The Duke of Cruiskeen Eile

For reasons noted elsewhere, I've been out of blogly circulation over the weekend. As a result, Myers' contribution on Friday went unblogged (not least because my girlfriend chucked the paper out that evening while getting the gaff ready for her parents' visit). Cruiskeen Eile couldn't help but notice, however, that it was mere days on the case when clear evidence that it had already flashed up on the colonel's radar emerged. How else to explain his invokation so close on our heels of the Anglo-Gaelic peerage in general and the O'Briens in particular, with special reference to the schooling of its scions at Eton College?

Rufus's fag at Eton had been Paget Plantagenet O'Brien Paget, who had inherited Donegal on his 10th birthday. He had been sworn into the IRB when fagging for Rufus.

At this point in his riotous narrative, the colonel sets out a hackneyed tableau of public school bumlordery, but Cruiskeen Eile will pass over the episode in deference to Kev's superior knowledge. By way of comparison we note the recent Cruiskeen Eile posting to the effect that:

[I]t is...evocative of the essence of the human condition to stumble upon the graves in the grounds of St. Mary's Cathedral in Limerick of Right Honorable young O'Briens, killed flying Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, listed in Burke's Peerage but Dalcassian princes still; old Etonians, sure, but descendants in primogeniture of Brian Boruma himself, High King of all the Gaels.

Myers deploys his weak hyperbole in an effort to demonstrate the absurdity of the proposition that anyone coming not merely from a Protestant but Anglo Irish and even Anglo Celtic background in this country could ever think to make common cause with the nationalist strain of thought in what was under colonial rule a socio-economic basket case. It intrigues us it must be said that the voices raised most often to decry and denounce the people who tried to reverse the baleful influence of colonialism in this country are also those raised most often in praise of an open economy, self-interest and self-determination. But, of course, we have our own suspicions about their motivations.

Re the nonsense of Myers' position, it suffices to point readers in the direction of Freestater who advertises a forthcoming series of lectures on Church of Ireland figures involved in the struggle for independence. Those who claim that the people as a whole were not in favour of the overthrow of British rule might also like to dig around the folklore archive in UCD and check out the songs and stories of the plain people of Ireland rather than to look into their hearts and Winston Churchill's diaries from the period.

Sadly, the colonel's rant rips the piss out of the Irish Guards, a fine regiment whose men fought with such distinction in the marshes around Anzio in 1944. For shame.

The target of Mr. Myers' bile this week is an American punter who claims to be the legitimate heir to the Leinster Dukedom of the FitzGeralds, former occupants of Leinster House, the cockpit of Irish democracy, as the son of Desmond FitzGerald. Mr. FitzGerald Snr. is believed to have been blown up in 1916 in France during a training exercise involving a carelessly handled grenade. The colonel characterises the claim as a conspiracy of the order of the sang real intrigue at the heart of Dan Brown shitefest, The Da Vinci Code:

And that is the key to confections as trivial as that of the claimant to the Duchy of Leinster and as profitable as the "novel" The Da Vinci Code. What you need to believe is what makes you believe.

Wait a minute...

Having damned himself out of his own mouth with a pretty convincing diagnosis of his many ludicrous positions, Mr. Myers gets down to business:

Few deaths in the first World War have been quite so thoroughly attested to as Desmond Fitzgerald's. He didn't vanish mysteriously on the battlefield, but on a beach in Calais, surrounded by the cream of English and Anglo-Irish society.

And they, it appears, were surrounded by the cream of him. As soon as Kevin finishes tugging his forelock in the direction of his betters, he makes his thesis known:

You cannot prove that the Catholic Church is not covering up the origins of European Christianity. You cannot prove that Paul FitzGerald is not the true Duke of Leinster.

And I guess, Colonel Myers sah!, you cannot prove that there are no weapons of mass destruction buried under Iraqi sands or that prior to the Anglo-US invasion, there was no undocumented link between that state and the terrorist Hydra, Al Qaeda.

Cruiskeen Eile had previously read about the FitzGerald case and feels it only right to point out to readers that the legitimacy or otherwise of Paul's claim can, of course, be proven through a blood test and it is around this issue that the case currently revolves. Wonder why Kevin didn't mention it.