Anything to Pat Halley the architect in Waterford?
There is a brilliant column on this topic in today’s Sunday Times by Justine McCarthy.
I think JMcC is by far the best columnist in Ireland.
Can you throw up a few pics of it please
Anyone got a sub?
She nailed it
2 Likes
From the Phoenix this week:
THE DEFENESTRATION of Eoghan Harris by Sunday Independent editor Alan English and publisher Peter Vandermeersch had little to do with sexism and everything to do with the national question, despite the tone of the debate surrounding the writer’s demise.
Harris’s fans still exist but they were long ago eclipsed by events and the new politics of modern, softer republicanism fanned by Brexit and the centenary commemorations. Not everybody south of the border is now a Shinner but the old Section 31 mentality is regarded as McCarthyite and Harris was seen as Senator Joe. The protestations of English that he is no Sinn Féin admirer are genuine, but English is a canny editor who knows his market and he was determined to do what his predecessor Cormac Bourke was unable to: namely, bring Harris to heel. In this he was gifted by the name calling of Mrs Vandermeerch, aka Francine Cunningham, being nicknamed Lady Macbeth; not the smartest move Harris ever made.
Not so smart either was his claim in a letter to the Irish Times that he admitted to running an anonymous account “when asked”. This means that English must have been completely addled when he wrote just six days earlier about an argument he had with his columnist last January. Then, he had put it to Harris – in a “pointed” manner – that his columnist’s remarks about his editorial motivation “reminded me strongly of claims being made anonymously on fake Twitter accounts”. Instead of fessing up “when asked”, Harris said he “didn’t know what I was talking about and changed the subject”.
Another contradiction was his denial in an interview with RTÉ’s Sarah McInerney that he was advising Micheál Martin on northern politics. Harris said he recently had hard words with Martin about former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and his alleged failure to rein in journalist Roy Greenslade for his secret republican bent (oh, the irony). Thus, Harris explained “I’m not doing that” (ie, advising Martin).
However, even more “recently” – in fact, just five days earlier – Harris had opened his last column for the Sindo with three paragraphs lionising Martin, saying: “For the DUP to dispense with Arlene Foster is as foolish as if Fianna Fáil was to dispense with Micheál Martin … Micheál Martin makes FF look more modern than it deserves … like Martin, she [Foster] had a pluralist vision”.
What now for the Harris officer corps at the Sindo after several months of editorial hand-to-hand fighting over northern coverage? Will they carry on the fight even though the Duke of Wellington has been felled? One such former acolyte appears to have been more prescient than most; Éilis O’Hanlon had begun to mutiny against the duke in recent weeks and had disagreed sharply with him over unionist consent to constitutional change in the north (see The Phoenix, last edition). Last weekend, she had the prime positioning slot at the head of the newly designed opinion section of the paper.
The real winner, though, is English who has asserted his authority with decisive action. If Harris does have any sympathisers left at the Sindo they will be keeping their opinions to themselves from now on.
1 Like
This whole “advisor to Micheal Martin” thing appears to be a red herring. cc @Special_Olympiakos @artfoley
I definitely read that Harris was advising Martin but nothing Harris says about it can be taken at face value because he’s a pathological liar and he’ll just say whatever suits him from conversation to conversation. The Rusbridger / Greenslade incident was only proven very recently, that leaves plenty of time for him to be advising before then. I also don’t see what it has to do with Micheal Martin or why Harris would stop advising Martin over it.
1 Like
in fairness theyre both pathological liars. id say harris did indeed have martins ear, if not specifically being a SPAD
Micheal should have written the moan in Irish.
Don’t like O’Toole being hit with a dose of the truth?
There, there little Free Stater.
Does anyone have O’Toole’s article?
I cancelled my Irish Times subscription.
Michael ran for Sinn Fein in the Dublin Bay North constituency in 2016 but failed to get elected.
A former lord mayor of Dublin and editor of An Phoblacht IIRC. Occasional frequenter of the Barrog club house. Think he lives across the road from it
Fintan O’Toole: Sinn Féin must acknowledge the disaster it helped inflict on the Irish people
Subscriber only
Sinn Féin seeks to exercise power on both sides of the Border. It must account for how it uses power
Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 06:00
The 19th-century French thinker Ernest Renan asked the question: “What is a Nation?” He answered, in part, that it is a collective exercise in amnesia: “Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.” What has to be forgotten, in particular, is the violence and brutality that accompanied the act of creation.
It is very striking that, if you talk to Irish people under 40, this desire for forgetfulness is strong. Those who look to Sinn Féin as the only possible vehicle for the creation of a new Ireland seem increasingly irritated by the insistence of those who lived through the Troubles on some kind of moral accountability for the IRA’s 30-year campaign of mass killing.
This is easy enough to understand. Younger people have only ever really known the IRA and Sinn Féin as participants in a process of peacemaking. They do not remember a time when the IRA was putting bombs in pubs to kill and maim ordinary young people like themselves.
All of that is “the past”. It is not relevant to, say, the housing crisis that they are experiencing as a daily reality. It doesn’t bear on the state of the health service or the problems of economic inequality or climate change. It lacks what Martin Luther King called “the fierce urgency of now”.
Fair enough. Except the same can be said for so for many things that younger people do care about, often passionately. The past, to adapt the cliche, is both another country and home territory.
Those children died between the 1920s and the 1950s. Does that make their brief lives and obscure deaths ‘ancient history’?
Consider, for example, the controversies over the recent report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. That report deals with institutions that no longer exist and with events that, in some cases, go back almost a full century.
I have not heard anyone from Sinn Féin, or anyone who argues that the IRA is ancient history with no bearing on the present, suggest that it is therefore meaningless. On the contrary, the imperative to acknowledge the pain of the past is, in this case, unarguable.
The most lurid and shocking part of that story is the discovery of nearly 800 bodies of infants buried on the grounds of the Bon Secours home in Tuam. Those children died between the 1920s and the 1950s. Does that make their brief lives and obscure deaths “ancient history”?
That institution in Tuam closed down 60 years ago, in 1961. The Provisional IRA shut up shop by decommissioning its weapons just 16 years ago, in 2005. Yet the second story is somehow much more distant than the first.
The same people can see what the nuns did in Tuam as a moral outrage that must never be forgotten and the IRA’s dumping of bodies in secret graves as an unfortunate episode that should stay in the past.
- Fintan O’Toole: We need schools for messers, dreamers and misfits
- Fintan O’Toole: The West had all the clocks but the Taliban had all the time
- Fintan O’Toole: Poverty is an expensive luxury we can no longer afford
In one frame, there is an entirely justified demand to literally bring up the bodies: the remains of the infants should be excavated, identified, properly memorialised. In another, there is a desire, in the biblical phrase, to let the dead bury their dead.
All of this points to a deep ambivalence about the public memory of recent history. What even is the Irish past?
On the one hand, it is very much a living thing. Over the last 25 years, public discourse has been shaped by the imperative to investigate and acknowledge the brutality and violence of the industrial schools, the Magdalene laundries, the mother and baby homes.
On the other hand, the Irish past is inert. The brutality and violence of the Troubles are not worth banging on about. They get in the way of the things that matter now.
The statute of limitations on cruel injustices is weirdly variable. For the Catholic Church, in particular, it never runs out. Nor should it. It is right and proper to reach back over the decades and to enumerate in as much detail as possible the harms it did to Irish people.
But for Sinn Féin and the IRA, the curtain came down when the violence stopped. These sleeping dogs are to be let lie, even while the old curs of Catholic Ireland are constantly roused from their slumbers.
How do we explain this difference? It is not, clearly, about the mere passage of time. Something else is at work.
The violence of the Troubles was as influential in the creation of contemporary Ireland as the church’s institutionalised cruelty
It is, ironically, what Sinn Féin itself used to call the partitionist mentality. For young people in the Republic, the church’s crimes matter because they helped to constitute “us”. They touch on the identity of both the State and society. They are part of what we are – and no longer wish to be.
But the IRA’s brutality was exercised, for the most part, north of the Border. It is part of someone else’s story.
It is not the past that is another country – it is “the North”. It is not time that matters but place.
Yet this is profoundly wrong-headed. The violence of the Troubles – and the complex ways in which southern society reacted to it – was as influential in the creation of contemporary Ireland as the church’s institutionalised cruelty had been.
This crazy dance of remembering and forgetting is, however, a means to an end. Recalling the church’s evils serves the same purpose as choosing not to know about the IRA’s. Both help to create a hopeful narrative of a new Ireland escaping from a dark history.
That’s a noble aspiration, but it comes up against one big problem: accountability. A democracy simply cannot work if the people who exercise power do not have to answer for what they do and have done.
The church accumulated vast temporal power in Ireland. It must account for how it used it.
Sinn Féin seeks to exercise power on both sides of the Border. It is vital that it accepts – as it has so far failed to do – that it, too, must account for how it uses power. Part of that process has to be a clear and final acknowledgment of the disaster it helped inflict on the Irish people.
Contrary to Ernest Renan’s dictum, Ireland cannot in fact create a new nation out of selective forgetfulness – or out of its conjoined twin, selective memory. Indeed, one of the things that has prevented the emergence of a single nation on this island is precisely the existence of competing and deeply partial versions of the past.
We can’t escape the past by continuing to explore some of its horrors while ignoring others. If there were to be a genuinely new Ireland, it would be one in which that game of instrumental oblivion is itself consigned to history.
1 Like
Thanks for that.
A strange article.