Recently, I have been debunking the myth that vampirism plays a major part (or indeed, any part) in Irish folklore and that this vampire tradition fed into the work of Bram Stoker. For example, the ancient story of Abhartach (or perhaps Ábhartach), a tyrannical chieftain from County Derry who returned from the dead and continued to oppress his subjects until he was buried under a huge rock to prevent his return, was rewritten about thirty years ago with Abhartach cast as a vampire rather than just a revenant.
There is now an article on Wikipedia which gives a lot of fake facts about this newly-manufactured story, glibly referring to ‘modern versions’ of the story (i.e. versions of the story made up by people who want to sell books about vampires.)
So much of this article is demonstrably nonsense and because of this, Eoin Ó Murchú in a comment on this blog suggested that I should go in and clean out the Augean stables, getting rid of all the rubbish about Abhartach on Wikipedia. While I understand Eoin’s point, I am quite sceptical/cynical about Wikipedia. I would certainly support and respect anyone who tried to do that, but I wouldn’t waste my own time trying.
Why do I have so little faith in Wikipedia? Well, it seems to me that the protocols of Wikipedia favour flaky and fringe ideas. People who have absolutely no idea about a subject consider themselves the ideal person to edit articles, drawing on ridiculously bad sources like newspaper articles which are essentially uncritical interviews with the talking heads (Daniel Cassidy, Peter Haining, Owen Harding) who originated this bullshit in the first place. Furthermore, looking up the real facts for yourself is considered to be ‘research’ and therefore unacceptable by the mad protocols of Wiki. Blogs like this are an unacceptable source, even if they are vastly more accurate and sensible than the printed sources. In short, the whole thing as it stands is a recipe for disinformation and nonsense.
I certainly hope someone else goes in and changes it to reflect the genuine facts rather than the contents of a lot of dim-witted Halloween-themed newspaper articles. However, if you do spend some of your valuable time doing that, only to find that some ignorant moron who has never even been to Ireland and knows less than nothing about the subject changes it all back again, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
cassidyslangscam 