The killer identified Margaret as a young girl in a dress and then he deliberately shot her…

I normally don’t write posts about the Troubles. I try to look forward and not dwell on the past. That’s easy for me to say because I never lost anyone close to me. I don’t have the raw pain of the missing person at Christmas and family events. But sometimes you come across something so shocking that you just can’t but write about it. Kevin Myers recently wrote on his blog about the notorious activities of the Paras in Northern …

Read more…

Full circle: Kevin Myers takes the rap and offers full contrition

But Kevin is right: editors should edit and take responsibility for all copy. What more is there to say?  Except that I hope he has a good pension plan. In his first comments on the issue, Myers said he believed “five or six” people would have seen the copy before it went to press. “I am the author of my own misery, I am the master of my soul, the author of my own misfortune. I must answer for what …

Read more…

Do the Irish papers emerge with credit over how they handled Kevin Myers? You decide

The Irish Independent has at last joined the Irish Times in entering the row over  Kevin Myers, who has written for both papers in his time. Former Indo editor Gerry O’Regan resorts to psychology and family background in Leicester and Ireland to explain Kevin’s “ inner rage.”  As his editor O’Regan says their relations were…. “unnecessarily uneasy and strained; his propensity to take umbrage at even the slightest criticism in time simply became tiresome. It is a character trait which …

Read more…

The limited case for Kevin

The Irish Times for which he once wrote and even more significantly the Jewish Council of Ireland have mounted a limited  defence of  Kevin Myers. As I labelled him a disgrace for the bonkers claim that two BBC presenters won bigger contracts because they were Jewish, I’m very happy to carry here the case for Kevin warts and all, such as it can be made. There is indeed more to him than this but it’s a pretty  unsightly wart. The …

Read more…

Kevin Myers’ ‘Watching the Door’: Book Review

This reads as if a mad picaresque tale. Myers as first a reporter for RTÉ and then as a freelance journalist with no real experience, finds himself wandering into savagery as he hastens north as the Troubles explode. A soldier dies next to him; he witnesses an IRA ambush; he sees children shot to death by snipers. The adjectives pile up: the conditions in 1970s Belfast lead to a life led as lies. ‘Insane, vile, ludicrous, preposterous’ characterise what happens …

Read more…