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Last Saturday there was a demonstration outside the Dáil that was hastily organised to try to capitalise on a controversy that you may or may not have noticed, depending on what corners of Twitter you inhabit, if any.
The genesis of this was an article on the website Gript, a clone of far-right American opinion websites run mostly by former Youth Defence activists, and edited by John McGurk, who’s been on this podcast. It was about the new Green Party minister Roderic O’Gorman, his brief is the newly-renamed Department of Children, Disability, Equality and Integration – he’s basically the Minister for Woke.
Gript have made a habit of mining the social media feeds of newly-elected left-wing TDs for anything that can be packaged into an embarrassing article. To be fair to them, they exposed pretty unsavoury anti-Semitic comments made by one Sinn Féin TD; they didn’t get anything said by Roderic O’Gorman that was worth writing about, but they did find a photo from a Gay Pride parade in 2018 where he and the British-based gay rights activist Peter Tatchell appeared together.
This article then triggered the actor and sometimes Travellers’ rights activist John Connors to record a rant and put it on Twitter.
That ends a bit abruptly there, but that’s what John Connors published. It’s worth looking into the background of this.
Peter Tatchell is pushing 70 at this stage, but he was a pushing for gay rights long before it was fashionable. He was a UK Labour parliamentary candidate in 1981 in a previously safe labour seat, where he was subjected to a barrage of homophobic abuse and as a result lost badly to, ironically, the Liberal candidate Simon Hughes, who at the time was a closeted homosexual.
Tatchell stepped down from his activism in 2009 because of the effects of brain damage he suffered including from being beaten by neo-nazis while taking part in a Pride parade in Moscow, and by thugs hired by Robert Mugabe when Tatchell tried to perform a citizen’s arrest in Brussels for human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, and was beaten unconscious.
He clearly is not afraid to stand up for his views, and in most of these views has been vindicated by history, but not all. In 1997 the Guardian journalist Ros Coward wrote a withering piece about a book edited by one Joseph Geraci calling for what he called a ‘more balanced’ debate on paedophilia. Ros Coward rightly excoriated the book.
Peter Tatchell then wrote a letter to the Guardian, saying that while he didn’t condone paedophilia, he believed that not all sex with children is unwanted, abusive and harmful. He gave the example of the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea where all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation ritual.
Nonsense.
Papua New Guinea, is one of the most isolated places in the world, densely forested and impossibly mountainous, there are thousands of tribes who live an essentially stone-age existence, with little or no contact with the modern world.
This example, by the way is very, very well known to anthropologists. So I don’t say nonsense that this example isn’t true, it is true, I’ve seen it cited elsewhere, including in a book by Germaine Greer; I say nonsense to any suggestion that it has the slightest relevance to discussions of child abuse in the western world today, or in the 1990s, or the 1890s for that matter.
This example was brought up for one reason and one reason only. It provided a narrative whereby men who had a sexual interest in young boys could somehow construct an argument that acting on that interest would be something other than child abuse. I don’t have any opinion on the rituals of stone-age tribesmen in Papua New Guinea any more than stone-age tribesmen in Papua New Guinea have an opinion on this podcast. But that’s not what’s at issue.
What’s at issue is that any public figure carving out the intellectual space to minimise or explain away child abuse. But that was an issue for a fairly minor British figure at the end of the last century, what relevance does it have to Ireland decades later?
Well John Connors tried to make the link, he said that this was the Irish political scandal of the year, but didn’t really explain why, so I got in touch with him. I thought that it was particularly relevant because he had said in other tweets that he thought the media were ignoring the story. He sent me a message back via WhatsApp.
We exchanged a few more messages and agreed a time the next day to record, but John never answered the phone, and he’s ignored my messages and calls since then, and it seems has blocked me on WhatsApp.
The first question that I would have asked John would have been did he believe in guilt by association. Does being photographed beside a dodgy person make you responsible for their offences? Because if it does, then John has a few questions to answer himself.
In particular because he previously published a photograph of himself with Mike Tyson; Connors is giving Tyson a big thumbs-up, and in the caption says that he’s chilling with his mate, Mike Tyson.
Mike Tyson is a registered sex offender.
Tyson was convicted of raping a teenage girl in 1992. Bear in mind that Tyson was a heavyweight boxing champion, weighing 100kg, almost 16 stone, and incredibly muscular. His victim was less than half his weight.
Since that conviction Tyson is on the Florida sex offenders register, I found his entry on the register within a few seconds on Google. It’s clear to me that Tyson’s crimes are far more serious of anything that Tatchell has done, and Tyson’s connection with Connors is far closer than any connection O’Gorman has with Tatchell.
But that didn’t seem to bother Connors. He claimed this, remember
I asked Connors where he got this information, that the Green Party had invited Peter Tatchell to Pride in Dublin, which seems strange, since it’s hardly their business to invite or not invite anyone to a Pride parade, I asked him did he have a copy of the invitation. He hasn’t answered.
He did, however say this on his Twitter feed.
He claimed homophobia. The thing is that you just have to look at the responses to Connors tweet to see a whole raft of homophobia. The picture of the kiss that O’Gorman got from his partner when he was declared elected in February was posted and reposted, clearly pejoratively.
It didn’t take much searching online for photos of Peter Tatchell with members of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin to emerge. That didn’t seem to arouse any interest from the many accounts that were furiously retweeting the story. It was notable that a lot of those accounts that had no or fake profile photos, and strange numeric handles, a tiny number of followers and very recent creation dates, all indications that this are automated bots, not real accounts.
But the striking claim was the minister, and I’m not kidding here, the claim was the minister enjoys sharing satanic images online of children being eaten..
That takes a little unpacking. During the lockdown, people with too much time on their hands started a meme of mocking up famous paintings and sharing them as photos. Medics in full PPE recreated the Last Supper image by Da Vinci. Someone put a wastepaper basket on their head to get the look of a Flemish merchant in an old master by Van Eyck.
And there is a painting by a Spanish painter called Saturn Devouring His Son. The painter, Francisco Goya, died in 1828, and this picture is inspired by another painting by Rubens, who died in 1640. It’s a scene from Greek mythology, where the god Saturn ate his son. It’s gory, but in no way realistic. The myth it’s based on isn’t that different to the biblical story of Abraham sacrificing his son. The painting is currently in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Spanish equivalent of the National Gallery. In the shop there you can buy prints, postcards, notebooks and even bookmarks with the image.
And hopping on this trend, the Dublin comedian Hannah Mamalis recreated the scene with a doll and some tomato sauce, and tweeted the image of both. Roderic O’Gorman, it seems retweeted it.
On this basis there was a storm of tweets claiming that the minster was into cannibalism, satanism and child murder. Which, I think, is an overreaction.
And it’s not too much of a stretch to attribute that overreaction to homophobia, particularly when it is interspersed with clearly homophobic language.
And hopping on this trend, the Irexit party quickly organised a demonstration last Saturday outside the Dáil, with the slogan ‘Hands off our kids’. They obviously had better luck than me getting a call back from John Connors because within hours they were furiously tweeting and retweeting a graphic promoting the rally with a big picture of Connors, billing him as an ‘independent speaker’.
Irexit, you might remember is the party set up to promote the idea of Ireland following in the Brexit footsteps of Britain out of the EU. They got less than one quarter of one per cent of the votes in the election in February. The main mover in the party is a guy called Hermann Kelly. He once worked as a journalist at the Irish Catholic newspaper – he claims that he was the editor, but the Irish Catholic deny this. After that he went to work in the EU for the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group of parties in the European Parliament.
One of these was the Sweden Democrats, a party founded in the 1980s by Swedish neo-nazis including at least one who left Sweden during the war to join the SS, the nazi unit responsible for running concentration camps such as Auswizch.
Also at the rally, were activists from the National Party, and Justin Barret its founder, who has well-documented links with neo-fascist groups on the continent. The National Party, by the way, also got less than one quarter of one per cent of the votes in February. At the rally, many of their activists carried posters showing images of a noose.
Also at the rally were people wearing the Trump-style Make America Great Again hat, carrying a banner that said ‘No to RSE’, the sex education programme; few if any of them were wearing masks.
They heard Hermann Kelly railing against the press for not covering the event.
Kelly repeated a number of inaccurate claims about the new government’s policy, and as well as posing for a photo with Kelly, John Connors spoke as well.
Connors wasn’t able to reference any complaint that he had about anything that the minister had actually said or done, and the questionable tweets that he mentions seems to be a reference to the meme with the Goya painting that he retweeted.
But, John Connors said, he would never take a picture with a paedophile apologist – but what about him taking a picture with a mate of his, a registered sex offender? Later, on Twitter, he seemed to respond to people making that point.
What’s to make of all of this? I don’t think that John Connors is a particularly hate-filled person, despite the rhetoric and the kind of people he’s hanging around with. I do think that he’s a fool, and an egotist, and that’s not just my opinion, I spoke to a very senior source involved in promoting Travellers’ rights, who emphasised that they thought Connors had done great work as a role model and advocate for Travellers, but were deeply disappointed with his involvement with far-right figures.
The source was certain that Connors would be taken to task behind the scenes by Travellers’ rights advocates; they have made common cause with the Roma community on the continent, Gypsies, and are acutely aware of how Roma were murdered by the nazis in the holocaust. I would have liked to ask John Connors what he thought would become of Travellers if the people he was speaking with, and their fascist friends every came to power in Ireland, but as I say, for all his big talk, he hasn’t had the guts to pick up my calls.
But I want to leave this on one note. How do we know what the purpose of people like Hermann Kelly and Justin Barret is in all this?
I want to listen here to what Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party had to say on this topic. He managed to take his party, briefly, out of the fringe and get councillors and even two MEPs elected in Britain.
This is a recording of him talking to a group of neo-nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen in the United States. He talks about how his party had railed against Jews and immigrants from the fringes, and that he had changed tactics to avoid putting off potential new supporters.
Kelly and Barret certainly don’t have much of a history in advocating child protection. Have they had a sudden conversion to this cause? Or do they see it as an opportunity for something else?
