Bye Donal. Don't go alone

Finally, a senior clergyman has resigned over the many, many, Irish sexual abuse cases. A recent report identified several named Bishops as involved in the cover-ups - moving abusive priests on to fresh new territory, refusing to investigate accusations and the like. Donal Murray, Bishop of Limerick was merely one of this cabal who decided that the strength of the Church outweighs the needs of raped children, their families and the community.

More need to go. Schools need to be handed over to the State (they're still run 'for' the State by religious institutions in Ireland, and the Pope needs to 'fess up. In his previous job, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith (it probably sounds cooler in Latin), he had responsibility for all this stuff. He knew, and said nothing.

Ireland used to be the hope of the Catholic Church. While other nations slipped away into atheism or (worse) Protestantism, or developed strands of Liberation Theology (the idea that Catholic priests should identify with the poor and the oppressed rather than bolster the ruling classes), Ireland's Catholics stayed obedient, reactionary and devoted. They handed their children over to the Church and received in return a ruling class that never lifted a finger without checking with Rome first. One image serves well: all of the government and senior oppostion, with the brave exception of Noel Browne (an all-round hero), waited outside the funeral service for the President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde (owner of a splendid moustache), because the Catholic church forebade its members from attending Protestant services.

Catholicism's on my mind today. I certainly don't have any nostalgia for my days as an altar boy or choir boy, but it leaves its effects, positive and negative, even on we liberated atheists. I'm definitely a Catholic Atheist! In London the other day, Adam and I visited the National Gallery's The Sacred Made Real exhibition, a collection of paintings and statues from the 17th-century Spanish Counter-reformation. All the statues are hyper-real: John the Baptist's head is painted, and moving around the glass case reveals a neck complete with windpipe and bloody flesh. The Christs are all heavily scourged and wounded, the tears dripping from Mary's eyes are made of crystal.

It's the iconography of a church which feared and distrusted its congregation. Not for them the tales of liberation and joy available in the New Testament. Instead, the emphasis is on suffering and sacrifice: Jesus crucified and the gory martyrdoms of various saints, all dwelt upon with a dark kind of pleasure. The people, clearly, were urged to identify with the misery and pain of these events, rather than to consider the positive aspects of the religion. It's a very personal, inward-looking kind of belief, designed to encourage the faithful to resist the wider social and moral attractions of rival denominations. As art, the images are disturbingly beautiful. As theology, they're terrifying. This is what lies at the heart of the Irish scandal.

Such bloody awful poetry

Those of you who've ever been involved in student politics will know that the smaller the stakes, the bitterer the poison. So you won't be surprised (or perhaps interested) by the race for the Oxford Poetry Professor post - a non-job which involves giving a small number of lectures over a few years. But because Oxford and Cambridge are the jealously guarded property of the élite, the race attracts a good deal of backbiting, all stirred up by a press which loves tales of shenanigans in high places.

This year, the competition was between a Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and average poet Ruth Padel, who has been all over the papers this year because she wrote a lot of poems about her ancestor, Charles Darwin. I've used her book, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem for teaching purposes.

The race has been convulsed by 'friends' of Padel anonymously mailing out pages of a book which claims (convincingly) that Walcott sexually harrassed students 25 years ago. Walcott withdrew from the race, Padel won, and now it turns out that she mailed journalists saying things like 'I don't want you to pay any attention to the following claims made in this book which you might not have seen…'. Never mind the scansion - that's good shenanigans.

The depressing thing is that this pointless and sordid affair will fill entire chapters of various boring autobiographies, dutifully to be reviewed in the serious newspapers as though poetry and poets were central to our cultural lives. If only poetry were that important. I'm sure it's the hot gossip at this week's Hay Literary Festival, but nobody else will notice. I wish I were there though - my friend Aimee Lloyd goes for a week of intellectual replenishment every year, but instead I'm googling students' sentences and trawling through footnotes… not that there's anything wrong with marking! Oh well - Hay is a beautiful Welsh town with 80 bookshops, and the last thing I need is that kind of temptation.

(Post title is a Morrissey quote, by the way)