As a veteran newspaper reader ( and listener to the wireless since birth) I have failed to discern either a sense of humour or a sense of honour, in, amongst others, Fintan O’Toole, Father Seamus Murphy SJ, Stephen Collins, Kevin Myers and Fergal Keane, OBE, and the late Gay Byrne. I am familiar with later media also.
I’m not infallible. There was a time, when Conor Cruise O’Brien sued the Daily (or Sunday) Telegraph
for libel. In THE NEW STATESMAN in 1963 O’Brien exposed the supposedly independent magazine
Encounter as a CIA funded puppet. And O’Brien suffered for his opposition to the American war on
Vietnam when kicked by a New York Cop. O’Brien (a fellow-traveller of mine on the Hill of Howth Tram in the 1950s) was long my hero. Today I would salute the kicking cop as New York’s Finest).
For, in 1972 the Cruiser and his wife Maire Mac an tSaoi blotted their copybook, a a learned Concise
History of Ireland from ancient times, by stating that the non-violent demonstrators cold-bloodedly murdered in Derry by the British Army on Bloody Sunday that year were rioters.
So not only was the Cruiser in the CIA camp then, but served as a British agent, before joining an
Irish Cabinet and doing Britain’s dirty work while paid by the Irish taxpayer.
As I long failed to see fault in the Cruiser, perhaps I have failed to see virtue in those named in my first paragraph.
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