Neither Fintan O’Toole nor the THE IRISH TIMES are answerable to any authority other than THE IRISH TIMES TRUST. The TRUST, allegedly, is an oath-bound, secretive society established by Lord Goodman at the behest of the British Government during the Harold Wilson’s time in Downing Street. Goodman managed the financial affairs of Lord Portman for many years and stole millions of pounds from him. But more slippery than both Wilson and Goodman was Sir Andrew Gilchrist, British Ambassador to Ireland 1967-1970, who put ex-Major McDowell of British Intelligence, an executive
of the paper, in touch with Harold Wilson.
Gilchrist had form. He was Ambassador to Indonesia from 1962 to 1966 and masterminded a lying propaganda campaign which resulted in the genocidal coup in 1965 which put General Suharto in office and multinational corporations in possession of the archipelago’s vast natural sources. John Pilger has written perhaps the best account of that atrocity.
O’Toole has written a lot of trivial tripe, for instance on the prosecution in the 1950s of the Pyke Theatre’s staging of Tennessee Williams’ play “The Rose Tattoo” in Dublin He claimed, falsely ,that a condom was produced on stage. The prosecution was thrown out of court by the District Justice.
For hundreds of years in England, in fact until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain had to be given and to have passed every script for a play before it was publicly staged. In England the distinguished actor John Gielgud was arrested for homosexual conduct, whilst Micheal McLiammoir and his gay partner Hilton Edwards (both Londoners) were for decades feted in Ireland. Indeed their Gate Theatre
was to be State Subsidised on the initiative of Charles Haughey.
But of more consequence was O’Toole’s false account of President de Valera’s speech on the repatriation of Roger Casement’s remains in 1966.
It was a false and foul. The late, great Manus O’Riordan wrote refuting O’Toole’s falsehoods. But the IRISH TIMES had neither the courage nor the honesty to publish the refutation. To do so would conflict with the remit of the British Established Irish Times Trust.
Today, accompanied by gruesome photos, O’Toole rants about singing “Up the Ra”. It’s not a chant I ever heard or joined in. Forgive my ignorance, but I thought the RA was the Royal Artillery; I understand that people who do not believe in a Deity are happy to implore It to save the Colonel in Chief of the Parachute Regiment, and until recently stood for a prayer to save the Monarch who awarded an Order of Chivalry on a Para Colonel before the bodies of the demonstrators his men murdered in Derry were cold in their graves,
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