‘SCHOLARS, GENTLEMEN AND KEEPING THE SABBATH HOLY’ by Donal Kennedy

I never buy The Sunday Independent, which must have the greatest collection of perverse columnists, all beating the same drum, ever to disgrace a publication. I detest the  Sindo above every other example of evil literature. I was brought up both to enjoy the Sabbath  (no chained swings and roundabouts for us!) and to keep it holy, both impossible after browsing the Sindo‘s pages.

 Thus it was that I was not familiar with the name or fame of John Paul McCarthy who is to become  Foster Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford.

 I saw McCarthy’s name appended to a letter in the Irish Times last year attributing Sinn Fein’s sweeping victory in the 1918 General Election to the intimidation of the electors by that party’s followers. The paper had the grace to publish my letter noting that the Professor had presented no evidence to support his assertion, and that John Redmond’s party  had been found guilty by a tribunal of intimidation and corrupt practices in East Cork, East Kerry and Louth during the two General Elections in 1910. Neither the Professor nor anyone else challenged my comments. And the Professor was not gentleman enough to withdraw his assertion. Only this week did I discover his professional association with the Sindo or dip into the corpus of his work there.

 “CHANGING TIMES ” subtitled “Ireland since 1898 as seen by Edward MacLysaght” was published in 1978. MacLysaght was at various times a novelist, a historian, a Senator, a Chairman of the Irish Manuscripts Commission and a genealogist. He emerges from his book as a genial gentleman and a genuine scholar and I imagine he had no personal enemies. He kept diaries, and though his comments on the “Troubles” of the early 20th century are few, some of them are gems. I’d like to see the Sindo commentators see how they can rough-hew this diamond –

_{“Just one thing occurs to me to mention before I put this diary away: an example of how our claim for self-determination of small nations – championed by Britain in the case of the Czechs  – is misrepresented by politicians and newspapers there. In quoting statistics for last year’s general election they give the total votes cast for and against Sinn Fein only in contested elections, completely ignoring the 25 constituencies where Sinn Fein candidates were returned unopposed, thus presenting an entirely misleading picture.” (28 January 1919)}