[See also Donal’s blog at http://www.judecollins.com/2016/06/is-emer-okelly-a-fool-or-a-liar-by-donal-kennedy/ ]
Sent: Fri, Apr 3, 2020 4:26 pm
Subject: “FILTH IN THE ABBEY”
Reading Emer O’Kelly’s “An Irishwoman’s Diary” (March 30) piece deploring a complaint about Brian Friel’s “Loves of Cass Maguire” staged in Dublin 1967 I thought how liberal Dublin was at the time compared with London.
I’m surprised that a drama critic of Ms O’Kelly’s vintage has never heard of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, to which the scripts of all plays had to be submitted BEFORE they could be licenced for staging in England, under a law passed in 1737 when Horace Walpole was Prime Minister, and not repealed until 1968 when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. For centuries before that the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was responsible for the noisome duties of the Groom of the Stool, whose business or pleasure, was to wipe his Sovereign’s backside.
I’m not surprised that Ms O’Kelly has a bias towards Monarchical rather than republican government, considering her belly-aching in the Daily Mail against the poor taste of Irish men and women in celebrating the Centenary of the 1916 Rising which raised them from being despised subjects of a foreign monarch to the status of citizens of their own sovereign state.
Yours faifhfully
Donal Kennedy
LONDON
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