O’Loan tries to mix oil and water - Baroness attacks ‘virulent’ media

WHEN Baroness Nuala O’Loan was Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman between 1999 and 2007 she was a positive, unflinching agent for change.

Her assessments of the RUC until 2001, the PSNI thereafter, were not candy-coated. She criticised institutions that were as much part of the problem as part of the solution in the North. Her objectivity seemed a breath of fresh air in an environment where some, but not all, police officers felt unmoved by the obligation to be objective. Her contribution in the torturous process of “normalisation” in the North was significant.

It is sad therefore that objectivity seems to have deserted her. Speaking in Boston College at the weekend the Baroness accused Irish media of being virulently anti-Catholic. “In a country in which the media was once sympathetic to the Catholic Church, it is now aggressively hostile,” she declared. Like many conservative, old-school Catholics she has confused criticism of the institutions, the corporatism, of the Catholic Church with an attack on Catholicism. A regular columnist with The Irish Catholic Baroness O’Loan accused journalists of “on occasion, to have abandoned the careful, nuanced use of language in favour of wild sweeping assertions which fuel the lack of understanding of what Catholicism is about, and encourage virulent anti-Catholicism”.