How do you react to anonymous letters? Myself, I usually read them and then post them on this site…What do you mean, you didn’t notice that virtually all the posters on this site do so anonymously? Anyway, I know a verbal balaclava is the conventional headgear in discussion sites such as this so it doesn’t bother me that much.
But someone I know sent me a copy of the letter above a couple of days before polling. It’s interesting. First it’s anonymous, secondly it’s an appeal from an apparently helpless person, and finally it appears to be targeting Nigel Dodds. And note the bit about the little boy with cerebral palsy. Touching.
But why was it sent, not just to the person who passed it on to me, but to lots of other people as well? Well, looking for help, is your first reaction. But what help could anyone give someone who doesn’t leave their name and address? And who would be likely to send a letter which appears to accuse Nigel Dodds of heartlessness? What’s that, Virginia? The Shinners? After all, the electoral contest was essentially between Dodds and Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly. So if they sent it, you can see what an unscrupulous bunch they are. A fact no doubt noted by those who received the letter.
But hold. Do you think Sinn Féin are stupid? Do you think they’d sent out a letter like this, no name, no address, with a sort of Disneyland/Hollywood soaring-orchestral-strings appeal from a helpless mother with a gallant little lad suffering from cerebral palsy? A letter that shouts “Fake!” with every sentence? I think not. At first glance this seems an anti-Dodds letter, hence the Sinn Féin as sender suggestion. But two seconds of thought should show you that it’s really an anti-Sinn Féin letter, since it appears to show them up to dirty tricks.
So who or what party would want to show Sinn Féin as crude liars, intent on smearing their political opponent? Let me think….
Jude
Or at third glance it becomes obvious that that is what Sinn Fein want us to think.
Sending something so obviously a fake that of course we will assume it was sent by their opponents, when in fact it was them all along.
A clever ploy indeed!
But of course, gio – why didn’t I think of that?…Or then again, a step further on, maybe anti-Sinn Féin people sent it because…
Exactly what I was thinking too. What a shoddy disingenuous place we inhabit.
A triple or even quadruple bluff! We’re through the looking glass here, people…
into the rabbit hole – which pill?
Well the letter has scamster all over it , but without an address it’s certainly a bit odd. with an address to send the cheques to it might have worked for a few soft-hearted sentimentalists. Many have lost their bank accounts to scams like that.
I suppose it could apply to many politicians anyway. The majority will promise everything to get a vote and rip up those promises immediately after the election. Okay Doddsy is in the frame this time so you could point the finger at his political enemies digging a bit od dirt , but it’s all a bit cack -handed really…a bit amateurish. I suppose you could base a Sherlock holmes story on it with several differing scenarios.. the little boy with palsy is right out of the worst sentimental country songs and sounds a bit off alright….”Little Tom …what will be your fate ?”…as ferlin husky might have emoted….but i daresay the conspiracy theories are really leading us up an Norneverland garden path to a mad Hatter’s tea party…
It didn`t surprise me that Nigel and co. blamed the shinners for this pile of crap, some of the things they believe in beggar belief. Listening to Nigel`s slabbering after the election was quite bizarre, who says the DUPs don`t do irony? Accusing someone of dirty tricks, not to mention being sectarian, you really couldn`t make it up.
It is a truism universally acknowledged, Esteemed Blogmeister, that while the uber folk of Norneverland, are as straight as a Presbyterian spire, down here in the Free Southern Stateen the equivocating equivalent are as crooked as the corkscrew road between Ballyvaughan and Lisdoonvarna (where the truth is never less than varnished).
The reason for the latter lamentable FS Stateen of affairs is because our’ national’ symbol is as sham as the shamrock, the first official language is ersatz erse and the counting house we all counted upon for so long was the Anglo-Irish Mountebank.
Without the slightest hesitency one must record one’s profound disturbance therefore to read of the can-do candour of our straight as a die, separated born-again breds being contaminated by the sloothery and selective southern attitudes to the honest to God, gospel truth. Or not, as the case may be.
Mind you, it never did take much to coax a hoax out of the folks down here. To mention briefly two instances which summarily spring to mind. Both, oddly enough, involving the Phoenix Park whose very name itself is a long-standing, low-lying example of the phoney.
‘Phoenix’ being a Roundhead or Redcoat’s mispronunciation of ‘Fionn Uisce’ /Clearwater one frightful night when a bad moon was rising in mock-Tudor times. Typically, it is crystal clear that there is no hint of a revival of the Clearwater name for that park of hallowed oaks and political strokes..
The first hoax focused on the murders of Cavendish and Burke in 1882 when the Secretaries, First and Second, were knifed down by the turds of the Irish National Invincibles with surgical precision. There being, indeed, more than one way to skin the goat.
This heinous deed by those who were heard to guffaw like hyenas as they galloped away in turn led to the forgeries of Richard Pigott, the protype Stickie,as he has been described by, ahem, ‘a friend of Perkie’s whose opinion he respects’.
Its author being a journalist (imagine!) The Times (of Thameside not of Liffeyside, curiously enough) gleefully published them, having first paid a prince’s handsome ransom.
These fake letters starkly implied that Parnell supported the Phoenix Park murders. But their authenticity was soon rumbled by a misspelling: ‘hesitency’ for ‘hesitancy’. An error which R. Pigott the errorist, had been regularly guilty of before in his backstory career as a hack.
While Parnell was vindicated in court, the hack hit the road and never came back,no more,no more. They say the poor fellow committed felo de se in a Madrid hotel bedroom with a mouthful of pistol paella.
(It is important to point out at this juncture, that the disreputable Richard Pigott, hack, is in no way to be compared with another of similar profession and name. The other who also worked for The Times (U, not non-U) is familiarly known, in affectionately ironic tones, as the Leicester bigot who refined the art and craftiness of mud-slinging as, erm, mire-slinging).
The second hoax was perpetrated in the Fabulous Fiftes by some confident trickster who reported from one side of his,erm, crooked mouth the sighting of a….leprechaun. And he to be trooping across the width of Chesterfield Avenue in the Phoenix Park. In green jacket, red cap and white owl’s feather.
(A youthful Perkie was sadly debarred from going up to have a gawk at this ‘compulsory leprechaun’. Ever since, his inner contrarian has become a stern advocado of same).
It became a nine-day wonder (24/7) as thousands flocked to the scene of the bluff: enough said. Except to say it was perhaps the most astonishing display of Eejitry in the Phoenix Park till the Return of the Conquered Heroes from the USA after the World Footie Cuppie of 1994.
Embarrassingly, nobody initially turned up, apart from 98 cows, 34 deer and 15 Day Releasers. Necessitating the eleventh hour bussing in of wagonloads of bingo-going biddies from the neighbouring parishes of Cabra, Ballyfermot, Finglas and (gulp) Castleknock in to make up the numbers.
The carrot that coaxed them was the presence of the M.C.:none other than The Man you can Talk To: step forward with mike in hand the Rev. Joe Duffy. (Though he was merely Mr. Duffy in those days).
To conclude: it is with exteme hesitency, Esteemed Blogmeister, that one instances a third example of hoaxania. Certainly, there would have been no such hesitency as late as last Thursday, but, hoots mon, Woman Friday changed all that !
Nonetheless, a brief mench ought to serve as a cautionary tail end, not least because it too has a Ripley element to it,: it is not entirely unconnected with the Phoenix Park. Try as one might, that piece of real estate continues to rise up, kilt like, and take its place among the notions of this earth..
Scam number three: it has been described as ‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in the history of letters’.
That would be ‘Ossian’ by wee James McPherson. First published in 1760 and purporting to be a translation of from the original Scots-Gaeic (or breakswinds from the erse as some unkind critics would claim) it caused a sensation at the time.
Thomas Jefferson (the pre-airplane prototype) declared ‘Ossian to be the greatest poet of all time’ and he even vowed to learn Gaelic to enable himself to read the poetry in the original.
Dr. Samuel Johnson was rather less impressed, dissing it ‘as gross an imposition as has been inflicted upon the world’ and also putting the hobnailed boot thus: ‘Gaelic is but the rude speech of a barbarous people’. Little surprise he is often termed ‘the Declan Lynch of his day’.
Just as ‘hesitency’ was the h-word which ultimately pulled the trigger for R. Pigott (see above) so also were such blatant inventions of Wee Jammie McPherson: Malvina as the name of Oscar’s wee squeeze. That was his undoing.
What ever about no laddie being an island, no lassies has ever been …islands.
(The name was coined from the erse, thus: Mala Mhin……Smooth Eyebrows).
Malvina’s real name, of course, has since been proven by a Royal Commission of Enquiry to be: Falkland.
Be upstanding, a chairde Gall, and drink a toast to the lasting happiness of Oscar and, (gulp), Falkland.
The Phoenix Park connection by the way, came from the rather sour and short letter which the pompous Dr. Johnson wrote to the clubabble Lord Chesterfield. Naturally, it was the former’s snotty letter rather than those masterpieces of insightful elegance of the latter that the longsuffering schoolchildren of the FSS were subjected.
To finally finish: the above mentioned ‘Ossian’ although a superlative con-job, is not in any way to be confused with Oisin McConville who was, indubitably, the real deal. (Ask Kerry).
We still await the biopic of the lethal left-corner forward; but it just a matter of time.
It will be titled: Oisin’s 15.
hi there
fairly recent subscriber and reader but not for lack of trying, just for lack of hours in the day. I’ve always been impressed with the Irish sense of compassion to those who are in need. that said, when I started reading this letter it did sound like one of those good ol’ chain letters to tug on the heart strings, asking for money. Someone with a true axe in hand would’ve called the papers or TV to pick up on the plight of a child whose family was being hit due to the budget cuts. what producer doesn’t like that kind of story?
Very transparent but that doesn’t mean some don’t fall for these scams – it happens all the time and sadly to those gullible ones who have the most to lose.
DUP types really inhabit another planet.When they repeat a nonsense often enough they convince themselves it is true.Today a former DUP councillor came on “talkback” to oppose preportional representation and told us how she herself was a victim of PR in 2001 .She said that she polled 1000 votes but Joe ODonnell of SF only polled 200 and yet beat her for a council seat due to PR. She repeated these figures at least 6 times and William Crawley agreed that this was how PR can throw up strange results.As someone who has studied election results for 4 decades,I remembered that Joe had won that election (a great breakthrough in E Belfast) by polling at least 1100 first preferences.I rang in to say that the DUP woman was talking balls but before my comment was readout ,Niall O’Donnaile tweeted to say that Joehad in fact polled1200 votes.This woman lost her seat but had convinced herself that the crafty fenians had used PR to deprive her of her rightful position.