Once upon a time Albert Einstein lectured at Princeton University.
And Eamon de Valera led a rational, ethical government who bound up a nation’s wounds, saw off the threat of local Fascists, saved his country from world war, and kept faith with the Covenant of the League of Nations when most of its members ratted, For instance, the United Kingdom, which made Mussolini pay for the Rape of Abyssinia – by filling the coffers of the Suez Canal Company for passage of the rapists and war material.
From Sublime to Ridiculous:
These days Fintan O’Toole lectures at Princeton University and is acclaimed as a genius. And Simon Harris, Minister for Education intends that Primary Schools impose a Gradgrind regime of facts on children to the exclusion of the humanities which include ethical, philosophical and religious studies.
O’Toole and Harris ought to be at loggerheads, for the former lives in a fantasy land of the theatre where anything goes. He has a thing about the prosecution of the producers of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo in Dublin before he was born. He claims. wrongly that a condom was dropped on the stage floor. What a clanger for a man of letters! If you’ll pardon my French, the guy is a poseur whose work contains a surfeit of faux pas.
O’Toole failed to mention that the Prosecution was dismissed by a District Justice . Apparently O’Toole does not know, or deliberately fails to tell his readers or students, that at the time Ireland was more liberal in many ways than England.
From the days of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which included Shakespeare, to late 1968, no play could be publicly staged in England without its script being first submitted and approved by the Lord Chamberlain.
The earliest fruit of that relaxation in London was the staging of the Musical “HAIR” in London, where the male and female cast danced stark naked.
I attended it with a party of young ladies doing a Postgraduate Teaching Diploma Course at London University, and lodging in a Convent Hall of Residence in Cavendish Square, One of the ladies was a Malayan nun keen on pop music. And I gather the show was a revelation to nearly all of them.
I still retain two souvenirs of it.
One is the Theatre Programe.
The other?
Reader, I married her.
I’ve been talking to various of my contemporaries brought up in the 26 Counties. And none of them, whatever their family circumstances, recognise the pictures sketched for us by Fintan O’Toole and the Irish Times.
When thespians such as John Gielgud were harassed by Scotland Yard, the London-born gays Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards were unbothered by the Gardai and in fact were part of the Irish National Establishment and had their theatre subsidised by the State when Charles Haughey was Finance Minister.
Whether attending an International at Lansdowne Road or an All-Ireland at Croke Park I can remember supporters of opposing teams mingling together in friendship. When visiting Wicklow and Wexford in the 1940 and 1950s when my father was a an Inspector with the Land Commission, I remember laughter and friendship.
I met then colleagues of his who had fought in the First World War and men who had been on opposite sides in the Civil War. Later I worked in Dublin with men, much younger than I am now, veterans of 1916, the “Tan” and Civil War.
The dystopian Ireland portrayed by Fintan O’Toole is a distortion as is that of Fergal Keane who holds an OBE.
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