Kevin Myers was wrongly denounced as an antisemite
Alan Shatter defends the columnist and praises his memoir, which follows his career until his controversial sacking.
Kevin Myers’ Burning Heresies is a tour de force. It is a fascinating journey narrated at warp speed, portraying events during the author’s journalistic career from 1979 to now with intermissions and reflections on earlier parts of the last century. Over his many years writing the Irish Times’ ‘Irishman’s Diary’ and as a newspaper columnist and opinion writer, Myers has been variously informative, provocative, pioneering, infuriating, beguiling, courageous, contrary, cantankerous, passionate, funny, etymologically fastidious and linguistically reckless. When he gives it time and really cares, his writing can be both stunningly beautiful and truly evocative.
All of these traits and more are on display in this compelling book. To them can be added a self-deprecating sense of humour, a capacity for literary self-flagellation, occasional excessive drinking and acknowledgment of error. Accompanying that package is a series of trenchant opinions, sometimes unwisely and carelessly expressed to entertain in a world in which irony is no longer understood, grievance is king and intelligent debate and those who attempt to challenge so-called perceived wisdom are arbitrarily cancelled by the politically correct.
Myers rightly rails against the suffocating impact of political correctness and the distorted history-telling of Official Ireland that for too long gloried in IRA atrocities, ignored the bravery and fate of tens of thousands of Irish men and women who fought in two world wars, and helped to spawn the Provos and their political front-of-house, Sinn Féin. Not one to prevaricate, he writes of “the orgy of needless violence” that gave birth to the state and “ushered in a dysfunctional political order” that placed a curse on its existence thereafter. This curse, Myers charges, generated the stultifying politics of “isolationist Catholic nationalism” and a “society that flourished on lies and censorship”. He also criticises the character and conduct of some leading politicians both past and present, not just from observation but also in recounting some personal engagements and experience.
Readers are taken on a fascinating journey inside the world of the Irish Times as he pictorially describes its various journalists and commentators and the personalities, biases, ideologies, assumptions and egos that affect their reporting and opinion columns. He portrays past “values” of the paper as having “enriched the Irish nation like no other force in history” but as doing so “no more”. He confesses that his “infuriated love” affair with the paper is over.
The book more briefly references his days with the Irish Independent, his work with RTÉ and the Sunday Times. The events that followed publication by the latter of his personally disastrous, too hastily written, ill-considered opinion column at the end of July 2017 loom large in relation to all three, as well as the Irish Times.
As a reporter, Myers spent considerable time in Northern Ireland and the conflict and atrocities he witnessed clearly had an enduring impact. He carried those experiences with him when sent on assignment by the Irish Times twice as a war reporter to Lebanon and Bosnia. His hair-raising description of his time in both countries and of the death and tragedy he reported are sufficient cause to read this book. By way of contrast and light relief, his description of a flight on a small commuter plane in Panama, through storm-created turbulence, as “stinking chicken cadavers” leaking excrement fell on top of him and a hysterical women attempted to exit the plane at about 5,000ft is truly hilarious.
Myers’ passionate interest in the too-long-ignored sacrifice of the many thousands of Irishmen who fought for Britain in the Great War, now known as World War I, shines through the pages. His pioneering presentations of their deaths and their lives during his many years with the Irish Times and his successful campaign to have them remembered and commemorated is central to a distinguished career. So too are his many articles about World War II, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, which communicated historical fact that would have been otherwise unknown by many Irish people. These are discussed, as is his eureka moment when he deviated from the anti-Israeli prejudices and ‘woke’ perspective of the journalistic in-crowd and commenced writing articles that acknowledged the reality of the difficulties confronting the Israeli state and its vital importance not only to the Jewish people but also to the security of the western world.
Myers describes himself in his book as a utilitarian pragmatic rationalist. He also acknowledges that rational analysis did not always determine what he wrote. In confessional mode, he reveals that sometimes when reviewing past columns, he wonders “did I really write that”? He continues: “I have often been moved by the emotions of one day to pen thoughts that would be entirely alien to me on another. It is a boring soul, or a very sanctimonious one, who is consistently consistent.”
Myers has, however, as he asserts, always been consistent and unwavering in the scores of columns he has written about the horrors of the Third Reich, the immorality and depravity of the Holocaust and the evil of antisemitism. It is that which made so egregious the frenzy of denunciation that erupted in late July 2017 and his sacking by the Sunday Times. The paper published what Myers acknowledges as “a hastily written and poorly thought out” column. A reference in the column which, upon reading, I understood to be a crass, poorly framed expression of admiration for the intelligence of two Jewish female BBC presenters instantly resulted in his being wrongly denounced as an antisemite and targeted by online keyboard warriors ignorant of his previous writings.
The misleading headline to the piece, created within the paper, stimulated the additional charge of misogyny. Two weeks of falsehood, misrepresentation and hysteria followed, ludicrously also depicting him as a Holocaust denier – a charge repeated by RTÉ for which it later apologised and paid damages. Prominent journalists enthusiastically and viciously joined the lynching, including former Irish Times colleagues. The dignified factual statement supporting Myers from Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, was largely ignored.
Burning Heresies deserves a wide readership. It starkly illustrates that Kevin Myers has a voice that deserves to still be heard. He should be brought in out of the cold and his place in Irish journalism restored. His undeserved isolation and purgatory should end as should any need to regularly ask himself, referencing his July 2017 column, “did I really write that”?
Memoir: Burning Heresies by Kevin Myers.
Merrion Press, 320 pages, paperback €19.95
Courtesy Irish Independent.
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