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1 November 2007 Edition

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Fifth Column

When Myers met Harry  

WHICH Irish Independent columnist has confessed to being part of what Sir Tony O’Reilly might call a terrorist conspiracy by hiding an ‘IRA gun’ form the British Army in Belfast in the 1970s? Eoghan Harris? Sam Smyth? Ian O’Doherty? No, it’s the Provo-loathing, British-Army-loving Kevin Myers.
Myers admitted in his Irish Independent/Belfast Telegraph column last Friday that he helped a well-known ‘Official IRA’ gunman evade the lawful authorities by hiding his gun for him while he was being questioned by a British Army patrol.
The revelation comes in a very affectionate homily for Harry McKeown, who recently died. “A scoundrel and a scam artist” but still “a very dear friend”, Myers mourned.
Given Myers’ excoriation of the IRA, his folksy tribute to a member of the Workers’ Party’s fund-raising wing, the Official IRA (when people like Eoghan Harris, Pat Rabbitte & Co were still gurus of the Sticks), and his open ‘criminality’ is all the more astonishing.
“Harry, perhaps the cleverest man I ever met,” Myers writes, “left school in Belfast at 14 to do odd jobs for different employers.
“As a teenager, he saw the opportunity to supply workers — bricklayers, joiners, labourers — to builders: and he would sort out the tax. Which is to say, he would do no such thing, thereby making a great deal of money. For Harry would rather have rubbed broken glass into his eyes than pay a penny in tax.
“Harry was a businessman who called himself a socialist, but one who made himself very rich from hiring out non-union labour.”
So, Myers knew that not only did Harry carry a gun and was fund-raising for the Sticks but he was also exploiting the least protected workers in the building industry, non-union labour. He was still “a very dear friend” to Mr High and Mighty Myers.

Harry: The real thing

MYERS met Harry when he was working in RTÉ in Belfast in 1971. Harry went into RTÉ to talk about the internment swoops when republican suspects were arrested, held without charge or trial, and some of them tortured. “Only Harry was no suspect,” Myers recalls, “but the real thing.”
Myers excuses Harry’s immersion in the OIRA and criminality, including his central role in the building site certificates fraud in the North that netted hundreds of thousands of pounds for the WP/OIRA. Harry joined the Sticks because it “conferred some protection from the Provisional IRA thugs who had taken over nationalist ghettoes”.
So, according to Myers, you were either in the Provies or you hid behind the Stickies. There was no middle ground. Which must come as a surprise to all those SDLP and Alliance supporters (and non-partisan people) who actually lived in nationalist areas without joining the Officials or the Provisonals.


Non-violence with a gun

DIDN’T Kevin Myers say that Harry “the real thing”? A real OIRA man, if you know what I mean. Mr Myers seems to contradict himself.
“Meanwhile, Harry conducted his own life in the undergrowth of an unabated – though non-violent – criminality.”
Non-violent? So what was Harry using that gun for when RTÉ’s Myers wasn’t sticking it up his impartial reporter’s jumper to save his ‘criminal/paramilitary’ friend? (Did Myers care?)
Chris Tarrant might ask Kevin Myers, do you think Harry was using the gun: (a) as a crow scarer on top of Divis Flats; (b) to ward off hungry foxes ravaging the bins of Beechmount; (c) as a prop in the Workers’ Party Christmas pantomime, ‘Harry McKeown and the Forty Thieves’; or (d) for criminal activities and to shoot if not actually kill people with?
You can ask the audience, Kevin Myers, but you can’t phone your friend.

Myers’ lunatic times

KEVIN MYERS had another curious reference to his time with Harry in Belfast at the height of the conflict in the 1970s.
Myers refers to visiting his good friend in Warrenpoint, County Down, last year. Harry McKeown had contracted asbestosis while robbing materials by stripping a ship in Harland & Wolff in the 1970s.
“My old friend, partner in a hundred lunatic escapades at the height of the Troubles, was dying.”
What Mr Myers was actually a “partner” in and what the “hundred lunatic escapades at the height of the Troubles” were, the normally verbose Irish Indo scribe doesn’t say.

Provisonal dilemma

A WOMAN rang Joe Duffy’s RTÉ Radio 1 Liveline show on Friday to give out about the FF/Green Government’s chaotic overnight clampdown on motorists waiting for their full driving licence.
The distraught woman cried: “Joe, I’m on my second Provisional.”
Joe Duffy: “What’s his name?”

Hector abú

OVER on da telly on Saturday night, Ryan Tubridy was interviewing Hector Ó hEochagáin and Risteard Cooper about their new documentary and DVD chronicling Ireland’s anti-climatic Rugby World Cup experience, Chasing the Blues.
The boys debated what went wrong, including comparing the team psyches and the martial merits of stirring anthems such as France’s La Marseillaise and, er, Ireland’s Call. Our own Amhrán na bhFiann, Braveheart stuff, is what you want, our tousle-haired hero, Hector, insisted, rather than the watery Ireland’s Call.
Tubridy asked if Ireland’s Call could be translated into Irish to give it a bit of ooomph. The trouble for the rugby heads, Risteard Cooper, opined, is that the first line translates as “Tiocfaidh ár lá!”

George Spence’s chicken balls

LOYALISTS plan to lay siege on Belfast’s Chinese community next month after Alliance Party MLA Anna Lo upset a band leader by writing to him at his home address in the band’s name.
Lo’s letter was conveying a constituent’s complaint that the Pride of the Raven Flute Band’s annual parade had stopped her getting to work. George Spence, the band’s big noise and a former soldier in the British Army, claims that because Lo’s letter had his and his band’s name on the envelope it has put his life in jeopardy.
Lo has apologised but now bandy head Spence’s pals have applied for permission on 24 November for 40 Orange bands and 3,000 loyalists to go out of their way to stomp through Donegall Pass, where many Chinese families live, to have a rally in support of nervous George. Lo has described the action as “racist intimidation”. A rally organiser denies this.
“The fact the she is Chinese does not, in the eyes of the band, impart any blame or responsibility for her foolishness on to the wider Chinese community.
“Indeed, many of the bandsmen may, on their way home, enjoy a Chinese meal.”


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