Readers may have noticed that I have revealed foibles and obsessions and maybe a bias or two in my contributions but I like to think that I have highlighted neglected corners of history or interpreted them in an interesting way. I don’t claim infallibility, but I do attempt to base my arguments on evidence which can be checked.
But I do find that many well paid commentators, when their assertions at challenged Duck like Quacks. They may have their posteriors in Editorial or University Chairs.or even have paid Solicitors to describe them as “distinguished historians,” but when they Duck like a Quack, it is not unreasonable to dismiss them as Quacks.
Perhaps the greatest repository of Quacks is the Irish Times. Or t may be The Irish Independent. Or the History Faculty of one of “Our” “Irish” Universities.
With all the pomposity of the American Civil War General who sent despatches to President Lincoln headed “From Headquarters in the Saddle” the IRISH TIMES heads its daily Pontifiations – “The Irish Times View On..”.Lincoln told an aide to tell the General that he had his headquarters where his hindquarters should be.
It’s a pity THE IRISH TIMES doesn’t reprint its February 1933 View on the impending Irish General Election. Fianna Fail had been in office a year, with Labour support and was seeking a renewed mandate. The Irish Times View was that its return to power would be a disaster. The electorate thought otherwise and returned Fianna Fail to power in every election until 1948 and with two intermissions , (1948-51 and 1954-1957) in every election until 1973. The Irish Times view was shared by few of the “mere Irish” who never had any time for it.
In March 1933 the Irish Times view of Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in Germany was one of enthusiastic approval, particularly because of his treatment of the Left. It endorsed his savagery, using the thugs’ slogan that you can’t may an omelette without breaking eggs. Hitler stood for no further elections and his public life was terminated twenty eight years before that of the democrat de Valera.
In February 1943 de Valera, and some of his Cabinet colleagues spent a couple of days listening to a discourse by one of the world’s leading scientists whom Dev had enticed to join the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. I’ve forgotten the man’s name but he had and continues to have a reputation as high as that of Einstein. The setting up of the Institute was Dev’s initiative though readers of fashionable pundits will tell you that Dev’s head was in the sands. In fact Dev had arranged for the man, his wife and his lover to get visas and the menage a trois was fruitful. So much for Dev’s reputation as a Puritan, probably as reflected in Paul Durcan’s poem “Making Love Outside Aras An Uachtarain.” That poem tells us nothing about Dev, but a lot about Durcan. It might be more suitably titled – “Durcan Off In The Park After Dark”,
In March 1943 on St Patrick’s Day Eamon de Valera made an enlightened. humane and Christian broadcast from Dublin, the capital of a sovereign Irish State which he and its citizens had established and saved from the madness of the World War, It was the 50th Anniversary of founding of the Gaelic League which created a Cultural Revolution which was a major factor in the State’s establishment. And the State’s President, though not a political revolutionary, was a co-Founder of the League, He was a Church of Ireland (Protestant) Scholar and son o a Clergyman.
Dev’s 1943 speech (like much of his long and distinguished career) is routinely misrepresented and sneered at by THE IRISH TIMES and the bird-brained pygmies its views.
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