DEMONISATION, CANONISATION AND DEIFICATION by Donal Kennedy

Those of my vintage who read THE IRISH PRESS in the early 1950s may recall its strip cartoons, “Calling All Cars” featuring American cops in cars in radio communication with each and their base. What a novel and exciting idea at the time!  It also featured “Little Panda” a Wee Bear in the Wood, and an even more Innocent Abroad in a City, and a Con-Man and charming trickster fox, George Goodfellow,.

It also featured a spaceman, years before the Russians put even a dog in space.And the Spaceman had got as far as the Red Planet. But just as the Russians first got dogs and men into space, the hero Spaceman, Buck Rogers, had been beaten to the Red Planet by loads of people, who livedunder the brutal tyranny of a pipe-smoking, mustachioed fellow, the tobacco-spitting image of a living statesman. So far as I can recall the tyrant on  the Red Planet was called Joe.

A few years ago I read about a remaindered novel set in Ireland. Its hero was called Fitzgerald and its villain O Fiaich. At the time the British media vilified Charles Haughey and praised Garret Fitzgerald as if the latter played for TEAM GB. (I believe they were unfair to both men.) Archbishop Tomas O Fiaich was also vilified in the British (and British-influenced Irish) media, whilst every utterance of Bishop Cahal Daly of Down and Connor was quoted and probably relayed through every British Embassy and Consulate abroad.

Though most Irish newspapers in the 1940s were pro-Irish, much of their international news came from Associated Press and Reuters and served Imperialist and Colonialist interests. When Sean MacBride became Minister for External Affairs he decided to rectify matters, the better to inform his fellow citizens. So he set up the IRISH NEWS AGENCY and appointed a brilliant scholar and Irish Civil Servant as its head. The full name of the scholar was Donal Conor Cruise-O’Brien.

Some thirty years later I was told of a meeting held in London featuring Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason, Editor of THE TIMES William Rees-Mogg, Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Papal Nuncio to Britain. The purpose of the meeting was to dissuade the Pope from appointing Tomas O Fiaich to the College of  Cardinals.

My informant was a close neighbour, born in Dublin in 1918 who moved London 10 years later, served as a Sergeant -Armourer in the British Army in the Second World War, whose brother was killed serving with the same army. He spent the rest of his working life in the British Civil Service, and was a very devout, conservative Catholic, active in the Catenians and a veteran of the Catholic Evidence Guild who used speak from a soap-box at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. He enjoyed and approved of the letters I wrote in the Irish Post, but would not have been too supportive of the Connolly Association, publishers of the Irish Democrat where I was beginning to have pieces published.

Last week in a letter in THE IRISH TIMES concerning the campaign to repeal Article 8 of the Irish Constitution, a Cistercian priest attacked the Irish electorate for preferring Haughey , an Irish Barabbas, to the saintly Fitzgerald. I’m surprised he didn’t say the “Divine” Fitzgerald.