In my last BLOG I transcribed a letter of mine published in a local paper in Enfield, London in December 1982 concerning the use of plastic bullets by the British army in Ireland, and the local (Enfield) manufacture of multi-shot plastic-bullet guns which threatened even further death and injury under the pretext of peace-keeping. I gave names, ages and genders of some of those deliberately killed who had posed no threat to British soldiers, nor their neigbours nor to property.
I also quoted an opinion piece in THE SUNDAY TIMES in June 1981 by Alberic Stacpoole a former Paratroop Officer with combat experience in Korea, a distinguished “anti-terrorist” record during the “Emergency” in 1950s Cyprus,a participant in the Anglo-French-Israeli aggression on Egypt 1956, subsequently a Priest and Monk at Ampleforth College and a tutor at Oxford University who was a mentor of Captain Robert Nairac of the SAS.
Father Stacpoole’s article was one of many of its kind in the British media following the election of Bobby Sands as an MP and his death on hunger strike in May 1981. THE TIMES of London threw caution to the winds and in its front page coverage of Sands’ funeral attributed all the killings associated with the Troubles since 1969 to Republicans, who it accused of killing 2,000 Protestants. At the time I contacted THE TIMES and requested it correct its story, but it stuck to it even when I reported it to THE PRESS COUNCIL Many British and Unionists put out the same untruth at the time. The PRESS COUNCIL stalled and I wrote to it about twice a week for some months. Finally, in February 1982 the Council upheld my complaint and censured THE TIMES.
But the lying continued and within months of that Press Council judgement, three newspapers, in a coordinated attack on Ken Livingstone, all in one morning repeated the lie condemned by the PRESS COUNCIL. They were THE DAILY EXPRESS, its stablemate the DAILY STAR.and THE DAILY MAIL.
An elderly gentleman in Birmingham .D. F. Conlan, aware of the PRESS COUNCIL’S recent condemnation of THE TIMES, complained the DAILY EXPRESS and THE DAILY STAR to THE PRESS COUNCIL, which dawdled for another nine months before upholding his complaint.
The following letter, headlined PROPAGANDA TRADITIONS was published in THE IRISH POST (London) then edited by Breandan Mac Lua, its splendid Editor –
“A recent television programme on war propaganda revealed that Dr. Goebbels modelled his approach on British World War 1 propaganda. Certainly, my late father disbelieved the first revelations of Auschwitz and Belsen because he remembered British government lying regarding fictitious German ‘corpse factories’ during World War 1 and the consistent lying of British ministers during the ‘Tan War’.
Not even Dr Goebbels dared to pretend that only his people or their allies died during World War II. British government sources and the British media – THE TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS, DAILY STAR and DAILY MAIL out-Goebbelsed Goebbels when they claimed, in effect, that the IRA peepetrated all the killings in the conflict in Northern Ireland and that Ulster Protestants were the only victims. Ian Paisley and his friends also spread this lie in America – a strange perversion of ‘the Protestantnethic’.
D.F.Conlan is to be congratulated on his successful and dogged extraction of the truth from the PRESS COUNCIL. That body could, of course, have delivered its condemnation of THE DAILY EXPRESS and THE DAILY STAR in less than nine months. Its condemnation of The Sun and The Daily Star for publication of photographs of a pregnant PrincessnDiana in a bikini was instantaneous.
It may be asked why, when Ireland has a government in Dublin and an Embassy in London, it should be necessary for private citizens here to combat British government-inspired lying propaganda in the media. It was not always so. Much of the meagre revenue of the FIrst and the Second Dail Eireann was devoted to nailing British Government and press lies.Take, for instance, the report of the Minister for Publicity on 26 April 1922, regarding Belfast.-
‘The situation there has been that a systematic pogrom had been directed against the Nationalist inhabitants, many of whom were murdered and their houses burnt and looted. The Belfast press represented these occurrences as Sinn Fein outrages. These misrepresentations were also cabled abroad. To meet this situation, we issued daily reports from Belfast.Particular care has been taken that these reports should be reliable……Nevertheless we have been largely successful in bringing much of the truth of Belfast to the world.’
Ireland’s Minister of Publicity in April 1922 was Desmond FitzGerald, father of today’s Taoiseach.
No Irish minister can today claim that his government has been largely successful in bringing the truth of Belfast to the world and exposing the distortion of anti-Irish agencies.
Donal Kennedy
London”
(1983)
I mentioned the lying DAILY MAIL, where the lie went out over the name of Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Humphrey Atkins, cited by Father Stacpoole as a reliable authority. I complained to the PRESS COUNCIL about his piece, which covered nearly two pages of the paper. THE PRESS COUNCIL declined to censure it but published a one or two sentence correction in an obscure part of the paper. Shortly afterwards the PRESS COUNCIL was renamed THE PRESS COMPLAINTS COMMISSION. Atkins got a Peerage, under a new name and was also made a Commisisoner on the new body. A well-paid sinecure.
That splendid journalist Breandan MacLua passed away in 2009 and I believe that D.F. Conlan is no longer with us. It might be said that they’ve continued on SLI NA FIRINNE – the high road they always travelled.
Alberic Stacpoole died in 2012 and Humphrey Atkins some years earlier probably continuing on their own twisted paths..
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