Paddy McEvoy is a full-on, no-holds-barred, Old Testament sort of Humanist.
If you meet him personally he comes over as a mildly eccentric, if prolix, fully-paid-up Tipperary man with a penchant for embellishing conversation with obscure phrases in Irish which he will then gratuitously translate for you. There is no ‘side’ to him. But with a storm at his back and a pencil in his hand he will sally forth to smite his Philistine foes with a fury akin to that unleashed upon Egypt by the spurned Jehovah. This is not a writer who is unduly troubled by ‘balance’ - he deliberately sets out to confront those sacred cows of leftish and religious orthodoxy which are his bêtes noire. Those who hold different political views are dismissed as “left” or “Trotskyite”. In this latest tome, Number 8, Jeremy Corbyn has emerged as a new McEvoy bogeyman, although it is not altogether clear why! He has made his mind up and the reader is required to do likewise.
The original idea behind this series of Humanist ‘Catechisms’ was, and remains, to challenge young and developing minds by offering alternative opinions to those usually put forward through the schools and the media.
As usual, the author revisits his regular themes. These include education, where he vents critical of faith schools, ‘bog standard’ comprehensives, the teacher unions, much modern teaching, ‘the left’ and – of course – some practices of his own teachers, The Christian Brothers. Many of his anecdotes are drawn from a long career in teaching and other preoccupations. Among his heroes are Michael Gove – “an inspirational thinker” - and Chris Woodhead, who has a whole chapter to himself in which he is portrayed as some Old Testament-style prophet railing against the educational depredations of “the left”. How he would get on with said gentlemen if he had to deal with them remains a moot point.
We also have chapters on the delusions of ISIS, and his musings on the machinations of modern Islam. There is less about the Irish Troubles than usual, though, and although Sinn Fein remains high on the list of abominations, Pearse and Connolly are left relatively unscathed this time, along with McGuinness and Adams, but ‘no surrender’ on the evils of paramilitarism.
There is no one out there wandering in the literary wilderness quite like Paddy McEvoy. And that’s what makes his works so readable. No matter how much the reader disagrees, the burning bush of his prose can illuminate, and his often alarming conclusions enliven the desert of orthodoxy. One should not always read for pleasure; sometimes it is good to break free from reason, balance and convention and find something that downright annoys you. The Humanist ‘Catechisms’, of which Number 8 is a worthy representative, will certainly do that!
“What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” (Luke 7:24)
There are certainly reeds being shaken here, some wild honey, and lots of thistles. And manna for some.
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