Kevin Myers (right_ and Sean O’Rourke on Today with Sean O’Rourke on RTÉ Radio One this morning
This morning.
On RTE One’s Today with Sean O’Rourke.
Former Sunday Times columnist Kevin Myers spoke to Mr O’Rourke in the wake of his sacking from the newspaper, following his column last Sunday.
From the interview…
Kevin Myers: “…I think I could have been treated with more dignity [by the Sunday Times] but I do understand. I too quickly said and an affirmative to a question I wasn’t expecting, I said ‘yes’. And I don’t think that’s quite right because anyone should have a second chance for making an error of judgment.
“You see I’ve come on air and I’m not fully prepared for what you’re going to throw at me. I haven’t slept in two nights and I’m…”
Sean O’Rourke: “It’s a very tough thing and, on a human level, I think people will empathise or sympathise with somebody losing, you’ve lost your livelihood?”
Myers: “Yes, I have. But I don’t want anyone else to lose their livelihood. Enough damage has been done. So, you know, it’s happened. I enjoyed working for The Sunday Times and I’m sorry this has happened. I did, I mean…”
O’Rourke: “But I mean even if, if there had been, and again, that’s noble of you to say it but if there are five or six people whose job it is to vet what people write for the paper, prior to it going to print, surely they have to be on the line aswell.”
Talk over each other
Myers: “Enough damage, enough misery has been caused. You see, you can have a perch, you can, and a lot of people would love a perch. A nice big witch hunt, lots of victims, lots of lives ruined, lots of mortgages…”
O’Rourke: “It’s called taking responsibility.”
Myers: “I’m taking responsibility for what I wrote. I can’t do anything for anybody else.”
O’Rourke: “OK, and the other thing that’s been much noted and much commented upon is that if there hadn’t been those references to two women presenters in the BBC, Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, you would still be a columnist. And questions are being asked…”
Myers: “And, you know, that was just one single a line or two, that’s all.”
O’Rourke: “Yeah, but the question is being asked what about the way you would appear to routinely write material which is misogynistic…”
Myers: “It’s not misogynistic, no it’s not misogynistic. I am a critic of political feminism. I am not a misogynist. That’s a term that you might have been, I don’t think you would have used that term about me in different circumstances, Sean. It hasn’t routinely been used about me but it’s a simple way of labelling somebody and that means you don’t have to listen to what they’re saying.”
O’Rourke: “But in terms of why people get ahead professionally and why men more so than women do so, you suggest that a personnel department or a human resources department, as it’s now called, will tell you that ‘men usually work harder, get sick less frequently and seldom get pregnant. But most of all men tend to be more ambitious, they have that grey-backed testosterone-powered hierarchy-climbing id that feminised and egalitarian-obsessed legislatures are increasingly trying to legislate against’.”
Myers: “Yes, well that’s an observation I would have made on many occasions and I don’t think it would have been the object of such obloquy in different circumstances but I do believe that men and women behave very differently and men are driven by ambition and by urges that women don’t have, generally speaking.”
O’Rourke: “When you wrote as well, in the same column on Sunday, ‘a fairly average female columnist in 800 indignant words of smouldering mediocrity will, without leaving her keyboard, earn more than a cleaning lady or a checkout girl, what they would earn, in an entire week plus Sunday overtime’. Now why refer to a fairly average female columnist there?”
Myers: “Actually, because we’re talking about the context of equality. I don’t believe in equality, Sean. I’m not asking you questions. You’re asking me questions. I’m on this programme because Mary, your producer texted me this morning and she’s doing her professional job outside. None of us is equal to one another. I’m arguing in, repeatedly, over the decades…”
O’Rourke: “Why put in the word, if you just wrote ‘a fairly average columnist in 800 indignant words’, I mean why does it have to be a ‘female columnist’?”
Myers: “Because I’m talking about the issue of female equality when women, when feminists talk about, within the BBC, talking about how they should be equal with the men, well actually nobody’s equal so the women who’s making the tea or cleaning the floors or whatever, is not equal to the star presenter. And it just, that was the issue, the context of that…”
O’Rourke: “That applies equally to male as well as female…”
Myers: “It does absolutely. But you see you can actually Sean, without any problem, got through line by line and paragraph by paragraph in that thing and find..”
O’Rourke: “OK, well I want to do one more, actually, if I may, and I don’t want to labour the point. But you say: ‘equality is a unicorn, don’t wait for it or look for favours because of your chromosome count. Get what you can with whatever talents you have and ask yourself how many women are billionaires, chess players, grandmasters, mathematicians, there’s a connection: mastery of money usually requires singular drive, ruthless logic and instant arctic cold arithmetic’. Now, it’s very easy to conclude, reading that paragraph or most of a paragraph that you actually believe that women are inferior to men.”
Myers: “Well you might have come to that conclusion. If I thought that, I would be an idiot. And I’m sorry that I’ve given that impression but I’ve already told you that I have many weaknesses and one of my weaknesses is a weakness for facile terminology like that. If it irritates people then you’re losing them, you lose them as readers or listeners or whatever. Now, the way you’ve read that out to me, and to your audience, makes me sound like a very unpleasant person. But I’m not a very unpleasant person. You’ve just taken any single paragraph…”
O’Rourke: “By the way, it is the duty of a columnist, I would argue and I’m sure you would as well, occasionally, to be unpleasant.”
Myers: “It is but the point is a single paragraph taken like that, out of context, makes me sound like a villain. But there are very few women mathematicians, there are very few women grand chess masters, there’s on in the top 100, that’s a fact.”
O’Rourke: “Maybe they have better things to be doing.”
Myers: “Well that’s the point. That is the point. Now if I had said that, it would be called misogyny.”
O’Rourke: “Now there’s a lot of traffic on our text line [reads out text] “Does Mr Myers apologise for calling the children of single mothers ‘bastards?’.”
Myers: “Well I don;t know why she’s asking that..Is that a woman asking that? I wrote an entire column on that. The column appeared on a Tuesday by Thursday I had written a full retraction and a full and abject apology in which the terms abject and contrite were the two words I used at the end. I knew I had done a bad thing.”
O’Rourke: “Ruth Walsh , I’m not sure if it’s our former journalistic colleague Ruth Walsh is tweeting to observe: ‘Kevin Myers in person is a very likeable but he has made too many throw away remarks over the years. He is not a rookie journalist’.”
Myers: “Well, I’m not going to argue with that.”
O’Rourke: “I’m wondering how do you go about rebuilding or do you at this stage…”
Myers: “Very hard to say how I can say I can recover from this. Personally I’m in a very bad way which is fine, people expect you to suffer if they give you a good kicking and that’s happening. I’m not sure if there’s any redemption for me now which will give a lot of people satisfaction.”
O’Rourke: “And if they read the Independent today, Gerard O’Regan their former editor is writing about how unnecessarily difficult it was for him as an editor to deal with you. I suppose brilliant people are often difficult people to deal with. It could be said you long ago burnt your bridges in the Irish Times, then the Independent and now the Sunday Times…”
Myers: “I didn’t burn my bridges in the irish Times. I left the irish Times. The irish Times didn’t ask me to leave and they actually tried very hard for me to stay. The Irish Independent declined to renew my contract when it was up but there was no strained feelings there. It didn’t happen and the Sunday Times took me on. We now know the Sunday Times relationship is over.”
O’Rourke: “You don’t think there’s any way to argue your way back in there by maybe writing a fresh column. Would you like to be given space to write 750 or a thousand words just to state your position not necessarily pleading for your job back.”
Myers: well there’s no question the Sunday Times are taking me on as far as I can see. Martin Ivens, the editor I amtold – I haven’t been reading stuff online as I haven’t got the constitution to take all that hatred that exists online – that I will never be employed by the Sunday Times in any guise in the future so I have to accept him on his word.
O’Rourke: “In your defence there is the statement issued by Maurice Cohen, chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland in which he says branding Kevin Myers as either an anti-semite or a Holocaust denier is an absolute distortion of the facts but he does go on to take issue with…”
Myers: “All the Jews have. I accept that. I was wrong. It was stupid of me this encapsulation of this quite big issue in a single sentence or half a sentence. It’s done me terminal damage but that’s that. It’s what happens in life these days.
O’Rourke: “Would there have been a sense though, subconsciously or otherwise, that I can toss out these lines and observations and sure look there’s half a dozen people to rein me in if I go overboard and I can push the boundaries, push the boundaries..
Myers: “I am the Master of my soul and the author of my own misfortune. I cannot blame anyone else”
O’Rourke: “What would you say to Vanessa Feltz and Claudia Winkleman this morning?”
Myers: “I am very, very sorry. I really mean this because I’m not rescuing anything. It’s over for me professionally as far as I can see. I am very, very sorry that I should have so offended them and I do utter an apology not for any reason other than out of genuine contrition for the hurt I caused them but I did so out of respect for the religion they come from and for the religion I still hold in regard, particularly the irish members of that religion who have been so forthright in their defence of me generally. Not just Maurice [Cohen]. Others who have been contacting me privately and I am so grateful for their support.”
O’Rourke: “Kevin Myers, thank you for coming in today.”
Myers: “Thank you, Sean.”
Listen back in in full here
Sunday: Kevin’s Gate
