Kevin Myers
Life
1947- ; b. 30 March, b. Leicester, son of an
Irish doctor and his Irish wife; raised in England; lost his father
in teenage years [aetat. 15] while at Ratcliffe Coll., a Catholic
minor public school; continued with assistance from Education Authority
and the shcool; accepted by UCD [Dublin] as part of foreign student
quota on 2 “A” levels (GCE) after his mother wrote to
Prof. James Hogan, a family friend, 1969; grad. in History; worked
on Newsight and then at RTÉ; journalist in Belfast
during the 1970s, returning to Dublin to take up the Irishmans
Diary column at The Irish Times, frequently devoted
to remembrance of the forgotten Irish soldiers of World War I and
victims of republican violence both in the War of Independence (1919-21)
and the Northern Irish crisis; presented Challenging Times
on RTE in the 1990s; served as member of Film Classification Appeals
Board [ie. reformed censorship]; travelled to Split and Sarajevo
for The Irish Times, June 1992; m. Rachel, 1995; issued a
first novel, Banks of Green Willows (2001), dealing with
the Bosnian tragedy; |
|
issued apology for remarks on mercenary motives
of unmarried mothers made in the Irishmans Diary
(Irish Times, 8 Feb. 2005) - employing the word bastards;
subject of voluntary printed apology by self and another by the
then-Editor, Geraldine Kennedy; moved to the Irish Independent;
issued Watching the Door (2006), a memoir of reporting on
Belfast in the 1970s; also More Myers: An Irishmans Diary,
1997-2006 (2007); subject of allegations of incitement to hatred
against sub-Saharan Africans by Irish Immigrant Council, July 2008;
dropped as The Sunday Times [Irish edn.] columnist following
a campaign against supposed anti-feminist remarks around the equal-pay
for women BBC controversy, July 2017 [Sorry, ladies - equal
pay has to be earned]; received apology from RTÉ for
false representation as anti-semitic; returned to British journalism
in late 2019; lives in Co. Wicklow; br. in law of big-house presenter
Anna Nolan. |
[ top ]
Works
Journalism (Irishmans Diary) |
- From the Irish Times Column An Irishmans Diary
(Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000), 292pp.;
- Watching the Door: A [Belfast] Memoir 1971-1978
(Dublin: Lilliput Press 2006), 256pp., and Do [rep. as]
Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast
(Atlantic Books 2008), 288pp.;
- More Myers: An Irishmans Diary 1997-2006 (Dublin:
Lilliput Press 2007), 271pp.
- Irelands Great War (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2014),
255pp.
|
Fiction |
- Banks of Green Willow (London: Scribner; Dublin: TownHouse
2002), 275pp.
|
Autobiography |
- A Single Headstrong Heart (Dublin: Lilliput 2013), 320pp.
[see note];
- Burning Heresies: A Memoir of a Life in Conflict 1979-2020
(Dublin: Merrion Press 2020), q.pp. [see Preface - extract].
|
Miscellaneous |
- , contrib. to Andrew Whittaker, ed., Bright, Brilliant Days:
Douglas Gageby and The Irish Times (Dublin: A.& A. Farmar
2006).
|
[ top ]
Criticism
Shirley Kelly, Columnist Turns Novelist, interview with
Kevin Myers, in Books Ireland (Dec. 2001), p.321-22 [infra];
Ruth Scurr, review of Kevin Myers, Banks of Green Willow, in Times
Literary Supplement, 7 Dec. 2001, p.21.); Rory Brennan, review of
Watching the Door, in Books Ireland (May 2007), p.105 [infra].
See An Answer to Revisionists: Eamon Ó
Cuív, TD and others launch Sean Moylans Memoir (Aubane
Hist. Soc. 2005), 118pp., in which Ó Cuív assails trained
historian Kevin Myers in a short introduction; and see also Martin Manserghs
Irish Times column in Dec. 2005, asking whether Kevin Myers is
still necessary?
Wikipedia - update Feb. 2020: |
[...]
At the end of July 2017, Myers contributed
an article entitled Sorry, ladies - equal pay has to be
earned to the Irish edition of The Sunday Times about
the BBC gender pay gap controversy. He speculated: Is
it because men are more charismatic performers? Because they
work harder? Because they are more driven? Possibly a bit of
each and that men might be paid more because they work
harder, get sick less frequently and seldom get pregnant.
Myers further alleged that Claudia Winkleman
and Vanessa Feltz are higher paid than other female presenters
because they are Jewish. He wrote: Jews are not generally
noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest
possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of
inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. The editor
of the Irish edition, Frank Fitzgibbon, issued a statement saying
in part This newspaper abhors anti-Semitism and did not
intend to cause offence to Jewish people. Martin Ivens,
editor of The Sunday Times, said the article should not have
been published. Ivens and Fitzgibbon apologised for publishing
it. After complaints from readers and the Campaign Against Antisemitism,
the article was removed from the website. It has been announced
by the newspaper that Myers will not write for The Sunday
Times again.
Myers was defended by the chair of the Jewish
Representative Council of Ireland, Maurice Cohen, who said that
Myers was not antisemitic, but had rather inadvertently
stumbled into an antisemitic trope. ... Branding Kevin Myers
as either an antisemite or a Holocaust denier is an absolute
distortion of the facts. Myers apologised for this article
on radio, saying that it is over for me professionally
as far as I can see, and that I think they [Jewish
people] are the most gifted people who have ever existed on
this planet and civilisation owes an enormous debt to them -
I am very, very sorry that I should have so offended them.
Media reporting the 2017 controversy drew attention
to a 2009 column in the Sunday Independent and Belfast Telegraph
opposing laws against Holocaust denial. Despite accepting that
the Nazis planned the extermination of the Jewish people
and that millions of Jews were murdered, Myers wrote
Im a holocaust denier by making hair-splitting
objections to statements about the Holocaust: namely that the
figure of six million Jews killed was false in that it was approximate,
not exact; and that the label holocaust was etymologically
inaccurate in that, unlike a sacrificial holocaust, most victims
were not burnt in the ovens in Auschwitz but died
by gunshot, overwork, or starvation. The column was subsequently
removed from the Sunday Independent and Belfast Telegraph websites.
The Observer referred to Holocaust denier Kevin
Myers, later adding a footnote Kevin Myers says
he is not a Holocaust denier. He is not, in the usual sense
of that term. In February 2018, the Broadcasting Authority
of Ireland by majority decision upheld an objection to a Morning
Ireland presenters description of Myers as a Holocaust
denier: While noting that Mr. Myers had described himself
as a Holocaust denier in a typically provocative
newspaper article that he had written, it was evident from the
article as a whole that his description did not in fact amount
to a statement denying the genocide of the Jewish people at
the hands of the Nazi regime. Rather, the article was a comment
on how language is used and the criminalisation of individuals
or groups who engage in Holocaust denial.
|
Available online;
accessed 12.02.2020. |
[Note: The passage quoted here contains ftns.
20-27 and 1-3 [+3] - here excluded. The page is evidently
a work-in-progress with reference links which inadvertantly
open the relevant pages in the current window rather than
separate windows.]
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[ top ]
Quotations
Dead Men Walking: review of Martin McFarland, 50
Dead Men Walking (London: Blake 1997), 248pp., in Spectator
([during] May 1997], A most striking feature of McGartlands
tale is the intellectual and moral triviality of those he was informing
on, IRA leaders for whom the murder of insignificant members of the security
forces was in reality no more than an index of their determination to
get what they wanted. Tree-felling could have been just as efficacious.
The creation of a united Ireland is totally unrelated to the activities
of the IRA, which were based on primitive notions of organisation and
personal gratification through violence, as if a terrorist killing-contest
could achieve political victory, rather as goals win a football match.
[ top ]
An Irishmans Diary, in The
Irish Times (10 Oct. 1996)
|
O YOU know that this State now discriminates
in favour of terrorism? It is already the law of the land that provided
a terrorist murders with a revolver, he cannot be extradited to
another jurisdiction. Now the law says that suspected drug offenders
(but nobody else) may be held for questioning for a week.
Somebody caught with a marijuana joint can be interrogated
for a week, and be extradited to Northern Ireland on suspicion of
smoking a joint there; but a man responsible for the Lisburn bombing,
or involved in the planning of the bombing off London with 10 tons
of high explosives, would have to be released within three days
of his arrest; and if he had admitted to a handgun murder outside
the Republic, he could not then be extradited.
Does that not make your blood run cold, that we
havent permitted or even created legal loopholes for IRA killers,
but not cocaine users, to wriggle through? Does it not chill your
heart that there has been no outcry about this? Does it not put
ice in your veins that this legal situation appears to represent
the political will of the Irish people?
The white powdered cocaine which you snort up your
nose for purely personal pleasure gives you a week of interrogation;
the white powdered sugar which you use to dismantle London, or the
Channel Tunnel, gets you three days maximum. Then goodday sir, sorry
to have been troubling you.
Misrepresented
Of course the foregoing will be misrepresented as some sort
of mitigation for drug smugglers it is not. Our failure to deal
with drug smugglers as that crisis developed is now yielding its
rich harvest, a harvest which merely emulates the altogether more
ruinous crop which has flourished in our fields because we have
not dealt with terrorism with the necessary courage and political
will.
Yet merely to state this simple truth is widely
seen as backing for British policy or for unionism. It is neither;
nor is to deplore Bloody Sunday of 1972 or the activities of the
Shankill Butchers tantamount to supporting the Provos. Yet such
misrepresentation is a norm in discussing the role of violence today
and in the past. Recently, for example, David Moane of Dublin, following
a recent critical diary about Michael Collins, said that as usual
I displayed my usual wilful ignorance of "the history of Irish nationalism
in (my) attempt to justify the imperialism that oppressed it."
This is pathetic stuff, unworthy of the playground
logic of 10 year olds. I do not and did not justify British Government
misdeeds. It is possibly beyond David Moanes powers to grasp
more than one point at a time, but in the very article which prompted
his letter. I specifically said my criticisms of Collins were "not
to justify the crass and blundering idiocies of the British Government,
nor the brutalities and homicides of its agents." To transmute that
into a justification of British imperialism requires a rare alchemy.
Murder justified
Rowan Collins is up to something similar when he justifies the murders
of men of G Division in 1919, alleging that its intelligence was
responsible for numerous atrocities. Excuse me which ones? I had
said that there was at that time - 1919 - no police murder squad.
There was later, in response to the activities of Collinss
squad, but not then.
He offers the knowing justification that one detective,
Daniel Hoey, had pointed out Sean Mac Diarmada for the firing squad.
The allegation without a source note, was first made in Tim Pat
Coogans biography on Collins. It is meaningless.
Mac Diarmada was a paid organiser of the Irish
Volunteers, and had been one of the signatories to the Proclamation;
with his polio limp he was easily identifiable, and made no attempt
to conceal himself.
Gerard Kenny accused me of not answering questions
asked by other readers, notably Lieut. Col Duggan on August 27th,
1995. August 27th, 1995, was a Sunday. The Duggan letter appeared
the year before.
No answer
Since it did not deny my main thesis, that IRA men in the spring
of 1922 engaged in the murder of West Cork Protestants, it did not
require an answer. Do not take my word for it - Tim Pat Coogans
Collins biography reported how after an IRA man named ONeill
was shot during a raid on a Protestant farm, three Protestants were
shot in Dunmanway, and over the next week, the latent sectarianism
of centuries of ballads and landlordism claimed a total of 10 Protestant
lives.
In fact, more than 10 men were murdered. The man
who shot ONeill, Herbert Woods, an ex-soldier, was it is believed
tortured after surrendering to the IRA. He and his uncle, John Hornibrook,
were then murdered and their bodies secretly buried.
Other killings followed, and as Tim Pat Coogan
acknowledges, many Protestants fled Cork. To deny this reality is
like denying the reality of the massacre of the Catholic McMahon
family, very possibly by policemen, in Belfast a few weeks before.
Do we never learn that there is no clinical use
to violence within divided communities? It always unleashes emotions,
hatreds and expectations outside the control of those who initiate
it. It always ends with whimpering men being dragged from their
homes and shot, whether that home is in Srebenica or in Short Strand.
It is the one enduring truth we should take from our history: yet
it is the lesson we ignore each generation. |
— Posted on Facebook by Ruth Dudley Edwards,
22.02.2020. |
[ top ]
Kevin Myers on Irelands Great War (in
The Irish Times, 9 Jan. 2015)
|
In this extract from his new book, the former Irish
Times writer explains how he sought to disinter a forgotten
chapter of our history
|
[...]
The figure [of Irish deaths in action] I came up with, first published
in a feature article in The Irish Times in November
1980, was roughly 35,000. Such is the power of the press, and of
my colossal influence therein, that this figure of 35,000 has had
absolutely no impact whatever. Quite simply, people still prefer
the mythic – and perhaps Vedic: who knows? - number of 49,400.
But having since discovered the disgraceful War Office pension-saving
policies of discharging injured soldiers from the army, and then
not counting their deaths from war-related injuries as meriting
a place in SDGW or ODGW, I feel 35,000 is too low. Furthermore,
it is now clear that the military bureaucracy - like the War Graves
Commission, a generally meticulous organisation determined to honour
the dead - was sometimes overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophes
confronting it. And this is understandable, for it had to record
the same basic details for every single dead man: name, rank, number,
regiment, battalion, cause of death, date of death, location of
death, place of birth, place of residence, place of enlistment,
decorations and former regiment. That is at least 240,000 separate
facts for the 20,000 dead of the first day of the Somme alone, and
without a pause for counting, because on the second day, there were
1,438 dead, and on the third, 2,338, and on the 135th day, November
13th, there were 2,504 dead; and from July 1st to November 13th,
covering the duration of the Somme, there were 122,466 British dead
alone, yielding at least 1,469,592 details to be recorded in S/ODGW.
How does any organisation, using just clerks with fountain pens
and paper, manage such a feat, while all able-bodied men are being
sent off to war? So, allowing for such human failings, I would now
confidently say Irelands war dead number 40,000. [End] |
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Available online at The Irish
Times - online.;
accessed 12.02.2020 |
[ top ]
You Get What You Vote For: Irish voters need
Irish journalists to tell them what Sinn Féin is really
about.
|
Election time in the westernmost province of
the European Union has proved to be quite surreal. For what Irelands
EU-truncated government has almost no practical control over -
housing shortages and the health services – tops the political
agenda, while the media systematically ignore the far graver truth
that Sinn Fein [recte Féin], according to some polls now
the most popular party in the Republic, still retains its terrorist
wing.
It really shouldnt be necessary (but, alas,
it clearly is) to point out that the IRA army council has never
been dissolved. It remains the military arm of Irish Republicanism,
of which Sinn Fein is merely its Colgate-wing, all wholesome smiles
and empathy, like a brace of Mormon elders on your doorstep. Sinn
Fein nonetheless has of right one member on the IRAs ruling
army council, while other council members have ample scope to
double-job as secret IRA-men and public Sinn Fein politicians.
Yet this is the untold story of the Irish election,
the great lie to which almost the entire political and media establishment
– apart from The Sunday Independents Eoghan Harris
– has subscribed. The IRAs murky past rather embarrassingly
surfaced during the week when the mother of young Paul Quinn,
murdered by the IRA in 2006, denounced his killing and the excuse
offered by a prominent Sinn Fein politician that the
lad had been involved in criminality. Whereas, killing him apparently
wasnt criminal, and in the dystopian moral world inhabited
by SF-IRA, it probably wasnt.
Despite this moral dystopia, Sinn Fein might
soon not merely be able to tip the balance of power, but even
clamber onto the scales and achieve a place in government. This
is the harvest resulting from a quarter century of peace-process
obfuscation, lies, deceit and murder, which have rendered truth
into a congenial plastic that Sinn Fein can bend according to
its needs. Meanwhile, the political classes and the media, either
silent or complicit in the irreversible compromises that have
been made during that time are now powerless to undo the fictions
that have been so diligently woven. Almost no-one under the age
of forty is aware that Sinn Fein is not what it purports to be,
namely just another left-wing party.
Youthfulness is not an excuse for Bremainers
favourite Irishman Fintan OToole, who is clearly well-steeped
in his sixties. This week he anointed Sinn Fein with the myrrh
of memory-loss and the unprincipled unction of left-liberal sanctimony.
If about 20 percent of voters choose Sinn Fein there is
a real problem in telling them their votes dont count in
the formation of a government, he wrote in The Irish Times.
To tell them otherwise is not just disrespectful –
it is dangerous.
But not nearly as dangerous as putting into the
cabinet, thereby gaining access to crucial security files, politicians
whose loyalty is not to the lawful Army of the Irish Republic
but to its rival, the still-armed (if quiescent) Provisional IRA.
Responding to evidence that Northern Ireland Sinn Fein politicians
defer to the IRA, OToole offered the winsome caveat that
if Sinn Fein took office in Dublin, There would have to
be a strengthening of the official code of conduct for ministers.
Oh, thatll do it all right. After all,
this is the organisation that halfway through thorny negotiations
to restore the power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland took
time out to bludgeon and knife to death a former member [Eamon
Collins] who, they felt, had betrayed them. Talks resumed while
his mutilated body was still warm on the roadside, and Sinn Fein
delegates werent even made to stand on the naughty step
for a minute. Clearly, an official code of conduct for ministers
to the people who also gave you the Enniskillen, Birmingham and
Brighton bombings will make all the difference.
The key to Sinn Feins nature is not the
social democracy useful OTooles delude themselves with,
but its glorious history, to be endlessly mined for the lore of
the tribe and the ore of victimhood: hence its recent revival
of the exultant, rabble-rousing ballad Come out ye Black and Tans.
Moreover, with sublime cretinousness, the conjoined Irish politico-media
establishment has been sedulously feeding SFIRA a protein-rich
and largely one-sided diet of centennial commemorative encomia
over the bloody events of 1914-1920.
Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, the same
establishment has been wittering on brainlessly about the countrys
health and housing problems. But no Irish government can prevent
crises in these areas. The state controls neither its money-supply,
the key to any housing-programme, nor its borders. These are the
shackles that the British people have thrown off, but to which
the people of Ireland nonetheless remain deliriously devoted.
Those unfortunates now face the possibility of a high-taxing,
atavistic Sinn Fein-IRA in government, the peace processs
ultimate dividend and its final nightmare.
|
—In The Critic (6 Feb. 2020); Available
online at The Critic - online;
accessed 10.02.2020.
|
[ See Myers remarks on Countess Markievicz
- as supra. ]
Burning
Heresies: A Memoir of a Life in Conflict 1979-2020 (Dublin:
Merrion Press 2020)
|
 |
 |
See full-text
version here - as attached;
also available at Merrion Press. online;
accessed 27.09.2020. |
[ top ]
Commentary
Shirley Kelly, Columnist Turns Novelist,
interview with Kevin Myers, in Books Ireland (Dec. 2001), p.321-22:
notes that Myers was attacked with John Waters by Nuala OFaolain
as women-haters, and calls his novel Banks of Green Willow a direct
riposte had it not been written earlier. Written from standpoint
of Gina, a nineteen year-old American visiting the Bracken family in Mayo
in 1972, who falls in love with part-Bosnian Stefan and becomes pregnant;
marries Warren; returns to Ireland on death of her mother in a car accident;
events in Bosnia impinge on her life and Stefans [biog. as supra].
Ruth Scurr, review of Kevin
Myers, Banks of Green Willow (Scribner), calls it a disquieting
novel and writes: [
] while the dismaying figures of Milosevic
and Arkan maraud in the shadows, it is indirectly, through the Egyptian
myths of Osiris and Seth, that Myers addresses the war itself.
(Times Literary Supplement, 7 Dec. 2001, p.21.)
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford,
Theres Many a Good Heart Beats under a Khaki Tunic [Chap.],
in Irelands Other: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and
Popular Culture, Cork UP 2001), cites Kevin Nolans Irish
Times contemporary review of Dolly Wests Kitchen : [T]he
author wants to compare the loyalties and enmities in the dinner part
with the loyalties and enmities of the parties engaged in, or neutral
in the world war. Here he falls into a logical fallacy which is ultimately
lethal to his drama. Sexual love or hate is not comparable to love or
hate of country, so that to compare […] the resolution of sexual
relationships with the end of the war is merely sentimental. If
this assertion were correct, we might have to conclude that much of the
Irish drama we have looked at is merely sentimental. I would
reject this conclusion, along with the implied denigration of sentiment
as a political and theatrical force. When Benedict Anderson categorises
nationalism with kinship and religion he indicates that love of ones
country is closer to passion than to intellectual allegiance. That familiar
analogy between sexuality and national that McGuinness uses to structure
his play does not depend on a logical fallacy and it is inherent
in the Irish dramatic tradition. (p.72.)
John A. Murphy (Emeritus
Professor of Irish History, UCC), writes a letter to The Irish Times
(16 Oct. 2004) in response to Myers ridiculing his suggestion
that the real no petty people of modern Ireland [Murphys
itals.] were the small tenant farmers of Ireland who refused to be cowed
by a tyranneous Protestant gentry, magistracy, yeomanry and church establishment.
He concludes: For Mr Myers to change in modern Irish history
to modern Ireland in order to submit my sentence to ridicule
is a distortion for which I am owed, but do not expect, an apology.
Books Ireland
(First Flush), calls Watching the Door: A Memoir 1971-1978
compulsive reading: […] Here […] is a
book that may well earn the status of classic. It tells how as a young
man he survived seven years as reporter (for RTÉ and for newspapers)
of the Northern troubles but unlike other reporters getting deeply involved
in the madness that was Belfast. Not only was he on drinking - and closer
- terms with paramilitaries and paranoid petty assassins of all persuasions,
but he apparently slept with any and every one of the opposite sex who
happened to be available. On two occasions he was interrupted by an unexpected
husband (one a loyalist cuckold, the other a nationalist) and escaped
by a hairsbreadth. You keep asking yourself is this made up? Could it
all be fabrication - particularly as Myers tends to emerge as hero - and
yet somehow you know it isnt. All the political and military analysis
is meaningless and thin stuff beside this racy kaleidoscopic slice of
life, chronicling the hatred and violence as well as the loyalties and
loves of real people. it is funny and moving and in Myers bafflement
perhaps lies as good an explanation as youll get for the troubles.
Rory Brennan, review
of Watching the Door, in Books Ireland (May 2007), judges
that for its individualism and … fideltiy to disquietening
truth, Watching the Door will take its place with Murphys
Divided Place, McCanns War and an Irish Town, and
de Paors Divided Ulster (p.105).
Myers Complaint - Irish Examiner
(16 July 2008) reports that the Immigrant Council of Ireland has lodved
an official complaint with the Gardaí arising from comments made
by Myers under the heading Africa has given nothing to anyone
- apart from AIDS (Irish Independent,Thurs. 10 July) which
it deems to be in breach of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred
Act.
Danny Morrison:
Jo ODonoghue of Mercier/Marino Press writes to The Irish Times
(Letters, 13 May 2000.) in answer to Kevin Myer
whom she accuses of using Danny Morrisons The Walls Came Down
as a launching platform for intemperate attacks on RTÉ, Irish
public opinion and the author himself in his regular column (Irishmans
Diary, 11 May 2000). [See further under Morrison, Notes, infra.]
[ top ]
Notes
A Single Headstrong Heart (2013)
- publishers note: Very funny, quirky and touching, A Single Headstrong
Heart describes in a first-person narrative the authors childhood
up to the early years of his career as a journalist and his departure
from University College Dublin in the late 1960s. The grotesque humour
is reminiscent of Road Dahl. Recollections retain an authentic childlike
sense of galloping self-importance, but in an adult re-casting. Ostensibly
chronological, what emerges as the main narrative arc is the authors
relationship with his father, and how information found after the fathers
death reshapes his memories. Related with Rabelasian verve, this work,
a prequel to the bestselling Watching the Door, has all the panache
and particularity of that masterly book. Kevin and his twin sister Maggie
are sheltered by a mothers domestic diligence and survive a fathers
eccentricity and gradual disintegration. Being Irish and Catholic in an
English provincial town brings fascinating tensions and analysis to bear
on boarding- school experiences,social status,sport and a burgeoning sexuality.The
travails of puberty have rarely been so candidly depicted.Pop music, political
awareness and modernity break in with the advent of the sixties and modernity.
Burning Heresies (2020):
In this remarkable sequel to his critically acclaimed memoir Watching
the Door, journalist Kevin Myers reflects on his roller-coaster career
over three decades in the Irish media, from the European conflicts he
reported from, to the personal conflicts he fought. Fresh from the horrors
of 1970s Belfast, Myers took a job in 1979 with The Irish Times, and brilliantly
evokes the comical chaos of life in the smoky newsroom of Ireland’s
paper-of-record. Having taken over An Irishman’s Diary, Myers single-handedly
pioneered the campaign to rehabilitate the memory of the forgotten Irish
soldiers of the Great War, and in the process fell foul of the paper’s
editor, the legendary Douglas Gageby. He was rewarded with plane tickets
to more perilous assignments, and soon Myers was back in the frontline
of European warzones, as communism collapsed and civil wars emerged. While
Myers is at his brilliant best dodging bullets on the battlefields of
Tel Aviv, Beirut and Sarajevo, he also keenly and unapologetically participates
in the many cultural conflicts erupting within a rapidly changing Ireland,
as he opines on a broad spectrum of Irish life, covering history, politics,
religion, economics, culture and society; all explored in his inimitable
prose and sardonic wit. This courageously trenchant account of journalistic
conflict and hubris also forensically examines his very public fall from
grace in 2017, and his legal battle with RTÉ for a public apology.
Burning Heresies is a candid and eye-opening must-read for anyone with
even a passing interest in Irish life and current affairs. (Merrion Press
publication notice, Sept. 2020; see Preface - as attached;
also available at at Merrion Books - online.)
Literary agent: Myers literary agent was
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson in 2001.
[ top ]
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