hospital for infants under one year, established by GP and political activist Kathleen Lynn in 1919, he “saw red”, according to Dr Margaret O’hOgartaigh, author of Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor.

“He was convinced that they were up to something because they were not, for the most part, Catholic and he wanted a Catholic hospital,” she told MI.

The Archbishop informed John Charles McQuaid, who, at that time, was President of Blackrock College but would go on to become his successor, and together they led a campaign to sabotage the merger, paving the way for the establishment of a Catholic-run children’s hospital in Crumlin.

“They said that you couldn’t trust Dr Lynn, and that they [doctors in St Ultan’s] were in communication with doctors in Germany. They accused them of sterilisation, that kind of nonsense,” according to Dr O’hOgartaigh.

“And they also had powerful friends in the government, including people like Sean T O’Ceallaigh, who was Minister for Local Government and Public Health. In the 1930s and early 1940s it was one department and he was basically an ecclesiastical minister. He wanted Catholics in the top jobs and it was about getting your own people in to crucial places. So they got at people and it worked.”

   

In the 90's the church also fought tooth and nail against the needle exchange programmes for HIV positive drug addicts.

Gay Doctors Ireland are looking for a repeal of a section of the Employment Equality Act which allowed religious emmployers to discriminate legally (http://www.imt.ie/news/latest-news/2...ck-repeal.html) . it is expected that this will be repealed in the next while.

Information on the ethos of other hospitals is quite scant but the following article from the Indo offers some fair opinionhttp://www.independent.ie/opinion/an...-26250526.html

This might be acceptable if there were an alternative. But there are no secular hospitals in this country. There is no longer even an Anglican much less a multi-denominational ethos in any of our hospitals (except, of course, for the Rotunda). The liberal (Protestant) ethos of the Adelaide Hospital is supposed to have been preserved as part of the ethos of Tallaght Hospital, but many people, not least members of the Protestant churches, fear for its survival.

The selling off by the Sisters of Mercy of St Michael's Private Hospital in Dun Laoghaire and the Mater Private Clinic in Dublin, is indeed proof, as Mr Sheehan pointed out, that the Sisters are not in medicine for the good of their health: they need to make money. So the Catholic ethos is not necessarily one of high-minded and selfless charity.

Moving forward, there is no harm in being blunt, Irish hospitals are there to treat people and act on the basis of what is factual and not what is of a religious opinion. Ireland has nearly severed the chord of the monster of the catholic church, it needs to take a hammer and smash the head in to ensure its brain dead (although judging by church actions this has already been done). Reilly should remove funding from any hospital or establishment that refuses to treat people based on religious ethos or religious opinion, religious ideals are a personal opinion, not something to be inflicted on the sick and dying. Legislation should be robust to charge those that do not comply with the law and jail time for those who refuse to treat on the basis of religious superstition....

Did a judge let his religious affiliation affect his sentencing?...

http://www.broadsheet.ie/2013/06/14/judge-of-the-day-8/

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news...-29343754.html

A judge has described as nasty and despicable a 20-year-old woman taking advantage of the charity shown to her by an elderly nun.

At Ennis District Court, Judge Patrick Durcan jailed Leanne Purcell of Seminary Court, Blackpool, Cork, and Ardcullen, Hollyhill, Cork, for four months for the robbery of €40 from the Sister of Mercy nun, Sr Anne O'Grady. Judge Durcan said: "This was a very nasty and despicable crime. It was activity of the vilest nature."

   

The thief was sentenced to 4 months prison for the theft of forty Euro fro the Sisters of Mercy.

On the website of the Holy Selpchure (http://www.holysepulchre.ie/) there is a picture showing Judge Durkan. Broadsheet reports that the OP over on the other site says the judge allegedly said:

“we had, in the past, in this country a society where we recognised the tremendous contribution in education, health and charity on the part of the Sisters of Mercy.”

   

Whaddya think?...

Should doctors religious views be vetted before they are hired?

Because of the recent case of Savita should religious views be vetted of doctors be vetted to ensure that it would have no impact on the care given to a patient? Every doctor takes a hippocratic oath to work ethically and ensure that there is top care given to a patient but in some cases could religious belief affect the judgement taken?

Just a random thought....

Religion as a Tool for Social Control

Man's mind is irrational at times and while we are rational in how respond to fear the response to the fear of alienation was the irrational with the manifestation in the mind of man of religion. You are stung by a wasp and what do you do? You swat it with a paper or you avoid it for a few minutes, you do not come after the wasp with a flame thrower and seek to smash the hive and set it on fire. Religion is a lot like that, our fears of alienation played on our minds and the response was to invent religion - the flame thrower on the wasp hive. That is not to say the religion does not have a role to play in society, it can act as a glue to bind those whom are being oppressed. Bedouins being a nomadic people were those often living in the desert and were often people of a modest disposition in contrast to towns people whom would trade and live off the profits they made from trading. Under a prophet the Bedouins were united in their fight against oppression and as such there becomes a vicious cycle with a correlation between religion and economic gain.

Past History however has shown that religion grew too big for its boots and inevitably became a focus for past rulers to seal their rule with an iron fist. An unruly people require great resources in order to be ruled so man power is not exactly available but the next best thing is that of dieties, the rules of the gods that browbeat society into a particular way of thinking and seek out a malleable populace to conform to their way of thinking and via cognitive dissonasance then other people follow likewise influencing others via their peers or their family. Hammurabi of Sumer was the first ancient king to realise the value of religion from researching this topic. Through his codes he ruled with people never questioning his authority lest they be judged by the gods whom they believed in



Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.


Modern day Ireland is getting used to the last vestiges of the RCC looking to obtain control via proxy organisations and others acting in the name of god. Recent calls for abortion were met with a reaction from 15,000 pro lifers bussed down by parish churches and money spent by religious organisations to ensure that they are still on control of the country. Having seen their definition of the family undermined by the potential legalisation of same sex marriage, the Iona institute launched a campaign to keep the definition of the famiy as per Bunreacht na h-Eireann arguing that such a change would inevitably impact on the development of the child. The extent of religious control does not extend just to that of social policy and research has touched upon it as a tool for the control of wealth to benefit the bourgoise in society where the vast majority of wealth lays.

Frederick Solt from the University of Illinois looked at the use of religion as a tool to keep the poor as exactly as they are, poor. His research took into account the correlation between religiosity of those whom were rich and those whom were poor. They labelled this theory as the 'Relative Power Theory'. Their conclusions were that religion takes the place of materialism in their lives and the priveleges of the rich are kept intact. Which brings us back to the whole vicious circile that we mentioned earlier in the post.

Research by Pippa Norris, at Harvard University, and Ronald Ingelhart, at the University of Michigan looked at modernisation and its affects and they came to a conclusion which some people will agree with. The less people have the more likely they are to turn to religion as they see financial security as the replacement for this and are turning their backs on religion. Europe has a low level of believers in place of the USA where there is no welfare model as we have in Europe so people will not believe in a god in Ireland but are more likely in America.

Not a comforting thought, you are either financially secure or are more than likely religious but its rare we find both and the poorer you are the more religious you may become, a cog in the machine of that religion . Doing as you are told for fear of ending up in hell which is if you are poor, where you may very well be......
http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=456

http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...p-poor-in.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-lanc.../plain/A933914

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2220/who-needs-god
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Correlation Between Religious Belief and Education

From http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/cen...tire%20doc.pdf

See page 13 and the following paragraph...

Persons with no religion (including Atheists and
Agnostics) had higher levels of education than the
general population, as illustrated in the graph on the left.
They were more than twice as likely to have a
postgraduate degree or diploma compared with the
general population (17.1% and 8.2% respectively) and
more than half (56%) had a third level qualification
compared with 35.5 per cent of the general population.

What would this say to you? Im not commenting as my bias is well known but just to open the floor for comments. ....

If we take into account that perhaps there is no link at all between the two at all and that access to education was limited in the sixties at the peak of the RCC golden age. Now that we are aware of the abuses of the church and that there is a lot more people going to college it may have been a skewered interpretation that some people took when looking at the data. Its fascinating the two topics in themselves, the correlation between the data and what is the conclusion, does religion itself come with a low standard of education (Its inconclusive) and the other seperate topic of how a preconceived notion will mean that different inferrences are drawn from the data.

The Evolution of Religion

In ancient Greek mythology, Zeus put in Pandora's box hope, for he knew man was too curious to not open it, in it were contained all the evils of the world and Zeus knew that man would need something when the evils of the world were unleashed on him. Religion is a bit like that, during a time of need we need something to cling to, a mechanism to aleviate fear when times are tough and religion precisely fills this roll.Humans know that their time on Earth is limited so how do you cope when you lose a loved one and need to engage in something that fulfills that attachment mechanism we all need? There is a strong case that religion itself is an adaption that we needed to be crucial for survival, the so called god gene as Richard Dawkins called it. Some of the research I have read explains a lot of the psychology behind religious belief very well as religion by and large is very irrational. One of the examples I read about was if someone says something is true, that does not mean its necessarily so. Eg. I tell you that you are warm when you are freezing, a faith in being warm is not going to alleviate the suffering but when religious people are going through some sort of tough time they are thrown head long into their faith, they seem to cope somewhat better than some athiests do . This irrational belief system may have evolved somewhat to enabled us to cope when times were tough and is therefore an adaptive measure. Another reason I have seen cited is that religion is more or less like a community aspect and brings people together under a common umbrella and therefore is likely to enable people in social groups to carry out business deals, favours etc as is the case in a lot of the American right wing now days. Perhaps now thanks to more abstract thinking and a more critical view of the world and the fact people are a lot more widely educated they can cast of the shackles of an irrational belief system and live their life as it was intended.

Referenceshttp://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articl...9_religion.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evoluti...gy_of_religion


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