Social Items

TPQ

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty Three

 

A Morning Thought @ 3294

 

A Morning Thought @ 3293

Kate Rice ✍ The name Michael Montgomery is well-known in the city of Derry. 



In 1973, Michael Montgomery became Derry's first Republican Clubs councillor under the new local-government system - he was deeply involved in his community, often found helping with housing and advocating for the rights of the working-class people of the city. Michael Montgomery was also a Hooded Man.

For those perhaps unaware, the Hooded Men were a group of 14 men unfairly removed from their homes and interned without trial under circumstances that we would consider utterly inhuman. I do not seek to repeat the details of what terrible things were done to these men, for the sake of their loved ones who may read this and do not need to be reminded of the cruelty that was inflicted on these men without justifiable cause. Without detailing, their case has been acknowledged by organisations such as Amnesty International and The Law Society of Ireland, and investigated for the disgraceful handling of these men, using methods we now call the Five Techniques of sensory deprivation.

If I were to talk purely about what was done to these men, I would write for pages for there is no simple way to describe the injustice of it. But today I would like to write instead about Michael Montgomery.

Michael was a husband, and a father. The family of five were deeply woven into the culture of Derry and Michael was greatly respected for the care and effort he put in for the constituents of the city. Michael was fond of James Connolly, and he was a socialist. He was deeply fond of his children, and supported his daughter Fiona’s education in catering college. His children have spoken of their memories of constant visitors to their door, seeking Michael’s assistance in some matter or other.

He was trusted. He was respected. The family lived in Creggan. In 1971, their house was raided and Michael Montgomery was dragged into the street. He was kicked in the groin. The armed men taking him pointed their weapons at his children. One of his children, Deirdre, remembers chasing the Saracen down the street, demanding Michael’s return, and hiding her baby sister in an electric box out of fear of the men taking her father. Thus began Michael's experience as one of the Hooded Men. He was among those taken to the special interrogation centre in August 1971, where the five techniques were used. His wife and children were told he had been killed. Michael himself was led to believe his family had been killed. They did not see him until weeks later in Crumlin Gaol, broken and hurting from the treatment he had been subjected to.

Despite being elected as a councilman in 1973, Michael could not recover from what was done to him. According to daughter Fiona in an interview with the Bloody Sunday Trust Interviews, he startled at the sound of the hoover, at the sound of the washing machine, at the sound of the newspaper. He cried downstairs alone while his children slept upstairs. His marriage fell apart. Michael Montgomery died from a heart attack in 1984 at just 48 years of age, permanently altered by what he had experienced.

I write about Michael Montgomery today, because I am lucky enough to know and love his daughter Deirdré as though she was a member of my own family. I have heard her experiences, her fright. Her memories of that day and how the cruelty her father was subjected to was not always restrained just to him. I write about Michael Montgomery today because he should be remembered. He should be thought about, and known and respected. None of those men should rest forgotten. As a child, Deirdré wrote a poem about her father which I have inserted below.

Creggan Derry Aug. 9th 1971 we were put to bed. So late my cousin shoved us up the stairs, we thought she had a date.

We were laughing, singing lying in the bed when at the door it wasn't her, a man with a gun instead!

"Get to sleep now yous'ns and be quiet here tonight"

Little did we know we would be awake before the light, men in uniforms standing over us with guns?

My father being dragged down

the stairs, them kicking him in the groin. My grandfather cursing for upsetting us "they're to blame!"

My cousin Betty roaring "don't touch her she's a wane", the soldier with the gun there sticking in my face.

"Why is this man in my house this is not his place!"

Then my da went missing, ten days we didn't know, we got a call then after that the Crum we had to go.

So to Belfast we made the trek, my mother then and me, we saw my father sitting there Oh god this could not be!

For he was bent and broken, his eyes still glistened, though we were all okay, and he was glad to know.

They'd told him they had killed us an accident you see.

You've nothing left now Michael one of us you'll have thank.

God thank you he's an Irish man so brave and yet so true, he knew his fight for Ireland and continue is what he'd do!

Two screws came to grab a hold of me to stop me crying sore, my daddy's standing hurting when another one comes through the door.

I am only 8 years old why are they doing this to me?

I don't want their medicine in just upset.

Can't they see today its decade's later children going to see their dads . . .  and it is no different today from the visits that I had!

We still love to see our daddy's. But the hassle is so great.

God let the day come when they smile to see him walking freely through the gate!


It has been my great honour to learn about Michael Montgomery, and my great horror to learn of what happened to him and those 13 men who suffered with him. I would ask you to please join me in remembering this husband, father and good man.


I am the betting horse,

Lay on your whip and your blinkers;

Lash my back and cover my eyes

Run me ragged on your circle track

And raise your golden trophy.

I am the victor who returns,

my home unadorned,

my foals searching for comfort

my earned rest and a finish line.

my bed untouched and mine alone,

and you must return your trophy eventually - KR.

⏩Kate Rice is a peace baby.

In Loving Memory Of Michael Montgomery

Jim Duffy ✍ Very revealing.


 It shows how extensive the campaign of Russian disinformation is. All the posts that lash states, democracies, and promote the far right fringe (and some far left fringe), have dried up. So have posts championing the AfD, Reform, and spreading smears against Ukraine and Zelenskyy. 

On Threads, the extreme pro-Trump posting, along with calls for Obama to be executed, has suddenly gone quiet. Trump was obviously using the Russian data centres to post hate of his opponents, only to lose that when the Russian data centres were blown up. The personalised hate directed at Irish politicians has suddenly largely disappeared also.
 
Russian misinformation and disinformation is all about destabilising states by generating discord and hate. It knows the usual useful idiots will swallow the posts hook, line and sinker and believe vast numbers share their opinions when they are actually on the fringe. 

A lot of the hard line pro-triple lock posts have also disappeared. Ukraine in bombing the data centres perhaps unintentionally has revealed the extent of Russian misinformation and disinformation taking countries, including Ireland. 

Well done, Ukraine. 
Slava Ukraini!

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Russian Misinformation And Disinformation

Anthony McIntyre ☠  Yesterday the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to South African jurist, Navi Pillay.

The reason for the choice of Pillay came in the words of Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee:

This year's laureate has been instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are prosecuted . . . The system of international law is under tremendous pressure and its institutions are under attack . . . towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice.

Little is left to the imagination as to who is the first among equals in this rogues gallery. Ms Pillay pointedly referred to her role heading the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) into Israel's behaviour in Gaza, stating: 'The last thing I did is the delivery of the report on Gaza, naming what's happening there as genocide."

Within hours Donald Trump, furious at not getting a peace prize for waging wars, ordered sanctions against the International Criminal Court. Trump might feel he has a point. In 1973 the prize was awarded to another US war criminal, Henry Kissinger. Horrible Henry was responsible for more war crimes than any other Western leader in the post World War 2 era. Think Vietnam, Cambodia, Cyprus, Argentina, Indonesia, Chile, Laos, Bangladesh, East Timor. He has been at the scene of every crime against humanity, his finger prints on every napalm bomb, torture chamber or assassination. Two members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee resigned in protest at the decision to bestow the peace prize on the US War criminal. Kissinger himself declined to turn up to receive his prize for fear of anti-war protests.

One writer at the time said that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize". And when an international criminal clown sanctions the International Criminal Court as punishment for not awarding him the prize the same type of sentiment is easily echoed.


Consider for a moment who nominated Trump for the prize - the most bellicose state in the Middle East, a country that has bombed as many nations as Kissinger did. Netanyahu nominating Trump for a peace prize has the same moral worth as the paedophile priest Brendan Smyth nominating Jimmy Saville for a child protection award.

While Trump gave off a hissy fit, a deeper reason comes to the fore and which was articulated by US Secretary of State, the Zionist Marco Rubio:

President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans . . .That is ‌why, today, the United States is sanctioning the International Criminal Court.. . . We ⁠will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate.

The Trump regime intends to punish companies that provide services to the ICC.

US sanctions typically bar all US-based companies from any work with a sanctioned organization, forcing banks to shut accounts, ⁠insurers to end ​coverage and software companies to halt cooperation.
 
The Court which has a membership of 125 nation states has described the Trump administration action as an 'assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order' and called on its 125 member states to take action to defend it:

The court cannot stand alone. Its fate now rests also in the hands of the states that created it . . . This is not just about defending a single institution, but about safeguarding the international order grounded upon the rule of law . . . History will judge this moment.

The Nobel Prize Committee has referred to the huge contribution to peace made by the work of the ICC.

An international legal system in which war criminals are held to account and the victims of abuse see justice served is a precondition for a peaceful world.

Contrast this with the bellicose perspective of a genocide enabling state like the US, of which it has been said: "We inhabit a world where The fastest way to get on the president’s sanctions list is to put a war criminal on yours."

As we gather on West Street today as members of Drogheda Stands With Palestine, on the third anniversary of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, we are under no illusion as to what this is about: the unconstrained, unchallenged power to perpetrate crimes against humanity and avoid being held to account. We stand with the 85-year-old South African judge and against the 80-year-old US war criminal. 
 
⏩Follow on Bluesky.

International Criminal Clown Sanctions International Criminal Court

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  2-October-2026.

Our Own Ground • No. 5

Photo by Natalia Gusakova on Unsplash

At 3pm tomorrow, thousands are due to gather on the Garvaghy Road. Many were there last Sunday as well, and on the Sunday mornings of 1996 and 1997 before that; a few will even be standing on the exact place where police removed them from the road 30 years ago.

No one should deny them even a minute of it.

Yet since yesterday one question has remained unresolved, and it is more important than the number of people on any road.

The Orange Order has put forward an offer. Should the Court of Appeal affirm Monday’s determination, the residents say they will accept the law and step aside. If the court rules in the opposite direction, the Order says it will accept that outcome and do likewise. In either case, both sides will be governed by the ruling, no matter how it turns out.

The residents have still not replied.

It is worth grasping what that proposal amounts to, because it is no minor matter. For 28 years the Orange has insisted that it either follows that path or does nothing, and the week opened with a rally in Portadown being told that no other course will be accepted. Yet within a day they said they would place the entire matter before three judges and accept the outcome.

Perhaps it is a snare. Perhaps it is a calculation based on believing Monday favours them. Perhaps it is the first candid step anyone has taken since Friday week.

Whatever it is, it is not something to set aside while several thousand people assemble on a road.

And here lies the difficult point. The residents’ own position, the one their lawyers will advance on Monday, is that the Parades Commission misread the police assessment (itself demonstrably inaccurate) and should be answerable for that before a court. That is a claim that the institutions should function and that the law should be properly applied. It is the strongest case they possess, and it is the correct one.

You cannot press that claim on Monday and then refuse to accept its verdict.

I can see why no one wants to agree. To say yes is to imagine a morning when 35 Orange men walk down that road with the court’s approval and the community has pledged not to block them. For anyone who remembers 1997, that is not an abstraction; it is the concrete memory of being hauled away from their own street.

Still, once a case is taken to court, it is placed in the court’s hands. The residents did that first, and they did it twice. They were right to do so.

So tomorrow’s issue is not the size of the crowd, nor is it what is shouted from the back of a lorry. The issue is whether the response to that offer will be yes.

If the answer is yes, the residents finish the week as the side that trusted the process while the other side had to be brought to it, and that will matter far more in every decision over the next decade than any crowd will.

If the answer is no, then we will have spent a week insisting the law was misapplied, while keeping the option open to disregard it if it turns against us.

Stand on the road tomorrow. Then give the answer.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

The Question Nobody Is Asking Tomorrow

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty Two

Gary Robertson ⚽ It’s been some time since I’ve written a column and felt this happy.
 
Don’t get me wrong - I love putting virtual pen to virtual paper but it’s been a rough few weeks in Robertson Towers.
 
Defeats in Europe hurt but defeats at the hands of the enemy in Glasgow derbies cut deeper and it takes some time to shake off that injury and feel good about football again.
 
So with the SPL returning at the weekend there was some trepidation regarding an upcoming fixture at Motherwell.
 
Particularly as this was the Sunday lunchtime match on Sky.
 
With Rangers and Hearts both playing Saturday it meant that come kick off Celtic could have found themselves deposed at the top of the league, and the Jambos closing the gap.
 
A thoroughly professional performance in the first half against Kilmarnock at Ibrox gave McInnes’ men a comfortable and ultimately unassailable 3-0 lead against beleaguered Kilmarnock who find themselves rooted to the foot of the table and struggling for any sort of consistent form. Whilst the boys in blue seemed to take their foot off the gas in the second half and Kilmarnock did manage to find the back of the net a comeback never looked likely, and so it proved. 

By 5pm on Saturday Rangers were top of the league and in impartial honesty quite rightly so. They look like a team that have gotten their act together after an inauspicious start to the season, and look a formidable force. Young German Striker Naderi scoring twice more for the light blues he seems to have hit a rich vein of form.
 
Hearts were similarly impressive with a 5-0 thrashing of St Mirren. In front of a crowd of almost 19000 and two penalties expertly slotted away by Scottish winger Calvin Miller, who also assisted in Braga's goal in the 54th minute, Hearts are starting to show some badly needed form after a defeat to Falkirk and a draw with Kilmarnock. Is this the turning point for the men from Tynecastle? We can watch with interest, particularly given, Europe aside, Hearts are Celtic's next opponents (Sunday Oct 18th 3pm kick off) and given the events of last season I suspect this will have given Vrancken's boys a much needed lift ahead of what will be for some a grudge match. No titles on the line, three points only, but revenge is sweet whenever gained.
 
Hibs under new manager Reedijik travelled to Tannadice in Dundee to face United. Both sides finding form difficult to come by, a solitary goal from Dundee United's Bennie in the 35th minute kept the three points at home and sent Hibs back down the A90/M90 to Edinburgh empty handed and languishing in 10th in the league. It’s not spectacular but it’s functional football and kudos to United who find themselves - granted it’s early days - in the top 6.
 
Falkirk managed to lose a 1-0 lead over Dundee and a fightback from the visitors sealed with a 91st minute winner from Dundee's Hay, a bad day at the office for Falkirk and a further three points for the men from Dens who now find themselves in fourth.
 
So to Sunday. The wait was over and to be honest I just wanted it over with.
 
Granted Motherwell aren’t the team of last season but Celtic have been far from convincing and after two defeats at the hands of Rangers confidence wasn’t high.
 
Once again though Celtic proved why I write about football rather than manage a team.
 
I don’t want to go overboard but it was hard not to be impressed with the performance the Bhoys showed on the Fir Park turf. From Sinisalo (the birthday boy) in goal to Høgh up front everyone played their part in this victory. Even the often hung out to dry Tounekti had a game to remember for the right reasons.
 
Celtic never in the 90+ mins looked threatened, unbalanced or scared. There was a grit that has been woefully missing, a determination to get on the ball, the passing was lovely to watch and the finishing exquisite.
 
I am once again in love with football.
 
Sure we will suffer defeats, all fans do, but it’s days like Sunday that make it all worthwhile.
 
Granted Høgh appears to be laden with the £11m price tag and is struggling to score goals however he played his part in setting up Nygren for the second in 58 mins. I’m sure the rewards will come for the Dane and we need to be patient. Remember this is a man who’s scored against some of the best in the Champions League. You don’t suddenly become a bad player overnight. It rather goes without saying but with the right service he could easily be a 20 plus a season player.
 
Sundays highlight wasn’t so much the result though but the return of Portuguese winger Jota. Having spent 18 months with injury and recovery, some of us wondering if he’d ever play in the hoops again, he made his seasonal debut coming on in the 74th minute to rapturous applause and cheering from the Celtic fans in attendance a smile across the faces of all Celtic fans around the world. The biggest smile however was on the face of the player himself and who can blame him? It truly made for a beautiful Sunday.
 
The Celtic fans of course were in good voice showing their solidarity with those on the Garvaghy Road along with a tifo in support of legendary Celtic captain (and only player I can tenuously claim to be related to through my son (look it’s distant ok but I’ll take it)) Danny McGrain in his battle against Alzheimer’s disease. We of course, I’m sure, send our best wishes to him and his wife Laraine along with his three daughters, Vicki, Dawn and Carly.
 
The protest against Celtic owner Dermot Desmond continues unabated and the fans at Fir Park continued to show their ire toward the board and the man himself.
 
The other game of the weekend featured Aberdeen at home to Premiership new boys St Johnstone.
This was one I truly didn’t expect. Not the fixture but the result. A 1-0 victory to the visitors from Perth again, a single goal being all the difference between the two, a penalty scored by Saints' Fowler in the 14th minute enough for three points. Aberdeen find themselves in 8th while St Johnstone are riding high in 5th. For the Dons the 15th of September when they put four past Motherwell must seem a very distant memory.
 
So that’s pretty much it really, no drama beyond the obvious and some wonderful highlights.
This week European football returns so I may not be as cheery in next week’s column but right now I’m smiling and I hope you are too.
 
Have a great week and whatever you do be safe be happy and do it well.

Til next time …… 🐼 

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Oh Happy Day

Barry Gilheany ✍ Where alternative medicine and proponents of cuddly “disciplines” such as naturopathy nutrition make their presence felt; dollar, pound and euro signs are never far away . . . 
. . .  flashing as they do in front of those desperate for a cure or explanation of chronic health issues or those gullible enough or so set in their distrust and hostility to the medical “establishment” and supposed cronies in the “mainstream media” that they become willing victims to the 21st century reincarnation of that most ancient of archetypal figures – the confidence trickster. 

In this vein, I give you Barbara O’Neill, a self-styled naturopath and nutritionist who lectures internationally on “natural self-healing” but who has been banned from providing any health services in her native Australia. However this prohibition is not preventing her from embarking along with her husband[1] Michael on a series of events in the UK and Ireland despite criticism from scientists, health charities and academic bodies.[2]

Ms O’ Neill has previously claimed that cancer is a fungus that can be treated with bicarbonate of soda, that vaccines have caused an epidemic of conditions including autism and cot death, and that pregnant women with group B streptococcus do not have to take antibiotics. For these and other such pearls of wisdom, in 2019, our Babs earned a permanent ban from the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC), enforceable across all of Australia,  from providing any health services either voluntarily or in a paid capacity after it concluded an investigation into her.[3]

Among the HCCC findings were that she:

does not recognise that she is misleading vulnerable people … by providing very selective information. The misinformation has real potential to have a detrimental effect on the health of individuals because Mrs O’Neill also discourages mainstream treatment for cancer, antibiotics and vaccinations.[4]

Barbara O’Neill has promoted herself as a naturopath, nutritionist and health educator since at least 2004, despite having no relevant qualifications or training. She presents her claims at alternative medicine conferences, wellness retreats and Seventh Day Adventist Churches. She is married to Michael O’Neill, the founder of the Informed Medical Optics Party, now the Health, Environment, Accountability, Rights, Transparency (HEART) Party - an anti-vaccine and anti-fluoridisation political group. [5] His reaction to the HCCC investigation against his wife is classic persecution complex of conspiracists and quack medics alike, asserting that the HCCC has "serious legal flaws” that are under investigation, and that “there are political moves to place the HCCC organisation under investigation for their bias against natural wellness practitioners”.[6] Regulation by recognised professional bodies with the appropriate codes of ethics (such as the British Council for Counselling and Psychotherapy [BACP] might help such practitioners prove such discrimination.

But where there is a market for wellness woo, do follow the lucre. As of 2019, she ran the Misty Mountain Health Retreat near Kemply, NSW with her husband charging clients as much as AS$2,450 for a one-week stay for one person; and AS$8,800 for two people for two weeks. According to O’Neill’s website, she provided detox services claiming to aid recovery from heart disease, hormonal imbalance and chronic fatigue.[7]

After her ban from working in health services in Australia, Barbara O’Neill continued to dispense her alternative health wares internationally including in the USA, New Zealand and Fiji. She continues to deliver programmes aimed at cancer patients in the US as of July 2023 as at a cost of almost US$ 6,000. In October 2025, O’Neill was awarded the satirical Bent Spoon Award by the Australian Skeptics for her unfounded medical claims such as her promotion of cayenne pepper for curing ulcers; placing sliced garlic on a baby’s front was stronger than any antibiotic and using chopped onions to cure pneumonia. She has recommended that parents unable to breastfeed their infant use substitute formula including unpasteurised goat milk and a mix of almond milk and dates or bananas. When provided with National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) infant feeding guidelines for health practitioners, O’Neill said that she had never read then and that she would refuse to read them. In August 2026, the online newspaper Egypt Independent reported that Egypt’s Council for Media Regulation (SCMR) prohibited her from appearing across Egyptian media outlets.[8]

Another one of her egregiously false claims was made in Part One of her lectures on TikTok when in attempting to dissuade women from having Pap Smear tests and mammograms she said that they cause cancer; contrary to all expert advice on cervical cancer detection.[9]

Never shy of protesting faith in the power of a deity and of victimhood at the hands of perpetual evil, our Babs in her online petition calling for the HCCC to reverse its 2019 decision proclaimed:

It looks a bit dark but the Great God of the Universe will not let this wonderful health truth to be eliminated regardless of how men and women may try. 

 She also claimed to the press that she was a victim of a Nazi style propaganda campaign.[10]

And now the O’Neill roadshow has come to the British Isles. Among the venues that the pair have given seminars in are Donald Trump’s luxury Turnberry golf course. A five-day retreat, a Taste of Mist Mountain, is scheduled for the De Vere Cranage Estate in Cheshire with tickets priced at £700. The programme includes lectures by Barbara O’Neill: “What Really Causes Disease”, “The Science of Breath” and “The Immune System” plus a session by Michael on “Barbara’s Under Attack”. The couple are also scheduled to appear at the Founders and Future at Glasgow University Union (GUU). According to the Union President, events held in the building by external organisations in no way reflected affiliation to or endorsement by the GUU Board of Management. Likewise, the Cranage Estate take no responsibility for “content or opinions expressed at privately organised events.”[11]

Across the Irish Sea, the Christian health group Balm of Gilead (with all the creepy connotations associated with the totalitarian, misogynist theocracy of that name described by Margaret Attwood in her classic works The Handmaids Tale and The Testaments) has organised from 13th to 15th October a multi-day event at the City North Hotel and Conference Centre in Gormanston, County Meath in which the O’Neills have starring roles. Later this week, she is hosted by the “holistic”, “spiritual” and “inspirational” organisation Positive Life at a sold out one-day event in Jackson’s Hotel, Ballybofey, County Donegal with Front Row tickets retailing at €85 and General Admission at
€75; not quite the outrageous outlay in terms of client fees cited earlier.[12]

Predicably so and justifiably so, medical and scientific experts have sounded the alarm about somebody in the words of Dr Robert Grimes, a biomedical science expert and author of a book on medical misinformation, who is “a leading vector of medical misinformation”. A letter organised by Dr Grimes asserts that:

her repeated misguided medical assertions, unqualified advice, and abject demonisation of conventional medical treatment have directly led to harm.

The letter addresses the venues staging O’Neill’s events in these admonitory terms:

she will spread dangerous health fictions to a susceptible audience, leeching off an illusion of legitimacy afforded to her by the surrounds of your respectable establishment.[13]

Among the signatories to the letter are Orla Dolan, Chief Executive of Breakthrough Cancer Research; Prof Colin Doherty, Head of Trinity College Dublin School of Medicine; David Colquhoun, fellow of the Royal Society, University College London, and a science communicator; and Sander van der Linden, professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge. [14]

The warnings in and the tenor of the letter just cited raise crucial issues around how to safeguard vulnerable people from the spread of dangerous health fictions vis-a-viz free inquiry concerns that potentially arise from the regulation or even civil or criminal sanctioning of such misinformation. 

How is health security imperatives, particularly in the post- Covid era and the possibility of future pandemics, to be balanced against the liberty of the citizen in a liberal democracy to make their own healthcare choices despite their possible adverse consequences for the individual concerned? Is there a right to be wrong and who decides what is right and wrong? To what extent can Isaac Berlin’s concept of negative liberty, of freedom from external interference (usually from the state) _be asserted and validated in the domain of health freedom? Staying within a liberal philosophical frameworks but eschewing ultra libertarian versions of them; I would argue that Berlin’s concept of positive liberty in which human flourishing is enabled though a right to truth and access to the most up-to-date information and knowledge is a better ideological framework to resolve such trade-offs. Healthcare is a fundamental human right and it is incumbent of health providers to be as abreast of changing epistemology as is humanely possible. It is the right of and also the responsibility of human beings with agency and autonomy to acquaint themselves with the most accurate health information available which is not always available through consultations with Dr Google and certainly not with fraudulent alt-health false gurus like Barbara O’Neill.

I have previously argued that since consumer law penalises companies and private service providers from making untruthful or exaggerated claims about the efficacy of their products; this principle should be extended to politicians and other powerful interest groups. In other words, it should be a criminal offence to lie. Nutritionists, counsellors, aromatherapists, and other complementary health professionals should be protected terms which would provide a legal framework to put charlatans like Barbara O’Neill out of business and practice bans imposed in one democratic jurisdiction should apply to all other democracies. Truth must never become a casualty in any information war.

References

[1] Nicola Davis. Lecturer is “spreading health fictions” The Guardian. 2 October 2026

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Wikipedia

[6] The Guardian, op cit

[7] Wikipedia

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] The Guardian, op cit.

[12] Wikipedia

[13] The Guardian, op. cit

[14] Ibid

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Wellness Woorier 🪶 Barbara O’Neill And Her Caravan Of Health Misinformation Coming To A Place Near You

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty One

 

A Morning Thought @ 3292

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)