“A NEARBY COUNTRY OF WHICH WE KNOW NOTHING” HEADLINE IN THE TIMES OF LONDON 6 JANUARY 2022. “A NEARBY COUNTRY OF WHICH WE KNOW NOTHING” HEADLINE IN THE TIMES OF LONDON 6 JANUARY 2022.
I quote from an article by David Aaronovitch which has a subheading -“A HUNDRED YEARS AFTER THE ANGLO-IRISH TREATY, there’s a casual ignorance among the English about Ireland and its history“
Perhaps it’s “a bit Irish” of me to ask why the British, who are free to read myriads of newspapers and journals produced in Britain, and are inundated with radio and television news and comment can be so ignorant of Ireland and its history.
Is it an impertinence to suggest that British media have always failed in their duty to inform their citizens of the context from which conflict has arisen, not once, but repeatedly,for many centuries?
My BLOG of 3rd January “THE BBC AT 100” examined its current and some former comment on Ireland and revealed the less than liberal inspirationof its founding father, Robert Reith.
Among the 30 Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 is Freedom of Opinion and Information. I agree with that sentiment. But holding an Opinion on a subject about which one knows nothing is a sub-human folly. Men and Women are deemed to be Rational and Moral. Media which fail to respect their public are betraying them. They are, incidentally rejecting the fine English invention of trial by jury which is based on the premise that humans are rational and endeavour to come to verdicts in a moral manner.
In April 2016 I was prompted by a piece by Mr Aaronovitch to write the BLOG – “JOYCE’S MARTELLO TOWER REVISITED (BY THE TIMES) which you may re-read below.
I will comment in more detail on Mr Aaronovitch’s problem with his own compatriots presently.
Donal Kennedy
JOYCE’S MARTELLO TOWER REVISITED – (BY THE TIMES)
Those of us who read the first few pages of Ulysses may remember how Buck Mulligan and Stephen Daedalus played host in the Martello Tower at Sandycove to a visiting Englishman whom they concluded was a Gobshite and, if I recall correctly, a source of beer money.
The Gobshite had formed the view that England had wronged Ireland (in the past) and that “history was to blame.” So he presumed to lecture Daedalus and Mulligan on Irish history.
I’m reminded of this by David Aaronvitch, a columnist with THE TIMES of London, who has made a flying visit to Dublin, stood outside Joyce’s Tower, looked across the Bay to Howth and contemplated history. He seems to believe that Ireland has wronged England and that a misunderstanding of history by the Irish people is to blame.The headline instructs us – “Don’t romanticise the bloodstained past.”
He says – ” The received version of the Easter Rising, as taught at mother’s knees, in comic books and films, is of a brave band of patriots, whose only sin was impetuosity.”
He mentions the Howth Gunrunning of 900 rifles in July 1914 and claims that at the time the British Government was for Irish Home Rule.
He doesn’t refer to the Ulster Volunteers preparing to resist Home Rule nor their landing of many thousands of rifles at Larne in April 1914. Nor the challenge by British Army Officers, backed by the Conservative Party, when in March 1914 they said they’d resign their Commissions rather than challenge the Orangemen.
Nor the editorial comment by The Daily Telegraph at the time – “The Army has killed Home Rule.” The DailyTelegraph’s reading of the situation was precisely that of Lenin..
Nor does Aaronvitch mention the shooting dead of unarmed Dubliners by the British Army on the day therifles were landed at Howth.
God help the man’s ignorance, but he says that Irish children had comics extolling republican heroes and films doing the same. The comics I saw in Ireland were virtually all English or American.
The films in our cinemas were British and American. The newsreels we saw were British Pathe and other British ones showing, for instance, their Queen opening a flower show. There was no Irish film industry nor an Irish TV station until the last days of December 1961. And for many years Radio Eireann didn’t come on the air until 5.00 PM.
As for what I heard at my mother’s knee. Her younger brother went out to loot sweets in Easter Week. His recently widowed mother was sending him back to return them when she took up his gigantic packet and felt the weight. It had been in the shop window empty and merely for show. The poor child was unlucky in his choices. He later joined the British Army and was killed at Singapore in February 1942 when I was 6 weeks old.
I think that the Dubliner, William Howard Russell, who reported from the Crimea for THE TIMES did a wonderful job.
But, when THE TIMES sent Aaronovitch to report from Dublin somebody clearly blundered.
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