In my recent BLOG – “Teachers, Pupils and Parents” (January 4th 2025) I recalled
how the universally loved Thady O’Connor, a Holy Ghost Father, was a life-long
friend of Eamon de Valera. I quoted my Mother’s advice “Show me your companions
and I’ll tell you what you are.” More evidence of the stature of Dev recognised by The Traveller from a Distant Land recalled in a former Blog.
In earlier Blogs I recalled the favourable comment on the 1916 Insurgents and its
most prestigious surviver, Dev in the British media, including the Daily Telegraph on
its Golden Jubilee in 1966. Dev welcomed the British officer who had arrested him in
1916 to Arus an Uachtain. Field Marshall Montgomery, who had declared that
he didn’t care how many houses he had to burn to defeat Sinn Fein at a time that
party had won a landslide victory in “a contest agreed on all sides to be a Plebiscite”
also made peace with Sinn Fein’s Greatest leader.
On the Centenary of the Insurrection there was a veritable Shitefest in the Irish Times,
diplomatic service, universities, and to a lesser extent in Britain.
I think Michael Gove first came to my notice as a columnist in THE TIMES then
when he called the Insurgents “a squalid gang who betrayed Ireland”. Later he
saluted Conor Cruise O’Brien as “The Greatest Living Irishman” probably in a
column dictated by the Cruiser himself. The habit of scratching each other’s backs
is not unknown in Grub Street.
I can remember reading in the Daily Mail by Gove’s then wife of how irresistible
he was in a Dressing Gown made by Turnass and Bull’er or some such Kensington
outfitters.
Back to the SHITEFEST IN THE IRISH TIMES
Well what can you make of a Jesuit Professor at an American University who calumniates Pearse, comparing him with Daniel O’Connell “who never shot
anybody”?
In more enlightened times schoolboys were flogged for such howlers and adults
burned at the stake.
O’Connell famously shot John D’Esterre dead in a duel in KIldare in 1815 and,
in the same year was arrested in Ostend,on his way to answer the challenge
of Robert Peel, a crack shot by all accounts. Could any American Historian
claim that Aaron Burr never shot a man dead, and retained a Professor’s seat.
I may be wrong, but I have never seen an admission by Seamus Murphy SJ
that he was writing nonsense.
At Princeton, where one of mankind’s greatest geniuses Albert Einstein,,once held
a Chair, the Quack Fintan O’Toole, of the IRISH TIMES once posed as a Lecturer in
Irish Letters. You will appreciate the Irony if you see my BLOGS:-
ANTI-RATIONAL, ANTI-NATIONAL, WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO ADMIRE ABOUT
FINTAN O’TOOLE? November 13th 2021.
FINTAN O’TOOLE? November 13th 2021.
FINTAN O’TOOLE, THE IRISH TIMES AND CENSORSHIP October 19th 2021
THE DYSTOPIAN MYTH OF DE VALERA’S HEYDAYS PEDDLED BY FINTAN O’TOOLE December 10th 2024
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