The Broken Elbow

On the same day, the Dems cave in to an obscure parliamentary trick which bans the $15 minimum wage and the US bombs Syria, Plus ca change!

Great piece in The Washingtonian magazine about the horrors of working in Trump’s hotel in the US capital.

This is a very good piece in The Hill of all places, about the US media’s disgracefully uncritical coverage of the Biden presidency, contrasting the hardball handling of the Trump White House with the embarrassingly oleaginous coverage of Trump’s successor. This bit jumped out at me, bringing back memories of the Belfast media’s unctuous coverage of Mo Mowlam:

To his colleagues at Iveagh House, the ornate Georgian palace off St Stephen’s Green once owned by the Guinness family but now the headquarters of the Irish government’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Richard Ryan was known as ‘the man who dined for Ireland’.

With the Irish embassy in fashionable South Kensington as his base, it was Ryan’s task, during the months leading up to the 1985 Hillsborough Accord, to wine and dine Britain’s great and good, to discover what level of sympathy there was for Dublin’s ambitious hopes for an historic deal with Britain that would see off the burgeoning threat from Sinn Fein and to glean, if he could, the direction Mrs Thatcher and her ministers might be heading.

He also broke bread with fellow diplomats, especially those representing Britain’s allies, in an effort to discover what they might know. So it was that on or around April 30th, 1985, he lunched with one Peter Reams, an official in the US Embassy who previously had responsibility for Northern Ireland matters in the State Department in Washington.

His report of the meeting to his masters in Dublin was sent by courier service to Iveagh House. He had marked it ‘Confidential’ but on receipt his superiors upped that to ‘Secret’. A quick reading (thanks to the release of the document in 2015) especially of the final paragraph, provides the reason for that upgrading:

It is difficult to read that paragraph and not deduce two facts about the diplomats’ lunch. One is that Mr Reams, or was it Mr Ryan, had been a touch too generous with a doubtless excellent bottle of Bordeaux; the other was that the American diplomat’s remark was tantamount to an admission that Dublin’s favourite foreign ally was not beyond rummaging through Ireland’s dustbins, as it were.

Mr Ryan, who went on to become Irish ambassador to South Korea, appears to have had a knack at extracting spying admissions from officials of other governments. A month before his lunch with Mr Reams, he dined with Lord Gowrie, the second most senior minister in the Northern Ireland Office, who warned the Irish diplomat of a massive British spying operation targeted at Ryan’s colleagues.

As a result Ryan’s superiors decided to no longer trust electronic communication and instead used the services of a courier service, one of whose first missives delivered to Iveagh House seemingly warned of a similar exercise by the Americans.

Here, for posterity, is the full letter:

I am indebted to CM for bringing this fascinating and important document to my attention. It was actually released by the Irish government in 2015 under the thirty-year rule, but appears to have gone largely unnoticed, despite its significance as an insight, admittedly not a neutral one, into the workings of the upper reaches of the Northern Ireland legal system on the eve of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.

I could find only one reference to the document on the internet and that was a single paragraph in a preview of the Hillsborough Agreement written by John Bowman for The Irish Times. Otherwise it appears to have escaped the Irish media entirely, although I stand ready, and will be happy to be corrected. (A copy of this document can also be found on the CAIN archive.)

The document is an account of a four hour interview cum conversation featuring one of the North’s most distinguished Catholic QC’s, Charles Hill, better known by his colleagues as Charlie, that was conducted by Daithi O Ceallaigh, an official with the Department of Foreign Affairs. Journalists who were active in the 1980’s will remember the DFA man as one of the so-called ‘Travellers’, diplomats who had the task of venturing North to collect intelligence and gossip from as many sources as would talk to them.

The subject of this conversation/interview was twofold: the role Catholic QC’s would like to play in the administration of justice in Northern Ireland and the role played by then Lord Chief Justice, Robbie Lowry in frustrating them.

It is a fascinating insight into a world which then, as now, was too often closed to the world.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

The boycott of the above title by The Irish Times and RTE appears not merely to have been extremely successful, but also contagious.

Not one single media outlet reported the recent shocking admission by Frank Fitzgibbon, the former Irish editor of The Sunday Times, that the allegation made by his newspaper that I was an antisemite was completely wrong and unjust.  This lie was repeated across the world. I think you all know the consequences of that falsehood for me.

My memoir “Burning Heresies“, which covers my career as a columnist and war correspondent, and includes the shocking events of 2017, has still not been reviewed by The Irish Times, four months after publication. Pre-booked interviews with RTE were cancelled at the last minute, and the station has never mentioned the book. Neither The Irish Times nor RTE News has ever revealed the costly settlement RTE was forced to agree to for calling me a Holocaust Denier.

In their reviews, Alan Shatter and Eilis O’Hanlon praised Burning Heresies in glowing terms. Amazon reviews are 84% five stars, 16% four stars.

Please urge as many people as possible in your address book not merely to consider buying “Burning Heresies“, but for them also to make the same request via their address books.

Every day, the mob claims more victories. This cannot and must not continue.

Break this boycott! 

Thank you for bearing with me thus far.

Sincerely
Kevin Myers

I am sort of kicking myself this morning for not asking just exactly who Sir Desmond de Silva was when it really mattered. I mean, we know he was the distinguished barrister who agreed to head a British government inquiry into the British Army’s Force Research Unit, and that he cleared the military of any involvement, via a FRU/UDA agent called Brian Nelson, in the UDA’s plans to assassinate Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.

But just exactly who was Sir Desmond de Silva?

It is a relevant question because governments are not stupid. The choice of the person to lead an investigation invariably predetermines its outcome. Choose someone who has a track record as a trouble making, doubting Thomas and you can be pretty sure that his or her probe is going to be hard hitting. Pick a team player on the other hand and the odds are that everyone but the real culprits will get the blame.

So, which category was Sir Desmond de Silva in?

Sir Desmond de Silva died of heart problems in June 2018 and the obituary writers, freed of the usual restraints when writing about a member of the establishment, allowed themselves a little indiscretion.

There was, for instance, this little gem in the The Times obituary:

Forgive my scepticism but what odds would you give me for a wager on the possibility of someone who elicits immediate facial recognition on the part of the monarch, judging the soldiers of that same monarch guilty of conspiring to murder a solicitor who specialised in defending the same monarch’s sworn and violent enemies some of whom had, in fact, murdered her dearest uncle? Or was it cousin? I can never remember.

Perhaps I am being too hasty.

In September 2017, a year before his untimely death, Sir Desmond de Silva published his autobiography, ‘Madam, Where Are Your Mangoes?’ and the book’s launch was lavishly covered by Britain’s premier society magazine, Tatler.

The launch was held at the exclusive Carlton Club in London’s West End, where prospective members must be nominated and then elected, i.e. must be judged acceptable by their peers. Thanks to its links to the Tory Party, the club was bombed by the IRA in 1990, resulting, some months later, in the death from his injuries of Lord Kaberry, a prominent and popular member.

Amongst the club’s distinguished members is the former British prime minister, David Cameron whose government asked Sir Desmond de Silva to head the Finucane inquiry. So one Carlton Club member hired another to investigate one of the most controversial killings of the Troubles, of a solicitor, many of whose clients belonged to the organisation which bombed their exclusive club.

This is how Tatler magazine featured Sir Desmond de Silva’s book launch:

So, who attended his book launch? You can read the whole article and view the pics here, but this is the list of luminaries who came to celebrate the launch: Lord Fellowes, Marjorie Wallace and Lady Colin Campbell, Lady Emma Fellowes and Anne Hodson-Pressinger, Doreen, Marchioness of Londonderry and Sir Toby Clarke, Michael Cockerell and David Oldroyd-Bolt, Basia Briggs, Alexander Newley and Anne Dunhill, Lauren Goldstein-Crowe, Selina Blow, Viscountess and Viscount Bangor, Naim Attallah and Ramsay Attallah, Sir William Cash and Lord Magan, Lady Cash, Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia and Victoria de Silva.

Would the same illustrious crowd have been so eager to attend Sir Desmond de Silva’s book launch, one wonders, if he had found the Force Research Unit complicit in the murder of Pat Finucane?