Some truth in this, but it is one eyed at best.
The article is garbage.
Complete rubbish, Fintan doesn’t live anywhere near the border anyway. A highly elitist perspective.
Edit: I never bothered reading that until you asked for it. It was the most commented IT article yesterday, over 300 comments. Nearly as many daily comments as a TFK coronavirus thread.
Also, why does he start by quoting Renan only to contradict him at the end - Fintan’s getting a bit old I think.
Establishment hacks are getting ever more rattled with each passing year about the prospect of change.
Can one be an “occasional frequenter” of a venue ???
Just asking
A load of shite… The IRA didn’t just parachute into Ireland from outer space in the late 1960s. As long as pricks like O’Fool want to ignore the context that gave rise to the troubles then he’s as guilty as the next person for whitewashing history.
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Also equating a complex conflict with the carry on of the Church here down the years is pretty terrible debating!
It reeks of desperation.
Is that not O’Toole’s modus operandi?
He’s a terrible journalist, you’d feel a lot of sympathy for anyone gullible enough to deem him a reasonable commentator.
He had a Late Late Show debate with the members of the Wolfe Tones claiming that their songs were pro IRA.
Didn’t think a debate was needed to come to that conclusion.
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Journalists go to war over ‘Barbara Pym’ Twitter claims
Eoghan Harris and Aoife Moore sue one another in fallout over ‘Barbara Pym’ account
Eoghan Harris, the former Sunday Independent columnist, is suing a journalist over comments she made about his secret Twitter account. Harris has filed Circuit Court defamation proceedings against Aoife Moore, a political reporter for the Irish Examiner, who is in turn suing him for defamation in the High Court.
Harris was sacked from the Sunday Independent last May after its editor discovered he was behind a Twitter account using the pseudonym “Barbara Pym”, which focused on Northern Irish issues and criticised journalists, academics and others. Twitter suspended the account and ten others that it said breached the platform’s manipulation rules.
The revelation prompted Moore, who is from Derry, to tweet that the Pym account had “sent me sexualised messages about whether Mary Lou McDonald ‘turned me on’, the size of my arse, and called me a terrorist from the month I started at the Examiner”. She said she had to seek counselling and go to the gardai.
In his Circuit Court action, filed last month, Harris has confirmed he was behind the Pym account and had tweeted public messages about Moore and her articles. He denied ever sending Moore a private or direct message through Twitter. Harris’s submission is that, on Twitter, the word “messages” has a particular meaning and refers to private direct messages or DMs.
Harris denies ever communicating with Moore in a “sexualised way” and said none of his tweets contained any sexual innuendo or content. He claims that he was defamed by Moore’s post, which was retweeted more than 2,200 times, liked by almost 10,000 people and responded to by 1,000.
His complaint is that Moore’s tweet, by ordinary meaning or innuendo, suggests that he communicated with her in a sexually threatening manner and that he is “sexually deviant and/or is a pervert, and/or misogynistic”. He claims his reputation has been gravely injured and he has suffered enormous distress and embarrassment as Moore’s tweet was “carried in every daily broadsheet newspaper in the state”.
The former Sunday Independent columnist has also sent a legal letter to the Examiner over a column by Terry Prone that he says accused him of “laying twisted sexuality” on Moore.
Harris has listed a series of tweets from prominent Irish personalities criticising him as a result of Moore’s claim, including journalists Matt Cooper, Audrey Carville, Una Mullally, Susan Daly and Róisín Ingle, and politicians including Paul Murphy, Hazel Chu and McDonald.
His solicitor, Robert Dore, wrote to Moore on June 24 stating that Harris was “loath” to issue proceedings against a fellow journalist, and would not pursue the matter if Moore retracted her tweet and posted an apology. Harris received a holding response from Moore’s solicitor in July. His Circuit Court action seeks damages, which are capped at €75,000 in that court, and a correction order.
Moore has claimed she was subjected to a “malicious” campaign of more than 120 tweets from the Barbara Pym and Dolly White accounts in the past year. The Dolly White account was run by Gwen Halley, Harris’s wife.
A number of academics and journalists said they would sue Harris over the contents of tweets from the Barbara Pym account. So far the only cases filed in Dublin are by Moore and Allison Morris, a journalist with the Belfast Telegraph. Both are represented by the Belfast-based Phoenix Law. They are also suing Twitter and seeking orders to compel the company to release user details of other Twitter accounts that they claim have defamed them.
Moore, who last summer helped to break the Golfgate story, about the Oireachtas Golf Society event that led to a political scandal, is writing a book about Sinn Fein to be published in 2023. Sandycove, the publisher, has claimed that it will be the “definitive book on Sinn Fein”.
Darragh Mackin, Moore’s solicitor, said he was aware of Harris’s action but was limited in what he could say due to a harassment claim that Moore has made in Northern Ireland and a complaint made to gardai, both of which Harris will contest. “There are related proceedings in Northern Ireland in which we have asserted […] that Harris has embarked upon a campaign of harassment against our client over a prolonged time,” Mackin said. “The threat of litigation in these circumstances forms part of those allegations to which we are seeking damages.”
Harris gets a ‘sorry’ on Twitter
Eoghan Harris, the former Sunday Independent columnist, has received an apology but no damages from a Newstalk presenter who published a “false allegation” against him on Twitter.
Kieran Cuddihy, who presents the Hard Shoulder programme, tweeted an apology to Harris yesterday for wrongly accusing him of using Twitter to “sling personal insults at young female journalists based on their looks”.
“I now accept this accusation is false and I apologise unreservedly to Eoghan Harris for causing him distress,” Cuddihy posted.
Harris confirmed he sent a solicitor’s letter to the Newstalk presenter requesting an apology to “vindicate my good name” and had not requested compensation. “I didn’t want any money and I didn’t ask for any money: this is very important. I asked for an apology and I got it,” he said.
Harris was fired as a Sunday Independent columnist last year because of his involvement with a fake Twitter account operating under the pseudonym Barbara J Pym. Many of the tweets published by it were critical of Sinn Fein and elements of the media it alleged were sympathetic to the party.
Aoife Moore, a journalist with the Irish Examiner, is suing Harris for defamation in the High Court over material published by the account, which has since been suspended by Twitter. She has claimed she was subjected to sexualised messages from the account.
Harris, in turn, is suing Moore for defamation in the Circuit Court. He insists that any criticisms he made via the account were “gender-blind”. It was reported last month that gardai have completed an investigation into alleged online harassment of Moore by Harris and his wife Gwen Halley, and that a file was to be submitted to the director of public prosecutions.
Yesterday Harris said he was glad Cuddihy had apologised and the matter was “done and dusted.”
“The bottom line is there’s a kind of delusion out there still that there is safety in numbers, just because a lot of people piled on against me and effectively cancelled me. Maybe in some residual way, [Cuddihy] thought there was some truth in the allegations or that it was safe to say these things . . . because he went much further and said that I slighted female journalists on foot of their looks.”
The commentator insisted his only interest in journalists was in their political writings.
Harris said he had no plans to sue others retrospectively but warned that “if anybody piles on again in that way, I’ll certainly go the distance”.
“The reason I took on Kieran Cuddihy was that I just wanted to make a point that I’m not an unperson, that I’m not cancelled, and I have legal rights,” Harris said. Asked to comment, Cuddihy said: “I won’t add anything else on the record — he might threaten to sue me again.”
The former Senator Harris and his wife have been cleared of all criminal charges relating to allegations of fake Twitter activity.