Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, provided Mary McAleese with a great publicity boost by banning her participation in a conference on women’s rights to be held at the Vatican. The conference was moved to the Jesuit Curia office nearby, and the former President of Ireland did not disappoint. The Catholic Church, she said, was an “empire of misogyny”. Power lay “among a hermetically sealed cosy male clerical elite …”

There may be worse examples of institutional misogyny in the world, but her latter point hit its target.