The Pseudonymous Giordano Bruno takes issue with my description of some paid “Analysts” as “whores in their hearts.” I’d thought the name meant Gordon Brown, but it seems it was the name of an Italian, who, less prudent than my cow’rin, tim’rous critic, was burned at the stake in ( more enlightened?) times gone by.
When welcoming Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 THE IRISH TIMES admitted he was a rough diamond, but invoked in his defence the blackguard aphorism that one cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs. Yesterday (14 May 2017) in a SUNDAY TIMES review of a biography of Maxwell Knight, “MI5’s Greatest Spymaster, ” Max Hastings observed that “in the decades following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the propertied classes were so terrified of communists that until the last gasp before the Second World War many were less dismayed by fascists than they might have been. ” Hastings is no leftist fellow-traveller, nor woolly liberal and his is an understatement. Brown-nosing the Brownshirts and Blackshirts united THE IRISH TIMES, THE DAILY MAIL and THE TIMES of London. And it must not be forgotten that in Dáil Éireann, a future Taoiseach in 1934 praised the Blackshirts and “Hitler Shirts” and the Blueshirt Hitler-wannabes who sought the overthrow of democracy in the Free State.
The IRISH TIMES today is no more dedicated to democracy than it was in 1933 and I am happy to describe some of its paid commentators as “whores in their hearts.” Alas, I have not coined the term. My father heard it used once and found it colourful. It would be a sin to let it be forgotten today when it is particularly appropriate.
Eamonn McDermott – “Will ye ever catch yourself on?” today, May 15 quotes a radio phone in where a woman described her unease because, in hospital she encountered a nurse with an Irish name, and the presenter didn’t challenge her. An aunt and a sister of mine, with Irish names, worked as Doctors in the NHS in England for many years without frightening the patients, but in Ireland there are Ubermenschen who regard anything and anybody identifying themselves as Irish with disdain if not trepidation.
A prime example is Gemma Hussey, whose memoir, “AT THE CUTTING EDGE” recalled her horror when, appointed as Minister For Education in Dublin, met with her Department’s Senior Civil Servants, all of whom had “impenetrable Irish names.” The horror! the horror!
Hussey was very impressed that her husband’s cousin was Editor of “COSMOPOLITAN” a publication for hick chicks posing as slick, which I would catalogue as a Slag Mag. I heard its founder, Helen Gurley Brown, author of “SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL” interviewed on the BBC. She was the essence of solipsism, devoid of humour and so up her own orifices that I’m not surprised she was was single. Poor Donald Trump would be a shrinking violet, or a detumescent crocus, beside her.
But, back to La Hussey. The joke of it is that she had run a language school in Dublin. Irish may have been foreign to her, but her use of the Second Official La gauge could be hilarious. On the death of the American Feminist Bette Friedan, she recalled how Friedan had addressed hundreds of women in Dublin. “She had us all in the palm of her hand – it was A SEMINAL moment.” It seems here that there were some ballsy ladies there – or somebody was talking Ballocks.
Arlene and the Orange Order are probably more amenable to the Irish Language than the Free State bourgeoisie, including the Labour Aristocrats. Not a sweet focal to be seen on the Stáitse at Waterford this year. Not surprising when you consider that,a few years ago they adopted the Blairite red rose, thus presenting themselves as a colonial sub-section of the British Party.. And considering that Ruairí Quinn, in an extraordinary act of self-abasement, attended the funeral of the most viciosly anti-labour and anti-Irish prime minister of the twentieth century.