I find Fergal Keane an INCREDIBLE REPORTER and believe he has earned his OBE many times over.
I have on my shelves a book published by Dublin’s Talbot Press in 1922 and reprinted by Cork’s Mercier Press in 1996 with its text unaltered.
It is a collection of notes published immediately after the the death of their author, Michael Collins, with the title “THE PATH TO FREEDOM.”
I have heard Fergal Keane declare that Collins had tried to persuade his political and Irish Volunteer comrades to accept the partition of Ireland.
A seven page Chapter of “THE PATH TO FREEDOM” is headed “Partition Act’s Failure” where Collin argues that the agreement he signed in London negated the part of Westminster’s 1920 “Better Government of Ireland” under which “The Government of Ireland of Northern Ireland had already been established and its Parliament opened by King George V before the British Government agreed to suspend their war against the Irish people and talk to their elected representatives.
Whether Collins was himself deceived or wished to deceive his readers is a moot point. What is certain however is that he deluded himself in thinking he could out-cheat David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Lord Birkenhead, as clever, ruthless and deceitful a gang of blackguards ever collected outside Hell itself .
The gang had at its disposal a Civil Service with many centuries’ experience of the Black Arts which had earned for their country the reputation of Perfidious Albion.
If that wasn’t combination enough to make Collins pause for thought there were the Ulster Unionists, who had contempt for the subterfuge of British statecraft.
The Ulster Unionists had an unconcealed murderous hatred for Catholics and for Irish Nationalists of any religion or none, and for democracy and the rule of law.
Collins organised a war in the North of Ireland in 1922.
Fergal Keane has published and broadcast numerous assertions which are untrue. And I have published refutations of them in newspapers and blogs which neither he nor his admirers have challenged.
Fergal Keane was awarded his OBE at an earlier age than Colonel Wilford of the Parachute Regiment received his. Wilford was given his gong in early 1972 shortly after Bloody Sunday. So apparently Her Gracious Majesty judged Keane’s service to the British Empire was even more meritorious.
Incidentally, I can recall the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent, Marl Urban, who recently voiced Britain’s official position on President Putin’s actions, calling the Bloody Sunday murders in Derry a public relations blunder.
So far I have neither read nor heard from mainstream western media a dispassionate analysis of the background to the unpleasantness which is the source of the commentators’ Bollinger and Beluga. Eastern Media are silenced.
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