James Joyce has the last word on tyrannical church

HOW timely that we are celebrating James Joyce again.

Timely because, had we, as a nation, been more attuned to the story of his life and what he wrote we might just possibly have avoided the hell on earth endured by victims of widespread clerical abuse.

It was the suffocating stranglehold of institutional Catholicism, maintained in part by the same religious orders that later ran the industrial schools and Magdalene centres, that drove Joyce into exile and later fuelled the banning of his books.