Written on: 19. 11. 2022 in the category: Uncategorized

OFFICIAL IRELAND: THE IRA’S GREATEST ALLY

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A recent post of mine that alleged that John Hume had been caught in a honey-trap attracted the following tweet from David Davin-Power, formerly of RTE.  “I like Kevin Myers, but the honey-trap slur – introduced without evidence, attribution or context – is redolent of the tactics of Sinn Fein and those he despises. It is actually contemptible.”

Well now. He didn’t say the allegation was incorrect or untrue, because he can’t. He simply says it’s a “slur”, whatever that means. Perhaps he dislikes the light it shines on the “peace process”, the great moral dementia that has destroyed any consensus within nationalist Ireland about what is right and wrong.

That great canker aside, there’s a basic rule for all journalists that if you want to challenge a controversial statement, you must first contact its author, looking for further evidence. Davin-Power never did that before he compared me with Sfira and denounced my assertion as “contemptible”, meaning of course that the line “I like Kevin Myers” was disingenuous blather.

Did Davin-Power really not know that in addition to being an almost uncontrollable alcoholic, Hume was a serial womaniser through the 1970s-80s? In which case, he must uniquely have been ignorant of these two most salient features of Hume’s character, known to all other journalists covering the North, as well as the Department of Foreign Affairs and MI5.

Moreover, it is a professional and legal norm for journalists NOT to reveal their sources, especially when dealing with a terrorist group such as the IRA, for whom source-disclosure can be a death-sentence for the source.

As to context, I provided it. “In the European elections of 1984, in what might be considered a plebiscite of nationalist voters after the hunger strikes, Sinn Fein’s Danny Morrison still won only 13% of the total vote against John Hume’s 22.1%.  This of course was before Hume had been caught in the sexual honeytrap of the kind to which he had long been vulnerable, which was then used not merely to blackmail him into withholding all further condemnations of the IRA, but also to enter the Hume-Adams talks, ultimately leading to the destruction of the SDLP.”

How thick do you have to be to think that no context had been provided for my assertion that Hume had stopped condemning the IRA? Even Hume’s response to the IRA’s more astonishing atrocities would be to resort to artful casuistry such as that “all right-thinking people” would condemn them, without his using the first-person singular pronoun.  Clearly, his time in the Maynooth seminary was not wasted.

Now I certainly do not expect – and nor should you – decency or a regard for truth from Official Ireland. This entity abhors me, a compliment indeed: its dislike for me is as nothing compared to my contempt for it, though I of course am powerless, and Official Ireland is most emphatically not.

There is a price to be paid for such asymmetrical potency, as I discovered after I won my defamation case against RTE for Audrey Carville calling me a “Holocaust denier” on “Morning Ireland” in 2017. This lie had gained initial currency from the tweets of the IRA-agent Roy Greenslade, and Carville’s repeat of it sent a flashfire of hysterical hatred through the Irish media and political classes. Within hours, both the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald had denounced me as an anti-Semite and misogynist and congratulated The Sunday Times for sacking me.

Never before in Irish history had an Irish government applauded a multinational for sacking an Irish citizen like this. Equal in sheer cowardice and utter contemptibility was the attack on me in The Irish Times from Sean Donlon, formerly secretary general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and at that point chairman of the Press Council of Ireland. Donlon: Fitzgerald: Varadkar: Carville, the rank and vile of Official Ireland.

The only institutional voice of reason during the lynching came from the Jewish Representative Council. “Branding Kevin Myers as either an anti-Semite or a Holocaust denier is an absolute distortion of the facts. …”

The evidence on my side was irrefutable, and three years ago this month RTE reached a financial settlement with me, agreeing to broadcast this:

On July 31st 2017, Morning Ireland introduced an item that suggested that Kevin Myers was a Holocaust denier. This was untrue and gravely defamatory of Mr Myers’s character. Morning Ireland acknowledges that Mr Myers has for over three decades repeatedly testified to the scale and the wickedness of Hitler’s Final Solution. Morning Ireland acknowledges the damage done to Mr Myers’ reputation. We regret this and unreservedly apologise.

We soon learnt what “unreservedly” meant to RTE: absolutely nothing. The moment the apology was read out, the programme immediately reverted to the shameless villain of the piece, Carville, who was now chirpily promoting that night’s Late Late Show. The apology was not included in Morning Ireland’s podcast and RTE News never reported it. Similarly, The Irish Times never reported either the apology or the settlement, details of which had been sent to its news desk. A letter protesting at this omission to Professor John Hegarty, who uniquely sits on The Irish Times Trust and The Irish Times Board, went unanswered

Meanwhile, two RTE programmes, Prime Time and Miriam O’Callaghan’s Sunday morning radio show asked me on air to discuss the scandal. It was agreed that O’Callaghan should get the exclusive interview, and this was confirmed by her producer. Two days before the broadcast, the producer cancelled the interview.

My memoir, Burning Heresies, came out in autumn 2020. Claire Byrne’s morning programme on RTE Radio One agreed to an interview, but only on condition that she got a daytime exclusive. My publishers agreed and notified Byrne’s rivals accordingly, who dropped out of the bidding. The day before my appearance on the show, the programme cancelled my appearance.

A review of Burning Heresies was commissioned from Anne Harris for The Irish Times and her piece was subbed and put up in page mock-up, from where it vanished before publication and has never been seen since. Even today, most Irish Times readers are unaware of my memoir which is largely about my time with the newspaper. Worst of all, my greatest lifetime achievement, the restoration of the Irish dead of the Great War, has now been air-brushed from the record. My first full-page 3,000-word article on that subject appeared on November 11th, 1980. This has now been removed from The Irish Times on-line archive, though a front-page promo for the deleted article remains as proof that I am not imagining it.

However, to confirm my non-role in this process, The Irish Times’ Ronan McGreevy recently wrote: “Recovering the memory of the Irish war dead was begun by (President) McAleese’s predecessor Mary Robinson (when she attended) the annual Remembrance Sunday service in the (St Patrick’s) Cathedral …in 1991.”

This was eleven years after my first article on this subject, which was followed by scores more. Indeed, as Mary McAleese told the Queen when she introduced us at Islandbridge Memorial Park in 1911: “This is the journalist who kept the flame of this place alive for so many years. He fought the good fight and like so many battles, it was worth fighting.”

McGreevy should have known this, which means that he is either an idiot or a liar. Take your pick.

But he is now the poster-boy of Official Ireland, as was Davin-Power when he was RTE’s polcorr during the fatuity of the peace process. Now we are reaping the just desserts of this unprincipled supping with the devil that is the IRA, as the SDLP can attest: the extinction of unarmed nationalist opposition and the electoral vindication of historical terrorism. Furthermore, the brainless celebration of the 1916 insurrection six years ago quite predictably gave an incalculable boost to the Sfira alliance. I say with absolute certainty because I predicted it.

This recidivist addiction to republican conspiracies is a curse on Ireland, now even contaminating our women’s football, and it will not stop until it is thoroughly excised. Yet how can that happen when the source of infection is no longer the IRA alone but also Official Ireland, which is more intent on silencing critics such as Eoghan Harris and me than hearing the truth? And what is the more contemptible? What has happened to him and me and others like us, or for me to reveal the coercive reality behind the Hume-Adams talks, the diseased base upon which the great lie of the Belfast Agreement now sits?

 

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