Ruth Dudley Edwards is an historian and a prize-winning biographer and crime writer. She writes for the Daily Telegraph. Three of her recent articles for this newspaper are titled – ‘The Jews crucified Our Lord’: Irish antisemitism and the complicity of the Catholic bishops; Dolours Price is a lesson in the ugly futility of Irish republican terrorism; Gerry Adams: he hasn’t gone away, you know. Excerpts and links follow. Her eleven non-fiction books include The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843-1993 and Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice.
‘The Jews crucified Our Lord’: Irish antisemitism and the complicity of the Catholic bishops
Sarah Honig, a recent Israeli visitor to Cahersiveen, a charming little town in County Kerry, wrote yesterday in the Jerusalem Post of being asked in its main street for a donation by three teenage boys carrying large signs saying “Free Palestine”.
When asked from whom Palestine was to be freed, they replied “The Jews”. “Are you sure”, she asked, “that this money wouldn’t fund terrorists and murderers?” She was thrown by the response: “What do you have against Palestinians? What have they done to you? They are only against Jews. Jews are evil.” One of them helpfully added that the Jews “crucified Our Lord”.
Honig then met the teacher, who explained he had brought them out during school hours as part of a class project “to further a humanitarian goal” by inculcating a commitment to charitable work. He “nodded in agreement without a word of objection” when she told him of the children’s remarks about Jews.
Those of us who publicly address the one-sidedness of the Irish take on the Middle East are used to ill-informed and/or bigoted politicians and activists (particularly but not exclusively republican or of the Left), but the Catholic Church has been having a pernicious effect too, particularly through its official overseas development agency, Trocaire, an Irish word meaning compassion.
The charity was launched in 1973 by the Irish bishops laudably to “give whatever help lies within its resources to the areas of greatest need among the developing counties”, while domestically making “us all more aware of the needs of these countries and of our duties towards them.” Nowadays it is more fashionable and majors on gender equality, Aids, climate change and human rights, with particular emphasis on the rights of Palestinians.
Trocaire’s blatant bias on Israel was addressed in an article a week ago by Richard Humphreys, a Dublin Labour councillor and one of the few dissenting voices . He discussed its relevant on-line educational pack for secondary schools, which had a Palestinian flag on the front page and inside two harrowing stories of Israeli wrongdoing through Palestinian eyes. There was no mention of rocket attacks on Israel: the blocade of Gaza was designed “to punish Hamas”. “The more I read of the Trocaire pack, the more it seemed to be a case of four legs good, two legs bad. Palestinian victims and Israeli oppressors.”
When he made contact with Trocaire he was told they had withdrawn the resource for review and had decided not to revise it but instead to focus on the issue of boycotting produce from Israeli settlements. Because there is nothing on labels to distinguish settlement goods, this in effect means a boycott of all Israeli produce.
Why, asked Humphreys, should Israel be singled out? “Do Trocaire really believe that Israel is the worst human rights offender on the planet?” Did the country get no credit for its record on the rights of women and gays, on free speech and on religious freedom, which so contrast with the Palestinian regime. Now Christians are under attack in the Arab world, he suggested, “you would have thought that persecution of Christians would be a bigger issue for the Catholic bishops and their aid agency”.
I don’t know if the Carersiveen school had made use of the Trocaire educational pack, but it’s a fair guess that they had. Certainly, its pupils’ campaigning zeal can only be heightened by the charity’s call to lobby retailers to boycott Israeli goods. The Irish bishops, who are mostly punch-drunk since the child abuse scandal and few of whom seem brave, either approve of their charitable funds being spent on anti-Israeli propaganda rather than saving Christians from persecution, or are hiding under their collective duvet.
It’s no wonder that the Israeli Foreign Ministry sees Ireland as the most anti-Israeli and, indeed, anti-semitic, country in Europe. The bishops should be ashamed that – in the name of compassion – they allow their charitable arm to disseminate hatred.
Dolours Price is a lesson in the ugly futility of Irish republican terrorism
Dolours Price, one of the 1973 Old Bailey bombers, died yesterday in Dublin after years of poor mental and physical health. Her sister, Marian, is in jail in Northern Ireland, alleged by her family to be close to breakdown.
Gerry Kelly, another co-bomber, hobnobbed with the powerful from the beginning of the peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement, is a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, has held junior ministerial office and is so chummy with Jonathan Powell (Tony Blair’s Downing Street chief-of-staff) that they travelled together to Manila to speak to rebels and government on behalf of the conflict-resolution industry.
The reason for their differing fortunes is that Kelly has been a faithful follower of the IRA/Sinn Fein leadership throughout all its tactical twists and turns, while the Price sisters stuck grimly to the uncompromising ideology inculcated in them by their hard, intransigent IRA father, Albert: a United Ireland or nothing.
When the IRA dispatched the sisters to London to kill for Ireland, they were respectively 21 and 18. Sentenced to life imprisonment (later reduced to 20 years), they demanded to be transferred to Northern Ireland prisons, went on hunger strike with other bombing colleagues and were force fed. The mighty republican propaganda machine made the most of their youth, good looks and gender and ‘Bring Them Home’, the obligatory mawkish rebel song, was recorded in their honour.
(For those who can’t face listening to it, here’s a sample of the lyrics: ‘So I pray you men of Ireland/Don’t betray our daughters true/Proudly stand beside our heroes/Lest they die for me and you/Though the tyrant would deny us/We can break their hearts of stone/And all of Ireland will be singing/When we bring our daughters home.)
They were sent to Northern Ireland in 1975 and were released in 1980 on humanitarian grounds, suffering from malnutrition: Dolours married the actor Stephen Rea. Like Marian, she couldn’t stomach the Good Friday Agreement, which she saw as a cynical betrayal. While Marian became publicly associated with the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, the political arm of the Real IRA, Dolours was a loose cannon, had alcohol and drug problems and was given to emotional public outbursts. She caused Gerry Adams discomfort with her allegations that – among other IRA activities – he ordered the murder and disappearance of Jean McConville. She also recorded interviews for a Boston College archive that are now the subject of a complex legal tussle in the US and there is much speculation about how much she might damage some republican reputations when the transcripts are released.
I have no compassion for Marian, who had none for those who died in the Omagh bomb, but I’ve had the occasional flicker of sympathy for Dolours. Still, having read a few tributes to her today, I side with the journalist Walter Ellis. “Dolours Price was an active terrorist for a number of years,” he wrote on www.thebrokenelbow.com, the blog of Ed Moloney, a journalist friend of hers who shared her single-minded antipathy to Adams. “She bombed the Old Bailey; she drove Jean McConville to her place of execution; she almost certainly took part in other IRA operations. She opposed the Good Friday Agreement, which brought a fractious peace to the North, and, logically, she must have had sympathy with the Continuity or Real IRA.
However pleasant she might have appeared when relaxed and in company, she was a committed urban guerrilla, who regarded murder as the principle means of advancing her political agenda. She had great courage, but also a cold heart.
If it should turn out that her testimony adds to the public perception of Gerry Adams as having been, for a number of years, the Provisional IRA’s chief strategist in Belfast, that is to the good – for that is what he was. Other than that, and while respecting the feelings of her family, I shed no tears for Ms Price.”
Gerry Adams: he hasn’t gone away, you know
In case you haven’t been paying attention to the stellar career of Gerry Adams, here are a few updates.
He has celebrated his thirty years as president of Sinn Fein by announcing the glad news that he’ll stay on for at least another three years. He’ll step down “when the time comes. But that time isn’t now. I have work to do”.
This work includes spearheading a campaign to have an all-Ireland referendum on the constitutional position of Northern Ireland some time between 2015 and 2020. It takes a visionary peace-maker like him to grasp that what is needed to calm a disturbed province is to explain to loyalists that Sinn Fein are upping the ante on a United Ireland, which the polls and recent census returns show is wanted by very few people – north or south.
He also condemns current violence in a way that makes loyalists – who know his grisly history – choke. It was Sinn Fein’s attempt to get the Union flag removed permanently from City Hall that kick-started the recent trouble. Adams has stoked the flames by visiting his old constituency, West Belfast, which he abandoned to stand for the Dail (the Irish parliament), in order to condemn unctuously “anyone who engages in violence”. It is, he explained to the camera, “not spontaneous, it is not organic, it is orchestrated, it is planned. This was a deliberate policy of coming to these so-called interface areas and attacking people only on the basis that they are Catholic”. Having visited the nationalist Short Strand area, he insisted that its inhabitants had been involved “in no activity at all”. Unfortunately for his credibility TV news coverage showed non-violent loyalist protesters being assailed with fearsome missiles hurled from the Short Strand.
Adams is having a few health problems, but, don’t worry, he seeks the best medical help. Although a member of the Dail, he had eye surgery last year at British taxpayers’ expense in the Belfast Royal Victoria Hospital. And his troublesome prostate was dealt in New York, with the assistance of the US Friends of Sinn Fein, who stumped up for his flights and accommodation. Adams has been voluble in his denunciation of privatised medicine, but he is making no apology. “It’s a private decision by me,” he explained. “That’s my business. And I think those who attack me on that are engaging absolutely in hypocrisy and opportunism”.
His feelings are more easily hurt these days. Republicans have many friendly lawyers and are as quick to sue as Adams’s paramilitary associates used to be to shoot. The press in the two islands are harried and intimidated. Adams, however, has been strangely reluctant to challenge those who over the years have called him a liar for claiming he was never in the IRA. I am not the only hack to have accused him of being a senior officer in print and on the airwaves. But he recently had Sinn Fein complain to CNN because its World Report described him as ‘a former IRA paramilitary commander’. It may be, of course, that this was a worry over nomenclature. As a pedantic friend pointed out on Facebook, ‘commander’ is a naval term: Adams was a landlubber and should more properly be described as an ‘officer commanding’.
He may be more easily upset these days because he’s performing so badly in the Dail. He’s profoundly disliked there because of his hectoring, his sanctimony, his humourlessness and his lies. He’s the worst example of what are known in the south as ‘Nordies’. Even the polite Taoiseach has taken to baiting him over his IRA past and his alleged involvement in such atrocities as the murder of Jean McConville, Belfast mother of ten, abducted, killed and secretly buried in 1972. But although he performs badly and is an economic illiterate, Adams is hanging on to his leadership of the parliamentary party too, and is attempting to stifle dissent.
The days of bloody coups are over in modern republicanism, but Adams should not lie easily in his political bed. There is young talent in Sinn Fein, and though he can bully his critics into submission, for now, these days, he cannot threaten them with physical retribution. He may end up having to leave the political scene sooner than he’s planned.