Kevin Myers

Some people can’t stand Kevin Myers because he has written some blimpish
essays in the Daily Telegraph and also in times past in the Irish Times
where he brilliantly wrote an Irishman’s Diary. Now he resides in the Irish
Independent and has continued his campaign to include the British-Irish and the old real history in the real tales of modern Irish history.

Kevin specialises in the uncomfortable truth of the Irish independent state being
ruled by an unelected cult through techniques of mass psychological
conditioning from the cradle to the grave. Dissenters were demonised and
often driven out. Civil rights, human rights, education, laws, literature,
plays, human physiology and pathology were all subjected to cult rule. The
1932 Eucharistic Congress was the summit and photographs tell an
astonishing story. Recently, the Mass in the Phoenix Park with Pope John
Paul 11 is the only rival. I don’t think that it would be possible to
repeat that now. The opposition would be significant.

He is dubbed Colonel Myers and because he has clung on to the Leicester
influence in his speaking accent. He can easily be caricatured.

However, I think he fulfils one the requirements of adulthood – he is able
to think for himself and is eminently unclubable – a bit like myself.
There is nobody else doing what he does although Professor John A Murphy
has a good record.

Politics and politicians are full of yaboo. We’re right and you’re wrong
even when it is obvious that the opposite is the case. That is why NOBODY
should accept dictation from the leaders of any party in a democracy.

If I was Lord Mayor, I would offer him a “People of the Year” award. I also
think that Vincent Browne is in the same category and should also be given
a life-time award for services to Irish Life.

Myers article in the Irish Independent is very interesting

Kevin Myers: Irrationality has always been at the very heart of Irish life.

By Kevin Myers

Tuesday August 03 2010

THE Defence Forces recently organised a parachute jump to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Army’s deployment to the Congo. Guests were invited to watch the drop from inside an aircraft hangar.

Yes, from underneath a metal roof, so that we saw nothing. We couldn’t see
the men leave the plane — I presume it was a plane, but for all I know,
they could just as well have jumped off the roof. We didn’t see them
free-falling or doing any fancy mid-air manoeuvres or opening their
parachutes or formatting downwards. In fact, the first we saw of them was
through the open doors, for the final few feet, as they landed.

I’m sorry but frankly not even North Korea would organise an invisible
parachute jump for invited guests. It was if it had all been laid on to
conform with some ghastly stereotype of irrationality that we daily imbibe
from our newspaper headlines.

So we read that the Financial Regulator authorised the Quinn Group to
borrow money from Anglo Irish Bank in order to buy Anglo Irish shares —
which is rather like the Vatican running an abortion clinic.

Then we hear that dear old Anglo Irish Bank, which now has debts of ten
zillion, has taken over Arnotts, which has debts of three zillion. Needless
to say, although you and I effectively own them all — Quinn, Anglo Irish,
Arnotts — we are powerless to stop this madness.

Then we read that David Doyle — one of the mandarins at Finance whose
hands were on the tiller as the ship of State ploughed on to the rocks —
has taken early retirement with a tax-free golden handshake of €350,000 and a specially topped-up pension that will pay him six times the average
national wage — for life.

The news that a five-year-old boy has been given €7,500 for defamation
after being falsely accused of stealing a bag of crisps serves as
confirmation that this is truly Gagaland.

But was it not always so? A deep, recidivist irrationality seems to have
been a defining feature of Irish life from the outset. How else can one
describe a State that began to celebrate its freedom in the 1920s by
limiting freedom in every direction?

No other democracy in European history has ever chosen to use its
post-imperial independence to curtail the liberties of its citizens; but
that is precisely what Ireland did. The various censorship acts of the
1920s made it a criminal obscenity for any publication even to mention
contraception, divorce, menstruation or abortion.

The State freely handed over the custody of orphans to the Catholic Church
and then turned its back on abuses there, though government inspectors in
the 1930s repeatedly reported what was going on. Decades later, the State
commissioned various inquiries into abuse by the church, yet studiously
ignored the complicity of the State in all such abuse.

Meanwhile, Irish historians obligingly complied with the fantasies created
by the political classes. This would have been a major feat in a
totalitarian state, but for it to have been achieved in a democratic state
is truly astounding.

But thus it was. Myth descended over almost every major event, so that even serious history books became intoxicated with falsehood. The Rising was a casebook study, in which history was inverted and the executions of the leaders became the initial injustice, rather than the first murders of
civilians and police officers by insurgents on Easter Monday.

When someone first named the unarmed policemen slain on Easter Monday some 16 years ago, it caused consternation, disbelief and anger.

BUT such emotions are inevitable whenever the truth — only occasionally —
raises its head like a kraken in a sea of fantasy. For decades, the Irish
State freely chose to forget that hundreds of thousands of Irishmen had
served in British colours in the Great War.

But the same someone who had long before begun the press campaign to get
their memory revived was totally ignored two years ago when — with the
subject now fashionable — three of the intellectual prime architects of
that amnesia (RTE, Trinity College Dublin and The Royal Irish Academy) then chose to mount a massive commemoration of Ireland and the Great War.

Similarly, until the account in 1998 by the Canadian historian, the late
Peter Hart, (of whom more anon) no history book of the Civil War ever
mentioned the butchery of Protestants in the Bandon Valley in 1922 or the
attacks on Protestants that were widespread over southern Ireland from 1919 onwards. But 10 years before Hart, the same aforementioned someone had described these atrocities and named the victims. The reward was —
predictably — vilification.

Moreover, no formal history of this time has yet told of the arrest in
September 1922 by Charlie Dalton, a uniformed officer in the Free State
Army and former member of Michael Collins’s Squad, of three unarmed teenage boys he’d caught pasting up anti-treaty posters in Drumcondra.

He took the lads to the Red Cow crossroads and, using his army revolver,
shot them dead.

Within a decade, Dalton had become a director of the Irish Hospital Sweeps,
the biggest state-sponsored con-trick in Irish history and effectively a
template for all our modern corruption.

This, too, with all its profound legal and moral ramifications, has been
totally ignored by Irish historians.

You see those headlines that shock you every day? They’re not news — they
are merely the latest symptoms of a chronic and pathological irrationality
as old as the State itself.

kmyers@independent.ie

– Kevin Myers

Irish Independent