FROM THE ARCHIVES:Fianna Fáil's choice of Erskine Childers as its presidential candidate in 1973, just after it had lost a general election, prompted this burst of outrage from John Healy in his Backbencher column. – JOE JOYCE
CAN ANYONE tell me what are, in April 1973, the elements of a Fianna Fáil soul? The twin national aims – abolish Partition, and the Restoration of the Language.
Anyone who wants to analyse Fianna Fáil policy and speeches will find that funny: my own reading is that current Fianna Fáil policy and the twin national aims should now read: Abolish Irish, and the Restoration of the Border!
If the great Republicans wanted to punch a hole in the Border they could have reached for a Northern candidate. If the party was really anxious to signify its great concern for the language and its place in the life of the nation, it would have a Gaelic speaking candidate.
Erskine can manage Bored na Moaner or Bored Faulther: he is the first to admit himself he does not have the native tongue.
Again, let me say Mr. Childers’ lack of the language is no reflection on his candidacy or on his character as a very good and concerned Irishman: when it came to an issue of law and order in the miserable and now dead 19th Dáil, Erskine Childers was a better Republican and used more forceful language than 95% of his own Republican Party, who had the First and Second official languages but lost their tongues when it came to condemning violence.
And now, because they want to lay their hands on the only bit of loot that’s going, the Soldiers of Deceit, with the Fáinne Nuas glinting like bayonets in the sun, march shoulder-to-shoulder behind the latter-day Dev.
It is, of course, a healthy development, whichever way it goes. For one thing the election of Mr. Childers must mean an end to the nonsense of having Irish to hold a State job. Liam Cosgrave and Dick Burke , now that they’ve scrapped compulsory Irish for the Inter and Leaving Certificate, within two days of Erskine being returned, abolish compulsory Irish for the Civil Service Mo léin, but wasn’t it a long day it took us to arrive at the bitter moment of truth about ourselves.
It was not – and this is the historical and literal truth as we will see it in perspective – until a tiny handful of men, armed with bomb, bullet and incendiary device, set one corner of this island on fire that the purgatorical [sic] fires of Belfast purged us of the hypocrisy of the official ideology preached by the Soldiers of Deceit. The Provos have effectively stripped the Republic of its myths which spawned so much more destruction and disaster in rural Ireland.
And now, Fianna Fáil, with supreme audacity, stomps the landscape and what’s left of the people, asking us to forgive them their sins and prove that we have granted them absolution by putting Erskine Childers in the Park. I’ll see them in hell first.