Titus Oates was an 18th Century Perjurer who waxed fat by sending innocent men to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn for a non-existent Popish Plot. His most distinguished victim was Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, whose martyrdom was recognised by Rome nearly three centuries later when he was declared a saint. A suspicious mind might think that Oates, or similar operators in the British interest, had friends in to veto the canonisation of the Irishman.
Oates posed as a Jesuit, and some appalling Irish characters such as the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, Sir Michal O’Dwyer (1864- 1940) ,and the forger and perjurer Richard Pigott (1835-1889) had Jesuit links. Whilst there are no statues of either, even in today’s Dublin, a statue of Udham Singh, who shot O’Dwyer dead, was unveiled in Amritsar in 1940.
The longest-established, permanent, anti-national journal in Dublin has a long-standing political editor, Stephen Collins who is on the Board of “STUDIES”, which is described today as “An Irish Quarterly Review” founded by the Jesuits in 1912 and understood by the few people who had heard of it as a Jesuit publication for intellectuals.
But an on-line check suggests that if the Jesuits are centrally involved they are not boasting about it.
Now those who have read my recent BLOG “IRISH REPUBLICANS AND THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY” will appreciate that for 230 years from the days of the United Irishmen, Republicans have been in the van of the struggle to abolish slavery, racism, bigotry, in all their manifestations, and have shed their blood from Fredericksburg to the Ebro, and even by the Bann, the Lagan, the Shannon and the Liffey itself in that struggle.
In these circumstances what is one to make of Stephen Collins’s June 26 IRISH TIMES piece “Why Daniel O’Connell is truly a hero for our times”?
“His hold on the popular imagination in this country has faded over the past century, as his commitment to non-violent politics was replaced by official reverence for the cult of blood sacrifice.”
My personal take is, that is as malevolent as the work of Titus Oates, as false as the forgeries of Richard Pigott, and as ignorant and stupid a piece as I’ve ever seen or heard. Abraham Lincoln, as a WAR MEASURE, decreed the emancipation of slaves in those states that were in rebellion against the Union. Slavery in those States that remained in the Union was not abolished. Lincoln was not an abolitionist. Nor had he the Constitutional authority to abolish slavery by decree for States not in rebellion. The abolition of slavery was not the product of editorials (not even in THE IRISH TIMES) but the blood sacrifice of Union soldiers, including those in the Irish Brigade and other Irish Units.
I would like to think that Stephen Collins could be as ashamed of himself as Richard Pigott was when exposed, but would hope he doesn’t follow through with attempting Pigott’s final solution.
Stream of consciousness demands I tell you the story of Noel Coward’s response, when a lady on a cruise ship lamented how her boring husband had blown his brains out –
“He must’ve been a fff.frightfully good shot!
But Stephen Collins is not the only candidate for a pew in the TITUS OATES CHAPEL.There are others.
In a snide, corner-boy attack on the 1916 Insurgents, one Seamus Murphy SJ invoked Daniel O’Connell to attack Patrick Pearse. O’Connell, declared Murphy, never shot anyone. In fact O’Connell publicly shot a challenger dead in a duel in 1815. As a Barrister in Ireland at the time he would not be considered a gentleman if he did not rise to the challenge, O’Connell was defending his honour, and his ability to advance his cause and earn his living. It seems to me that Seamus Murphy was neither descended from gentlemen, nor had advanced much as a scholar to utter such a schoolboy howler, nor indulge in such corner-boy mud slinging. Besides, later in 1815, O’Connell was on his way to Ostend to meet a challenge from Robert Peel, when he was arrested,
And though Pearse was shot dead by a British firing squad, Father Murphy would appear to be the first person ever to have charged him with shooting anybody.
Even Fintan O’Toole, who appears to have no Jesuit connections, has been known to invoke Daniel O’Connell, whom he appeared to believe to have been airbrushed out of Irish History. Apparently O’Connell had stood up to the Catholic bishops in 1812 when they were so cowed that they would have allowed the British Government veto appointments to their bench. Apparently that put O’Connell in an anti-clerical (rather than an anti-British Govt?) chamber of virtue. But O’Connell was such a devout Catholic that he died on a pilgrimage to Rome. By his wishes his heart was removed from his body in Genoa, and buried in Rome. O’Toole’s tale of the air-brushing of O’Connell’s memory out of Irish history prompted a letter from me, that a new bridge then being built over the Liffey should be dedicated to “the Liberator’s” memory.My letter was spiked by THE ANTI-NATIONAL JOURNAL.
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