Indolence Rather than Intellect

By AM Sunday, October 28, 2012

Share Tweet Share Share Email

I have very little regard for the political opinions of Niall O’Dowd in respect of the politics of the North of Ireland. They tend to be slavish to what is a demonstrably mendacious Sinn Fein narrative. Nor do I believe that he exercises his analytical capacity to any great degree when writing on the same.  Rather than reflect he regurgitates. Indolence rather than intellect would best seem to characterise his output.

But that would not lead me to endorse the intemperate description of him as one of the world’s greatest assholes. There are many out there deserving of such invective more so than O’Dowd, amongst them those who have long censored all and sundry rather than permit an opinion different to their own.

Whatever my aversion towards O’Dowd’s political perspective I readily concede that since about twelve years ago when he first allowed his media outlets to be used as a platform from which assaults could be launched on me and others not persuaded by an implausible Sinn Fein narrative, he has unfailingly allowed the right to reply.  That’s more than can be said for some other sections of the media. Last year the jaded, timid Old Lady of D’Olier Street palpitated at the mere suggestion that it should afford a right of reply to a particularly disingenuous op-ed piece it had earlier published. The paper of record is certainly weak when it comes to being a paper of discord.

On the contentious matter of Boston College’s Belfast project, Niall O’Dowd takes a wholly contrary view to my own. Fine. Free inquiry is a contact sport where heavy tackles go in. This holds good even when he has been pulled from pillar to post by his own lack of focus, inexplicably and without consistency oscillating between criticising the British authorities and finding fault with the researchers for having tapped into a new vein of knowledge.  Nevertheless, it is to his credit that he has called on US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to intervene as a means to prevent the subpoenaed archive ending up with the British. Moreover, he has usefully outlined on the basis of precedent how this could be executed: much in the same manner that former US Congressman Bruce Morrison has done in an excellent piece by the Boston journalist Jim Dee.

None of this however should constitute a shield for O’Dowd with which he can ward off challenges to his prejudiced, tendentious and implausible views.

As of late he has found himself beset by a plausibility deficit.  In his bid to facilitate and promote the revisionist Sinn Fein narrative he has checked into Hotel Paradox. Under the false flag of raising public understanding he strives to erode it by coupling myth to myopia. He targets researchers while simultaneously shielding dissemblers. Those not remotely convinced by the Sinn Fein narrative, and therefore willing to probe beneath it, find themselves in the eye of the Periscope from where verbal depth charges are launched: fortunately without much in the way of steady aim. Whether it is the researchers at the heart of the Belfast Project or academics who comment on it, they find themselves shackled in the same dock by Niall O’Dowd where they stand jointly charged with ‘getting Gerry Adams’.

At no point does O’Dowd seem capable of addressing the central issue involved in any construction of IRA history: is it any more possible to get such a history without touching on the role of Gerry Adams, than it is to get a history of the war in Vietnam without reference to Henry Kissinger? If Henry Kissinger headed the National Security Council, it was hardly remiss of the Secretary of State at the same time, William Rogers, to mention him in memoirs. In fact there would have been something suspect about Rogers’ account had he failed to mention Kissinger. There would also be something ethically dubious about the researcher who asked Rogers not to mention Kissinger in case it might propel politically motivated accusations of ‘getting Henry.’

When mining at the coalface of history retrieval, as the oral historian is prone to do, the task is of one of extracting the raw material. The specialised sifting comes later, and is not always carried out by those tasked with the original extraction. The greater the insights mined while there is still time the better it is for those who have the task of processing it later. More acquisition rather than less would seem a prudent strategy at the retrieval stage. 

Moreover, as the Finnish historian Jussi M. Hanhimäki suggests, for a historian there is nothing like meeting those who were ‘present at the creation’; something oral historians, unlike others in the historiography field, often have the chance to do.  This ‘presence’ pertains as much to the creation of events as processes. It is hardly of shock value to find that those present at the moment of creation will have a view of the creator. What possible reason would there be for them not to have? Is there any longer room for doubt that Gerry Adams was the foremost creative influence behind the Provisional IRA campaign? Has any history of the IRA, of which there are numerous, when addressing the matter concluded anything to the contrary?

What analytical problem is posed by an enhanced understanding of that dimension? None, unless everybody that ever wrote a book or doctoral thesis on the IRA did so with the intention of getting Gerry Adams. The problem posed is a political one. Vested political interests don’t welcome probing. ‘Knowledge must wait’ being one of the catchphrases of the peace process.

In matters of history construction one would imagine that hackles would be raised in respect of historians who exclude rather than include, where the real crime is one of omission rather than inclusion, where historical revisionism is valued more than historical accuracy. But one senses that this reversal of the order of things is precisely the real motive behind the O’Dowd discourse: shout, roar, stomp your feet, bang the table, anything that drowns out an unapproved voice any time Gerry Adams - who O’Dowd concedes has lied about his IRA past - is analysed in the hope that eyes will be averted.

Niall O’Dowd can save his breath. Attempts at smothering academically relevant information have failed and will continue to fail for the simple reason that there is more epistemic oxygen out there than can be suffocated by the partisan demands of politics and the need to perpetuate false narratives.