I was thinking today the garbage masquerading as wisdom served up for years in THE IRISH
TIMES, and of two cowardly charlatans in particular.
One of them is Fintan O’Toole who is pitifully ignorant of the circumstances surrounding the
staging of The Rose Tattoo in Dublin, which occurred before he was born. The Gardai prosecuted
those who staged it and the case was thrown out by the District Court, the most lowly Tribunal
in the State.
O’Toole has published untruths against long-dead men who could not sue for libel – Eamon
de Valera, Roger Casement, Kevin Barry and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. Unlike
O’Toole, none of those men was a physical or moral coward. When the late Manus O’Riordan
took O’Toole’s remarks apart, line by line – indeed lie by lie, in a letter to THE IRISH TIMES
that “Trusted” Organ didn’t have the balls to punish it.
O’Toole is inordinately proud of putting a sixteen year old pregnant girl in touch with abortion
services. He wrote about the “yuk” factor which was his instinctive reaction to the idea. Then
he decided that he had not the courage to risk derision by following his natural human response.
The aborted child, grown to maturity, would surely have served humanity better than O’Toole and
his ilk if he, or she, merely worked for a small wage.
It being Easter, I could not forget Father Seamus Murphy SJ and his contribution to the IRISH
TIMES at Easter 2016 on the Centenary of the 1916 Rising. Here was a man to rival Titus Oates for his cheek, Richard Pigott for his dishonesty and Fintan
O’Toole on his ignorance.
Most Dublin schoolboys of my generation knew that Daniel O’Connell had killed a man in a duel
101 years before the 1916 Rising. Some of us later read that he had been later arrested in England
on his way to Ostend to answer a challenge by Sir Robert Peel.
In the first case the weapon used was a pistol. In the second case, pistols were proposed and Peel
was a Crack shot.
The presumed Gentleman and Scholar Jesuit told his readers that Daniel O’Connell never shot a man, “unlike Patrick Pearse.”
Irish Barristers in O’Connell’s time were famous, for duelling, a practice frowned on by the armed
forces of the Crown.
It was a question of honour, not shame. And Catholic Barristers who would refuse a challenge would
invite even more contempt from their presumed betters than they suffered already
At least two English Prime Ministers fought duels. And in America in 1804 the Vice-President, Aaron
Burr, shot dead the Secretary to the Treasury, in a celebrated Duel.
Duelling had long died out in polite society in Britain, Ireland and the United States by 1916.
And before reading Seamus Murphy’s contribution to commemoration of 1916 I had never seen
it stated that Pearse had ever shot anybody.
At the time it was not unknown for polite ladies in these islands to accost healthy men of military
age wearing civilian clothes and presenting them with White Feathers as symbols of Cowardice.
I read that the 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement Father Murphy has reappeared
in THE IRISH TIMES.
Would someone give him a White Feather?
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Very interesting piece as always.