Finucane’s son John, a Sinn Fein MP, has written to every member of parliament saying: “It is a matter of public interest, not just in Ireland, but in Britain and internationally too, that answers are provided to the questions around the full circumstances which led to the deliberate targeting and murder of a human rights solicitor and subsequent cover-up.”

In Washington, twenty-four members of Congress have today called for a public inquiry into Pat Finucane’s murder. They have signed a letter to Boris Johnson calling for an investigation, in the hope that the Prime Minister will order Lewis to give the go ahead.

Lewis would be off his head to agree.

“In death,” wrote Sean O’Callaghan, the repentant IRA terrorist who became an informer, in 2003, “Pat Finucane has been wrapped in a halo. He inhabits a superior moral place, a finely honed weapon to wage war by other means against the British state and the Unionist people of Northern Ireland.”

Over three decades, with the energetic backing of Sinn Fein, doggedly litigious members of the Finucane family have done a superb job in extracting concessions from successive British governments and winning support for a public inquiry from badly-informed politicians in Dublin, Brussels and Washington.

Republicans claim that when in 1989 Home Office minister Douglas Hogg said in the Commons that some Northern Irish solicitors were “unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA,” he was writing Finucane’s death warrant by tipping off Protestant paramilitaries, who killed him three weeks later.

They appear to believe that Protestant terrorists are so thick that none ever killed a Catholic without having his target and his weapon provided by the security forces, and they shout collusion at every turn. Finucane’s widow Geraldine believes that Margaret Thatcher “knew exactly what was going on” between “security forces, loyalist paramilitaries and the State.”

Over the past three decades various British governments have tried to placate Mrs Finucane by holding investigations and reviews, but the only time a public inquiry was offered, it was rejected by the family because its parameters were too narrow.

The Saville Inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry cost £200 million and there are many Republicans who are still disgruntled that Saville didn’t conclude that Edward Heath had ordered the killings.

The inquiry the Finucanes want would be astronomically expensive, and why would you expect the family to believe any conclusions that didn’t  point at Thatcher?

Since the IRA practise omertà, unsurprisingly no investigation has found unassailable proof that Pat Finucane was in the IRA even though there is plenty of circumstantial evidence.  He was close to his brothers, John, killed on active service as an IRA volunteer, and Seamus and Dermot,  who were imprisoned for terrorist offences. Sean O’Callaghan first met him in 1980 at an IRA meeting. Sir John Hermon, after he had retired as Chief Constable, said, “Pat Finucane was associated with the IRA and he used his position as a lawyer to act as a contact between suspects in custody and republicans on the outside.”

Much is made of Finucane being a lawyer, as if that made him sacrosanct, but to the best of my knowledge no Finucane has condemned the IRA murders of lawyers, including Catholic judges William Staunton and Rory Conaghan, each shot in front of his daughter, magistrate Judge William Doyle, whose elderly passenger was grievously injured in the shooting, Judge Maurice Gibson and his wife Cecily, who were blown up by a car bomb, or that of Mary Travers, killed as the IRA failed to finish off her judge father, Tom.

Like all those who died during those terrible decades in Northern Ireland, Pat Finucane shouldn’t have been murdered, but he deserves no special treatment. There are many much better people lying in their graves with little attention being paid to finding out how they died.

As Norman Baxter, once in charge of counter-terrorism intelligence in the PSNI, put it: “The Finucane family are entitled to justice, as every citizen is. But the granting of a public inquiry creates a hierarchy of victims, which is in itself an injustice.”

It doesn’t matter if Sinn Fein manages to get Joe Biden to demand a public inquiry. The only moral and prudent course of action is for Brandon Lewis to explain politely to Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the Greens and Alliance that if they want this inquiry, they need to persuade the Northern Irish Executive to find the money.

So here’s my take on Hume.

I haven’t had many kind thoughts about him since he unwittingly sold the pass to Gerry Adams, so I was surprised at my unexpected sadness. It was the photographs that I found distressing. There were all those vibrant, shots of the young and middle-aged Hume, a charismatic, able and astonishingly brave man who was doing a lot of good. And then came the images of the exhausted man undone by his vanity. And finally, over the past few years, occasional sightings of an old man who had disappeared into dementia.

I had known John well from the early 1980s, when I joined the committee of the British Irish Association, which tried to get people of all shades of opinion on matters Northern Irish to talk and listen to each other in Oxbridge colleges. Although from a Dublin nationalist background, I had lived for years in London and had no fixed views about Northern Ireland, but I knew that John had done a lot to raise the morale of resentful nationalists in and beyond his native Londonderry and had been extremely brave in standing up to police, soldiers and IRA terrorists from the outbreak of the Troubles.

John was friendly, warm and good company when he wasn’t depressed or angry, and at those conferences, like pretty well everyone except Unionists, I was moved by his eloquence and for a while bought into his view – given relentlessly in what became known as his “single transferable speech” – that the Irish were simply a divided people who could be brought to embrace peace if only everyone showed sense.

I was never cut out to  be an acolyte, and as I came to make friends with Unionists, increasingly I disagreed with John, who was never a man to encourage dissent, and particularly when he had been drinking I could be accused of being a traitor or an agent of MI5. I was coming to realise through observation that despite his rhetoric, he just didn’t like Ulster Protestants. Unionists who never thought Hume’s deputy Seamus Mallon sectarian thought Hume a bigot.

I knew many of the players on the Anglo-Irish circuit by then and was concerned that through sheer force of personality and his prowess  at emotional blackmail and the importance of “taking risks for peace”, he appeared to be dictating the Northern Irish policies of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs who in turn were greening the British Foreign Office, and further alienating Unionists. Yes, he deserved a great deal of credit for persuading Irish-American activists to  abandon financial support for Sinn Fein, but the people  he associated with, like Ted Kennedy,  reinforced his tunnel vision and arrogance.

And then came his decision to talk to Sinn Fein/IRA whom he was convinced he could seduce onto the path of constitutional nationalism.

I had a great friend who was very close to John who repeatedly warned him that he was imperilling his party and his country by giving legitimacy and hope to the struggling Provos, but John had a complete belief in his own judgement and preferred to deal with Republicans than with Unionists and thought that in any game, his superior intellect would triumph over that of the Gerry Adams.

The island of Ireland lives with that appalling misjudgement. Sinn Fein is a cancer on both sides of the border, a powerful cult that is run from behind the scenes by the IRA Army Council. Having almost destroyed Hume’s party, in Northern Ireland it splits power with the Democratic Unionist party, and makes Northern Ireland ungovernable. In the south, it is the main opposition party challenging a shaky government that knows that Sinn Fein would triumph in an election.

Here’s a quote from a prescient article in Prospect magazine written in April 1998 by my friend Sean O’Callaghan, a repentant IRA terrorist who was warning at every opportunity of the perils of talking to the IRA. “Since the foundation of the Irish state there has been a clear dividing line between extreme violent nationalism and constitutional nationalism. But without any debate, and denouncing his critics as “anti-peace,” John Hume has blurred that line and given life and energy to extreme nationalism. He has brought the political arsonist into the house without taking the box of matches from his pocket.”

Ken Clarke isn’t having it, David Blunkett won’t put up with it, Sir Michael Palin is vexed and the banner of revolt has been raised by Baroness Altmann, one-time Conservative Pensions Minister. What they and we other malcontents have in common is that we think the British government has a damn cheek to think our age a sufficient reason to intern us. Like The Who, we are fed up because “People try to put us d-down/(Talkin’ ’bout my generation)/Just because we g-g-get around.”

We also note that as we are consigned to invisibility and dependence, exceptions are made for others.  The US president is 73, his Democratic challenger is 77, as is Paul McCartney, the Irish president is 79, the Green Goddess is 80, the Pope is 83,  Mary Berry is 85, the Queen is 94, and Captain Tom is 100.

What we need now is a British equivalent of Howard Beale, the TV anchorman in the 1976 film Network who was appalled by quiescence.  “We know things are bad — worse than bad,” he screamed.  “They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’”

The emerging facts about Covid-19 are rousing the healthy elderly to protest against double standards.  We are fit, we have energy and we walk and exercise as much as we’re allowed to but we’re classed as vulnerable and bullied into solitude. Yet no one is proposing to single out for incarceration younger people like men, the obese, diabetics, people with heart or lung problems and so on. In phone calls, on Skype or on Zoom, we speculate on what would happen if the government announced that anyone as fat as the Prime Minister was when he almost died in St Thomas’s Hospital will have to lose a substantial amount of weight or stay at home, or that because of their disproportionate  vulnerability to diabetes and other diseases, certain ethnic groups will be be singled out  for isolation.

Something is rustling in the undergrowth.   The British Medical Association has just declared that “a blanket ban on any section of the population being prohibited from lockdown easing would be discriminatory and unacceptable.”

And polls are showing people are increasingly worried about younger and healthier people having to make disproportionate sacrifices  to protect the old. The website Conservative Home suggests contributory factors are: “concern about the condition of the economy; worries about other healthcare outcomes; unhappiness about wider shutdown effects; less fear of the Coronavirus than a month ago, with spare NHS capacity being widely noted; opposition to the lockdown in media they consume, such as the Daily Telegraph, together with claims that countries with looser shutdowns are “doing better”; claims about the lethality of the virus; boredom with the lockdown.”

Comments this week on the Daily Telegraph article about Baroness Altmann include this telling remark: “The whole country cannot be destroyed to ensure that I and people like me, live another 10 years or so.” Another sagely pointed out: “If someone over 70 goes out, catches the disease and dies, the person who will suffer most is that person. The country on the other hand will save a fortune on future pension payments and possible social care bills.”

The elderly are stressing that if you’ve made it into your 70s you probably have enough experience to make sensible decisions.   The Who rather bear that out. Of the quartet, Keith Moon died at 32 of a drug overdose, John Entwistle in a Nevada stripper’s bed at 57 of a cocaine-induced heart attack and Pete Townshend (74) and Roger Daltrey (76) learned from experience and are doing just fine.

“I want you to get up now,” said Howard Beale. He told his listeners to get up right now. Sit up. Go to their windows. Open them and stick their heads out and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’

We want to take our chances. Stanley Johnson (80), who wants to be released to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, seems to be nominating himself for the position of leader of the pack. I’ll be right behind you, Stanley, in the march on Downing Street.

In the election on 8 February, the party far exceeded even its own most optimistic expectations by winning 37 seats, the same as the main opposition party Fianna Fail and two ahead of the governing party, Fine Gael. In the popular vote, it won 24.5% , with Fianna Fail on 22.2% and Fine Gael on 20.9%: in a poll last weekend, it shot up to 35%. No one doubts that if there is another election it will be impossible to keep Sinn Fein from being in government.

There is no mystery about why they did so well. It isn’t just crises in housing and health: Ireland, just like the rest of Europe, is hungry for change. There have been some other dodgy parties elected, but they don’t have an armed wing that thinks it’s the lawful government.

As Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the parties that have dominated the state for almost a century, dither about potential coalition partners, Sinn Fein’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, has been organising mass meetings claiming Sinn Fein is the voice of the voiceless and that democracy is under threat because the will of the people is being flouted.

I’m not much given to throwing around the “N” word (“Nazism”), but as an historian and close student of Irish republicanism, I’ve been reminded of the political success of the Nazis in Germany in 1932.  My pro-IRA granny had a photograph of Hitler at the bottom of her bed in the 1950s.  Not only did the IRA view him as a liberator whose “cleansing fire” was driving the Jews from Europe, but it offered military support in the event of a German invasion of the island of Ireland.  In 1940, having been fêted in Berlin and given advanced explosives training, its chief of staff, Sean Russell, died on a U-boat of a burst ulcer.

The IRA and its Sinn Fein front-people have never disowned its historic support for Nazi Germany: the party still exhibits alarming fascist tendencies, not least in its cultishness, its suppression of internal dissent, its war on free speech (these days through lawfare and social-media intimidation), its success in teaching the young to hate and its anti-semitism.

In 1951 IRA supporters unveiled a statue to Russell in Dublin that has been occasionally attacked, is then repaired and still shames the city.

Republicans are big on honouring their dead, and Russell is no exception. Annually there is an event at his statue hailing him as a patriot. In 2003, when Gerry Adams felt it necessary to blood Mary Lou McDonald – his new able, articulate middle-class, educated  protégé who would succeed him as Sinn Fein president – he had her beside the Russell statue as a supporting speaker to Brian Keenan, the late IRA mass murderer whose achievements included organising the bombing of Canary Wharf.

Like Adams, whom she has appointed to her negotiating team, McDonald is adept at presenting a respectable face in the south while nipping up from Dublin to keep the northern hardliners happy and insulting Unionists while spouting clichés about peace and reconciliation.  While denying the IRA still exists she never apologises for its actions.

While British and Irish governments have bribed Sinn Fein into government in Northern Ireland, despite knowing they are subversive, having them in the government of a sovereign state with access to security files and a voice in international negotiations is a very different matter.  Party leaders like Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar are now spelling out why they can’t go into government with a party whose own constitution does not recognise the legitimacy of the Irish state, its defence forces, its police or even its name. Sinn Fein calls Northern Ireland “the North” or “the Six Counties”, and have a range of alternatives to saying Republic of Ireland that include “the southern/free state” or “the 26 Counties”.

The 75% of the Irish electorate who did not vote for Sinn Fein would settle for a coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, but both party leaders realise that as the official opposition Sinn Fein will be ferociously effective.

The UK’s new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, has been keeping a low profile since his appointment by Boris Johnson. We must hope that he has learned by now what democrats on the island of Ireland are up against. Sinn Fein is an anti-democratic, fascist party that cares only for a united Ireland.  It is a cancer in both jurisdictions.

Like his predecessor, Karen Bradley, Julian Smith had pretty well united Northern Irish politicians. Bradley was stunningly bad, showing quite remarkable ignorance of the whole island and no inclination to learn about it. (Today a Queen’s University law student called Sean-Diarmuid Kelliher tweeted that she “once corrected me when I said I was from Kerry. She said it was sometimes called Londonkerry.)

As politicians had agreed that Bradley was utterly useless, so despite various differences of opinion with him, they were almost all united in believing Smith to be outstandingly good at his job.

The Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, tweeted his thanks: “In 8 months as Secretary of State, Julian you helped to restore powersharing in Stormont, secured an agreement with us to avoid a hard border, plus marriage equality. You are one of Britain’s finest politicians of our time. Thank you.”

Northern Irish First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster tweeted about him: “We may not have always agreed (we did sometimes) but his dedication to the role was incredible. Best wishes to him and his family. Always welcome in Fermanagh.”

Deputy First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, who like all Sinn Fein leaders is required under the party’s terms and conditions to be grudging and ungracious to British ministers, thanked him for nothing and contended that he had been sacked because the deal committed him to bringing forward legislation on legacy issues (which because of a squalid deal choreographed by Tony Blair more than a decade ago are advantageous to victims of the security forces rather than those of terrorists) which had been “dragged out” for more than five years” –  mainly, because Sinn Fein had collapsed the government in January 2017. But she had signed the deal.

“The genius of Northern Ireland secretary Julian Smith,” Melanie McDonagh wrote in  the Spectator in January “has been to make it clear to recalcitrant Stormont members – and we’re talking Sinn Fein mostly – that unless they get their act together and re-establish devolved government, there’s going to be no money. Not a bean. So when the nurses and teachers want to get the boot into someone, they know where to go. That has concentrated their minds.”

But there was much more to his short period in office than that, as Colum Eastwood MP, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic Labour Party, said in thanking Smith for his “tireless commitment to devolution, for the work you’ve done for victims of historical institutional abuse and for securing much needed resources for Derry.”  There were distressed messages from members of SAVIA, lobbyists for survivors of church and state institutional abuse.  “I’m heartbroken,” said one.  “How could they do this to such a wonderful gentleman… No one could ever… be as caring as Julian was to HIA [Historical Institution Abuse] Survivors. He invited us to Buckingham Palace garden party. Well if he is not going. We won’t. #Respect”.

That hashtag was the key to his success, because he treated everyone he dealt with in Ireland with respect. He inherited a nurses’ strike that was crippling the NHS, stopped by the picket line, talked to the nurses and resolved the dispute in record time. Northern Ireland office staff in Belfast were desperate for him to remain in the job. “Serving the people of Northern Ireland has been the biggest privilege,” he said in his goodbye tweet. “I am extremely grateful to @BorisJohnson for giving me the chance to serve this amazing part of our country. The warmth & support from people across NI has been incredible. Thank you so much.”

“Sacking the most successful SOS in a decade shows Johnson’s dangerous indifference to us,” wrote Colum Eastwood. And so it does, but of course the Prime Minister’s eye is on the big picture. Smith was always straight-talking, and he did for himself when in October he told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that “no deal is a very, very bad idea for Northern Ireland” and left Downing Street convinced that his loyalty was suspect and he might at any time resign on principle.

I get the importance of establishing Number 10’s authority, but there is not such an abundance of talent in the Conservative party that it can afford to dispense with an outstanding minister at a moment when Sinn Fein’s electoral success is potentially deeply damaging for Brexit negotiations. Strong and stable government is one thing. Control freakery is another. At the very least, his successor Brandon Lewis should be seeking ways to harness Smith’s gifts and knowledge in the interests of good Anglo-Irish relations.

Polls are suggesting that in the general election on Saturday there is a good chance that Sinn Fein will come first or second to Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, the two parties that have dominated politics since independence, and become contenders as a coalition partner.

Up to now, although the Irish establishment has been keen on Sinn Fein sharing power in Northern Ireland, there’s been little toleration of the notion that that would happen in the south in a sovereign government.

In a leaders’ debate on Tuesday evening, the interviewer Miriam O’Callaghan lobbed a grenade at Mary Lou McDonald, the highly-articulate, privately-educated, Dublin graduate who two years ago replaced Gerry Adams as president of Sinn Fein. “You know of course about Breege Quinn, the mother of Paul Quinn, the 21-year-old who was so horrifically beaten to death in November 2007. She is asking for an apology from your minister for finance in the North, Conor Murphy, because he aligned her son to criminality. You were due to speak to minister Murphy today — did you speak to him to clarify?”

Paul Quinn was 21 when – nine years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement – in revenge for an altercation he had with the son of a senior figure in the Provisional IRA South Armagh Brigade, around ten men beat him in a barn with iron and nail-studded bars breaking every major bone in his body. Locals believe those responsible for ordering his murder were fuel smugglers.

Three weeks after Paul’s death, Breege and Stephen Quinn heard the local Sinn Fein MP Conor Murphy say on television that “Paul Quinn was involved in smuggling and criminality and I think everyone accepts that.” There was and is no evidence whatsoever that this was true, and it was particularly shocking coming from an IRA ex-convict who was friendly with Thomas “Slab” Murphy, alleged former Chief of Staff of the IRA, who ran a cross-border criminal empire.

The strategy of the IRA veterans who still pull the strings from behind the scenes in Belfast has been to give the party a new image in the Republic by importing cleanskins and gradually retiring ex-cons. During the election campaign MacDonald has usually been flanked by two articulate well-educated TDs who discoursed learnedly on the housing crisis and prohibitive insurance costs. Like all Sinn Fein representatives they are required periodically to eulogise dead terrorists and endorse obvious lies such as that Gerry Adams was never in the IRA, but they try to do that as little as possible in the Republic.

A slide in support for Sinn Fein began to be reversed only a few weeks ago and it seems to be another manifestation of the Europe-wide craving for change, particularly among the young and those who feel left behind – particularly on the sprawling housing estates. The hard left are confined to the margins and there is nowhere to go except Sinn Fein.

There’s always been a spread of middle Ireland that would have nothing to do with that party because of the horrors of the Troubles, but the young seem to have neither memory nor interest in that period nor in Northern Ireland. Nor do the media seem to care that the Police Service of Northern Ireland recently re-affirmed its view that the IRA Army Council still oversees Sinn Fein, and that emails have been made public showing that Conor Murphy’s predecessor as finance minister was in constant contact with shadowy IRA controllers.

But the Quinns have not given up their pursuit of an apology. Wearing her most sincere expression, Mary Lou told Miriam O’Callaghan that she had spoken to Murphy about this and that he apologised for his comments. At which O’Callaghan disobligingly pointed out that the previous evening in an interview she had said: “I have spoken to Conor Murphy about this issue before. He is very clear that he never said that, that that is not his view.”

Murphy, McDonald and the Sinn Fein hierarchy are resisting the escalating demands from other politicians that Murphy resign. Will McDonald sacrifice him? Indeed, will she be allowed to do so by her puppet masters?

Voters go to the polls in Ireland this weekend. In the aftermath might the leader of Fine Gael, Leo Varadkar, overcome the resistance of the law-and-order core of his party and do a deal? Might Micheál Martin, who hates Sinn Fein and would never go into government with them, be overthrown by the green wing of Fianna Fail. Have the Irish people lost their moral compass?

Matthew’s belief that Brexit will lead to Irish unity is a worrying signal that he’s not yet out of the acute-BDS ward. He based his prediction on a poll conducted in Northern Ireland some months back by Lord Ashcroft that suggested a slender majority for unification, and one last May in the Republic that showed two-thirds would vote for unification if a poll were held immediately.

Dr Graham Gudgin, that great authority on matters factual about Northern Ireland, demolished the evidence of the Ashcroft poll today in the Times letters column: 20%-40% is nearer the mark. Meanwhile, down south, as Sinn Fein’s President Mary Lou McDonald – whose party is electorally on the slide – cries out for a border poll, nationalist opinion has been showing signs of panic.

An unintended consequence of Brexit has been that that the Republic realises that major constitutional change could be a nightmare and even nationalist politicians are pointing out that the Irish nation would have to be fundamentally altered to accommodate almost a million unionists – including angry loyalist paramilitaries.

Just before Christmas, Michael Martin, the leader of Fianna Fail – Eamon de Valera’s party – said he was against a border poll. “Sinn Fein has started this,” he said. “It’s aggressive, is perceived as threatening one community, the unionist community, the loyalist community, and in my view there is danger in how all of this has developed… my view is that the poll itself should be the culmination of a developed understanding and I believe in an evolutionary pathway.”

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar echoed his words: “When we have the institutions up and running properly then there is time to have a long look at the institutional arrangements and the constitutional arrangements. We have to learn from our history and we have to understand that there are a million people in this island who are British and unionists.”

Thinking nationalists like to reassure unionists that a new Ireland would be a happy and inclusive place for them.  There was quite a bit of nationalist pride on display at the centenary commemoration of the 1916 revolution, including such gestures as a wall in Glasnevin Cemetery – where many famous Irish are buried – with the names on it of everyone who was killed at the time.

The year 1916 was just the beginning of a decade of centenaries – which include what is known as the War of Independence as well as the brutal civil war that followed. However, any complacency has been shattered by an outbreak of tribal rage over the well-meant decision by the Minister for Justice, Charlie Flanagan, to hold a low-key commemoration for those who served in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Dublin Metropolitan Police from 1822 and 1836 respectively until 1922.

The vast majority were Irish Catholics: most in the later years wanted Home Rule. But like police anywhere, they often had to do the government’s dirty work and their families not only had to endure the killings of hundreds of them, but also their demonisation for almost a century afterwards.

Flanagan had reckoned without the malevolent power of Sinn Fein to spread toxic tribal nationalism on social media, which duly delivered a popular narrative that the event was a celebration of the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries (bolted onto the RIC at a time of carnage in 1920), who in many cases behaved appallingly.

Dublin City Council denounced what would be “an affront to generations of patriots who struggled to end centuries of imperial tyranny”, and others promised a boycott.

As the always measured commentator, Mick Fealty, who runs the brilliant Slugger O’Toole blog, put it: “How can southern politicians and academics tell themselves they’re ready for reconciliation with the north if they cannot even bear to remember 500 plus Irishmen who died a hundred years ago?”

He continued: “As for unionists, for many, it will provide a certain kind of perverse relief that the southern state is not quite as liberal and outward-facing as the fight to free itself from religious ‘self-oppression’ suggests.”

I’ve met many astute Irish taxi drivers in my time, but my favourite was the one who observed that he wouldn’t mind one bit if “they made us” have a united Ireland, as long as it had no effect whatsoever on the 26 counties, that is those in the Republic of Ireland. That’s about it still.

Sorry, Matthew, but there is no happy green dawn beckoning.

Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of, inter alia, The Seven: The lives and legacies of the founding fathers of the Irish Republic and The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions.

Like anyone fearful about the imminent Corbyn Terror, I listened nervously this morning to Boris Johnson being mauled on LBC by Nick Ferrari and a selection of vexed phoners-in. Finally, having responded to attacks over something he had written about single mothers in 1995 (the dirt-digging has been non-stop) and to an allegation that he intended to review Channel 4’s public service remit because they don’t like him, the hesitancy disappeared and his voice became Churchillian: “I want a free, fair, objective, dynamic, exuberant, unbridled media. I think that a free press is one of the glories of our country and I want to protect it and enshrine it.”

And, reader, I believed him.

The other piece of good news was an apology read out on RTE – Ireland’s equivalent of the BBC – to Kevin Myers, Ireland’s gifted, morally and physically courageous, original and controversial journalist who has a Johnson-like enjoyment of slaughtering sacred cows and saying whatever the hell you like as colourfully as possible.   His career was destroyed by a clumsy sentence, a misleading headline he didn’t write, and an army of tweeters who included Financial Times editor Lionel Barber and J.K. Rowling. Because of its herd mentality, the Irish media turned their backs on him.

I was participating with my old friend in a history festival in West Cork on the fatal weekend in July 2017

When he went to bed on Saturday night, he was a Sunday Times columnist with a distinguished career of more than forty years.  We woke on Sunday to find he was a global scandal. A journalist had tweeted a clumsy sentence from an article he had written about the row at the BBC over the gender pay gap. Having suggested that male single-mindedness and women getting pregnant might have been contributory factors, he noted that the two highest-paid female presenters – Vanessa Feltz and Claudia Winkleman – were Jewish.  He had essayed a clumsy compliment: “Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity”.

J.K. Rowling had sent it to her 11.4 million followers with the comment: “Women and Jews quite literally deserve what they get. This filth was published in @thesundaytimes.” He had already been fired when Gideon Falter, the chairman of the UK Campaign Against antisemitism – without apparently even reading Kevin’s Wikipedia entry – called for all “decent”  publications to refuse to employ him.

Then someone found a 2009 article – a pedantic argument against criminalising those involved in Holocaust denial with the headline written by a subeditor – “I’m a Holocaust denier, but I also believe the Nazis planned the extermination of the Jewish people”- and fed it to the twittermob. The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland issued a statement regretting that Kevin had “inadvertently stumbled into an antisemitic trope,” but pointing out that “more than any other Irish journalist, he has written columns about details of the Holocaust over the last three decades that would not otherwise be known by (a) substantial Irish audience”.  It was ignored.

RTE’s equivalent of the Today programme described him as a Holocaust denier.

Since then, treated by the press as a pariah, Kevin has been sustained by the support he’s had from Irish Jews and a few loyal friends. When RTE refused to apologise – despite his article having said that the  treatment of the Jews by the Nazis was “one of the most satanic operations in world history” –  he risked irreversible financial ruin  by suing them. Unbothered that the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland ruled that he had been misrepresented, RTE plunged merrily on defending the case with the help of taxpayers’ money.

An incriminating letter that turned up accidentally very recently has forced the organisation to capitulate and admit that suggesting he was a Holocaust denier “was untrue and defamatory of Mr Myers’ character,” and that “for over three decades [he had] repeatedly testified to the scale and wickedness of Hitler’s final solution.” They acknowledged “the damage done to Mr Myers’ reputation. We regret this and unreservedly apologise.”  Costs and compensation are heavy.

In 1999 Kevin wrote in defence of a nun who had become a victim of appalling anti-clerical bigotry that led to her being unjustly imprisoned: “Massed self-righteousness is an ugly animal and it invariably spawns an uglier beast still – the lynch mob. Listen: can’t you hear its baying in the wind?”

Twitter has made the lynch mobs global and ear-splitting in volume.  As Toby Young –  himself almost eliminated by the PC assassins –  has been suggesting,  their victims must join hands and stand up to them en masse.   We can now fly the banner of St Kevin, patron saint of free speech.  And, all going well on December 12th,  we might yet have one for St Boris too.