This tirade was the fourth in a series at the expense of Dr Alfred O’Rahilly, president of UCC during the controversy over the withdrawal of the so-called Mother and Child Scheme. The feud began when an Irish Timeseditorial claimed (correctly) that pressure from the Catholic bishops forced the government’s U-turn. Writing in a Catholic weekly, the Standard, O’Rahilly had in turn attacked the editorial. And when Myles na gCopaleen weighed in on the IT’s behalf, the UCC man turned his fire on “MC”, as he abbreviated the columnist’s name.
It may or may not have affected the tone of exchanges that O’Rahilly had been an intellectual apologist for the Blueshirts, or that he was the brother of TF O’Rahilly, who a decade earlier had been half the butt of Cruiskeen Lawn’s famous joke about the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies trying to prove there were “two St Patricks and no God” (a joke over which the institute successfully sued for libel). In any case, Myles’s threat to keep the columns going “till Christmas” was unfounded. The series lasted only a week and a half. – FRANK McNALLY
DID YOU read me yesterday on Alfred O’Rahilly, the Cork gawskogue? I was damn funny, if I say it meself. It was right gas. But I overlooked one small comment I had intended. AOR referred to me as “a Catholic who masquerades under the pseudonym of “Myles na gCopaleen”. Thanks, but why this perfectly gratuitous assertion that I am a Catholic? How does AOR know what my beliefs are, of what nature is my creed? I do not likely take on the grandiose title of Catholic. If AOR is a Catholic, it follows that I am not: the contrary would suggest the equation AOR = MC, which is perfectly preposterous. In any case, I deny absolutely that I am an Irish Catholic; dub me that and you dub me heresiarch.
I promised to quote AOR’s drool paragraph by paragraph and, having managed to deal with two of them yesterday, I now reach the third.
This: Ordinarily I would take no notice of a writer who with studied buffoonery divagates into paltry trivialities and offensive epithets as a subterfuge from a sociological discussion for which he is incompetent. But he asserts: “A number of readers have written asking me for definitive adjudication.”
If we may judge by some of the correspondents of The Irish Times, this ridiculous exaltation of MC into a super-bishop may well be true. Anyway, several people have taken the matter seriously and have written to me. So in the absence of any editorial reply, I will deal briefly with the editor's blustering substitute.
When a thing is intrinsically funny it is possible to spoil it by comment. However, we’ll chance it. Number wan, I really don’t think it’s necessary to describe “trivialities” as being “paltry”. I never heard of a momentous triviality. But where are we at all, at all, when a Cork philosopher (stet), ridiculing the idea of people writing to my Excellency for advice on spiritual matters, immediately asserts that “several people have written to himself”. I wonder would they be the same people? “Me dear Doctor, I was on to Myles but could get nothing out of him at all only studied buffoonery divagating into paltry trivialities. Please let me know is the bishops all gone mad . . . ”
Number two: Wot’s all this about the exaltation of myself into a super-bishop? It’s a crack that comes well from AOR, who describes himself as “President, University College, Cork”. My Greek dictionary states quite bluntly that the word episkopos means “president.” Really, I have no ecclesiastical ambitions and I was never a member of the Jesuits: I am merely a spoiled Proust. BUT – and this is awfully important – AOR should be aware that the Catholic Church does not require that one should be a clergyman, of however low degree, to be made a Cardinal. Suppose – just suppose for a minit – that the Red Hat should go not to Drumcondra or Armagh, but to Santry! That would certainly shake some people. “No sir, he’s not in. Matterafact he’s across in Rome.” By gob, stranger things have happened. I wonder would AOR muster sufficient humility to kneel devoutly and kiss my ring?
However . . . I showed yesterday that AOR uttered a falsehood when he asserted that the editor of this newspaper, afraid to make any move himself from his editorial eyrie, covertly prevailed upon myself to give AOR a public hiding. Now read again the tail end of the quotation above. I am awarded the title of “editor’s blustering substitute.”
In the same issue of the Standard,the editorial article is concerned with the important subject of money. The editor of the paper, having published a full-page advertisement crying the merits of Dr Browne's apparently godless Mother and Child Scheme, thought it better to pipe down till the bad smell subsided. And so, "in the absence of any editorial reply", as AOR says, it is he who will deal with me. He says himself that, so far as the Standard is concerned, he is "the editor's blustering substitute". Or has the unfortunate chiner's prose broken down again?
But the really funny word in the tail end of the paragraph is “briefly”. The Corker’s idea of brevity is of the same order as his veracity, his learning, his reasoning powers and even his syntax: namely, less than mediocre. He deals with me briefly in some three full columns, all of which I will quote here. That means that his brevity will keep us all here till Christmas.
I pass to the next paragraph, which is headed "Gems of Invective". The suggestion behind thatis that I live in a glass house and therefore shouldn't throw precious stones. Read it yourself: In a matter involving such far-reaching issues, especially when the campaign was opened so offensively, I have no objection to good hard-hitting argumentation. The editor of The Irish Timesis unknown to me; I have reason to believe that he is personally a liberal, fair-minded gentleman.
But I am concerned only with him as a journalist. For all I know he may have written with his tongue in his cheek, to play up to the gallery or to increase the circulation of his paper by a succès de scandale.
I have vigorously argued against his editorial; I am disappointed that he has not replied with equal vigour. I am more than disappointed that, instead of this, he has got his professional jester to emit a stream of irrelevant and stupid personal invective.
Honestly lads, isn't he the most extraordinary and incorrigible thullabawn. The "blustering substitute" becomes the "professional jester", changes his clothes lower down in AOR's treatise and becomes a "phraseological gunman", later is stated to own a "jester's cap and bells" and still later becomes a "pseudonymous jester", who emits "vulgar cat-calls". (By the way, I wonder whether a cat-call could, in certain circumstances, be felicitous?)
More particularly, I wonder what is the nature of the reason AOR says he has for believing that the editor of this newspaper is “a liberal, fair-minded gentleman”. AOR must be confusing the editor with myself.
The editor is nothing of the kind. He is a bigot who has sufficient intelligence to propagate his bigotry with a show of humanism and broadmindedness.
He has many of the characteristics of AOR himself, though he cannot match him in stupidity nor in his personal consate of hisself.
Naturally, all such judgments and comparisons are relative. In this part of the world the norm is I (“is I” sounds a bit pedantic, I admit).
In me only can you descry the statutory and sapient 4,840 square yards.*
As you read this I am writing some extremely amusing stuff, replete with quotations from AOR’s drool, for tomorrow. I never knuwn meself in better form!
*I am a wiseacre.