Older readers may remember the excitement over the “moving statue” in West Cork in 1985. Faith and gullibility moved some to prayer, some to despair and at least one man to prophesy.
The Prophet was a prominent English broadcaster and journalist who was holidaying in West Cork at the time. West Cork has long been very popular with leaders of opinion, politics,diplomacy, and intelligence in Britain, including James Callaghan, Anthony Jay, Admiral Somerville and Elizabeth Bowen. I’d be interested to know whom the Prophet spoke with,if anyone, whether he consulted a Crystal Ball, or like the American Minister in Dublin during the Second World War David Gray, and the “historian” Peter Hart, he communed with spirits departed from this vale of tears. He reckoned the uptight, ethically conservative rural Catholic South would so at loggerheads with the (presumably) right-on hedonism of Protestant Ulster that partition would last forever.
In 1992 within seven years of the moving statues in West Cork, visiting a pub in the area for relief, my wife was shocked to see a condom machine in the ladies’ toilet. The pub was a few feet from a ruined abbey, knocked about a bit by Cromwell, I believe, and the subject of the melancholy reflections of the poet Sean O Coileain (1754-1817). The poem is called Macnamh an Duine Dhoiliosaigh. or if you prefer Esperanto – La Meditato De La Melankoliulo. I wonder who’ll recall the Pundit/Prophet’s name two centuries after he pops his clogs?
It is today clear that the former nationalist parties in Leinster House and the leading Nationalist one at Stormont are less staunch in their defence of traditional moral principles than
the unenlightened Unionists of Ulster, and, dare I say it? more British in their attitudes.
Anyhow, as I wrote in 1985 –
“THE HUMOURS OF THE TIMES”
“Although it is not generally rated a “fun” paper THE TIMES (of London) unconsciously deserves that designation. Lately it praised Karl Marx,who, if we were to believe it, would have disowned the striking miners and branded Mr Scargill a heretic. This is not its first recorded instance of embracing the great Socialist. Once a sympathetic piece on a veteran republican by its ace reporter Christopher Thomas might have been told in one sentence – ‘I was only a Fenian bomber until I discovered Kapital.’
From time to time the paper features opposition figures who might be of influence under a Labour Government. One such, Peter Kellner, Political Editor of The New Statesman, has been holidaying in the mountains of West Cork, observing the Catholic peasantry, reading the Dublin Sunday Tribune,and from these exertions drawing conclusions and remuneration.Mr Kellner fancies himself a radical and perhaps passes for one in the wine-bars of Fleet Street. He disparages the radical credentials of the Sunday Tribune but hangs the hat through which he argues on one of that paper’s discredited complaints – that the playing of the Angelus Bell on RTE is offensive to Protestants and indicative of Catholic manifestations which must be suppressed if Ireland is to be united.
That nonsense originated with Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien and should have been buried over a decade ago when the Church of Ireland Dean Stack of Clonfert answered him in The Irish Times.The Angelus prayers are found in Scriptures read by Protestants. It would make more sense for Irish Unitarians attack Dr. O’Brien’s old (Protestant) College, Trinity,or
for Mr Michael Foot,an Atheist, to object to the prayers in Parliament. Catholic and Jewish Dubliners swing the New Year in to the Protestant Bells of Christchurch,all Corkonians to the chimes of Protestant Shandon, and Londoners of all descriptions those of Bow Parish Church. In fact Mr Foot has written in The Times pleading with the Established Church to retain the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer.Not for that civilised Englishman the petty breast-beating of Dr O’Brien – at least on matters rooted in the culture of England. Any stick, no matter how bent or rotten, may be used, however, to beat Irish Nationalism or the Catholic Church.
Mr Kellner also cites the Abortion Referendum, mindless of the supportt 9 of the North’s 10 Unionist MPs at Westminster gave to the Corrie Bill which would have curtailed abortion in England, and the absence of any call by them to have Mr Steel’s 1967 Act extended to Northern Ireland. Mr Kellner might be forgiven ignorance of the Irish Constitution, with its preamble echoing an English (Protestant) Leveller manifesto, the influence of the English Tom Paine,and its codification of English democratic practices, and its absence of Monarchy, Lords and Established Church. But the matter of Abortion is so near to his own paper’s heart, and to his own judgement of the question of Ireland, that Mr Kellner might have been expected to have done his homework.
Mr Kellner is not a ‘one-off’ Labour contributor to The Times on Ireland, but a base from which ex-MP Philip Whitehead developed his anti-Republican case.Mr Whitehead wants Irish Catholics and Protestants to make concessions whilst Britain makes none but retains sovereignty.
Alongside such pseudo-radicals The Times is always open to the hereditary standard-bearers of reaction. The funniest of these to surface lately was The Dowager Duchess of Westminster,writinfg from Fermanagh on the ungrateful attitude of the minority and the absence of media coverage of the concessions given them.
She should know. In 1955 her late husband, who had carried a gun for the Empire as a Colonel, contested Fermanagh and Tyrone in the General Election. He was trounced by
a man who had carried a gun against the Empire, then that Empire’s prisoner. The MPs assembled in London, and surrounded by the defeated candidate’s London estates, overruled the majority vote of Fermanagh and Tyrone, and installed the Colonel as its MP. Now that’s a concession to the minority deserving gratitude and renown!
DONAL KENNEDY 1985.
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