[quote=âMacâ]Bandage - now that I think of it and on a forum where you can say what you want - what the fluck happened with that Tom Mooney thing on An Fear Rua last summer?
I was away for 3 weeks over the Tipp and KK semi final last year so missed it all. Any time I tried to suggest it when I came back, Cahill either deleted my post or closed the thread. I know I disagreed with a lot of what you said about his article but I never fully found out what happened.
I remember something about you posting an article up on this site as a type of an interview and parts of it took the piss out of Cahill but didnt hear much more than that. Care to shed any light on it?[/quote]
I remember seeing his article at the time and I had no qualms with what heâd actually written. I canât really recall but I think some people on the thread asserted that he spoke a lot of sense and he was the type of figure we needed involved in Wexford GAA or something along those lines. Anyway, I know enough about him and enough people who know him to conclude that heâs a smug idiot. Despite his flowing prose heâs not somebody who concerns himself with GAA either and itâs more of a stereotypical â3 weeks in Julyâ jump on the bandwagon period where he writes a few opinion pieces on Wexford GAA. It actually reminds me of kids who play tennis out on the street for a couple of weeks during Wimbledon every summer and then forget about the game for the rest of the year.
So I basically, in a pretty crude way, said he was a fool and not somebody who should be considered a definitive voice on Wexford GAA. AFR had a go back at me for my âmean-spirited attackâ and in fairness I had called him a c0ck or whatever. I think I replied that even if my language was over the top that my general point stood. In hindsight I shouldnât have called him a clown / idiot / knob or whatever but I stand over the general point still.
AFR then came back with some tripe about Mooney being a journalist who paid his annual subscription to the NUJ and he deserved respect and was above the likes of me. I then said that itâs blatantly ridiculous to suggest an NUJ member is more worthy of respect than anyone else and queried whether other union members are deserving of equal respect or is it just NUJ members who warrant this elite status. I also questioned the practice of putting up articles from local papers up on the âdiscussion forumâ to begin with if he was going to censor debate about them.
Mooney himself came back (if it actually was him) citing his extensive playing career with Bray Emmets and Wicklow and AFR then closed the thread. I knew he was from Bray and I presume he thought Iâd just accept his claims and go, âwow, I was wrong - heâs actually deeply involved in GAAâ and let it go seeing AFR and others had responded negatively to what Iâd said.
But I knew he wasnât involved through personally knowing a number of journalists from both of the local papers in Wexford. Also, by chance I know a few lads who are heavily involved with Bray Emmets through a former job (one of them is on here). I got them to check his story about being a GAA starlet himself and they said nobody in the club had ever heard of him. I told the lads my online credibility was at stake and to check with all the older club stalwarts and the lads involved on the hurling side (as his story was heâd played hurling rather than football with Wicklow) because I needed to ensure I was right! The lads were wondering why I was so bothered but then I directed them to the thread on afr and they became intrigued themselves and literally followed up out in Emmets with anyone whoâs anyone in the club and again not one person had any recollection of the clubâs star hurler, who also played with Wicklow apparently, ever having even played with Emmets in either code.
So then I did the mock interview with myself where I had a few little jibes at AFR for getting a hard-on because heâs a fellow member of the NUJ along with a Wexford-based local newspaper editor and also said Mooney had made up stories of his GAA background to earn himself more kudos in the argument. AFR then either locked or deleted the thread and that was that and he wouldnât allow any more discussion on the topic either for whatever reasons he had himself.
