In today’s Irish Independent newspaper regular columnist Eoghan Harris recounts a forty year old tale that perfectly illustrates the perverse thinking that long ago corrupted the ethical heart of journalism in Ireland. It relates to a clash between a local Irish-speaking community in Galway and the infamous Language Freedom Movement (LFM), a supremacist Anglophone grouping opposed to Hibernophone rights, and Harris’ reporting of the controversy for RTÉ (note that I have corrected the numerous spelling mistakes found in the original opinion piece):
“In June 1969, the Feach team, with Diarmaid as reporter and myself as producer, covered a dispute about the Irish language in Ahascragh, Co Galway, between a branch of the Language Freedom Movement and the local school principal and famous sean-nós singer, the late Seán Mac Donnacha.
Filming the protagonists, we found a spokesperson for the LFM had a slight speech impediment. Normally this might not have…
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