At the age of eight a child is still a child and cannot be
expected to have much of an appreciation of history or public affairs.
If, at the age of thirty- five a citizen is woefully ignorant of those matters,
he/she has not grown up. I believe that is the gist of remarks made by
Cicero, long, long ago. And I wouldn’t dare to contradict him.
At the age of eight, as I have remarked here before, Fintan O’Toole confused
Yul Brynner and the hired gunmen of the
movie “The Magnificent Seven” with the seven selfless signatories of
the Proclamation of 1916 executed by the British fifty years earlier. We have
O’Toole’s word for it for when asked by his paymasters in the Irish Times for a
piece on the Insurrection on its seventy-fifth Anniversary, he had nothing
whatever to say except to recall his childhood ignorance.
Another apparently key feature of Fintan’s life occurred when he was eighteen.
Having just started University and was
asked by the parents of a pregnant girl of sixteen if he could find out how she
could arrange to have her child’s life
destroyed. He had never thought about the issue but decided to put them in
touch with those who could facilitate the
deed. His excuse, because he had no argument, was that the girl could get on
with her life. The child whose life was
terminated, might if he/she been spared, now be about forty three
years old, getting on with THEIR life and making
their contribution to humanity.
Mr O’Toole is proud of what he did to arrest, forever, that child’s
development.
And apparently happy in achieving the arrest of his own.
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