HARRY S gAME
Among new TDs converging on Dublin this week is Harry Blaney, the seventysomething Finn Harps fan who won a seat in Donegal North East.
Eamonn McCann, 25 Jun 1997
Among new TDs converging on Dublin this week is Harry Blaney, the seventysomething Finn Harps fan who won a seat in Donegal North East.
Harry may be a fraction long in the tooth for inclusion in any list of likely new lads, but he s an interesting character, all the same.
A councillor for close on 40(!) years, he took over as front-runner for Independent Fianna Fail last year after the death of his brother, the redoubtable Neil. In the subsequent by-election, however, he was bested by Cecila Keaveney of official Fianna Fail. This was the first time since 1923 that there had been no Blaney elected in the constituency: Harry vowed they d be back.
Fiercely anti-British, he s likely to ally himself closely with Caoimhmn O Caolain of Sinn Fein. He was helped over the quota-line by a big transfer from the SF candidate, party vice-president Pat Doherty.
But the key local factor in Blaney s election was his alliance with the Donegal Pro-Life Campaign, which he had secured earlier this year by leading the opposition to a vasectomy clinic in Letterkenny.
Blaney is chairman of the North West Health Board, and had presided at the meeting on March 20th which ordered the clinic to close. The closure motion was moved by another IFF Councillor, Larry McGowan.
At the time, Blaney angrily denied that his party was making an issue of vasectomy so as to win back fundamentalist Catholic votes. But one of his colleagues, IFF candidate for the adjoining constituency of Donegal South West, Patrick Kelly, told a different story when I spoke to him for the Sunday Tribune.
It was completely inevitable that vasectomy would be a general election issue, he said.
He continued: The opening of this clinic could be the first step towards the provision of abortion and we will be pointing that out to the people.
To the suggestion that this was some distance over the top Kelly responded: The point is, these things are being introduced behind the people s backs, and if they can bring in one they can bring in the other.
Mr. Kelly was frank in explaining that the two bishops had spoken, and that the people must choose which one to follow. The Catholic bishop, Boyce, had described vasectomy as a sin and a mutilation ; the Protestant one, Mehaffy, had pleaded for the various, different beliefs to be accommodated.
Alarm was expressed, including by Catholics, at this open suggestion that Catholic teaching be imposed on an area with a large Protestant population and a growing number with no religious beliefs at all. In the end, the clinic reopened.
But the pro-lifers didn t forget Blaney s role in the affair. In the last week of the election campaign, a series of full-page ads in local newspapers urged support for him as the pro-life candidate . In the biggest-selling paper in Inishowen, the Derry Journal, there was more space bought for pro-life ads for Blaney, than for all other candidates in the constituency combined.
One estimate put at hundreds the number of pro-life canvassers combing the constituency for Blaney in the days before polling. This sounds an exaggeration. But they certainly made a major effort.
After the declaration of the result, a spokesman for the Blaney campaign acknowledged the importance of the pro-life contribution. It is difficult to measure the impact in votes, but the party was happy to have had the support of this group.
Anyone who thought the Letterkenny vasectomy controversy quaint or irrelevant last March should note that it all turned out exactly as some of us believe it was planned and that, as a result, Harry Blaney is up in Leinster House, where he ll miss no opportunity to speak up for Irish freedom.
As distinct, of course, from freedom in Ireland.
Life s too short to read the Sunday Times, so I always have to say nay when I m asked what I thought of Eoghan Harris column last week.
What people tend to say is, Did ye see what that fucker Harris was on about on Sunday? I don t know why they print it. Nobody reads it.
But then somebody mentioned a rumour he d made a reference to myself which wasn t derogatory. So I nipped into the Linen Hall Library in Belfast for a look-see. Didn t find the non-derogatory ref. But I found this.
Eoghan, March 9th, this year: From what I hear, Fergus Finlay, Dick Spring s first mate, is feeling bullish. His feelings are well-founded. Labour s slide has stopped.
Must have cheered Finlay and Spring up no end, that. And as for the Rainbow Coalition: Whatever the polls say, all the political indices predict a winner.
Flicking further through the files I came upon a complaint from Eoghan that the producers of current affairs programmes weren t paying him proper respect. Instead, they were amplifying the views of commentators far slower than himself on the uptake.
This from April 20th: The pundits who monopolise the airwaves should get up to speed. Just as I predicted Labour s Dublin collapse long before they did, let me now predict, long before them, that Labour is back in business.
Labour back in business, eh? Rainbow a winner, is it?
Interested enough by now to want to know how Eoghan might explain this disastrous misreading of the situation, I bought the Sunday Times on June 15th. Here s what Eoghan had to say: Neither John Bowman nor Emily O Reilly could find room for even a 30-second comment by me in any of the prolific panels of their general election programmes this although I was the first, and for almost a year, the only, pundit to predict that Labour would be destroyed.
Maybe he s a total duffer at reading the political runes. But he d take some beating for brass neckery.
Incidentally, on March 9th Eoghan had told us that The Provos have run out of puff.
Then, on April 20th, 11 days before West Belfast and Mid-Ulster returned Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as MPs, a month before the North s local government poll saw Sinn Fiin emerge as the biggest party in Belfast and increase its percentage of the poll in every single council area, and six weeks before the Southern election gave the party it s first TD since the 50s, Eoghan explained: My political antennae (have picked up that) people are bored with the Provos. And it is permanent . . . Everything has its season and Sinn Fiin simply didn t know when to stop . . . It will go down because it is addicted to two drugs self-pity and self-publicity. There is no surer way to lose public sympathy.
Wrong? Was there ever a man wronger?
It must be near on 30 years since I first explained to Eoghan that wishful thinking is the world s worst guide to what s happening. But would he listen? I might as well have been talking to the Walls.
Still, Harris was right about Michael Collins.
Been wanting to say that for some time. n
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