I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised when news broke recently that Eoghan Harris had been sacked by the Sunday Independent newspaper for holding a private anti-Sinn Fein twitter account(s) and using it/them to spout lies and attack a number of journalists who he didn’t like or agree with. Harris’s editor described some of the twitter commentary from the account(s) as going well beyond what is fair and acceptable political and journalistic commentary.
I had always assumed that Harris would have been involved in operating one or more of those false handled online accounts out there, with the specific intention of trying to stem the growing support for Sinn Fein but more specifically for Irish unity.
What did surprise me when Harris’s boss Alan English broke the story, was the revelation that the Barbara J Pym twitter account had been set up as recently as February 2020. But perhaps that timeline gives us all a little clue as to Harris’s real motivation, as opposed to the pathetically weak excuse he later gave for setting up the Pym account, because February 2020 was also the month that Sinn Fein rocked the political establishment in the south by winning most votes in the general election there. One can only imagine that Harris and his like-minded circle of partitionists must have been driven into spasms of panic by the election results as they came in. Harris’s Sunday poison pen column in the Sindo obviously had lost its potency and wasn’t working anymore. Was there a sudden shock realisation by Eoghan that his poison quill had passed its sell-by date?
The good journalistic Samaritans at the Irish Times decided last week to give poor old Eoghan a sympathetic ear by allowing him the opportunity to reply and explain what was behind the whole saga through its readers letters column.
Harris didn’t hold back in trying to tap into whatever scraps of sympathy might be out there for him and immediately reverted to victim mode, by thanking the Irish Times as the sole organ available to afford him a right of reply. Eoghan of course doesn’t do irony and had soon forgotten that his former editor Alan English had recently revealed that they had previously rowed over a demand by Harris that no right of reply should ever be given to the Shinners or anyone else who might wish to reply to anything he had previous written in his weekly column.
So, what else did Harris write in his Times letter which is worthy of comment? Well, I took some notes as Eoghan, as we all know, is not averse to writing porkies. Here are some:
- Harris did not first come out and reveal to the world that he was behind the Barbara Pym account. His editor, Alan English outed him after first confronting him about it and forcing him to come clean.
- Harris said he opened the Pym account on twitter because there was lots he wished to write about the north and his normal weekly column in the Sindo was busy with other stuff. But that hardly makes sense, as Harris’s Sindo column was very rarely without focus on the Shinners and the north, in fact, I’m not sure I had ever read a Harris column that didn’t mention or attack the shinners. And If Harris wanted to attack innocent journalists like Aoife Moore and others and using the offensive language and terminology as he used under the name of Barbara Pym, why didn’t he do it in his weekly Sindo column? Isn’t it simply true, that he knew that he wouldn’t have got such poisonous material passed his editor and would have been sent packing anyway?
- Isn’t it also the case that Harris knew he could never get away with writing and accusing impartial journalists like Aoife Moore of being shinners in any decent and responsible newspaper without first producing evidence to back up such claims? Is it therefore not surprising that some of these journalists are now looking forward to their day in court with Harris?
- Harris went on in his Times letter in victim mode while claiming that he has to regularly deal with Sinn Fein online trolls who can say anything they like. We must be careful here because Harris might be right that some of those who do engage with him on twitter and other forums might well be Sinn Fein members, Or they might just as easily be ordinary people who disagree with him and happen to agree with Sinn Fein and the idea that Ireland should be united and partition ended. Either way, Harris isn’t in a great position to complain about trolls, whereas Aoife Moore and others most definitely are. Wasn’t he, as a Barbara Pym-the Troll, allowed to say anything he wanted?
- Harris also said he wanted to use the Barbara Pym account to engage others with an open mind about the north. Is such a claim, an admission that not all who read his former weekly column in the Sindo really accepted and agreed with his extreme paranoid views?
- Harris believes, or at least he wants people to believe that he believes he is the saviour of the Irish people’s conscience and his true mission in life is to protect us all from the dark enemy of Sinn Fein and its private army. Now I’m not sure if Harris really believes all that oul codswallop but he plainly has no purpose in life without the SF bogeyman. Funny though, how in the 1980s when Eoghan was at his peak working in RTE during the glory days of section 31 of the Broadcasting Act censorship and when republicans were banned from the airwaves, and when he was still associated with another Sinn Fein (official) family wing, that he never spoke out about that party’s private army which throughout that period was very active relieving banks of its cash up and down the country, and also engaged in printing counterfeit five punt notes and to this very day has never decommissioned a single weapon. But that’s good oul Eoghan for ya, a champion defender of democracy and free speech.
- But here is the real clincher for Eoghan. Above all, he tells us the real reason for setting up the Barbara Pym account, was to engage with and reach out to the loyalist working class community in the north in terms of reconciliation. Now Eoghan, I know I’m not the only one in the country who needs to know how setting up an openly anti Sinn Fein twitter account which trolls and bullies innocent female journalists using inflammatory and misogynistic language equates with an exercise in peace and reconciliation? Surely it had the opposite effect on loyalism and was doing nothing but reenforcing bitter and sectarian attitudes, and above all else, was showing extreme loyalism that you agree and think as they do.
For example, I would like to know what advice Barbara Pym was offering loyalist youths during the April riots as they were burning buses, attacking the police, and trying to provoke nationalists on the other side of Belfast’s peace line? Surely Eoghan, if you are genuinely in the business of reconciliation, you should be trying to ensure that working class loyalists were offered serious progressive leadership that directed them towards the future, a future that involved all of us on this tiny island. You would be explaining to them how regressive it is to be clinging to the apron strings of an old insular nationalist empire that no longer wants them and is itself slowly beginning to implode.
There is no doubt that Harris sees the world in a very different way than most people. Yet, that he doesn’t feel he can back up and defend some of what he writes, is played out through the devious way he tries to prevent others from calling him out. I think his former editor Alan English helped to nail that big flaw in Harris’s character. Here is another:
One of the last twisted and upside-down pieces written by Harris for the Sindo, was about a woman, Miss Maria Lindsay of Coachford in North Cork who was outed for informing against the IRA, when she betrayed a pending ambush against British forces at Godfreys Cross on February 26th, 1921. Lindsay’s tip off to the British resulted in the ambush being foiled and resulted in five republican volunteers being court-martialled and executed two days later, on the 28th in Victoria Barracks Cork. How did Harris deal with this incident – his headline was “Miss Lindsay set out to save lives, while her IRA captors set out to take life.”
Now it’s very easy to see why Harris wouldn’t want anyone coming back with a right of reply that would expose such partisan and indefensible nonsense. For a start, the lives Miss Lindsay set out to save were British occupying soldiers, while the lives she set up for execution belonged to native Irish soldiers, some of whom were her neighbours. Here is another thing about Mrs Lindsay that Eoghan Harris wouldn’t want his readers to learn. After her court martial and sentence of death, the IRA gave Miss Lindsay a fighting chance by leaving it up to the British as to whether she should live or not. This occurred when local IRA commander Frank Busteed wrote to General Strickland at Victoria Bks Cork, with an enclosed personal letter from Miss Lindsay appealing for her life. Busteed told Strickland that if his volunteers were executed, so would Miss Lindsay and her butler/driver.
Six republicans were executed at Victoria Bks on the morning of 28th, including the five captured at Godfreys Cross, and Miss Lindsay and her driver were executed shortly afterwards. Miss Lindsay learned when it was too later that her misguided loyalty to Britain was non-returnable. Something unionists in another part of Ireland are beginning to experience today.
A couple of days after Eoghan Harris was sacked from the Sindo, I bumped into a friend who asked me what I thought of it all. His exact words when greeting me were “Well they finally caught up with oul Harris”. He then went on to ask me a couple of thought-provoking questions about Harris himself. The first was, “Which do you think it is, Is Harris working with or for British Intelligence? I asked if there was a difference? “Of course, there is, if he is working with them, it would imply he is doing so freely and agrees and thinks as they do. But if he is working for them, it is probably because he was at some point over the years coerced or blackmailed into doing so, probably while he was a member of the officials/stickies.”
The second question my friend asked was no less intriguing. He asked if I thought Harris’s irrational and unhealthy obsession with Sinn Fein was more of a symptom of a mental imbalance/condition? He also wondered if his real driver was his hatred of Sinn Fein or was his obvious belief in unionism stronger?
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