In my blog – “Sense, Sensibility and Fintan O’Toole” (28 June 2018) I commented on his “How I found out what I felt about abortion” in THE IRISH TIMES of 14 June 2018. His piece can be googled if you’d like to read it.
Fintan protested that the article was not about him. The first person pronoun occurs twice in the piece’s title, and rather a lot in the remainder of the piece.
The first paragraph, (of 6 sentences) had the pronoun “I” 6 times and “me” once.
The second paragraph (of 8 sentences) had “I” 3 times, “Me” twice and “My” twice.
The third paragraph ( of 4 sentences) had “I” twice.
The fourth paragraph (of 5 sentences) had “I” no less than 6 times in a paragraph claiming”it’s not about me”. The word “Me” occurred once and and “My” twice. But when Fintan says “when ,’you’ find ‘yourself’ under pressure to make a decision ‘you’ are not prepared for that ‘your’ hidden instincts reveal themselves” he is talking about nobody in the wide world but Fintan O’Toole. It is a very revealing paragraph. It reveals O’Toole as a narcissistic solipsist.
I gave up counting the pronouns after that paragraph. Others are welcome to try.
In 1991 on the 75th Anniversary of the 1916 Rising THE IRISH TIMES published a piece by O’Toole purporting to reflect on that seminal event in history.
O’Toole did no such thing. He did not examine the motives of the insurgents, their conduct, or the national and international context, or its consequences, good or bad. Within weeks of the Rising General Maxwell, whose troops had put it down and shot the leaders, wrote that the insurgents had accomplished more in a week than the Irish Party had in forty years, and that if an election were held in Ireland then, the Redmondites would be swept away and “Sinn Feiners” as advanced Nationalists were referred to by friend and enemy alike, would sweep the board.
O’Toole was too lazy, or too much of a navel gazer, to do a professional job, but reflected on his eight-year-old self on the Golden Anniversary of the Rising in 1966 when he had confused the seven altruistic signatories of the Republican Declaration, with the hired gunmen of The Magnificent Seven.
Had he investigated how people other than Fintan O’Toole reflected on the Insurrection on its golden anniversary he might have discovered the following –
1. Some 900 Insurgent veterans gathered at Dublin’s GPO on Easter Sunday. (No more than 2,000 insurgents were “out” in 1916. (Source: THE IRISH TIMES Easter Monday 1966.)
2. The Sunday Times Supplement carried on its cover a photograph of veteran Maurice Collins in the Stonebreakers’ Yard in Kilmainham where the leaders had been shot. I knew him, when a child. His Bureau of Military History Witness Statement is revealing of some of his activities, and he is mentioned in the memoirs of Sean T O’Ceallaigh,who was President of Ireland from 1944 to 1959.
3. The Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph carried pieces praising the Insurgents.
The right-winger Constantine Fitzgibbon, author of “When the Kissing Had to Stop” wrote a piece in praise of the Insurgents and their legacy.
4.British TV carried RTE’s “Insurrection” written by Hugh Leonard. My English workmates in London, watched it with admiration of the insurgents.
5. The British Officer who had arrested de Valera in 1916, was Dev’s guest in Aras an Uachtarain at Easter 1966.
6. The President of India in 1966 had been a student in Dublin in 1916 and a supporter of the insurgents’ cause..
7. The insurgents inspired subject peoples’ struggles for freedom across the world.
8. Irish people who were 60 years old in 1966 (the age O’Toole is now) will have remembered their transition from subject to citizen status – a transition they themselves had effected, led by the insurgents and their successors, whom they repeatedly chose to conduct their affairs. And they thronged O’Connell Stree and other venues to celebrate their liberation with pride. Those who in 1966 were my current age and possessed my current memory will have remembered the continuation of the Parnell split, the sympathy with the Boers which had GAA clubs naming themselves after De Wett and Kruger, and hearing of Irish heroes with more generous motives than the hired gunmen of the Magnificent Seven.
Come to think of it, hired gunmen are less contemptible than hired penmen.
By the way, July 1st is the Feast of St. Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, hanged at Tyburn on the perjured testimony of Titus Oates, a well-paid scoundrel.
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