It's an eventful day in Irish media circles because the Irish Times has run an editorial apologising for a column by one of their opinion page regulars, Kevin Myers, who runs his own apology today as well (may require subs.) The column at issue ran on Tuesday and was a tirade about out-of-wedlock births, single motherhood, and the impact of the welfare system on the behaviour thereof.
Myers has peripheral links to the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, having another column in the Sunday Telegraph and a rhetorical style similar to Mark Steyn. It's quite possible that the latest offending column reflected lingering hostility towards his editors, who had canned a pre-Christmas column that, as it turned out, correctly blamed the IRA for the Northern Bank job (which now imperils the scale of the St Patrick's Day festivities at the White House this year).
His key device in the column was to continually refer to out-of-wedlock children as bastards, and the mothers therefore as Mothers of Bastards, which nicely abbreviates to MoB. Hence sentences like:
All of which [outline of welfare payments to single parents] is a long-winded way of describing insanity - because we all agree it is mad to bribe impressionable young women into a life of MoBbery, which is crushingly limiting, with little sense of achievement or personal ambition, and no career to speak of, other - that is - from cash-crop whelping.
And, reflecting our view that the column was part payback for his editors' perceived softness towards the IRA, he got in this dig as well:
After all [noting Sinn Fein opposition to welfare changes], Sinn Féin/IRA have strong proprietorial feelings about single-parent families, having made hundreds and hundreds of them out of what had originally been two-parent families: why, God love them, they've even dabbled in making a good few no-parent families.
So between today's editorial, his apology, and a letters page entirely given over to the issue, it's all Myers all the time at the Irish Times. As public apologies go, its reasonably frank -- "In my desire to make my point powerfully, I used stupid, offensive language, and I deeply apologise for that." -- while being clear that he still believes in the substance of what he wrote.
So far, at least, he still has his gig with the paper. But in one bit of consolation to Myers, we'd point out that he appears not to have broken the ultimate taboo of the Irish media world -- criticism of our literary giants. Because we learned via Maud Newton's blog that critic Terry Eagleton believes that he has been blacklisted from being a reviewer for the Irish Times after he was judged to have been mocking Seamus Heaney in a contribution last year:
Writing in his diary for the New Statesman, Eagleton says he wrote a poem satirising a self-congratulatory [European Union] event Heaney gave his seal of approval to, which was subsequently published in the paper's literary pages, "only because they hadn't a clue what it was about."
Eagleton continues, "Once the penny dropped, all review copies and telephone calls ceased instantly."
What did poor Terry expect, taking on our dominant role in the European Union and our "you'll never beat the Irish" poetry in one go?
UPDATE: We had hoped to use the vast resources of BOBW to find for our readers the offending Eagleton article. But we can't find it in the Irish Times archives, consistent with his claim that it's now considered lese-majeste. Nonetheless, we did find coverage of the original event which drew the satire, an EU enlargement ceremony in May 2004, reminding us of our own remarks at the time about the pompous platitudes. Here's the paper's story (may require subs.) and the actual Heaney poem. Read the poem and you'll see what tempted Eagleton.
Myers has peripheral links to the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, having another column in the Sunday Telegraph and a rhetorical style similar to Mark Steyn. It's quite possible that the latest offending column reflected lingering hostility towards his editors, who had canned a pre-Christmas column that, as it turned out, correctly blamed the IRA for the Northern Bank job (which now imperils the scale of the St Patrick's Day festivities at the White House this year).
His key device in the column was to continually refer to out-of-wedlock children as bastards, and the mothers therefore as Mothers of Bastards, which nicely abbreviates to MoB. Hence sentences like:
All of which [outline of welfare payments to single parents] is a long-winded way of describing insanity - because we all agree it is mad to bribe impressionable young women into a life of MoBbery, which is crushingly limiting, with little sense of achievement or personal ambition, and no career to speak of, other - that is - from cash-crop whelping.
And, reflecting our view that the column was part payback for his editors' perceived softness towards the IRA, he got in this dig as well:
After all [noting Sinn Fein opposition to welfare changes], Sinn Féin/IRA have strong proprietorial feelings about single-parent families, having made hundreds and hundreds of them out of what had originally been two-parent families: why, God love them, they've even dabbled in making a good few no-parent families.
So between today's editorial, his apology, and a letters page entirely given over to the issue, it's all Myers all the time at the Irish Times. As public apologies go, its reasonably frank -- "In my desire to make my point powerfully, I used stupid, offensive language, and I deeply apologise for that." -- while being clear that he still believes in the substance of what he wrote.
So far, at least, he still has his gig with the paper. But in one bit of consolation to Myers, we'd point out that he appears not to have broken the ultimate taboo of the Irish media world -- criticism of our literary giants. Because we learned via Maud Newton's blog that critic Terry Eagleton believes that he has been blacklisted from being a reviewer for the Irish Times after he was judged to have been mocking Seamus Heaney in a contribution last year:
Writing in his diary for the New Statesman, Eagleton says he wrote a poem satirising a self-congratulatory [European Union] event Heaney gave his seal of approval to, which was subsequently published in the paper's literary pages, "only because they hadn't a clue what it was about."
Eagleton continues, "Once the penny dropped, all review copies and telephone calls ceased instantly."
What did poor Terry expect, taking on our dominant role in the European Union and our "you'll never beat the Irish" poetry in one go?
UPDATE: We had hoped to use the vast resources of BOBW to find for our readers the offending Eagleton article. But we can't find it in the Irish Times archives, consistent with his claim that it's now considered lese-majeste. Nonetheless, we did find coverage of the original event which drew the satire, an EU enlargement ceremony in May 2004, reminding us of our own remarks at the time about the pompous platitudes. Here's the paper's story (may require subs.) and the actual Heaney poem. Read the poem and you'll see what tempted Eagleton.