GAYBO & TUBRIDY – A COUPLE OF ABOMINABLE SHOWMEN by Donal kennedy.
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Tue, 18 Jul, 22:15 (10 hours ago)
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It will be fifty-nine years in November since I left Ireland a month before my 23rd Birthday.
My pride in its history was largely due to knowing men and women, who without making
a song about it had lived heroic lives.
None of them were particularly wealthy and I think neither they nor I had ever heard the word
celebrity.
In 1966 on the golden jubilee of the Easter Insurrection, I was in Dublin, where the whole
population seemed to stand tall. In Britain, the BBC, The Sunday Times and the Telegraph
were agreed that Pearse and Connolly and their followers were heroes, and those heroes
included Taoiseach Sean Lemass, and President De Valera, who welcomed to Aras an
Uachtarain the British officer who had taken him prisoner 50 years earlier.
Hugh Leonard had dramatised the Insurrection for RTE and the serial was shown on BBC
or another British channel. Many of my English work colleagues, in early middle age were
veterans of the Second World or Korean Wars, and those a couple of years older than myself
had done National Service in the British Forces. Without exception they expressed admiration
for the 1916 Rebels.
Some years later fashions changed and required new attitudes in Dublin with those out for the main chance.
Gay Byrne invited the electoral superstar Gerry Adams to appear as a guest on the Late Late Show.
He refused to shake hands with his guest and had packed the panel with a veritable lynch mob,
led by Hugh Leonard to attack his prize guest. The plot backfired and Gaybo and Leonard ended up
with jam on their faces.
Gaybo departed and Gerry Adams and his friends went from strength to strength.
Along came Ryan Tubridy of the third generation who had done well out of the 1916-23 events.
Interviewing the former IRA leader Martin McGuinness who had emerged as a constructive and
deservedly well-loved statesman, he attempted to turn him into a “felon-setter” and say that Adams
had been in the IRA. The forgers of the Casement “Black Diaries” and the “Zinoviev Letter” were unable to produce even a forgery to entrap Adams. And, the politically illiterate Tubridy did not know that Garret Fitzgerald had for years sat on the Fine Gael benches in the Senate without joining the party, and that John A Costello never joined any party, being in politics 40 years, some in the Blue Shirts, and twice Taoiseach having never joined a party.
I’m afraid Gaybo and Tubridy were a couple of Abominable Showmen
My pride in its history was largely due to knowing men and women, who without making
a song about it had lived heroic lives.
None of them were particularly wealthy and I think neither they nor I had ever heard the word
celebrity.
In 1966 on the golden jubilee of the Easter Insurrection, I was in Dublin, where the whole
population seemed to stand tall. In Britain, the BBC, The Sunday Times and the Telegraph
were agreed that Pearse and Connolly and their followers were heroes, and those heroes
included Taoiseach Sean Lemass, and President De Valera, who welcomed to Aras an
Uachtarain the British officer who had taken him prisoner 50 years earlier.
Hugh Leonard had dramatised the Insurrection for RTE and the serial was shown on BBC
or another British channel. Many of my English work colleagues, in early middle age were
veterans of the Second World or Korean Wars, and those a couple of years older than myself
had done National Service in the British Forces. Without exception they expressed admiration
for the 1916 Rebels.
Some years later fashions changed and required new attitudes in Dublin with those out for the main chance.
Gay Byrne invited the electoral superstar Gerry Adams to appear as a guest on the Late Late Show.
He refused to shake hands with his guest and had packed the panel with a veritable lynch mob,
led by Hugh Leonard to attack his prize guest. The plot backfired and Gaybo and Leonard ended up
with jam on their faces.
Gaybo departed and Gerry Adams and his friends went from strength to strength.
Along came Ryan Tubridy of the third generation who had done well out of the 1916-23 events.
Interviewing the former IRA leader Martin McGuinness who had emerged as a constructive and
deservedly well-loved statesman, he attempted to turn him into a “felon-setter” and say that Adams
had been in the IRA. The forgers of the Casement “Black Diaries” and the “Zinoviev Letter” were unable to produce even a forgery to entrap Adams. And, the politically illiterate Tubridy did not know that Garret Fitzgerald had for years sat on the Fine Gael benches in the Senate without joining the party, and that John A Costello never joined any party, being in politics 40 years, some in the Blue Shirts, and twice Taoiseach having never joined a party.
I’m afraid Gaybo and Tubridy were a couple of Abominable Showmen
Abominable showmen is being kind to them. Free State hypocrites who glorify the old IRA, the ones who used water pistols to fight the British, whilst condemning the IRA of latter days, who used real bullets. Useless and overpaid the pair of them.
They were a reflection of the people they represented the chattering classes , the mór le rá &and the éirí in airde people , the monied people and those that ruled this country from podium and pulpit whereas Martin McGuinness and Jerry Adams represented that respectable minority who were struggling in the age old fight for Irish Independence.