They say you should never meet your heroes, they’ll only disappoint you.
I recently listened to the podcast ‘Free State’, normally presented by Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning. In this holiday podcast Joe had left the building for reasons best known to himself, and Dion, a mild-voiced man, took full charge of interviewing the guest : Colm TóibÃn.
If you’ve read his novels Brooklyn and the sequel Long Island, you’ll know that TóibÃn is one very gifted as well as successful novelist.  And he was a jolly guest on the Free State podcast, talking wittily and irreverently about many things. Then Dion asked him about the North and Sinn Féin.
TóibÃn’s response modulated from chirpy to melancholy. His main comment on the North was a detailed account of the Kingsmill massacre, where ten Protestant workmen were killed by the IRA. Dion tried tentatively to indicate that, though horrific, this was only one incident in a thirty-year conflict, and that the War of Independence and the Civil War contained many similar acts. TóibÃn chose to ignore Dion’s words and continued to lament this brutal incident, in his view still not properly purged by Sinn Féin. In short, he talked like a man who saw the Troubles through the lens of Kingsmill.
No. That’s not quite true. He also spoke of Bloody Sunday and the burning of the British Embassy, and how then the Irish people in the South, of their own volition, decided to turn their backs and keep that kind of violence confined to the North.
I am weary beyond words of hearing people talk about incidents like Kingsmill, which yes, was bloody and brutal, but which formed just one part of a very bitter and painful conflict in the North. And I am tired to the point of despair listening to people who ignore the fact that the people in the South, by way of its compliant media, were for thirty years and more served a diet which nourished and made fat a conviction that north of the border was a horror-show, peopled by a collection of bigots, head-bangers and bloody psychopaths.
Colm TóibÃn is a splendid novelist. Beyond that, political speaking, he thinks and talks in misleading clichés.
Very good jude free Palestine
I think Jude there is a clue in the name of the podcast. Free staters think Ireland has twenty six counties. Michael Collins and his IRA used Nerf guns and water pistols. The north is some kind of Bowiesque Diamond Dogs wasteland populated by fanatics and psychopaths. There are many honourable and intelligent people living in the free state, people who realise the northern problem is was and always will be the British presence. But one hundred years of partition has created a mindset which detests northern Nationalists.
Toibin is a fine novelist and I enjoyed the film BROOKLYN enormously.
But his disdain for most of the Irish nation matches that of the 19th Century Lord Salisbury and
Trinity College (Dublin’s) Professor Mahaffy.
Well over thirty years ago I quoted Toibin in THE IRISH DEMOCRAT to make that point.
I believe I recycled that comment in the BLOG “Sunday,Sunday” during the last couple of weeks
The RECYCLED PIECE published here 11th December 2024
was called OLD, OLD NEWS…………..by Donal Kennedy
It was my take on the newspapers I read between 1949 and 2990
It was very long and the last quaerter of it dealt with TOIBIN’S
PSEUDO ANGLO -IRISH didain for the rest of us.
Some of our best friends, indeed Republican leaders, were
Anglo-Irish
Patrick Pearse’s radicalism stemmed from his English father, a disciple of Charles Bradlaugh, founder
of the National Secular Society. His Murder Machine might be plagiaism from Dickens’s Hard
TIMES and Mr Choke-um Child withits Gradgrind Utilitarianism. Pearse wrote of a parent who complained that all his son wanted to do was play the tin whistle. “Buyhim one” Pearse suggested.
Edward Mac Lysaght in his memoir “Changing Times” tells how he had held every copy of Dail
Eireann’s IRISH BULLETIN from its 1919 inception. His ENGLISH mother borrowed two copies
to travel from Killaloe to Limerick in February 1921.
The train was boarded by British soldiers and the passengers searched. Mrs MacLysaght was
court-martialled in Limerick and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment or a £20 fine,
He wanted to accept the imprispnment, but, to her chagrin, hr husband, who that day had returned from a business trip to Australia, insisted on paying the fine.
English men and women of integrity are humanity’s greatest friends.
And native Irishmen who live into their dotage on the Hill of Howth can fall by the wayside,
like my old fellow-traveller Conor Cruise O’Brien, hailed by the twerp Michael Gove as “the greatest
living Irishman” before he departed.
take on the train from Killaloe