THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY – Part 1 By Donal Kennedy
From THE SUNDAY TIMES Culture Section 4 JUNE 2023:-
“Great Coastal Railway Journeys (BBC 2, 3.30 pm Monday 5 June
Michael Portillo journeys to Derry/Londonderry and makes an admission. At 18, on an exchange trip, he struggled to explain Bloody to US peers.’I would have done better , as David Cameron did as Prime Minister in 2010, simply to have hung my head and apologised for Britain’ “
Portillo, since leaving politics has revealed himself as a civilised human being. But when Defence Secretary under John Major (a civilised Tory far less brilliant than himself he could wow his party
Conference with the slogan “Who Dares Wins” the SAS Motto.
That was game play which won the support of Norman Tebbit, the recipient of perhaps the most elegant and politely phrased put down in the House of Commons in the past fifty years:-
“The honourable member has been a Member of the House for quite a long time now.
It is really time for him to try to let the nicer side of his nature to emerge.
It is not necessary that every time he rises he should give his famous imitation of a
semi-house-trained polecat.”
The 18 year old Portillo can be forgiven his poor understanding of the Bloody Sunday murders.
But not the 55 year old Conor Cruise O’Brien and his wife Maire Mac an tSaoi, for the game that
they played at the time. You could scour every land under Heaven to meet more learned and experienced and worldy- wise persons than they were, without finding any.
They published a Concise History of Ireland (from the earliest times) in 1972. In the book they
described the targets of British Musketry and Marksmanship in Derry on Bloody Sunday as rioters.
Thus they aligned themselves knowingly with liars and murderers. O’Brien was a nephew of Francis
Sheehy Skeffington, Ireland’s most prominent ppacifist and feminist, murdered on Easter Tuesday
1916 by an irregularly cobbled together firing squad and buried in Portobello Barracks, Dublin, by a British Captain who was promoted during that week. The Captain an Anglo-Irish Grandee, was evacuated to Canada by the British Government. Maire Mac an tSaoi, was the daughter of a Fianna
Fail Minister, who had ben sentenced to death as an Insurgent in 1916.
O’Brien became a Cabinet Minister in 1973 under Liam Cosgrave and continued in British service,
being rewarded on his ejection by the electorate by an appointment as Editor in Chief of London’s
Observer by Lord David Astor, believed by some to have been an MI6 spook.
To be continued.
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