The following letter of mine was published in THE IRISH POST (London) in April 1982 when the BBC invited the then Taoiseach to give its annual Dimbleby Lecture. Thirty-five years on readers may judge the progress made or not made since.
It was headed “GARRET TO SHAME THE DEVIL ON BBC?”
“WHEN ARTHUR GRIFFITH FOUNDED SINN FEIN, one of his aims was the breaching of “the paper wall” Britain had placed around Ireland. When Britain’s General Kitson considered counter-insurgency, he advocated blocking holes in the paper wall. The British media could be expected to do their duty, but psychological operations would be mounted against opponents. The hooding and disorientating techniques used on prisoners could be complemented by the disorientating of former adversaries.
So far, Kitson’s techniques have worked. When so mild a domestic dissident as Professor E.P.Thompson could be “disinvited” from giving the 1981 Dimbleby Lecture because of his reasonable opposition to British nuclear policies, it should be no surprise that Attllee’s (1949) Cabinet minutes,* confirming beyond doubt that Britain’s interest in Ireland is virtually totally strategic, should be subject to no scrutiny in the British press.
(The official release of these documents, under the 30-year confidentiality rule, seems to have gone unnoticed, even by the anti-militarist E.P. Thompson.)
As reported by your newspape,r the “Open Door” television slot was slammed in the faces of a group seeking free speech on Ireland and held ajar for play-actors whose message is that the plight of the people of Turf Lodge and Ballymurphy does not arise from British rule. THE TIMES can for two years paint a false picture of events in Ireland whilst THE OBSERVER plagiarises the toilet walls of Sandy Row for its editorials.
THE GUARDIAN can offer the fatuous suggestion that the drop in the Irish Labour Party’s support may be due to its parting with Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien! And the papers which have lesser penetration have less to boast about. But all this will hardly surprise an informed Irishman.
THE SURPRISING SUCCESS OF KITSON’S METHODS have been with key individuals and institutions in Nationalist Ireland. Jack Lynch could describe the nationalist majority in Derry as “a minority” and THE SUNDAY PRESS has published a similar inversion of proportions for Fermanagh and Tyrone. THE IRISH PRESS Northern correspondent could predict 12,000 votes for Bobby Sands who topped 29,000 votes, and a defeat for Owen Carron, who topped 30,000 votes.
Fresh from years in Belfast, the London Editor of THE IRISH TIMES could blow-up the figures of Birmingham bomb fatalities by 50% to equal the 30 killed in Dublin and Monaghan by Loyalists and broadcast this nonsense on London Weekend Television as well as publish it in his newspaper.
To top it all, an article on Southern Protestants in THE IRISH PRESS located most of them in Donegal. If these are not examples of disorientation, I’m a Chinaman.
THE BBC’S INVITATION TO GARRET FITZGERALD to give this year’s Dimbleby Lecture must be seen in this context. Professor E.P. Thompson, a genuine English patriot of the best type, is persona non grata. How then can a man whose father, Desmond Fitzgerald, was director of Sinn Fein and IRA propaganda, and whose mother wrote to Bernard Shaw that she was teaching her children to curse the English in Gaelic, be a suitable performer?
Does the BBC not know that last spring in “The Crane Bag”, Dr Fitzgerald praised the Irish Constitution as an essentially secular, liberal and enlightened document?** Could it be that the BBC is unaware that Fitzgerald’s party has long traded on the names of Griffith, already referred to, and Michael Collins, the most forthright of revolutionaries, who took the Treaty as a a stepping-stone to a United and independent Ireland?
Griffith’s grave is marked by a broken pillar, symbolic of the unfinished business of the Irish independence movement.And those who would borrow his mantle have a duty to continue with that job. Can it be that, in picking Dr. Fitzgerald, the BBC has misjudged the man, and the days of distortion, of the Beal Bocht and the Beal na Bla-Blah are over, and the time to shame the devil has arrived.
Donal Kennedy
London
April 1982.
*See BLOG “AIRSTRIP ” March 1st 2017.
** As indeed it was in 1938 and 1982!!
As relevant today as then.