BLOTS, COPYBOOKS AND A WORLD OF SPIN – by Donal Kennedy

In 1972  Conor Cruise O’Brien and his wife Maire Mac an tSaoi, two formidable scholars and diplomatists had their jointly prepared CONCISE HISTORY OF IRELAND published.

It was a very short book covering our country’s history from ancient times. For some years I had read much of the Cruiser’s work. I’m no scholar but had admired what he had written, and I still admire quite a lot of it.

But he and his spouse blotted their copybook claiming that British troops in Derry had on Sunday 30th January 1972 fired on “Rioters” in Derry. They didn’t go so far as to describe the place as “Londonderry.” But they knowingly published a damnable lie which they never retracted and I hope they are roasting for it.

The Cruiser became a Cabinet Minister (in Dublin!) the following year and did a lot of mischief which still endures.

Ten years later, on an evening in February 1982  I watched TV as the Editor of THE TIMES, Harold Evans, was proclaimed “EDITOR OF THE,YEAR” by fellow Editors, including the Editor in Chief of THE OBSERVER, Conor Cruise O’Brien. In the 1950s, as a schoolboy, I had been a fellow traveller with “the Cruiser” on the Hill of Howth tram. He always had his head stuck in a book, and I didn’t know who he was. 

Come to think of it I doubt if the Cruiser knew who I was.

There were a lot of pupils from various schools, Catholic, Protestant and other, on that tram. I and a few others were off to Christian Brother Schools. For all his wide and deep knowledge of Ireland and the wider world the Cruiser knew Sweet Fanny Adams about the Brothers. The very worst men of that order treated the boys in their care, either for small fees or free, gratis and for nothing, as if they were the sons of England’s richest men paying tens of thousands of pounds for their sons to endure such abuse. 

The majority of the Brothers were conscientious and good men and the worst that they did in Ireland was to turn honest barefoot peasants and city urchins into an ungrateful middle class.

The Cruiser claimed that the Christian Brothers  were rip-roaring Fenians whereas they were Redmondite  Home Rulers. And Roy Foster, who hasn’t got a fraction of the Cruiser’s learning has, copied his nonsense on the  Brothers.

Anyhow back to February 1982.

The very morning of the day Harold Evans was proclaimed Editor of The Year, his paper, THE TIMES had been  compelled by Britain’s PRESS COUNCIL, to publish that COUNCIL’S adjudication on the paper’s front-page commentary on the funeral of BOBBY SANDS the previous May.

The paper’s Correspondent in Ireland claimed that Sands’ comrades had killed over 2,000 Protestants in the years since 1969.

As a very high proportion of 2,000 odd killed in the conflict were Catholic and  a high proportion of the killers were anti-Irish or anti-Catholic, and certainly anti-republican, the story did not reflect well on the integrity of THE TIMES.

I had asked THE TIMES for a retraction of its false story and received a lying letter from its managing Editor,an ex-Baliol grandee who claimed his correspondent had confirmed his story from several sources, So I  lodged a complaint with the Press Council.

 A reader in Paris did the same, independently. The Press Council was every bit as dishonest as THE TIMES.

I got help from Breandan MacLua, Editor of THE IRISH POST in London, and he passed on to me statistics compiled by Father Raymond Murray in Armagh  and Father Denis Faul in Dungannon.

The Press Council tried to wear me down by raising all sorts of nonsensical objections to my straightforward case. So I was writing for nine long months

The Press Council  gave THE TIMES a slap on the wrist. Not so loud that the BBC nor the GUARDIAN nor the CRUISER’s OBSEVER heard it or reported it.

I had, in vain,sought support i from the “National” papers in Ireland. I passed the Council Adjudication to the Catholic Diocesan Press Office in Dublin and the Communist Morning Star in London. THE IRISH TIMES published the adjudication which had been passed to them by the Diocesan Ofiice.

A few months later, all on the one morning , three London papers published VERBATIM     the lies for which THE TIMES had been rebuked.

The papers, THE DAILY EXPRESS and its stablemate THE DAILY STAR, and THE DAILY MAIL were smearing Ken Livingtone, Chair of the Greater London Council, which had met with members of Sinn Fein and other Irish organisations and iindividuals.

An elderly gentleman in Birmingham complained to the PRESS COUNCIL about the DAILY EXPRESS and THE DAILY STAR.

The Council took another 9 months to condemn those papers though it could have been done in nine minutes.

I took the DAILY MAIL to the Press Council but got no satisfaction whatever.

The lie had gone out under the name of Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Sir Humphrey Atkins

The Council had arranged for a buried correction in the paper which made no mention to Her Majesty’s Liar.

Sufficient numbers of the public recognised the toothlessness, and some perhaps, the truthlessness, of the Press Council.

So it changed its name to the PRESS COMPLAINTS COMMISSION.

Sir Humphrey Atkins disappeared. from the Northern Ireland Office 

He was made a Peer. And was re-named Lord Colnbrook.

And was appointed Chairman of THE PRESS COMPLAINTS COMMISSION.

I started this piece on Conor Cruise O’Brien and his spouse and their reaction to Bloody Sunday.

In June 2010 British Prime Minister David Cameron apologised to the people of Derry for the murders carried out by  British soldiers there on Bloody Sunday 38 years before. Conor Cruise O’Brien and Maire Mac an tSaoi’s Bloody Lie was officially disowned by the British  Prime Minister.