THE TOPSY-TURVEY WORLD OF FINTAN O’TOOLE and other IRISH TIMES GURUS by Donal Kennedy

Time and time again I have remarked on the perverted ingenuity of Fintan, whom

I understand to hold, or have held, a Chair of Irish Letters at Princeton University.

He still cultivated a bee in his bonnet about the prosecution, before he was born, of

Dublin’s Pike Theatre, for the Staging  of the ROSE TATTOO by Tennessee 

Williams. The District Court threw out the prosecution case. The play’s producer

publicly denied that a condom had been shown on stage, though O’Toole seems

to think that one was. He is hardly an authority on Irish, American or French Letters.

 

For scores of years the Londoner “Micheal MacLiammoir” a naturalised Irishman and

Gaelic writer, together with Hilton  Edwards,  in MacLiammoir’s words, 

in the Gate Theatre competed as “Sodom to the Abbey Theatre’s Begorrah.” They

were honoured in Ireland at a time when John Gielgud was  being arrested in London. I’m not sure if the Abbey Theatre was the first in Europe to be State subsidised. But one of the myriad of progressive things Ireland owes to Charles Haughey, is that as Finance Minister, he subsidised the Gate Theatre.

 

Censorship of books was often stupidly applied in Ireland, but not anything like

the censorship today applied by the regimes admired by O’Toole to all media.

 

During the Cold War one might tune into Radio Moscow in English. But today you

cannot get RT. Until a few days ago one could watch informative news reports, and

documentaries on Al Jazeera.

 

You can’t do that today. And over 170 of its reporters and photographers have been

systematically murdered by ……..you know whom and there are hardly any western

journalists protesting or at the atrocities or providing the service to humanity which

the murdered heroes and heroines rendered.

 

Another IRISH TIMES guru with a seat in an American University is Seamus Murphy

SJ.

 

He would have us believe that Daniel O’Connell never shot a man and was thus of 

a higher morality than Patrick Pearse. Pearse was never accused of shooting anybody and the dog-collared guru provides no evidence of him doing so.

 

In fact in 1815, one hundred and one years before Pearse read the Proclamation of

a Republic on the pavement by the GPO, Daniel O’Connell killed John d’Esterre 

with a duelling pistol in County Kildare.

 

In the same year, two hundred and one years before the clerical guru’s Cock and Bull story, O’Connell was arrested on his way to Ostend, to answer a duelling challenge from Robert Peel, himself a crack shot.

 

Daniel O’Connell was an heroic and brilliant man, a Benthamite utilitarian, though

his work was made futile by the Great Hunger.

 

Pearse’s declaration on the pavement by the GPO bore fruit less than 3 years later,

when in a contest “regarded on all sides as a plebiscite” according to THE TIMES,

the Republic declared by him was endorsed by Irish men and women voters.

 

It was perhaps the only State in History established by popular vote, and in accordance with principles proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson and used as a pretext for the war planned by Britain since 1904.

 

Britain and France, having defeated Germany, the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires held no plebiscites in their captured territoris and looted them. They cobbled together ersatz “nations” with neither histories nor futures, e.g. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. and Iraq and Lebanon and Jordan, and plundered their resources, using aerial bombing for their extraction. There was no plebiscite in Palestine, where Arab

Moslems and Christians and  Jews had lived in harmony. 

The people of Palestine gave no mandate for a Jewish State.

It was the invention of Arthur Balfour, who, as Prime Minister twelve years earlier had

presided over the Aliens Act, passed to restrict Jewish immigration to the UK to escape persecution under the Tsars.

 

Today, and from before anybody heard of Hitler, Arabs in great numbers were being 

driven from their homes which were plundered by Zionists, and terrorised and murderers.

 

Fintan O’Toole is no more of a moral guide than was Richard Pigott, the Forger.

And Seamus Murphy SJ might well be the reincarnation of Titus Oates.