Lying The Flag

By AM Monday, August 8, 2011

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‘It isn’t a sin, a crime or an offence to forget about something’ (even Liam electioneering) – Gerry Adams

It must be in the water. If it is then it is that bottled water Sinn Fein have been marketing this past while back. Only Our Fibbers Run Free or something it is called.

Most of us have heard of flying the flag but Sinn Fein in its innovativeness has come up with something new. It has dropped the F and is now lying the flag. The party gives full credit to its state of the art propaganda machine, Porky Productions.

What possessed Raymond McCartney to go on Radio Ulster and claim authorship of an op ed piece about flags in the Derry Journal that he most certainly did not write? After being challenged on the authenticity of his claims to be the author Raymond claimed without equivocation:

It was an opinion piece, it was in my name and I penned it. There is no one trying to pretend. The opinion piece was from me and then used by other people.

If so he must have written it five years earlier and put Mitchel McLaughlin’s name on it. The Irish News rumbled him by showing an image of the article in a July 2006 edition of An Phoblacht.

Something tells me this is the handiwork of the Big Lad. You can just imagine him standing in the Felons with a crowd of them worshipping at his feet.   

How great do you think I am?
Infinitely so Master. 
Enough to give up your dignity for me?
Even my industrial wage great leader
Later, Tom, later
Me first Master, me first, I will sing everlasting praises to you.
Jim, you do that in the Irish News every Thursday anyway
A thousand praises in the next column Master
No change there then.
Unchanged, Unchanged utterly, Master
Will you stand up in public and gratuitously spout the same bollix I do?
Yes Master, Yis Siree Bob.
My bollix, not Bob’s. Mine will suffice. Don’t worry there is enough to go round all of you .
Yes, yes.
So what shall it be?
Your bollix Master, yourself alone.
Ok, Raymond, you first.

Now we know it didn’t happen that way but it is so easy to imagine how it could have. The Big Lad, not too long ago got up and spoofed on Talkback that he had been singing the song ‘Always Look on The Bright Side of Life’ in the H-Blocks in 1978. Ok if it had not been for that awkward little fact that the song wouldn’t be released until the following year as part of the film The Life of Brian. It is highly unlikely that the Ministry of Funny Walks despatched a freebie copy to the Ministry of  Money Talks so that the Master could sing it in the H Blocks just to annoy the screws with the sure knowledge that he knew something they didn’t.

After that Igor, the Master’s long time manservant, launched a rescue attempt. But Danny Blunders is no Otto Skerzeny and like much else he has done in his career this met with about as much success. The Big Lad remains stranded on his remote little lieland. Danny who readily admits to remembering that he remembers Gerry over the past 40 years – but not through the IRA as Gerry has no memory of being in that – approvingly quoted the novelist Karl Greenfield that ‘a falsehood can be deposited in the brain and reinforced almost as easily as a true-life experience. Memory is fallible, we all acknowledge that.’

Unless of course you were on the Blanket protest in the H-Blocks circa 1979 and therefore must surely remember Blunders and some court case he was caught up in because Blunders was a very important person and republicans don’t forget the very important people in their lives. That’s how he remembers Gerry Adams for forty years.

The fault line in the manservant’s apologetics was of course that even when told by David Dunseith that the song was not released until a year after Gerry thought he was rendering it, the Big Lad continued to insist that he had been singing it. When you are infallible you are always right regardless of the evidence. Old habits die hard so when the Big Lad found himself in a hole in the ground he just kept digging in the hope that the problem would disappear.

Few  will understand why Raymond simply did not do what Michelle Gildernew had the savvy to do. She released a statement after the article that Raymond didn’t write had also gone out in her name. Explaining that she had been on holiday and that the piece appeared without her knowledge or clearance, she will take no hit for it whatsoever. Raymond need merely have said something similar instead of placing himself in the stocks for everybody to throw eggs and rotten fruit at. 

The DUP will laugh, riff and poke fun at SF members’ intellect, as Jim Wells did in his reference to the ‘literary masterpiece’, but little else will come of it. It suits the DUP to have such a limited lot making the case for nationalism.  Ultimately Raymond will survive even with a lot of egg on his face and the odd  jibe in public debates from here on in. The real effect will be a reinforcing of the belief that the party functionaries are a band of wallies resembling a crowd of clones, incapable of independent thought.  A few twists of the Master key in their backs and off they go chanting in unison, ‘Victory to the PSNI’ and suchlike. When caught in the headlights they lack the wit to jump out of the way before getting run over.

Ah well, no need to despair; Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life – 1978 version. One copy only, on the record label HMV - His Master’s Voice. Truly, a collector’s item.