Comments on The Pensive Quill: Of Fenians and Fairy-tales

Smiley Ireland, Thanks for that. My analysis on t...

2012-09-20T23:46:17.828+01:00

Smiley Ireland,

Thanks for that. My analysis on the revolutionary period was arrived at after a great deal of thought. I was exposed to revisionist thinking for the first time as a teenager via newspapers and school teachers. Indeed, I accepted some of it for a while.

However, the more I read, the more complex the picture became. I realised that while there were flaws in nationalist historiography, there were even greater ones in the analyses of Kevin Myers, Eoghan Harris, etc.. The notion that ordinary men like my great-grandfather hatched an evil scheme to overthrow a stable democracy just does not bear the least scrutiny.

Excellent article! Extremely impressive and certai...

2012-09-20T22:19:45.876+01:00

Excellent article! Extremely impressive and certainly hitting all the points I always use when debating the 1916-1921 period in our history. At this stage Myers is just plain boring, he harps on about the same stuff. I often read his articles that have nothing to do with our history and yet somehow he manages to get a dig in at Irish Republicanism. My great-grandfather William Oman fought in the Rising, War of Independence and Civil War and people like Myers do him a great dis-service with their articles. And when people argue that the RIC was mostly made up of Irish Catholics I honestly couldn't care less, they were still a British-run institution. The fact that the IRA shot and killed RIC men actually bolsters the arguement that they were not sectarian as some would suggest.

Some articles that are well read don't alwasy ...

2012-09-13T06:57:14.737+01:00

Some articles that are well read don't alwasy get the comments you would expect. An article like this would be read by a wider and different audience than we normally get. There would be an academic and historian type interest in it.

Not really Alfie. It was well enough read

2012-09-13T06:55:17.539+01:00

Not really Alfie. It was well enough read

Thanks, Anthony. The article is actually a lot lon...

2012-09-12T22:41:09.781+01:00

Thanks, Anthony. The article is actually a lot longer than I had intended. Perhaps that might discourage many potential readers.

Alfie, Thanks for the piece. A lot of work put in...

2012-09-11T08:53:29.260+01:00

Alfie,

Thanks for the piece. A lot of work put into that and TPQ is delighted you put it this way. I want to have a longer read at it again. Like the piece by Larry Hughes it has a lot in it to digest.

Marty,

I haven’t read the book. It is by Tom Reilly but he did write a very funny one on his experience as an atheist. I enjoyed that.

Would you try a review of the Gralton book for the Quill? It sounds really interesting.

Larry Hughes Myres' mentor and fellow 'en...

2012-09-05T21:38:32.498+01:00

Larry Hughes

Myres' mentor and fellow 'english drunkard' was the late obnoxious Christopher Hitchens of whom the best accolade paid was, 'Im not glad he's dead, but Im glad he's gone.'
Praising Myres' aforementioned masterpiece of 'bile', this pickled inebriate, made the trajectory even before him. As George Galloway noted 'it was the only time he could ever remember seeing a butterfly, metamorphose into a slug'.
Well George, now you can also add PSF to that list.

truthrevisionist Every time I see Myers on reelin...

2012-09-05T14:38:33.737+01:00

truthrevisionist

Every time I see Myers on reeling back the years in his stuffy student days i cringe. What a gobshite. If we think SF have gone all SDLP then Myers takes the buscuit for his trajectory from left to right at the speed of light. Why he is tolerated and fettered in the south is a mystery to me. Bet those guys who punched Charlie Bird during the Dublin riot against the Love Ulster parade in 2006 wish it had been Myers they were bashing...the turd.

Anthony there is a historian in your adopted town ...

2012-09-05T09:51:27.197+01:00

Anthony there is a historian in your adopted town who claims that the massacre carried out by Cromwell there didnt really happen,then we had in the 80,s the campaign to demonise the RA by claiming that they were nothing like the old IRA,that assertion when put under the microscope proved correct the good old IRA were much more vicious,I have just finished a superb booklet entitled Jimmy Gralton An Understandable Alien,loaned to me by the undauntable and tireless worker for human rights Padragín Drínnan,It is about the life and times of a Leitrim socialist who fought for the country,s independence, who was forced after the war to emigrate to America where like Connolly before him he became involved in the labour movement on returning to Ireland he joined the Revolutionary Workers Group a forerunner to the Communist Party of Ireland he donated the land and built a hall named after Pearse-Connolly for the people to meet ,dance and debate, much to the chagrin of the bishops and clergy of the catholic church they hounded this man who worked tirelessly for the people until the de Valera government deported him as an "undesirable alien"Jimmy Gralton was the only Irish person ever deported from their own country,which shows that the catholic church not only fucked the kids they fucked everybody here.so when I read about Irishmen like Gralton and talk to Irishwomen like Padragín Drinnan I have no need to read the rants of bastards such as Myres and I,d rather be labled a commie than a catholic any day..

Correction: There is a mistake in the endnotes. T...

2012-09-05T09:29:32.309+01:00

Correction:

There is a mistake in the endnotes. The tenth one should read as follows:

[10] Lee, Modernisation, pp.162-163

If you want to read a proper 'fairy tale' ...

2012-09-04T22:57:03.078+01:00

If you want to read a proper 'fairy tale' I would refer you to Kevin 'spoofer' Myres' book 'Watching The Door'. This brilliant 'Hans Christian Anderson-esque' take, on his part in the 'troubles', even had the H.E.T. threatening to go on strike, after analysing its' 271 pages of 'lies bullshit, fabrication and fiction'.(These, the words of HET investigator to a friend, after Myres excused his bullshit as 'artistic licence').To give credence to this 'buffoon' by even referring to him in a scholarly fashion, is akin to 'pissing on the graves' of victims of our conflict, ficticiously documented in this plethora of lies.
My advice? Ignore this English drunkard fool!