Kevin Myers is as sound a writer as Jonathan Swift, but with actual skin in the game. Kevin Myers became a fearless critic of the IRA and Sinn Fein, having spent much time with IRA gunmen.
Here is some of the work of a real journalist:
In 1974 Myers was approached by the Official IRA who, aware of his contacts, requested a meeting with their loyalist counterparts. A meeting was arranged between Jim Hanna, an Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) leader and a representative of the Officials. The Europa Hotel, Belfast was chosen because its supposedly tight security would ensure neither side could be armed. Yet both sides managed to smuggle in armed men and Myers described their comical attempts to blend in. Further meetings followed and agreements were reached for the safe return of unfortunates who accidentally found themselves in the other's territory.[17]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article608437.ece
Later, at a secret meeting arranged by Myers at the request of the Provisionals. Dáithí Ó Conaill and Brian Keenan had talks with UVF leaders Hanna and Billy Mitchell near Lough Sheelin, County Cavan. Myers summarised the purpose of the talks: The IRA simply wished to discuss the terms of the loyalist surrender and the loyalists wished merely to assure the IRA they had no intention of surrendering. The meeting lasted four hours. Mitchell later recalled that "We just wanted to get to know one another. And we thought we could find a way to call an end to everything." "I really liked David. And neither of us accused the other of anything."[18] That night the two sides had dinner together, followed by a drinking session. Keenan and Mitchell fell asleep, drunkenly in each others arms.
Following the meeting Myers discerned a brief lull in the IRA targeting of UDR soldiers.
Today, American journalists are wringing their chubby hands over the possibility of London style riots here in America. Open your friggin' eyes Cupcakes -Americans riot on the installment plan -teen flash mobs and daily shootings. The Revolution will not be televised, but it will be an HBO documentary by Spike Lee.
Yesterday, Myers lambasted the PC Press in England, as they have helped stoke the riots in the same manner as American journalistas do Class Warfare as opposed to reporting the news.
This is a must Read:
By Kevin Myers
Wednesday August 10 2011
The duty of journalists is to tell the truth. If we don't do that, it's the equivalent of a nurse comfortably chatting over a nice cup of tea while an empty saline drip feeds air into a patient's artery. The moment that we think it's more important to protect some comfortable ideological dogma is the moment when our particular patient, truth, begins to die. I take no pleasure in what follows; but there is a job to be done, so here goes.
Perhaps the most astounding element in the British television coverage of the riots over much of England has been the steadfast refusal to mention the race of most of the rioters. They are clearly, and overwhelmingly, Afro-Caribbean, the descendants of immigrants, though such has been the utter British failure to integrate so much of the immigrant population that many have retained something of a Caribbean accent. Admittedly, not all of the rioters are "black": clearly, some white youths have joined in.
But where they have not got race is common, they probably have another feature that joins them: absent father-figures. An astonishing number of young males in London are the sons of single mothers. They have been raised without the presence of a male authority figure to impose familial order, and furthermore and most vitally, to promote the patriarchy.
Contrary to what the feminist mantra of recent decades has proposed, the patriarchy was not invented to oppress woman, but devised by Abraham to control men. Adolescent males, without an imposed order, are as feral as chimpanzees. This is why all societies have adopted rigorous means of imposing authority on teenage boys, and which always requires male authority-figures: either sergeant-majors or patriarchs or that unfashionable thing, "dads".
But Britain, like Ireland, went down the insane path of encouraging single mothers to have children: indeed, both societies actually created additional incentives for unmarried women to reproduce. It is social lunacy, delinquency turned into state policy, to encourage women to bear a population of young males without fathers. Yet that is what our two islands have been doing in a weak-minded, abject capitulation to the feminist ideological dogma that men are really redundant in the family. Yet the statistics across the world show that the single mother is far more likely to raise a criminal, a thug or rapist, than the married mother. No fewer than 70pc of young offenders in Britain are from single-parent families. It is not mere "poverty" that produces the socially dysfunctional male, so much as father-free families.
Moreover, in all societies in the world where Afro-Caribbeans have settled, there is a problem with male teenage gang culture. That being the case -- for whatever reason -- it makes no sense whatever to "reward" single mothers of that background for having boys without a father-figure to control them. The facta are known: black children of single mothers are twice as likely to commit crime as black children with two parents. Nearly 60pc of London's Afro-Caribbean mothers are single. If the allure of the male hierarchy in a gang on the street proves irresistible, then ahead awaits social disaster.
There is a third element. Immigration: not of the parents or grandparents of the young males currently dismantling London and other cities, but more recent immigration, much of it white, that prevents young natives, of any ethnic background, getting jobs. There are some 10,000 unemployed in Tottenham -- though the moronic oxymoron term "jobseeker" is now the fashionable term to describe the unemployed. No doubt many want jobs -- for every job vacancy in Tottenham there are 54 applications -- but it is surely gilding the lily to describe every single dole-taker (whether he is in Britain or here) as someone really seeking employment. But that aside, in the past 10 years under the egregious and depraved policies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, an already overcrowded Britain took in over two million immigrants. Where have the jobs gone? That's where.
Six years ago, I wrote a column for 'The Irish Times' about the riots then erupting across immigrant areas in France and Britain. Michael D Higgins TD issued a statement in which he said: "The contents of his column today go beyond his usually crafted cowardice, staying one step on the safe side of prosecution for incitement to hatred or racism."
"Usually crafted cowardice", eh? Is cowardice really a characteristic of my journalism? And that's before we even come to the delightful implication of racist intent. So, is it remotely surprising that we never had any proper discussion about immigration, if a future presidential candidate of this Republic could feel free to use such vile and actionable language about a critic of our immigration non-policies?
Immigration did not cause our collapse, but the refusal to create an immigration policy was an intellectual companion to our populist failure to control our banks. And no one can deny this unassailable truth: our unemployment figures have been made immeasurably worse by the large numbers of immigrants who poured unchecked into the Celtic Tiger economy. Finally, if you want to know what a combination of failed immigration and social policies can produce, why, just watch the TV news from London tonight.
- Kevin Myers
Irish Independent
