Kevin Myers’ eager critics should feel ashamed of themselves

I have been out of the country for a little while, doing my bit to support the Greek economy. I return to find a most surprising subject for the latest two minutes of hate.

Lest anyone think I’m just carrying water for a friend I suppose I should say at the outset that I don’t know Kevin Myers, and don’t believe I’ve ever met him. But like many other people I have admired his writing over the years, and think that his book ‘Watching the Door: cheating death in 1970’s Belfast’ is one of the best memoirs of the Troubles that I know. Brave, funny, moving and profound, it is – as Andrew Marr said – a book that ‘stinks of the truth.’  

That work (published almost a decade ago) confirmed what anyone who had followed Myers’s journalism over the years already knew – which was that you couldn’t find a braver or more consistent opponent of the sectarian violence which tore apart Northern Ireland’s society. His often unpredictable work (which is also variable in quality, as whose is not?) has certain consistent strands. One is that his hatred of the behaviour of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland extends to him taking the position (uncommon in Ireland) of looking at the Israel-Palestinian dispute and not taking it as read that there are certain justifications for murdering Israeli families in their beds. 

Now I return from my holidays to find that Kevin Myers has been written off not only as an anti-Semite, but also as a Holocaust-denier. I have read his column from the Irish edition of last weekend’s Sunday Times and think it a pretty poor effort. Had I read it that morning I would not have read past the first few lines.