been happening to Mike. He had, said Mr Whelan, ‘discovered art’. Mr Whelan berated and jeered at Mike for his new-found interest in art, which it was alleged had brought about the destruction of a glorious career. Mike, he felt, had become pretentious and had lost his chirpiness. ‘The man who knew no fear,’ wrote Mr Whelan, ‘the broadcaster as happy as the day is long, who joked and jeered until the cows came home, has been looking at paintings and reading books. When he sits in the studio he carries the burden of these things with him. He wants to be serious and enlightening and it is awful to watch him try.’
It was a cruel and nasty article, but it was also, in a certain two-dimensional sense, accurate. It seemed to foretell, by looking deeply into the core of the problem with Mike Murphy, a tragedy that would soon befall the entire nation: we would all succumb to seriousness and ponderousness.
Nobody had ever heard of ‘Donal Whelan’ before. A few people who used to hang around the pubs on Merrion Row, close to where the Magill offices were situated in Dublin, were aware that ‘Donal’ was actually a well-known journalist with aspirations to becoming a novelist. They also noted that, when Mike Murphy started to present an evening arts progamme, ‘Donal’ became a regular panellist and was getting along famously with Mike.
It was only a matter of time. Someone told Mike who Donal was. One evening in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre, Mike approached this aspiring novelist and berated him loudly for his cowardice and duplicity. It was, by all accounts, savage.
Perhaps it was this episode that caused Mike finally to abandon his duty to keep the Irish people in a good mood. Years later, when the aspiring novelist had become a very great novelist indeed, and someone made a passing reference to the episode, Mike wrote a letter to the Irish Times saying that he was reading the latest novel by the artist formerly known as Donal Whelan and was enjoying it hugely. But this made the Irish people even sadder than before, because it merely confirmed the extent of their loss. They had always known that Mike Murphy was a good egg, but now their grief knew no bounds. Mike had forgiven Donal Whelan but he still wasn’t coming back.
19 Conor Cruise O’Brien
I t is not necessary to have agreed with Conor Cruise O’Brien about everything – or even about anything – to be able to recognize his importance in Irish life and culture. In our time his name has become a byword for a certain deeply unyielding mindset in relation to the so-called Irish Question. Perhaps because his view of Irish history was inordinately skewed by a desire to effect changes in the present, the Cruiser seemed to believe that the past could be re-entered and altered almost in the manner of a Harry Potter storyline. From the 1970s, he became the High Priest of revisionists who set out to deconstruct the alleged myths of Irish nationalism so as to pursue a reconciliation with unionism. Many Irish people, though agreeing that the Provos were an abomination, never came to accept that in order to isolate armed republicanism, it was necessary for southern Irish society to distance itself from all sense of moral grievance concerning its own history. When the revisionist blueprint extended to excoriations of the 1916 leadership and calls to downplay the gravity of the Great Famine, many found themselves having to excuse themselves from the anti-Provo express.
While many nationalists in the Republic agreed that the Provos had been able to take advantage of a legitimate historical grievance to justify acts of the most appalling barbarism, they had difficulty with the idea of dismantling their entire sense of history. Many supporters-in-principle of Cruise O’Brien’s position, while recognizing that there was a paradoxical validity to the idea that a change of heart among nationalists offered the best, perhaps the only, possibility of forward
It was a cruel and nasty article, but it was also, in a certain two-dimensional sense, accurate. It seemed to foretell, by looking deeply into the core of the problem with Mike Murphy, a tragedy that would soon befall the entire nation: we would all succumb to seriousness and ponderousness.
Nobody had ever heard of ‘Donal Whelan’ before. A few people who used to hang around the pubs on Merrion Row, close to where the Magill offices were situated in Dublin, were aware that ‘Donal’ was actually a well-known journalist with aspirations to becoming a novelist. They also noted that, when Mike Murphy started to present an evening arts progamme, ‘Donal’ became a regular panellist and was getting along famously with Mike.
It was only a matter of time. Someone told Mike who Donal was. One evening in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre, Mike approached this aspiring novelist and berated him loudly for his cowardice and duplicity. It was, by all accounts, savage.
Perhaps it was this episode that caused Mike finally to abandon his duty to keep the Irish people in a good mood. Years later, when the aspiring novelist had become a very great novelist indeed, and someone made a passing reference to the episode, Mike wrote a letter to the Irish Times saying that he was reading the latest novel by the artist formerly known as Donal Whelan and was enjoying it hugely. But this made the Irish people even sadder than before, because it merely confirmed the extent of their loss. They had always known that Mike Murphy was a good egg, but now their grief knew no bounds. Mike had forgiven Donal Whelan but he still wasn’t coming back.
19 Conor Cruise O’Brien
I t is not necessary to have agreed with Conor Cruise O’Brien about everything – or even about anything – to be able to recognize his importance in Irish life and culture. In our time his name has become a byword for a certain deeply unyielding mindset in relation to the so-called Irish Question. Perhaps because his view of Irish history was inordinately skewed by a desire to effect changes in the present, the Cruiser seemed to believe that the past could be re-entered and altered almost in the manner of a Harry Potter storyline. From the 1970s, he became the High Priest of revisionists who set out to deconstruct the alleged myths of Irish nationalism so as to pursue a reconciliation with unionism. Many Irish people, though agreeing that the Provos were an abomination, never came to accept that in order to isolate armed republicanism, it was necessary for southern Irish society to distance itself from all sense of moral grievance concerning its own history. When the revisionist blueprint extended to excoriations of the 1916 leadership and calls to downplay the gravity of the Great Famine, many found themselves having to excuse themselves from the anti-Provo express.
While many nationalists in the Republic agreed that the Provos had been able to take advantage of a legitimate historical grievance to justify acts of the most appalling barbarism, they had difficulty with the idea of dismantling their entire sense of history. Many supporters-in-principle of Cruise O’Brien’s position, while recognizing that there was a paradoxical validity to the idea that a change of heart among nationalists offered the best, perhaps the only, possibility of forward
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