Twice I had to stop myself from going there. Fagan sets up these open goals to see who’ll shoot
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By Francine Cunningham
When I read the press announcement last week about the decision by the Sunday Independent to terminate the contract of polemical columnist Eoghan Harris, due to his involvement in at least one fake Twitter account, I knew it was only a matter of time before “Lady Macbeth” would be blamed. True to form, the anonymous account @WhigNorthern posted this tweet last Friday: “Many journalists have Anon Twitter accounts. But Lady Macbeth was not likely to lose the chance to cancel Eoghan Harris. Surely more to this than we know of!” A number of high-profile journalists were tagged on the post.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the stated purpose of @WhigNorthern is to track Sinn Fein’s “subversive influence on Irish media.” Over the last year it first targeted me directly by name: “Francine Cunningham has always been at the extreme end of radical nationalist politics” and claimed I was the ex-wife of someone I have never met who was also deemed to be suspect.
On another occasion, WhigNorthern wrote: “Francine Cunningham, from Strabane Co Tyrone, formerly of the Sunday Tribune, carried a lot of hard northern nationalist baggage into the ST, and is now depositing some of it in the Belfast Telegraph, Irish Indo and Sindo.” Yet I never wrote for the Sunday Tribune and in the early part of my career was an arts journalist for the Irish Times and Sunday Business Post. Two decades spent abroad and two law degrees later, I now work for an international law firm. At other points the anonymous Twitter account refers to the “new Francine Cunningham pro-SF line in INM [Independent News Media] titles.”
Perhaps fearing litigation, at one point the account changed from naming me directly to referring to “Lady Macbeth from Tyrone” or simply “Lady Macbeth,” who it claimed was responsible for the “greening” of INM newspapers. Elsewhere in the account, Lady Macbeth is accused of casting a “witch’s spell” (bit of mixed metaphors here).
Over many months of offensive and false tweets from WhigNorthern, I did wonder who was the Barbara J. Pym who was liking those posts. Looking at her Twitter profile, she looked like a vivacious, middle-aged woman from Northern Ireland. I didn’t know then that instead of a woman from Northern Ireland like me, “she” was an older man who had never lived in Northern Ireland, along with assorted others who still refuse to put their name to their words.
So why did @WhigNorthern target me as “an Irish consort with a Northern agenda”? First of all because I have been married to the Belgian-Dutch publisher of INM, Peter Vandermeersch since 1999 when he was editor of a Belgian newspaper, De Standaard. This Twitter mob must have decided that it was easier to attack a woman than to attack the new publisher of INM directly.
Secondly, because I grew up in Strabane, a small border town in West Tyrone which had the distinction during The Troubles of having the highest unemployment rate in the industrial world and being the most bombed town in Europe in proportion to its size. The Troubles provided the backdrop to my childhood in Strabane, but I was thankfully spared the pain and grief that many other families suffered during the darkest days of the Seventies. Nevertheless, my family and my teenage self were held hostage at one point by the IRA when they hoped to rob the sub-Post Office run by my father. A group of three IRA men in masks simply walked into the house via the back door which of course was always unlocked.
I vividly remember my mother, who was a petite five-foot nothing, scolding a big IRA man: “Youse never worked a day in your life and you dare to come into the home of decent hardworking people…” He threatened to shoot her if she didn’t “shut up”. Now that is real courage. Not anonymous people who hide behind fake online accounts shovelling slurs.
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Journalists are mental.
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Published today by The Observer. 
so is harris the only H?
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Terry Prone, ladies and gentlemen. Terry Prone.
Day 216
Overnight, Alan English, the editor of the Sunday Independent, has canned Eoghan Harris.
It’s taken a long, long time. When I was a teenage freelance journalist and broadcaster, Harris, then an RTÉ producer, became a legend during a series of “sit-ins” within the national station. My print boss at the time was the wonderful Mary Kenny, and, at a meeting in her office in the defunct Irish Press on Burgh Quay, I listened to her accurately describing Harris as a brilliant, charismatic leader. One of the volunteers over in the TV block in Donnybrook, sitting in as a protest, was my radio producer, Howard Kinlay, already under a management cloud for left-wing activism.
Worried for Howard, I told Mary, in front of the other freelances on her team, that Eoghan Harris was a ruthless demagogue who never considered the possibility that he might be wrong about anything, a man who didn’t care about his followers, leading the naive into danger yet somehow never suffering, in career terms, himself.
The silence that greeted this blurt was, I thought, more reverential than the comment actually deserved. Until Mary drew a deep breath, nodded at one of the other hacks present, and said: “You do know, don’t you, that Anne is Eoghan’s wife?” Of course, I hadn’t, and, of course, it’s impossible to apologise satisfactorily for something you’ve said when you believe every word to be true. What small potential had ever existed for Anne Harris and me to be friends died right there.
Nobody ever stopped him
I wasn’t particularly clever in my teens and I mention what I said then not in schadenfreude but to wonder why, in the half-century afterward, until Alan English, nobody ever stopped Eoghan Harris.
Harris survived and succeeded like the Hydra in Greek mythology. The Hydra had an endless supply of heads, which, until Hercules outwitted it, made it unkillable. Same with Harris, unique in his transient energetic commitment to political parties including, at different times, Labour, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and unionists. Fine Gael was badly burned by his tasteless, unfunny, ard fheis skit starring Twink. The party leader of the day had to apologise for that skit at some length. Harris, never. In fact, he found a way to blame Fine Gael for the disaster.
As the Sunday Times noted yesterday, Harris for 20 years denied his secret membership of the Workers’ Party, threatening to sue anybody likely to say otherwise. His political loyalties might shift. His modus operandi, never.
His key instrument was the unstoppable monologue. Some politicians at the receiving end worked out that the payoff for humouring him could be a positive mention in his Sunday Independent column. The currency was attention. Give him that, and approval flowed from him. His prime need is to be validated, whether as a commentator, screenwriter, or adviser to politicians. So bottomless is the pit of his neediness, it’s no surprise he ended up on Twitter praising himself for oratory, literacy, singing, and heroism.
Most commentators, when RTÉ stops ringing them, know — if they’re realistic — the station a) thinks they’ve become predictable, or b) finds them a temperamental pain in the arse to deal with. Not so Harris. He used the Sunday Independent and — as we now know — his pseudonymous Twitter account for the same purpose: To rail against his absence from the airwaves as being attributable to RTÉ being in the pocket of Sinn Féin.
Insight? None.
It’s crazy someone could kid themselves they’d assuage the anxieties of the disaffected Northern Ireland working class through a Twitter account with fewer than 2,000 followers. It’s crazy to insult this paper’s Aoife Moore in such crude terms that she needed the help of gardaí and a counsellor to cope with it. (And, don’t forget, the account impugned Aoife’s journalistic standards as well as laying twisted sexuality on her.)
It’s crazy he and some other anonymous old persons would set up and use eight sock puppet Twitter accounts so ineptly. (The word ‘tribal’ is a giveaway. Harris always uses it to smear people he disagrees with.) It’s crazy that, having been discovered, fired, and exposed, he would still think he would win by going on RTÉ’s Drivetime to be interviewed by someone who’d been Tweet-abused by him. It’s even crazier that, when Sarah McInerney instanced this abuse, he basically told her it was all right because she was a strong presenter.
This is parallel universe stuff. But it has worked. For 50 years, Harris built a career out of duplicity, force of personality, lack of insight, flashes of creativity widely separated from each other, frenzied self-regard, and sheer uncaring nastiness to others. Anybody who’s come into contact with him could see him for what he was. And is.
Because he has never changed.
But in half a century, nobody stopped him. Nobody stopped him. That’s our shame. Not his.
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Terri had that one in arse pocket for decades. Fair play to her- a genuine filleting
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Not a fan of Terry at all but she’s destroyed him there alright.
Harris is an extremely nasty piece of work. And a right sleazebag, into the bargain.
The truly extraordinary thing about his career? His unalloyed mediocrity. A poor writer, predictable and monotonous, and none too bright (as per putting up a slam dunk giveaway fact on that Twitter account). As TP noted, the adjective ‘tribal’ is the lexical equivalent of Harris’ moustache, the emphatic unnecessary.
A leading sports journalist remarked to me recently on the curious “hypnotic effect” Davy Fitzgerald has on certain people. Harris seems another example of the phenomenon. And I suppose there is a substantial section of Irish society peculiarly susceptible to his sort of partitionist guff tricked out as political comment. And Stickiedom, media wise, is like an Irish version of freemasonry. Has Fintan O’Toole had anything to say about Harris?
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Why is Terry so disliked? Just for being an establishment figure or has she ever actually done anything wrong? cc @artfoley
The insane amount ts of money she has taken from the state for advice given to governments, fg in particular is one reason.
Here’s another.
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terry could nearly be talking about herself there
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There is nothing journalists like doing more than bitching about fellow journalists
a malign influence on politics in ireland. a truth blocker, message massager and its all on our money
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Didn’t Dearbhail McDonald leave the Indo lately? Within the last year or two, I think? I’m sure I sort of picked up that the circumstances of her departure weren’t particularly amicable? Could Harris have had anything to do with that?
I saw Harris once on the street in Blackrock. He looked like he had just been released from a mental institution. He was walking around with his head completely cocked towards the sky with a look of exasperation and pain on his face.
How it started
How it ended
My recollection is there’s a lot of creepy lechery smattered throughout Harris’s columns over the years. Case in point here.
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