God loves a tryer. Today again, The Irish Times is doing its damnedest to shackle Sinn Féin to the IRA and, it’s hoped, hobble that party’s chances of success in next Friday’s election.
This time it’s veteran journalist Olivia O’Leary leading the charge. She starts by quoting Gerry Adams: “We will not let the past be written in a way which demonises patriots”. You’d think that sentiment would be one that could be agreed to by most. Not Olivia. For her this is a “chilling” declaration coming from a former Sinn Féin leader, and Sinn Féin have “never said that republican violence was wrong”. She feels equally chilled by Mary Lou McDonald saying it was neither rational nor fair to pin IRA actions on people who were children or even unborn during the Northern conflict.
Why does Olivia feel chilled? Is it that Olivia believes that republican patriots are in fact demons?
To be fair, Olivia does concede that Mary Lou expressed her deep sorrow and apology for the pain that was suffered during the years of the Northern conflict. But Olivia immediately notes “She never said the IRA’s campaign of violence was wrong”.
What Olivia and others need to get their head around is that a lot of Irish people, while having misgivings with things the IRA did, realised that the IRA’s violence grew out of a half-century of discrimination, gerrymander, denial of civil rights and state violence.
But Olivia is upset about something else as well: Sinn Féin has said in its manifesto that it plans to have a neutral body investigate RTÉ’s coverage of the Gaza genocide (Olivia figures it’s more a ‘conflict’). Such an investigation Olivia sees as intimidation.
And yet she sees the need for “a healthy media that is able to ask questions and point out what’s not true.”
And so say all of us, Olivia. And there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Irish people who are firmly convinced that RTÉ did the bidding of the Dublin government of the day and presented the Northern conflict as sectarian insanity run wild.
It wasn’t, Olivia. It really wasn’t. And you as a veteran journalist should know that. Now would you for God’s sake stop talking about fifty years ago and talk about the next five days?
I was once told by a source I trusted of an ambitious woman who, noting the media celebrity of the
harpist Kathleen Watkins, herself became an accomplished harpist, and, whenever a celebrity entered
a room made a beeline for them, ignoring everybody else, and became a media celebrity herself.
But some sources I, and perhaps most Irish people trusted, betrayed that trust,
The most notable, for years a fellow-traveller on the Hill of Howth Tram was
Conor Cruise O’Brien, who lived long enough to be hailed by the super-twerp,
Michael Gove, as the Greatest Living Irishman
aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile …