It was pleasing, if hardly intellectually stimulating, to find Noel Doran at last do something other than use the threat of legal coercion to silence voices he takes umbrage at. However, it has hardly gone unnoticed that he concluded his piece with a call for a robust piece of writing to be suppressed. I will not wait to the end of this current piece to tell him that is not going to happen. The article by Paul Campbell stays in place, and if wasting time suits him, Noel Doran can have a censor lawyer use up a paper mill churning out threatening letters by the tonne.

Mr Doran might not have witnessed much else that has been going on in front of his nose lately but he has seen the inanity of coming to Letters Blogatory to make his case when it was much easier for him to have done what he was repeatedly invited to do, make it on the relevant blog, The Pensive Quill. His excuse, rather than his reason, was that TPQ is vulgar and confrontational. It seems he has at last read the contributions by the partner of his journalist, Allison Morris. True, TPQ confronts censors and libel bullies. That much won’t change. If he fears being confronted by people not willing to roll over in the face of his threats, he should seek help for either his phobia or his bullying.

On the point of vulgarity, he may as well cite the idiocy of blasphemy. Regional accents used to be regarded as vulgar back in the day when only BBC English would pass muster. Things have changed: vulgarity is a matter of taste. TPQ does not concern itself with parliamentary language. A daily newspaper might feel it has to but that is hardly a reason for Mr Doran not to engage on TPQ. He spends enough time reading it so presumably is comfortable with the ‘vulgarity.’ Or does he read the vulgar bits with his hands over his eyes? Much more plausible is that what he finds vulgar is a public challenge to his penchant for censorship. In my view, the reason for his absence is that he feels more at ease in the company of those he considers to be from his own social milieu, those he might consider a cut above the rest. It is the attitude of a pompous snob, a social class thing. Too bad, we won’t be doing hoity-toity to facilitate him.

Noel Doran is not in a position to determine the credibility of TPQ. He is much too busy trying to maintain his own in a community of journalists increasingly perplexed by his bizarre behaviour and his resort to libel bullying as he labours valiantly, but hardly victoriously, to either shut up or close down a small blog which has raised serious questions about the conduct of the paper of which he is editor.

My wife Carrie Twomey, former editor of The Blanket, has with consummate ease swept aside his claim of contradictory behaviour in respect of the use of pseudonyms and his disingenuous intimation that he had only wanted to engage without any legal threat. There is no need for me to labour the issue and pull the same decaying tooth twice. People can look into the substantial cavity in the Irish News narrative and judge for themselves. In fact, people need look no further than the pages of the Irish News itself, where it runs anonymous letters, has a weekly column devoted to reprinting anonymous/unverified comments from readers, and frequently uses the by-line of “Staff Reporter.”

One of the most recent examples of the work of the “Staff Reporters” is the front page report on the murders of Kevin Kearney and Barry McCrory. A photo of Mr McCrory’s broken-hearted and grieving family is prominent under the headline “Arms Cache Linked to Murdered Drugs Baron” while the article itself is based on allegations from unnamed “informed sources” claiming that one of the dead men, Kevin Kearney, was “regarded as being the boss of one of Belfast’s most disciplined crime gangs,” and that he headed a “major drugs gang.” The Irish News also claimed that a weapons cache discovered in August belonged to Kearney’s ‘gang.’ All of this may well be true; after all, the Irish News chose to publish it, so presumably they can stand over its contents. And, as they say, the dead can’t be libeled, can they? No irony lost here on the hurt feelings of the grieving family depicted a few days later at a funeral in another front page photo as they opened their morning newspaper and read of what unnamed ‘informed sources’ and ‘Staff Reporters’ said about their murdered loved one.

That is how the news media works. Pen names, such as ‘Anonymous’ in the letters section, are at the Editor’s discretion. If the Editor deems that there is a legitimate need to protect the identity of an author, that identity will be withheld; the Irish News, and its Editor, stands over the content of the material in the act of publication.

Likewise with the Irish News’s popular weekly column, Off the Fence, which selectively publishes comments submitted by anonymous readers. From experience, the paper does not verify the identity of the callers whose words they print; anyone can call or text the paper, call themselves whatever they like, and the comments they submit are carried without any follow-up from the Irish News. “Real GAA Supporter,” “Shane from Belfast,” and “Lurgan Orangewoman” are some of the names used. Occasionally, some comments are carried without any ‘name’ at all. Is it because the subject is Sport that this practice is acceptable to Noel Doran?

“Do as I say, not as I do” appears to be the editorial guideline being advocated by Noel Doran on Letters Blogatory.

On numerous occasions Noel Doran has been asked to back up with evidential specifics the charges he has made. He has singularly failed to do so, opting to hide behind the vaguest of generalisations and seductively waving the cheque book at the censor lawyer. On the issue of the personal safety of Allison Morris, I am wholly confident she is under no threat whatsoever as a result of anything that appeared in TPQ. There is more chance of her being hit by one of those fictitious Hezbollah rockets she discovered in South Armagh. What may be under threat is her credibility. Perhaps that is what really irks Noel Doran. He has placed his trust in her and is sensitive to his judgement being called into question in the wake of some of her stories.

He claims that it would not be legally appropriate to go over the defamatory claims on TPQ. That is because it is our contention that there are none. As I have insisted time and again, what is demonstrably ‘misleading and false’ was his own journalist’s claim on this blog as to why she did not attend my appeal hearing in London.

Noel Doran’s seems obsessed with establishing what he believes to be the true identity of Paul Campbell. Had TPQ inserted ‘Staff Reporter,’ ‘Anonymous,’ or ‘Ardent Paul’ rather than Paul Campbell, would he have been satisfied? Not at all. His quest is for one reason: so that he can fire off another letter from a censor lawyer. He seeks to legally coerce Paul Campbell as well. I am indifferent to his efforts and have not the slightest intention of assisting him.

Throughout he has churned out a load of vacuous waffle rather than address the issue at hand: the actions of his own reporter regarding the interview with Dolours Price. Contrary to the professed belief of Allison Morris I had no objections to her interviewing Dolours Price. Had I such objections I would have raised them at the time rather than writing a piece that was in no way critical of what appeared in the Irish News.

The contention pertains not to Ms Morris’s interview per se but to what Ms Morris did with the parts of that interview which did not feature in the Irish News piece. It is my unshakeable belief based on what Ms Price divulged to me coupled with the timeline, that Ms Morris passed this on to Ciaran Barnes. Information that Ms Price claimed to have revealed only to me and Ms Morris appeared in the Sunday Life under the by-line of a friend of Ms Morris, the same friend who together with Ms Morris made baseless accusations against me to the NUJ. It would be defying logic to believe anything else. If there is an alternative explanation then Noel Doran is free to offer it rather than censor the narrative that questions his own journalist’s account. He need not tell me the tooth fairy left it for Mr Barnes.

My case is this: Noel Doran, like most other journalists familiar with the issue, knows exactly what happened with the Allison Morris material. But rather than deal with it he has opted to become a libel bully. Both he and the underhand cabal at the Irish News will be tackled every step of the way. It does not matter how many censor lawyers he employs or libel bullies he aligns with. The Pensive Quill will not be silenced.

The post Response to Noel Doran appeared first on Letters Blogatory. Letters Blogatory by Ted Folkman and contributors is © 2011-2024 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images may be separately licensed.

In a copy and paste of what earlier this week he had posted on his own comments-not-allowed blog. Danny Morrison reiterated his demand on Letters Blogatory that ‘Ed Moloney has some explaining to do.’ How frustrating it must be for Morrison that Moloney is not tied to a chair and therefore can happily ignore his demand for an explanation. I am not tied to a chair either but I am used to all manner of exchanges with him over the decades, ranging from the friendly to the frosty, so responding to his queries doesn’t tax me one way or the other. Had he demanded me to answer I too, like Moloney, would happily have dismissed him. I guess there is much to be said for Walter Bagehot’s maxim that ‘the greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.’ And if Danny demands to be noticed, he will be joyously ignored.

Since the onset of the subpoena against Boston College’s Belfast Project Danny Morrison has been working hard to undermine the legal and political efforts the researchers have made to thwart the British raid. His pen has been put to the use of the British Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), lashing out where space is afforded to him. His ire is directed not against those seeking to seize the Belfast Project archives but against those fighting to prevent incursion. It has not gone unnoticed, with many of his former comrades now wondering whose side Danny is really on.

On one level his lack of antipathy towards marauding British detectives is understandable but only if viewed through a political prism rather than an ethical one. Morrison seeks to avoid being even mildly critical of the PSNI for fear of inviting any awkward probing that might devalue the current policing arrangement which he supports. Although Sinn Fein leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness promised to put manners on the British police it hasn’t quite worked out like that.

The elephant in the room that commentators like Morrison perform contortions in order to avoid confronting is that, courtesy of the political arrangement he gave his backing to, British police are in a position to use the present criminal justice system to police the politically violent past they helped create through their egregious policies and practices. They are able to bring ‘criminal’ prosecutions against former republican activists in respect of conflict induced actions in what is supposedly a post conflict situation. Simultaneously, they are engaged in covering up for the conflict induced homicidal activity of their own colleagues in the security services, quite a few of whom remain in the pay of the state. Through their pursuit of republicans and other non state actors they are rewriting and criminalising the history of the North’s violent political conflict in a way that exonerates state actors of any culpability. And not a word of criticism from Danny Morrison towards the British police in respect of this; just plenty of vitriol hurled in the direction of those seeking to frustrate British attempts to construct their reframing of the past.

I happen to concur with Danny Morrison in one of his earlier assertions that the outcome of the IRA armed struggle amounted to surrender. I further agree with him when he described the outcome of that surrender – a power splitting executive in the North of Ireland headed by Ian Paisley as something that could only mean that republicans ‘must need our heads examined … We would be a laughing stock.’

It is this surrender/laughing stock outcome earlier identified by Morrison that sits at the core of the current power disparity and which is potentially subversive of the peace in the North. It also helps explain why the British are off in hot pursuit of the Boston College oral history archive: because they have the power to. They don’t share power, they monopolise it.

When stripped of its protective balm of peace process film the picture is pretty clear: one key player from the violent past, the British police, has been empowered while another, non state combatants, has been disempowered. As simple as. No rocket science required to work it out. This constitutes a catastrophic systemic failure on the part of the Morrison endorsed strategy that purported to tackle the problems of law enforcement that were such an incendiary component of the Northern Irish conflagration. It also explains his silence on this salient political matter. In targeting the researchers behind the Belfast project rather than the raiders he seeks, through smoke and mirrors, to maintain a political and strategic fiction that masks the fact that real power resides where it always has: with the British state.

The PSNI, about whom Morrison is remarkably quiet, despite earlier reforms has over time become colonised by the most revanchist elements of the old RUC, ‘ex Special Branch officers, who served during the conflict and whose members have been subject to well-documented criticism.’
Determined to settle scores with erstwhile adversaries, these people – referred to as the ‘dark side’ by Sinn Fein – have embarked upon an aggressive policy of pursuing former combatants. Their behaviour is deeply corrosive of the spirit of the political arrangement that brought closure to the bloody Northern Irish conflict. Paradoxically, in what is supposedly a post-conflict environment, the PSNI is very much in a conflict mode, using law enforcement to police a past political problem that had much of its roots in a systemic failure of law enforcement. Because no law enforcement solution to the political conflict was conceivable, outside of the toxic world of British law enforcers, the British Prime Minister at the time of the Good Friday Agreement ‘said that the answer to the Northern Ireland problem required the criminal justice system to be turned upside down.’

Despite being plainly evident, none of it figures in the Morrison discourse on the Boston College affair. His public commentary projects an image of a seemingly faultless PSNI.

So where does that leave him? With more heat than light Morrison has opted to bat at the plate for the PSNI. While I do not profess to completely understand his reasoning, there is nothing that would lead me to conclude that he is guided by fidelity towards people like Gerry Adams. His entire discourse resonates with the mood music of those PSNI figures who have Adams firmly in their sights.

For the most part he has endeavoured, with negligible effect, to act as a foil to Los Angeles-based historian, Chris Bray,
who has put the British authorities squarely in the frame. In short, the British case against the Belfast Project has been argued noisily by Morrison while the case in defence of the project has been made forensically by Bray.

Whatever Morrison’s motive, whether he is conscious of it or not, the consistency of his leanings towards the interests of the British intelligence services are not in doubt. It is indisputable that his longing to find out what Dolours Price might have said to Ed Moloney in 2010 long after the Belfast Project had wound up is indeed something British intelligence agencies would share. Without a scintilla of evidence he claims that Ed Moloney flew in from New York specifically to interview Price. In his hostility towards the Belfast Project he has thrown his big black hat into the ring alongside the slashed peaks of the British security services. As such, in seeking disclosure that would ultimately be of benefit to them, he will get no help from this quarter where the whole emphasis, unlike his own, has been on protecting the archive.

There is a substantive reason for Moloney having interviewed Price in 2010 which will become transparent in time and which Morrison is not and will not be made privy to in advance. His eagerness to amplify British objections to the researchers provides no cause for confidence that he would shield from British police any insight that he might manage to acquire.

In his regurgitated Letters Blogatory piece Morrison identifies what he sees as three main planks of our opposition to the British police action and argues that ‘on all counts they have no defence.’

Firstly, he seeks to cast aspersion on our concern for the peace. As someone who is on public record, long before the IRA stopped killing people, as having called on republicanism to ‘never again use guns in pursuit of its ideals’
– at a juncture when Morrison was silent about an IRA killing in West Belfast where he lived – my claim to have bona fide concerns for the peace is demonstrably stronger than any detraction he can make of my position.

Secondly, he claims that there is no risk to my safety. Given his enduring penchant for wrong predictions he can hardly be relied upon to have called this one right. While I agree with him that the IRA surrendered and as a consequence its members pose no threat to the British state it does not follow that they are not a danger to others. This was demonstrated when Paul Quinn was beaten to death in Monaghan long after the organisation purportedly went out of business. If I err on the existence of a threat I do so on the side of caution.

Thirdly, he alleges that we have no standing to cite risk to oral history projects and academic research. Yet in one of his extremely rare for-the-optics public utterances against ‘repatriation’ of the materials being sought by the British he argued the very point we have been making: ‘the tapes should not be returned because of the damaging effect on future, genuine oral history projects.’

Rarely are so many confusions, contradiction and clangers to be concentrated in the perspective of one person. Perhaps his novel The Wrong Man was given its title for this very reason.

As is his tendency he manages to become even more ensnared in his own loop when he argues that the purpose of the Boston College project was to ‘get (Gerry) Adams’ from the outset: Adams, the current president of Sinn Fein and erstwhile chief of staff of the Provisional IRA, is widely alleged to have been the Pinochet-type architect of the IRA’s own version of “the Disappeared”. In his endeavours Morrison fails to explain how Dolours Price in the series of interviews I carried out with her does ‘not once mention the name Jean McConville … nor that she received orders to disappear people from Gerry Adams or any other IRA figure.’ That hardly fits with his theory that we were ‘out to get Adams from day one.’ But he is right that someone is out to get Adams and that someone happens to be the British, via recalcitrant and vengeful elements in the Northern Ireland police. And for Morrison to seek to shore up the police case against ourselves over the Boston College subpoenas, is to assist them in that task.

It is further instructive that a British judge cited Morrison to buttress his ruling against me in a Belfast court this week, denying an effort to secure a judicial review of the subpoenas on the grounds that the British police action has put my life in danger if efforts to seize the archive are successful. This I suspect has been his motive from day one: to strengthen the argument of British policemen that no threat existed, that it was as the judge alluded, quoting him, a ‘red herring.’ Who could have ever have thought the day would come when a British judge, the British police and the Provisional Republican Movement’s former spokesperson would be joined in such an enterprise?

Yet, in the midst of this draining and dispiriting battle, we can be thankful for small mercies. We are fortunate to have Morrison as an adversary who unfailingly rises to his own level of ineptitude. For that reason we feel not the slightest temptation to offer him the Adlai Stephenson way out: if he stops telling lies about us we will stop telling the truth about him.

The post Response to Danny Morrison appeared first on Letters Blogatory. Letters Blogatory by Ted Folkman and contributors is © 2011-2024 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images may be separately licensed.