BY FARRELL FRANK

Fintan O'Toole

Post-colonial whingers, cyphers and long distance radicals

Quite the most pathetic, half-hearted effort to come to terms with 21st Century Ireland - or should that read 20th Century- was The Irish Times apology for being so bold as to publish a supplement on the 1916 Rising. Announcing the supplement as an independent-minded effort to avoid taking sides, it presented the Rising as either "the founding act of a democratic Irish state or a historic act of treachery". Sure, take your pick.

Other dichotomies were presented to the readers with equal lack of irony or the need to avoid self-abasement, as in the presentation of the Volunteers as being either "freedom fighter" or "terrorist". The same 'objective' commentary went on to suggest that Irish members of the "British Army and the armed Royal Irish Constabulary" were as unaware of their political and historic role as were "the rebels themselves". Speak for yourself, Fintan O'Toole, for t'is himself, once more, being terribly iconoclastic, deconstructing shiboleths, courageously taking on icons and all that, ie being one of the 1980s Sticky neo-Unionists that abandoned the struggle for a republic.

The newspaper was at pains to assert that it did not take a view on whether the Rising was "right or wrong, whether it was an act of heroic self sacrifice or of criminal folly". That Ireland's premier newspaper should actually distance itself from the genesis of the state that they vigorously defend on those occasions they perceive it to be threatened by republicans, is almost beyond political polemic.

The description of the participants includes the Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army but not the British Army. However, it recounts the role of the Trinity Officers' Training Corp and speaks warmly of how their actions (they poured machine gun and sniper fire on "rebel positions" in the GPO and elsewhere) were credited with saving Nassau Street, Grafton Street, College Green, Dame Street and Westmoreland Street from destruction - by British artillery officers who would not fire on their own, although this is not spelled out.

However, while the commentary of O'Toole and the other anti-republican writers of 2006 amount to one long, post-colonial whinge, the first hand accounts published in the supplement of Dubliners who lived through the week are definitely worth reading and they bring the reality of the Rising to readers in an immediate and personal way that makes you realise how 90 years is but a spit in history. To be fair to O'Toole's political position, a reproduction of an Irish Times editorial which demanded that the "surgeon's knife must not be stayed until the whole malignant growth has been removed", shows that today's paper of record has come a little way since then. Just a little.

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Michael McDowell's drinking buddy and favourite cypher, Sam Smyth, also descended beneath his normal low threshold of taste and professionalism immediately following the killing of Denis Donaldson. Without a scrap of evidence, Smyth blamed the IRA for the shooting. While some media reported that Denis Donaldson's hand had been almost severed from his arm, Smyth's own newspaper reported on its front page that Gardaí had discounted any signs of torture and that the dead man's hand had been injured by the shotgun blasts.

This did not prevent Smyth - in the same edition of the paper - from employing lurid comparisons with the Mafia ritual of placing dead canaries inside the mouths of their victims and writing of grizzly acts of symbolism in the killing. 'A new low' is the only cliché your columnist can resort to in the face of such awful journalism.

By the weekend, that bizarre band of self styled 'socialist-republican' experts who never forgave the IRA for stimulating the peace process and stripping away their status as war reporters, had decided on their line on the Donaldson killing. These 'radical' hacks often cite 'rank-and-file' republican sources and indicate an authoritative line of communication with the republican base. The constant, wishful refrain is that the IRA membership is in open revolt against the peace process and they betray in their writings a subliminal hope that the war will recommence, sans the current republican leadership.

Last week they explained to their breathless audience in middle Ireland that a significant section of the IRA had organised Donaldson's killing and were in revolt against the IRA and the Sinn Féin leadership. Strangely and yet significantly, these left wing scribes converged, as they often do, with Messrs Eoghan Harris and Jim Cusack of the Sunday Independent who peddled the same line about Donaldson's killing being the act of an IRA segment in revolt. A degree of felon setting came from both camps with one senior republican being fingered by both the 'socialist' hacks and the neo-Unionists of the Sindo.

Equally interesting was that neither camp could make up their mind as to whether it was a faction in revolt against the IRA or the IRA itself that shot Donaldson. However, such contradictions and confusion matters little so long as republicans get the blame. A truly shameful week for the Northern 'experts', security correspondents and long distance radicals of the media.

• Michael McDowell's drinking buddy and favourite cypher, Sam Smyth