Oh, the absolute irony of it. You couldn’t make this nonsense up. Kneecap, who have spent the last three months complaining bitterly that they are being cancelled and intimidated because of their views on Gaza, have signed a letter calling for the cancellation of an event taking place in a local community hall in Drumshanbo in Co Leitrim.
‘Free Mo Chara’, my ass. What a shower of hypocrites.
From the outset of the Kneecap controversy, I wrote that artists should not be cancelled because of their views on Gaza or other issues because the right to free speech is paramount. I also wrote that I continued to hold that position even though it was very unlikely that the feeling would be reciprocated.
The left generally only believe in free speech for themselves and always seem astonished when cancel culture comes back to bite them. They’re happy to wield a big censorship stick when they’re punching down on someone in this small country with the approval of the establishment, but complain bitterly when the same tactic is used against them in the international circuit.
I’ll spell it out for those at the back: if you’re fine with supporting the cancellation of an event in Drumshanbo because you disagree with the political views of the speakers, don’t be crying when your own gigs are cancelled in Britain or across Europe because the sponsors take issue with your politics.
This latest bout of intolerance is around an event that was to be held later this month in Drumshanbo, the picturesque town in Co Leitrim famed, amongst other things, for being a hub of excellence for traditional music; for the quality of its award-winning gin; and for its proximity to Sliabh an Iarainn where, the old stories tell us, the Tuatha de Danann first descended from heaven to this land, bringing with them great artistry, magical prowess, and a deep understanding of nature.
Perhaps if we sent a signal up, Danú and the entourage might come back and fix the awful mess the country is currently in, and sort out the totalitarian tendencies increasingly coming to the fore.
I’m lucky enough to have been in Drumshanbo many times for the Joe Mooney Summer School and can’t recommend it highly enough: one of those weeks where masters of tradition congregate in small pubs or back rooms to weave the sort of music that stays with you long afterwards.
That was likely why the controversy that is playing out in the local Sligo-Leitrim media about an event that was booked to take place in the Mayflower Community Centre in the town caught my eye. It looked like yet another cancel-culture row: usually the case where liberals with an extraordinary illiberal intolerance of anyone with differing opinions seek to ensure that people be prevented from exercising their right to free speech.
A stultifying conformity is really what’s being sought, all too-often in the name of diversity. There’s that irony again.
However, its interesting that rows about free speech are now becoming more common because, to their great upset, the liberal left in Ireland and in other countries may be slowly losing control of the public narrative. First the Irish hate-speech bill, which was to be used to step up cancel culture from the online mob to actually being able to criminalise ‘wrongthink’, fell. Then the Irish people, the plebs who really should have known better after decades of social engineering, had the effrontery to deliver a landslide double NO in the 2024 referenda.
For too long it became customary to see people shouted down and cancelled just because they had different views from the establishment on anything from abortion to immigration – and yes, the establishment includes you, Kneecap, and Christy Moore, and all the others who are up to their oxters in taxpayer and national broadcaster support but still imagine themselves to be ragged revolutionaries socking it to the man.
THE BATTLE OF DRUMSHANBO
Whether or not we have learned that it is better to stand up to cancel culture was tested in Drumshanbo, where a battle for Free Speech was decisively lost this morning. Organisers of an event called Mise Éire had booked the Mayflower Community Centre for a music and folk festival for “those who cherish Irish culture, heritage, and are united in celebrating our shared values” to be held on August 23rd.
A crowd called ‘Leitrim and Roscommon Against Fascism’ weren’t happy, according to Leitrim Live. ‘Down with this sort of thing’, they cried, and collected 260 signatures (not a huge tally, it must be said) from those who agreed with them that Dangerous Ideas Must Be Silenced.
What were these dangerous ideas, evidently so risky and disruptive and radical that even uttering them aloud within the confines of a community centre to those who had paid to hear them posed a threat to social order? The anti-fascists seemed a little vague about that, perhaps because the Mise Éire festival appears to be focused on the Irish language and heritage, with singers and musicians set to appear, while speakers included Kevin Flanagan, founder of the Brehon Academy; journalist Louise Roseingrave; filmmaker Thomas Sheridan, and others.
So instead the cancel crowd jumped on the issue of immigration as a reason to shut the whole event down. People who opposed mass migration were going to address and attend the event, they shrieked. Something had to be done.
As it happens, a huge majority of Irish people now think we are taking in too many migrants, but even if they didn’t, only a thoroughly authoritarian society forbids the airing of an opinion unless its shared by the majority.
Apparently immigration wasn’t up for discussion at the Mise Éire festival, but even if it had been, what kind of a poor excuse is that to cancel a booking? John Waters, the journalist and writer, who is listed as a speaker, and Stephen Kerr, one of the organisers, have strong views on immigration. So what? They are entitled to have strong views on anything they like, because we live in a supposedly free country, and they should be free to express their opinions – just as Kneecap should be entitled to express theirs.
If the illiberal lefties in Leitrim and Roscommon don’t like the opinions of John Waters, then here’s the obvious solution: don’t go to hear him speaking at a festival in Drumshanbo, or anywhere else. Or organise a debate with him and thrash out the issues and let the public decide.
That’s not an acceptable solution of course, because these people often don’t actually have confidence in the validity of their arguments, and they instead rely on tantrum-throwing and pleading special position or invoking censorship to get their own way.
As the American abolitionist Wendell Phillips once said: “He who stifles free discussion, secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true.”
In addition, these self-appointed censors seem to think that the public aren’t entitled to hear argument or decide for themselves at all, but must instead be spoon-fed correct thinking until they are as addled and illogical as the people who bleat about fascism while literally trampling on the right to free speech.
APOLOGY MADE TO JOHN WATERS
Interestingly, Ocean FM had to issue a fulsome apology to John Waters after Meryl McGowan of Leitrim and Roscommon against Fascism made allegations on air against the writer which the station accepted were “unsubstantiated, comprehensively false, and had no basis in reality” – while adding that Mr Waters is a “respected writer and journalist of many years standing who has written many books and contributed fearlessly and constructively to public debate in this democracy”.
Mr Waters, the station clarified, “has never been associated with violent threats, arson attacks, loyalist gangs, or extremism of any kind, as may have been inferred from the unfortunate manner in which these comments were couched”. Ocean FM wished to disassociate themselves from said comments and apologised for the “lapse in vigilance” they said.
So a representative from the campaign to cancel the Mise Éire event was found to have made false and unsubstantiated statements on air which led to Ocean FM making an abject apology. “No basis in reality”? Sounds like a four-word description of the entire lunatic fringe who desperately cling to cancel culture like a drowning man to a life raft.
Shannonside reported last week that Séan Wynne, the chairman of the Mayflower Community Centre, said that when the Mise Éire event was proposed, it met all of the same aspirations as the Gaelic League, which was formed in 1893. He also stated at the time that the board will stick to its decision to allow the festival to proceed.
“This is just a question of making life difficult and a process to see would we collapse. And I make no mistake about it – in the next, whatever, it’s a month now from now, every effort will be made and every hand grenade in a verbal sense and in a media sense will be used,” said Wynne, who previously managed the European Parliament campaign for John Waters.
The organisers of Mise Éire said they had already sold more than 400 tickets for the event. The lefties then upped the ante and issued an open letter calling for the hall to be withdrawn because the gathering was “far-right” and “divisive”, and urged artists to sign it.
Cue Kneecap and Christy Moore, who according to the Leitrim Observer, signed up with hundreds of others to a demand that a festival booking in a local hall be cancelled.
WHERE’S THE ACTUAL HATE COMING FROM?
I’m not sure if any of the signatories of the open letter have seen the sort of garbage being posted online attacking those organising the Mise Éire festival in Leitrim, but its pretty nasty stuff.
Stephen Kerr and Suzanne Delaney of the Irish Inquiry and Seán Wynne are depicted as hosting ‘hate-filled dangerous nazis” and depicted as wearing swastikas – or, in Wynne’s case , with a grenade in his mouth.
It all seems unnecessarily personalised and vicious. There’s also the irony that Highland Radio interviewed Leah Doherty of the Leitrim group to talk about the dangers of using the Mayflower community centre because of fears about disinformation and division. She made it clear that the aim of her group is to ensure that all community centres are off limits for all organisations they deem ‘far right.’
No-one should be given that kind of power to shut down debate. It’s a bully’s charter and could be being used to censor and silence the kinds of discussions this country desperately needs to have.
Doherty has two convictions for assault on people whose political opinions she doesn’t like. As far as I know none of the people organising the Mise Éire event have any such record. Yet the Mayflower buckled under pressure, whatever excuse they are using today. Shame on them. They shouldn’t have given in to the mob
I spoke to Suzanne Delaney of the Irish Inquiry, who said that she felt the remarks and allegations being made online against the event were so inflammatory, and the level of vitriol so dangerous, that she was concerned for her safety and for that of her daughter, given that she was being falsely portrayed as an actual Nazi who hated people because of the colour of their skin.
She said that, in common with the now discredited remarks made on Ocean FM, these characterisations were totally false and misleading.
She said that if Kneecap had, in fact, signed the letter urging the festival be cancelled that the level of hypocrisy was “staggering”. She added that the “sense of entitlement” in the Leitrim campaign was palpable, and that she believed it was their view that “anyone who disagreed with them should be cancelled and destroyed”.
(I wrote to Kneecap to ask them to comment on Ms Delaney’s remarks, but have received no response to date).
She also said that the “horrifying, baseless” attempts to conflate the aims of the event “with the horror of the holocaust” are “disgusting, and insulting to those who died in the camps”, adding that she thought the posters and cartoons above were “reminiscent of images in the notoriously anti-Irish Punch magazine in the 19th century”.
She said that both she and the Irish Inquiry had worked to highlight some of the difficult and unacceptable circumstances for asylum seekers in IPAS centres. She pointed to what she said was the “huge contradiction of supposed left-wingers shutting down debate and supporting mass immigration” which she said was a boon to Big Capital.
Ms Delaney described these sort of cancellation pile-ons as “gang-stalking”. On other occasions where the left opposed an event, hotels and venues have been subjected to relentless phone calls and emails from a small group who call and email repeatedly, sometimes using threats of protest as intimidation. The ‘love and welcome’ crowd ratcheting up until they silence their opposition. History has shown us that’s a dangerous trend.
FREE SPEECH IS THE CORNERSTONE OF DEMOCRACY
And we’ve been here before in this country. RTÉ banned rebel songs, including The Patriot Green. We sang them anyway. Unionists sometimes bitterly opposed festivals of Irish traditional music and song in the north. We stood against those attempted cancellations.
Free speech is the cornerstone of democracy for a reason. Artists in Ireland have for far too long been cowed by fear of being cancelled or losing gigs or being shadow-banned by those who dole out grants and by the rest of the establishment if they dared to have a opinion which was contrary to that which is actually only really held by a fraction of the country.
Most artists know that if you don’t stay quiet or nod along with the open borders rhetoric, or the view that a man with a penis is a woman, or the idea that loving your country is ‘racist’, you’ll be blacklisted. McCarthyism is alive and well in progressive, shiny, modern Ireland. Its long past time that it was called out.
The battle of Drumshanbo is actually ridiculous. Its as if the fringes of society get to decide what speech is permissible, because too many people are too cowardly to tell them to take a hike and stick their insane demands where the sun doesn’t shine. Isn’t it telling that when the wild accusations against the Mise Éire festival were actually made on a platform – Ocean FM – where the cancel campaign could be held accountable, an apology and retraction was swiftly issued?
The Mayflower Community Centre should reverse their decision and tell the mob to get lost. It doesn’t matter what ‘Ordinary Man’ Christy Moore living in his mansion in Monkstown thinks – the majority of people are perfectly fine with free and open debate on most issues, including immigration, and they certainly don’t think people should be blacklisted for opposing open borders.
And Kneecap may not be able to grasp this fundamental truth, but either everyone has a right to free speech or no-one does.