Oxford professor on the Irish
from the sunday independent www.unison.ie
Liam Carroll
( he is right about bono and geldof though )
A RESPECTED Oxford historian has launched a vitriolic attack on Irish 'sacred cows' such as rock star Bono, the TV personality Terry Wogan and the Irish multimillionaires who are buying up London.
But his strongest criticism is reserved for former Blackrock College student Bob Geldof, whom he describes as "a mouthy sloven".
"England has undergone the reverse cultural colonisation of the erstwhile oppressed. As fluent talkers, the Irish have colonised entire areas of British television, with the benignly unctuous Terry Wogan succeeded by the vulgarly queer Graham Norton, whose sexually obsessive innuendo even managed to fall below the (very) low standards of British television comedy," says Michael Burleigh in his new book Sacred Causes.
The book, published by Cecelia Ahern's publishers, goes on: "However, the decline of English culture is at least matched by what has happened across the Irish Sea, which despite the lingering flutey-voiced sentimentality has become a vulgarised version of Essex."
Burleigh, an eminent historian and writer, deals with the role of religion and politics from "European dictators to al-Qaeda" and, in one engagingly politically incorrect chapter, he has a lengthy swipe at Ireland and the Irish.
He belittles the "minor poets" who have won the Nobel Prize for literature and adds: "Various provincial cliques and coteries, whether eccentrically Anglo-Irish, or just plain Irish, are inflated out of all proportion to their actual significance by their admiring fellows in the metropolitan British media".
But it is for such sacred cows as 'Sir' Bob Geldof and Bono that he reserves his most strident ire.
"Any cook or pop star can become a celebrity seer nowadays in a culture where other forms of authority have withered. Superannuated rock musicians have boarded this bandwagon, with saint-cum-sir Bob Geldof in the van of vulgarly formulated attempts to strong-arm governments seeking the youth vote into giving away more money that by and large finds its way into the Swiss bank accounts of African kleptocrats.
"It is startling to watch British politicians lapping up abuse from this mouthy sloven, until one notes that knowledge of pop music is nowadays a crucial part of obtaining high office.
"Ireland's professional moralists are represented, at most disasters and 'tragedies' by Irish television news reporters, again omnipresent on British TV, with a nice line in emoting about the world's starving, a sight that makes many of the cooler disposition long for the old days of stiff upper lip."
Wallowing in victimhood is "an essential element in the Irish problem" he says and it provides emotional and moral justification for "bullying, intimidating and killing" those who don't subscribe to their point of view.
"The Celtic warriors are as risible as Islamist militants," he says, going on to give the opinion that Cardinal Tomas O'Fiaich "colluded" in giving hunger striker Bobby Sands "a Christological air".
The scholar and author also turns his attention to the new mega-rich class of Irish businessmen who have invaded the British property market buying up landmark buildings in the heart of London.
"Some of Ireland's most prominent businessmen have a, doubtless ill-deserved, reputation for ruthlesness. Fans regard such figures as genially piratical; others think they are greedy and mean-spirited, a description that might also apply to large swathes of the Irish in the English building trades, although competently reliable young Poles are displacing this horde of bodgers and shysters."
While acknowledging that Ireland has now become "much richer" than neighbouring Britain, Burliegh has put this down to "its affluent diaspora and the European Union" while Northern Ireland "is kept afloat by an inflated public sector providing outdoor relief to its middle class".
Burleigh, taught at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cardiff Universities as well as a number of important educational institutions in the United States.
