Kicking With A Different Foot...

This little place is normally where I restock my arsenal.
But words bite like bullets, sometimes, and return fire is deemed necessary.

To anyone bothered to read this, I must beg a large favour.
First read the link to the article, and then consider my response, and then the illustrious journalists, as fairly as you think possible.

Maybe I just woke on the wrong side of the bed.....
The Article

My response... Bryan Mulhall
To kmyers@independent.ie
Kevin,
I have just read your truly wonderful, moving tribute to Elizabeth Primose Ruttledge, as fine a piece of heartfelt prose as I have seen in an age.

But you managed to ruin it with just twenty two ill chosen words.

A little background, just in case its needed, to justify my disappointment.

I am a forty two year old lapsed Catholic, born and raised on a country road one mile outside a small one street village in County Laois.
Strangely, ours was the only Catholic homestead on this stretch of sylvan and meadowed Eden, an indirect result, I suppose, of Queen Elizabeths plantation many centuries before.

So, our neighbours were "Other", and the traits and quirks of the Irish Protestant caste are well familiar to me, and just as you describe them so brilliantly.
The aloofness, the reticence, the work ethic, the "Respectability" recognised and derided by many of our countrymen ( but secretly admired, and envied, I believe, by many of those same detractors)

Perhaps some of those characteristics seeped in to my own flawed character by some kind of cultural osmosis, or perhaps I realised that the manner in which this unfortunate, set-upon tribe of Protestant countrymen and women conducted their day to day business presented a model way, a low-key guidebook on how to live a worthwhile life.

I have long been an admirer of both yourself and your style, your journalistic courage, and granite-faced determination in your commitment to causes "neither popular nor profitable", to paraphrase your illustrious predecessor in the top right corner of a certain page in the Irish Times.

I only started taking the Irish Independent to follow you, and use the rest to bed down chickens.

I have to say, though, that if I were one of those lost and found again twin daughters of this splendid woman that you so obviously admired, her passing fresh in memory, and I read those awful twenty two words.....
"Yes, as a teenager, she had once wrapped those long elegant legs around a mans body and had abandoned herself to lust"....

.....I would be sick to the heels of my left boot, and curse the eyes that allowed me read this truly poisoned praise.

I live in Baltinglass, not too far from yourself. If you disagree with my opinion, and would like to discuss it over a pint......
the first round is on me.

yours, Bryan Mulhall.


And now, his measured response.....

Kevin Myers Add to contacts
To Bryan Mulhall
Thank you for your mixed praise: but though my words appalled you -
and I'm sorry they did - they were chosen because of their
startlingness. They described an unexpected reality. Other people have
not been as critical as you. But I am glad that you enjoy my work
generally.

I look forward to that pint. However, it's not a question of who buys
the first one, but who drives home!

bw

K