Elis O’Hanlon has an axe grind with people in the media who insist on complication of a narrative that is hard to justify from a simple reading of the facts. Instead she invokes Occum’s razor (a powerful root of the modern scientific method) to great effect in today’s Sunday Independent. Or as Einstein might have put it: make everything as simple as possible: but not simpler:
The story is simple: the unimaginably brutal murder of their brother in a Belfast bar; the subsequent cover-up by IRA members and wall of silence erected by Sinn Fein; the attempt by the sisters to elicit national and international support for their fight for justice, culminating in the St Patrick’s Day visit to the White House.
The arc of the story is clean and straightforward, and yet as time passes it has become muddied with a multitude of extraneous interpretations and arguments about its ultimate meaning; an obfuscation which has been actively encouraged by republicans in an effort to detract attention from the simple fact that they have failed to match up to their alleged support for the McCartney women’s quest to see the men who killed their brother brought to court.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
