Essential reading on the origins of the Troubles and the flop of Boris Johnson's memoir The Irish Times

The work of a journalist is never boring. No two days are the same. Sometimes they are totally different. This week I attended the Moynalty Horse Chase to gauge interest in the general election and the launch of a campaign by retailers who are fed up with the crime they face on a daily basis.

On Thursday I went to Dundalk to speak to neighbors about missing boy Kyran Durnin. Someone who worked at a local charity shop said: “It’s surreal. It's like something from a TV show. The case has dominated the news since mid-week with so many questions left unanswered. If the eight-year-old was last seen in June 2022, why was this not reported? We are still waiting for answers to a case that Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has described as one of the most extraordinary in his more than 40 years of policing.

I hope you enjoy my selection of stories this week.

1 The most notable article in the Irish Times this week comes from our Berlin correspondent, Derek Scally, who is also the author of an excellent book, The Best Catholics in the World. He asks the pertinent question that many people have overlooked by directing their anger at the nuns who ran the old Bon Secours house.

Five years ago, I took a trip to Tuam with just one question: who were the fathers of the babies whose remains were found under the old Bon Secours house?

A well-known person in the town told me with a laugh: The fathers of these babies are the sons of the finest families in Tuam. And you'll never get them to talk. A decade after local historian Catherine Corless revealed a discrepancy between 798 baby death records without burial records, groundwork is underway to excavate the remains beneath the old house.

The warm moral indignation that the Irish reserve for our abusive priests and nuns calms down when it comes to confronting our men who have impregnated our women, often through abuse of power and acts of violence.

2 Not a day goes by that I don't feel ashamed of men, in some way, for what they do. The events in the town of Mazan in France surrounding the mass rape of local woman Gisle Pelicot have shocked the world.

3 This article by Anthony Coughlan debunks the pernicious myth that there was no alternative to the Provisional IRA's campaign of violence which resulted in the deaths of 1,800 people and injured thousands more.

Coughlan should know that. He was there during the civil rights campaign and remembers what happened.

As he writes: Contemporary Sinn Fin attempts to invent a myth of respectable origins, in which the Provisional IRA campaign was in some way a continuation of the Northern civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Coughlan believes that the demands made by the civil rights movement were met and that public opinion in Britain and around the world was overwhelmingly on the side of the northern nationalist population.

Coughlan writes: In my opinion, Northern nationalists, and even unionists, would not be where they are today if the peaceful approach to civil rights had been followed from 1969 onwards, but they would, in fact , in a much more advanced political position. than they currently are.

It is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of the Troubles.

4 Dave Hannigan's sports columns in the United States are always very good, and this one is particularly so.

Mark Cuban is everything Donald Trump is not. The principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks is a self-made billionaire who grew up in a working-class family in Pittsburgh. Unlike Trump, to whom his father gave a fortune, the Cubans' fortune is self-made. You would normally expect a billionaire plutocrat like him to be a Republican, but Cuban is not and is one of Trump's biggest critics. As Hannigan points out, his criticisms sting because Cuban knows what it means to be a successful businessman and Trump is none of those things.

A sports plutocrat and serial investor, his CV is as dotted with glittering business triumphs as Trump is pockmarked with epic failures and shameful practices. This is something that the sworn enemy of the Republican candidates likes to point out.

5 Anyone who has visited Dublin city center since the pandemic knows that the city center is in big trouble. There are dilapidations and vacant lots everywhere. There is also an air of menace and persistent antisocial behavior.

The powers that be are aware of all this, but what will they do? The Dublin task force established last May came up with 10 different suggestions, but as our Dublin editor Olivia Kelly pointed out, we've heard many of these recommendations before. The question is: how will they be implemented?

Podcast of the week

Don't believe the hype, Public Enemy so wisely noted many years ago. Sally Rooney's new novel Intermezzo is the publishing phenomenon of the year generating levels of interest rarely seen since the Harry Potter franchise, but is it any good?

I haven't read it yet, but I really enjoyed the Womens Podcast Book Club's discussion about it with Risn Ingle, her mother Ann and Irish Times journalists Niamh Towey and Bernice Harrison. Although everyone agreed that it was a brilliantly written book, the word genius was used once or twice, but there were strong differences of opinion as to its merits.

The Book Club: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

The best of the rest

As an author, I am fascinated and appalled by the 2 million advance given to Boris Johnson for his political memoir Unleashed. What were they thinking? HarperCollins believed that Johnson's memoir might have surpassed that of Prince Harry Spare, which sold 400,000 copies in the United Kingdom on its first day on sale. As this article in the UK Independent Points out, Johnson's book topped the non-fiction charts in the UK for two weeks in a row, but sales were a tenth of those achieved by Prince Harry. Bestselling author Richard Osman says there are piles and piles of unsold books in UK bookstores.

Johnson had an interesting story to tell, but it wasn't the one that appeared in his book.

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