Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

A Gombeen Irishman's Diary

A few days before Christmas myself and Sinn Fein Councillor Tom Hartley had some business in Dublin at the National Library. We were getting the 8 o’clock Enterprise train and decided that it would be more convenient to eat in the dining car rather than rushing breakfast at home.

When we tried to enter it we were told, very courteously, that it was for first-class passengers only. We decided instead to eat in the other half of the carriage, the bar. But when we ordered breakfast we were told that we had to wait until the people in first class had eaten. I began to feel like we were in steerage on the Titanic. After about fifteen minutes we again approached the caterers and were told that we wouldn’t be fed until the train picked up passengers at Portadown, some of whom would be travelling with first class tickets and might require breakfast. We could eat after them.

Finally, the fry we ordered came ‘ingeniously’ packed between a split soda farl, so that there was no need for a knife and fork, a plate, salt and pepper, or a dining car. We complained to the staff about the service and they shrugged their shoulders and said it was company policy. The point I was making was that if it were not for passengers on our side of the train, who make up the vast majority of the travellers, then Translink and Ionriad Eireann could not afford to be in business and could not organise a class division on the train for the privileged few. In fact, in a sense we are paying for our own discrimination.

I thought no more about it until the following day when the former northern editor of the ‘Irish Times’, Deaglan de Breadun, wrote a feature in that paper about how much he had enjoyed his journey on the train when women shoppers from West Belfast in his carriage crooned the length of half the country, and only a few passengers felt miffed. Could you imagine trying to stop them!

Prompted by his article I wrote a letter to the paper, explaining what had happened to Tom Hartley and myself. My letter appeared in Thursday’s ‘Irish Times’ but the following day that paper’s columnist, Kevin Myers, devoted his ‘Irishman’s Diary’ to a lengthy attack on me because I was convicted ten years ago in connection with the kidnapping of RUC informer Sandy Lynch, a tout I deeply respect because he has never written a book. Well, not yet.

Parts of Myers piece were quite funny, talking about the ‘appalling travails’ Danny ‘had to endure trying to get breakfast on the Enterprise express to Dublin, the poor lamb.’ But then he went on to write in detail about informers who were killed, weaving my story in and out of his, and how those killings represented so much thuggery. He finished by saying: ‘Now Danny, I don't know what you've got on your conscience and what you have not. All I'm sure of is that I'm glad it's your conscience and not mine. So do us this small favour, please: endure the slings and arrows of life's little misfortunes in silence. In other words, Danny my boy, you're alive, and thousands are not. So shut up.’

What Myers is saying that republicans have no rights. We can’t complain as consumers, we can’t complain about inequality or injustice or as voters, or if we are sick or unemployed or homeless. We are alive, so shut up.

Anyone who has read Kevin Myers will know that the man has a problem. He is still fighting the war against republicans. He despises the men and women of 1916 and glorifies those Irish men who fought and died in the First World War. He once described dead IRA Volunteers as the progeny of a pig’s litter. He has consistently attacked the peace process and when the cease-fire broke down in 1997 and the IRA bombed Canary Wharf, he crowed ‘ I told you so!’.

Five years ago he wrote an interesting piece in ‘The Spectator’, which was then used in David Sharrock and Mark Devenport’s hatchet biography of Gerry Adams. Myers, who was working for the ‘Irish Times’ in Belfast in the early seventies claims that he was once in a bar when he heard Adams say about a civilian, ‘Shoot him.’ You are going to need one large pinch of salt for the rest of the story. Myers can’t remember the name of the bar, the date, who was shot, and strange for a journalist, didn’t write about his ‘exclusive’ at the time. Surprise, surprise, he only remembered the story at the height of the ceasefire in 1995! To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, he would say that, wouldn’t he.

Last year he was invited to take part in Feile an Phobail’s ‘West Belfast Talks Back’. He appeared willing, but then cancelled because had a barbecue or garden party to attend. Nevertheless, the invite remains open. Kevin can come to Belfast and regale us with his high morals. But if you are coming up on the train, Kevin, remember to have breakfast before you leave home.

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