Tag Archives: Mary Kenny

Mary Kenny was to interview Kevin Myers at the Percy French festival in Roscommon

This morning/afternoon.

“Covid-19 was not the Black Death,”Mary Kenny said [on Today with Sarah McInerney on RTE Radio One] . It killed “some” who were vulnerable, but for most the symptoms were flu-like and unpleasant. And as such the government’s response should be proportionate.

“People should be sensible and take precautions, they should proceed with their lives. There are risks in life.”

Meanwhile…

G’wan Mary.

Don’t mind them fearful ninnies.

FIGHT!

‘Covid-19 was not the Black Death’: Mary Kenny brands Irish quarantine regulations as ‘draconian’ (Irish Examiner)

trump

Donald Trump arriving at Shannon Airport in May 2014

Mary Kenny, in The Irish Catholic, writes:

… But the people of Doonbeg, seem to have no objection to Mr Trump’s visit as a businessman. They acknowledge the many millions of Euros he has invested in Trump International Golf Links and Hotel, the environmental sea-wall against the Atlantic he plans to build, and the employment opportunities he has provided.

Tommy Commerford of the Doonbeg Fishman’s Alliance said he had “no problem” with Trump being in West Clare, and Caroline Kennedy, owner of the local Igoe Inn – she also runs the Doonbeg Jazz Festival – says he’ll be “welcome with open arms”.

So, whose judgement is best on this delicate issue – the politicians who have spoken, or the people of Doonbeg?

Much of what politicians say for public consumption is what is known, now, as ‘virtue signalling’. The message of their statements often means: “Look what a compassionate, high-thinking and virtuous person I am! I condemn racism, sexism and Islamophobia.” (Wasn’t there someone in the New Testament, described as being constantly at the front of the temple, virtue-signalling to everyone what models of moral conduct they were?)

But the Doonbeg people aren’t concerned with ‘virtue signalling’; they’re thinking of more basic, bread-and-butter issues, such as keeping their resort viable.

Doonbeg had seldom been heard of, outside of Ireland, until Donald Trump purchased it, making it, according to Condé Nast Traveler “the Number One [golf] resort in Europe”.

Bread-and-butter doesn’t inevitably come before ethical values. But the people of Doonbeg surely have a greater entitlement to speak on this particular question than the virtue-signalling Richard Boyd Barrett or Enda Kenny.

Hmmm.

Political protests of Trump visit just ‘virtue signalling’ (Mary Kenny, The Irish Catholic)

Previously: Meanwhile, In Clare

H/T: Oireachtas.ie

90365922Charles Haughey at Abbeville, Kinsealy, Co Dublin in September 1995

Really?

Yes.

Did not some great French sage say: “Le style – c’est l’homme”? And although Mr Haughey’s politics were not always admirable, there was something human and even shrewd about my mother’s instinctive attraction to the “Duce”, to reference to PJ Mara’s renowned allusion. Above all, there was something that spoke to the historical collective memory of the Irish people.

And it’s something ancestral which, strangely enough, Charles J Haughey shared with – of all people – Mary Robinson. When Charlie acquired Kinsealy, drank Montrachet, and sat on his hunter, he was vindicating the collective Irish unconscious in a parallel version of “the risen people”. This was not “the risen people” of wild rebellion, but the “risen people” who were now as good as their lords and masters had once been – who could be as grand, as stylish, as upper-class as any belted earl who had gained land and estates from selling out at the Act of Union, or who had exchanged an ancient chieftain’s role for an endowment by a Tudor monarch.

Charlie was proof that the “risen people” had arrived. And so, in a different way, was Mary Robinson – the very embodiment of the “Catholic gentry” who showed the world that we were no longer the wild Irish so unfavourably portrayed by cartoons in ‘Punch’ and the hostile London ‘Times’.

My mother’s generation – born before World War I – has now passed away and the folk memory which propelled their hunger for style, confidence and even upper-class taste in leaders has perhaps faded. She had been born into a Galway family where old people could remember the Famine, not only the lesser famines of the 1870s and 1880s, but the Great Famine of the 1840s, too. Eamon de Valera represented austerity and sacrifice, but Charlie brought panache, elan and glamour. And, for the vicarious pleasure he gave in that regard, I do not retrospectively begrudge him the Mercedes cars, the Charvet shirts or the wine cellar stuffed with Chateau Margaux.

Fight!

He loved a Merc and a Margaux – which made Charlie my mother’s darling (Mary Kenny, Independent.ie)

(Eamonn Farrell/Photocall Ireland)