The Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, the Right Rev Paul Colton, has said that no government should be surprised by the "festering discontent" among ordinary Irish people today. What we were witnessing was a fundamental breakdown in trust in the major institutions of society, including the church, he said.
Speaking in Cork last night, at his first diocesan synod as Bishop, he said that all the major institutions, political, economic, social, and the churches, faced the huge task of rebuilding the trust placed in them by the ordinary people of the country.
"It is with utter incredulity that people encounter assertions of tax evasion, misuse of power and unashamed cronyism; and allegations, the most recent of which seems more incredible than the previous," he said.
Regaining people's trust would depend on openness and dialogue. He warned against cynicism or complacency. "We need instead a conscious decision to engage, to comment and to get involved; a collective will to change our society that altogether might be called a productivity of involvement."
He pointed to the nurses' dispute and recent actions of primary school teaching principals as indicators of how the "way of partnership, that is so essential to our communal well-being, is being damaged by this unattended discontent and the breakdown of trust".
Referring to the North, Bishop Colton said that the people of the entire island were waiting with bated breath in the hope of a new breakthrough in the peace process.
It needed to be appreciated in the Church of Ireland and beyond that people living away from the troubles, such as the faithful in Cork, had nonetheless an undeniable interest and concern "about the destiny of our shared island home".
It had been implied in some utterances that bishops of the Church of Ireland should not speak out in the way they had been doing, he said, adding that such a suggestion was naive and untenable.
