Downfall. How Eoghan Harris self-destructed

Today is a good day for those of us on my island who are of the rebel persuasion.

Indeed, the warm, pleasant glow of schadenfreude has been almost impossible to shake off.

Dear reader, allow me to explain.

Last night the editor of the Sunday Independent Alan English announced that they had sacked their columnist Eoghan Harris.

The newspaper had established that Harris had been involved in an anonymous Twitter account that had indulged in a trolling campaign.

“We regard Eoghan Harris’s involvement with this account as a betrayal of trust, and as such, his contract has been terminated.”

English said that the content posted from the account, much of which was directed at Sinn Féin and nationalists, went beyond fair and reasonable comment.

Here is the account in question:

Twitter has stated that the account has been permanently suspended for “platform manipulation is strictly prohibited under the Twitter Rules”.

So, just to be clear, Harris in his Sindo column regularly called out anonymous cowards on social media who trolled him.

However, he was running exactly such a trolling account.

When it wasn’t indulging in that, it was applauding the brilliant polemics of one Eoghan Harris!

For decades, yes decades, Eoghan Harris has made it his mission to propagate an anti-Republican agenda.

It is fair to say that he has been on a  strange journey since the 1960s when he was a member of the Movement in the Cathal Goulding era.

For readers in Fair Caledonia, the best analogy I can come up with is that Harris is a sort of George Galloway character. In that, both of them have obviously travelled a great ideological distance from where they started.

Is the hat thing a clue?

No idea…

The Corkman became hugely influential in RTE in the 1970s and 80s in disseminating a revisionist view of the struggle for national independence.

In 2007  the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern nominated Harris to Seanad Éireann, where he served until April 2011.

This was after Harris had apparently something of a Damascene conversion.

Previously the bould Eoghan had regularly excoriated Fianna Fáil for being too green on the question of the North.

Indeed, in 1997, he denounced the party’s presidential candidate Mary McAleese, calling the Belfast born constitutional lawyer a “tribal time bomb”.

Then in the mid-2000s, when Bertie Ahern was being subjected to serious scrutiny over the ethical aspects of his personal finances, Harris was suddenly his most strident defender.

Now, a cynic might have concluded that his nomination to the well-paid non-job of a Senator was a reward for services to the leader.

I, of course, couldn’t possibly comment.

His column in the Sunday Independent gave Harris a major platform for his revisionist anti-Sinn Féin views.

In recent years, a frequent theme in his Sindo columns in recent years was to call out those who used the anonymity of social media to attack him.

Consequently, it is a crushing irony that Mr Harris was outed yesterday as running a sock puppet Twitter account that regularly trolled his ideological opponents.

Losing his column in the Sindo will be a major blow to him; make no mistake about that.

I find it especially sweet that it was apparently an action by Paul Larkin who precipitated this move by editor Alan English.

Full disclosure, Paul is a neighbour, friend, and comrade, and I’m delighted for him.

He’s the one hovering at the back at some fella’s book launch in Dublin in 2018.

I’ve no idea who the other two are…

There was often a common factor in who Harris either overtly or covertly attacked.

Anyone who believed that Donegal and Tyrone were not in separate countries and that the artificial boundary should be removed from those two Ulster counties were his enemies.

For example, award-winning filmmaker Sean Murray (who has been interviewed on this site) was also viciously targeted by the same Twitter account.

Sean was willing then to go to law if necessary to protect his good name, and you can read about it here from October 2020.

Well, it looks like his lawyers will be back in action soon.

Here is a statement from Sean’s solicitors today on the Eoghan Harris  Twitter story.

The sock puppet account that Harris set up also indulged in the misogynistic trolling of Derry-born journalist Aoife Grace Moore.

Today he defended then tweets, denying that they were sexually offensive, claiming the criticism was “humorous and robust”.

Not a good look Mr Harris…

You can listen to his explanations here.

In my opinion, he had his arse handed to him by RTE’s Sarah McInerney.

In many ways, Harris was already a figure that belongs to the past.

The younger generation in the 26 counties is now up for the conversation on 32.

It confirms my long-held view that people usually don’t change much, but generations do.

My own take is that the Easter Rising centenary celebrations in 2016 and the Brexit own goal in Britain in the same year was a seminal moment.

After that, civil society on both sides of the Border started to get some Irish ducks in a row.

Now, I know that is the stuff of nightmares for the partitionist fraternity here.

Eoghan Harris was one of their chief propagandists, and I’m glad that he has, by his own duplicity, been de-platformed in the Sindo.

Well done, Mr English.