That piece is disturbed and somehow disturbing.
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What a bitter, twisted man.
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I once had a fag with Myers outside the Challenging times studio, he was grand.
Then a little while later he stopped the recording to have me and a couple of buddies removed from the studio
He’s an enigma 
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Yes, he is showing what lay behind and beneath all those sanctimonious columns.
A poisonous egomaniac. And the hero of certain politically illiterate gobdaws on here.
It is the work of a deeply unhappy and troubled soul imo. It’s an uneasy read. The last analogy is just, well, sick.
The grandiosity laughable.
Unquestionably a gifted writer but certainly grew more and more consumed by reactionary bitterness the older he got.
Then again, that’s something you could say about a lot of people here too.
He’s dialling it in.
It is the different set of glasses used to analyse events in Irish history that is perplexing.
On one hand you have Michael Collins ordering executions of members of RIC and DMP and on the other you have IRA carrying out similar acts. How do you create a dichotomy or double standard in which one set of actions carried out in one passage of time is treated, talked about, taught and remembered completely differently to a set of actions in another passage of time. A FG friend of mine sent me on a picture of Collins immortalised on a membership card. Keynote speeches are delivered at Beal na Blath. In schools Collins is a revolutionary figure and celebrated as a hero. In the 1970’s you still have an occupying power, over zealous police force, collusion between paramilitaries and British state and that’s before we go into gerrymandering and deprivation of civil liberties in an apartheid society. Apart from Anne Cadwallader of the BBC I never hear anything about British state collusion especially not from southern media when looking at cause and effect of the troubles in Northern Ireland. I wouldn’t vote for Sinn Fein in a month of Sundays but how could you possibly teach or contextualise these events or explain the nuances so differently in an Irish history book a couple of chapters later. A great Grandchild of an RIC man killed back in Collins time taught a different lesson to the grandchild of a victim of an RUC man during the troubles. You cant unless you decry all violence.
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Well said Johnny. They’re either all murdering bastards or none of them are. This state still survives and trods along based on that hypocrisy
I’d be fairly certain that their Sectarian Fest with “Up The Ra” chanting and slogans was.
All very quiet on that front, including the so called “progressive” Shinner you cited earlier.
You’d see that ‘up the ra’ carry on in socio-economic black spots all over the south
Real whiff of narcissism off that Myers piece
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Ireland has to move on from commemorations generally. The South remains immature on this front, with the last government trying earnestly but clumsily to keep things on an even keel. The resections to World War I remembrance and the particularly the RIC one were embarrassing.
However one is in another life time, another isn’t.
What we have currently is a younger generation being more toxic than the one before them. It was a minority carrying out violence, it is a majority now voting for a party trying to rewrite how the public viewed their conflict.
All is this is divisive and damages the cause of a UI, but again that’s a secondary consideration. Number one is for the auld lads having their conflict viewers just like 1920. As proven by the likes of your post above.
Tim you do realise the commemoration and ridiculous nature of them is a result of what happened 100 years ago. The same thing you fear now but deny happened a century ago. The murderers used votes gained in some cases decades after the conflict as an endorsement of said conflict
You see it more and more in the South to be sure. As the younger generation have seen the Provisional IRA Disneyfied by Simpsons memes and the likes of Kneecap.
There were always a few people trying to be edgy with the likes of the Fields of Athenry but there is a new phenomenon of younger folks using it as a mild form of rebellion against their parents generation.
We have discussed the rights and wrongs of the PIRA campaign vs. the Old IRA.
The 1912-2022 errors were honestly made. 10 years earlier it would have gone fine. Instead we got ridiculous reactions to John Redmond being on College Green and the RIC thing.
Ireland (the south) absolutely needs to move on from this mentality.
However, the Provisional IRA is a living memory for many. It isn’t just what a Citizens Assembly on the flag of the country will talk away. “Move on” goes only one way with SF as it is the goal for 1980 to be 1920.
It’s not history for Austin Stack though, or a chapter in a book, it’s his own father that was murdered, I could ask how you’d feel in that situation but you couldn’t answer,
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You just need to “move on”.
Austin Stack of course is entitled to his personal grief. He is not entitled to set the curriculum of a school subject however
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I’d feel fairly shit about the whole thing but lets not make it about me. I just feel Austin Stack is being used as a puppet by establishment in this country as a means to attack Sinn Fein. I doubt they care a jot about him. Austin Stack specifically alluded to history when referencing the troubles and teaching it to young people who were not born in this time period. My main preoccupation for want of a better word was how would an educator go about doing that.
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