That Eamon Sweeney’s I hate England column even entered the foetid sewer of his subconscious was bad enough. But he actually proceeded to write it, which was worse. And then The Sunday Independent chose to publish it, which was yet worse still. That was over a week ago, and I forbore to comment on it because I assumed The Sunday Independent would make amends. But not a bit of it. Indeed, there has been a total lack of outcry over Sweeney’s unashamed and criminal indulgence in race-hatred, from both the media and that blessed sanctuary of abject conformism, Leinster House. How apt that this thunderous silence should have erupted just a fortnight short of the fourth anniversary of that weekend when the same media and Dail Eireann formed a lynch-mob to end my career as a columnist.
Yet that said, Sweeney’s phobic sleaze-fest caught the journalistic zeitgeist nicely. Over those four years, various columnists have visibly defected to the Sfira cause: O’Toole, Sheridan, Clarke, McWilliams in The Irish Times and McCarthy in The Sunday Times have all hitched their dismal drays to the Sfira wagon-train; but none has done so with such naked and hate-filled honesty as Sweeney.
Indeed, any such declarations – be it of racism, or misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, transphobia et cetera – can be strangely welcome. They serve as markers of an otherwise hidden malignancy, rather like a barium-meal that identifies a previously undetectable tumour. And because of the activities of all those well-meaning press councils and broadcasting commissions, such professions of undiluted hatred have become rare, and the cultural carcinogens of Irish life mask their true intent. Sanctimonious deceit is thus one of Sfira’s primary weapons: a loudly declared anxiety about the housing shortage, for example, is not actually a concern over homelessness but merely a flag of convenience under which the entire Sfira armada might one day sail into our ports and storm our democratic citadels.
But in his I hate England column, Sweeney – perhaps temporarily freed of the conventional inhibitions by the heady toxins of the European soccer championship, Covid and Brexit – brayed for a real Ireland that has always been there. It is an Ireland full of loathing and disdain for our neighbours to our north and to our east; its oxygen is hatred and ignorance is its food. This boorish Ireland-of-the-loathing once throve in the school syllabus and through the Christian Brothers’ thong: it was expressly violent both in both its teaching methods and their outcome. It was as ignorant of the reality of the events of 1916-1923 in Ireland as was any Eton curriculum, but instead of the vapid banalities of English history’s view of “the Irish problem”, a deep spiritual venom was nurtured, prized and praised at both the hearth and the blackboard: the secret asp of Ireland’s many aspirations.
You can put that venom in tails and a white bowtie and let it dance with royalty; you can court it in Chequers and the White House; you can hide it behind the fake folksiness of me jewel and darlin’ Dublin blather; you can say that rebel ballads are harmless expressions of a cultural tradition. All fine. But behind every single Wolfe Tones’ song is a deep personal desire to cause irrevocable human hurt, to make a widow of some woman the gallant singer will never know, to render fatherless a policeman’s perpetually nameless children.
Perhaps the most famous republican ballad, Sean South from Garryowen is a paean to the attempted mass-murder on January 1 1957 of Northern police officers, both Catholic and Protestant, merely for doing their duty. Had South succeeded, the massacred RUC officers would almost certainly have been transformed by ballad into ruthless, bloodthirsty Auxiliaries, and the slaughter at Kilmichael rephrased: Now here’s to the boys of Fermanagh. But RIC Sergeant Roy McGregor was quicker off the mark than the people who were trying to murder him, and that was that.
Yet in the deranged culture of republican balladry, it’s never quite that, because it’s always heads they win, tails we lose: for the IRA turned this military failure into an inspirational recruiting song as would-be killers became gallant victim-heroes. This piece of musical pornography is still endlessly played, usually with the phoney come-all-ye chest-swelling bravado of a saloon-bar republican.
The other ballad resulting from this fiasco, The Patriot Game, is not (as it is often represented by lefties) an irony-filled protest by its “communist” author Dominic Behan at the immorality of using youngsters like Fergal O’Hanlon in bloodshed. The opposite is the case: it was an unrepentant celebration of the culture of violence and a bitter condemnation of at the failure of the Irish government to support the IRA.
But still De Valera is greatly to blame
For shirking his part in the patriot game
I don’t mind a bit if I shoot down police
They are lackeys for war never guardians of peace
And yet at deserters I’m never let aim
The rebels who sold out the patriot game
And now as I lie with my body all holes
I think of those traitors who bargained and sold
I’m sorry my rifle has not done the same
For the Quislings who sold out the patriot game
Allow yourself a wry smile at “Quisling”: for was that not what Sean Russell, Frank Ryan, Francis Stuart and all other IRA emissaries genuinely were when they threw in their lot with The Third Reich?
From the outset, Fenianism has been inexorably bound to anti-Semitism. Arthur Griffith was explicitly anti-Semitic, a tradition that prospered within armed republicanism. The alliance between the IRA and the Nazis was agreed only days after Hitler had made his first public promise to exterminate Europe’s Jews. The description of Israel as “a travesty of history..of immense and sinister significance for the future of humanity” could have been uttered by any Sinn Fein TD or the party’s Kingstown ally, Richard Boyd Barret. In fact, they were penned by none other than Sean South himself in the magazine Fiat, the mouthpiece of the fascist movement Ailtirí an hAiséirghe. South wore many hats – Catholic, fascist, IRA, neo-Nazi – and he was the very quintessence of that homicidal and papistical pseudo-republican thread that thirteen years after his death would be woven into the bloody winding-sheet of the Provisional IRA.
This entity has since evolved to take different forms, even jettisoning its Catholic elements, but never its murderous pre-Christian roots. And in its most recent manifestation, with brilliant if breath-taking cynicism, it has created the most powerful and cohesive political force in Ireland. To be sure, it received a recent setback in Dublin South, but the party’s tacticians are always working on various plans in what is now an insanely volatile society.
But Dail Eireann’s eruption in a frenzy of populist anti-Semitism masked as anti-Israelism bespeaks an ancient hatred, predating this volatility. No other elected assembly in Europe sided with the aggressor after Hamas launched its unprovoked attack on Israeli cities. Moreover, Fine Gael’s decision to back an anti-Israel motion by a Sinn Fein party that has never severed its association with the IRA army council is unprecedented in the hundred-year history of the state.
Hip, chic Anglophobia is yet another manifestation of this political perversion, which took a new lease of life from the European soccer championships. It as if a brutal English lumpen lager-lout is more sinister and a greater national disgrace than an unashamed bomb-maker like Dessie Ellis TD, or even worse, the thousands of people who repeatedly voted for him knowing what he had done.
So, the deep well of hatred that exists in so many Irish souls was simply laid bare in Sweeney’s phobic explosion. We know that no English newspaper would have published an I hate Ireland column, and if one had so forgotten itself to have done so, the Race Relations Act would have been instantly deployed in all its ferocious majesty. The Met would have seized the hard drives to see how many people were party to what in England would be a serious criminal offence. But in Ireland, nothing….
Still, with all this poison in the air, it is clear now why I was chased out of the media, as was more recently Eoghan Harris, as inevitably will those other brave dissenters from the Sfira project, such as Eilish O’Hanlon and Mairia Cahill.
Now unlike most of you, I am a profound Eurosceptic, and I simply fail to understand the widespread pride over our membership of a union that systematically raped us after the bank bailout. But having often said that, I can now see the clear benefits of our EU membership. Without the limits that the EU, the Commission and the European Court of Human Rights can place on the otherwise unrestricted powers of a Sfira government, we could soon be hearing the death-knells ringing over the grave of Irish freedom. Otherwise….
Send not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.