From THE IRISH TIMES OCT 2 2014
( Though Jude and I were the unacquainted with each other, he cited this letter
of mine, with approvaI, in his BLOG “Electorai Personation and
Intimidation” on the day of its appearance in The Irish Times)
“Professor John P McCarthy (Sept 30th) would have us believe that the phenomenon
of 25 constituencies returning Sinn Fein candidates unopposed in 1918 ‘was in
no small part the consequence of intimidation.’ He provides not a scintilla of
evidence to support his assertion.
Prof McCarthy would have us believe that a party, thousands of whose supporters
had faced German or Turkish guns on land and sea for four years, could be
intimidated by a republican movement which was virtually unarmed and whose best-known
candidates were in British jails.
No party or candidate challenged Sinn Fein’s victories in the constituencies it
won, nor in the other constituencies it
contested..
Sinn Fein’s conduct in 1918, and subsequent elections, compares favourably with
that of the Irish Party when led by John Redmond.
In two general elections in 1910, the winning Redmondite candidates were
disqualified as a consequence of intimiidation
and fraud on the part of their agents or supporters in East Cork, Easst Kerry
and Louth.
Donal Kennedy
LONDON”
I’m unaware of any retraction of the Professor’s preposterous assertion, nor an
apology for giving his readers a bum steer. I believe that at the time of his
letter he occupied a Chair in Fordham University in the USA which, I believe,
is
a Jesuit institution. Seamus Murphy, SJ, who maintains that Daniel
O’Connell (who killed John D’Esterre with a pistol-shot in 18150 “never shot
a man” also held a teaching post in another American Jesuit seat of
learning.
The esteemed IRISH TIMES Authority, Stephen Collins, who has penned porkies too numerous to catalogue is an advisor to the Irish Jesuit Periodical “STUDIES.” It seems that the ghost of the scoundrel, TITUS OATES, who posed as a Jesuit, takes frequent breaks from his current quarters to dictate copy to living commentators and so risks sabotaging their reputations. Diabolical .
Donal.
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.I wrote the following piece in February 2010 but don’t think it was published anywhere. It’s quite possible I didn’t submit
it for publishing. But it might be of interest to dissenting readers of the Spectator and other raving right rightwing rags.
“An English friend of mine once told me, with a straight face, that THE DAILY TELEGRAPH was the house journal for
British Intelligence.
I’m sure he was joking. For I’ve seen nothing to suggest it.
I can remember when, during the Malvinas war in 1982 one of its military correspondents, a Brigadier or Major General, gave
an eye-witness account of Gurkhas in action, praising their “Anglo-Saxon courage.”
And one of their resident correspondents, I think it was “Peter Simple”, reflecting on the fact that TV coverage of the
US-Vietnamese war had turned US public opinion against it. He remarked that North Vietnamese hadn’t beamed the
war into Vietnamese parlours. Presumably he thought the Vietnamese hadn’t noticed the war when the Americans dropped
more bombs on them than all combatants had used during World War II.
The Telegraph’s greatest wheeze is a coat-trailing exercise – a competition for anti-Irish “jokes” launched by a young
man, whio, compared to the correspondents quoted, is a latter-day Renaissance Man, a Polymath and all-round Genius.
His name is Douglas Murray.
I first noticed Douglas Murray on the BBC’s “Question Time.” His face was frozen in a permanent sneer and he spewed contempt over audience and fellow-panellists alike. Perhaps he was advised to loosen up, for the next time I saw him he had dispensed with his tie, but not his sneer, as he patronised panellists more than twice his age, with more than a hundred times his accomplishments.
I note from Wikipedia that Murray is the author of “Neo-Conservatism, Why We Need It” (2009) and that he has advocated NATO’s pre-emptive nuclear bombing “in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction”. He seems to have more American than British admirers, and they all appear to be of The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party tendency there, now pinning their hopes on Sarah Palin.
Though not as pretty as Sarah Palin, Murray is more expensively educated and had the advantage of being educated at
Eton College and Oxford University. For all his Renaissance Man brilliance he achieved only a modest Lower Second Class Degree.Perhaps because he was competing for the Charles Douglas Home Memorial Prize for Rightwing Journalists, which he won.
During Charles Douglas Home’s editorship of THE TIMES, its editorials showed an even poorer grasp of reality than usual, and a near total absence of reasoning, perhaps the result of illness or medication of a dying man. He had the decency, though to publish a letter of mine demolishing an editorial .
Mr Murray is Director of the “Centre for Social Cohesion” which appears to be his own creation. In pursuit of such cohesion
he appears to incite riots. He has the self-love of a Narcissus, which must console him, for I can’t imagine anyone else loving
him.
He seeks confrontation with mirror-image extremists, rather than rational discussion. He accuses libraries in Britain of encouraging Islamic extremism and I rather think he would approve of book-burning, if not quite burning libraries down, as a pre-emptive exercise.”
Donal Kennedy
18 February 2010.
See also my BLOG Scoop of 2 July 2017 concerning THE HENRY JACKSON SOCIETY founded by Douglas Murray. I described Murray asm”a protégé of that insufferable tweerp, Michael Gove,
who is also a Director of the Henry Jackson Society – an influential and dangerous society..
I think that’s enough Old Rope to chew on at one sitting.
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