Cluanaire Eile

Nuair a d’fhoilsigh Daniel Cassidy, nach maireann, a chnuasach cacamais How The Irish Invented Slang deich mbliana ó shin, ba chóir go dteipfeadh go hainnis air láithreach. Caimiléir agus naircisíoch a bhí in Cassidy, duine a bhain feidhm as a scileanna mar shlíomadóir le post a fháil mar ollamh i gcoláiste beag in California gan oiread agus céim bhaitsiléara a bheith aige. Ní raibh Gaeilge ar bith aige agus ní raibh tuiscint ar bith aige ar an teangeolaíocht. An chuid is mó de na frásaí ‘Gaeilge’ atá luaite sa leabhar mar bhunús fhocail bhéarlagair Bhéarla, chum Cassidy féin iad agus ní raibh focail ná frásaí dá leithéid riamh ann sa teanga s’againne.

Agus sin ráite, bhí sé de nós ag Cassidy plámás agus béal bán a dhéanamh le cuid mhór daoine mór le rá: scríbhneoirí, fíorléachtóirí ollscoile, ceoltóirí agus mar sin de, agus thug na ‘cairde’ sin léirmheasanna maithe dó le cur ar chúl a leabhair bhréagaigh. Mar gheall air sin, cuireadh dallamullóg ar a lán daoine agus shíl siad go raibh substaint éigin ag baint leis na teoiricí bómánta a bhí ag Cassidy. Straitéis eile a d’úsáid sé lena chosaint féin ar cháineadh na saineolaithe ná a mhaíomh go raibh comhcheilg ollmhór ann a raibh teangeolaithe acadúla agus lucht foclóírí páirteach ann. Dar leisean, bhí na saineolaithe Anglaifiliacha seo ag iarraidh an fhírinne go bhfuarthas focail ar nós baloney agus wanker ón Ghaeilge a cheilt le stádas an Bhéarla a ardú! Ar ndóigh, ní raibh sa chomhcheilg seo ach finscéal eile de chuid Cassidy, agus ní ghlacann an saol acadúil lena theoiricí cionn is nach bhfuil i ‘saothar’ Cassidy ach raiméis amaitéarach, amaideach gan fianaise.

Mar gheall ar na bréagadóiri a thug tacaíocht don bhocamadán naircisíoch seo, deich mbliana i ndiaidh fhoilsiú an leabhair How The Irish Invented Slang, bíonn daoine ag nochtadh ar an idirlíon go fóill ag rá gur fíric an píosa seo nó an píosa sin amaidí ó leabhar Cassidy, nó gur chóir glacadh leis an leabhar iomlán mar fhíorthaighde. Roinnt laethanta ó shin, nocht bómán eile den chineál seo ar Twitter. Mhol an duine seo, Mary Ann Pierce, do dhaoine a bhí ag déanamh taighde stairiúil ar stair na Gaeilge labhartha sna Stáit gur chóir dóibh How The Irish Invented Slang a léamh. Nuair a fheicim bómán éigin mar seo ag áitiú ar dhaoine a gcuid airgid a chur amú ar leabhar bréagach Cassidy, bím ag coinneáil súil amach d’fhianaise na comhcheilge. Cad chuige? Bhal, is cinnte go bhfuil comhcheilg ann maidir le leabhar Cassidy. Comhcheilg de shlíbhíní gustalacha i Meiriceá a bhfuil cinneadh déanta acu an fhírinne faoi Cassidy a bhrú faoi chois agus beag is fiú a dhéanamh den teanga s’againne.

Is féidir roinnt giotaí eolais a fháil ar Mary Ann Pierce ar line. Bhí sí rannpháirteach i bhfeachtas le teach pobail stairiúil i Nua-Eabhrac a shabháil le – iontas na n-iontas – Peter Quinn, an cara ab fhearr le Cassidy, agus le (John) Joe Lee, a scríobh léirmheas ardmholtach ar an chacamas seo do chúl an leabhair. Chomh maith leis sin, tá baint aici leis an Irish American Writers and Artists Association, eagraíocht a bhunaigh Cassidy le dornán dá ‘chairde’. Nuair a mholann duine ar bith an leabhar seo don phobal, is fíorannamh nach mbíonn fianaise den drong lofa caimiléirí seo ann, drong atá ag iarraidh an fhírinne a bhrú faoi chois agus níl fáth ar bith agam a chreidiúint nach amhlaidh atá sé sa chás seo fosta.

Another Phoney

When the late Daniel Cassidy brought out his moronic crapfest How The Irish Invented Slang ten years ago, it should have bombed immediately. Cassidy himself was a fraud and a narcissist, who somehow conned his way into a job as a professor in a small college in California without any qualifications at all. He didn’t speak any Irish or have any knowledge of linguistics. Most of the phrases which are given in his book as the origins of slang terms were made up by Cassidy and never existed in the Irish language.

However, Cassidy sucked up to a large number of credible people, writers, genuine university lecturers, musicians, and these people gave him good reviews for his lying book. Because of this, many people have been tricked into thinking that there is substance to his ludicrous theories. Another strategy he employed to protect himself from criticism was the claim that academic linguists and lexicographers with Anglophile leanings were involved in a grand conspiracy to hide the fact that words like baloney and wanker came from Irish! Of course, this conspiracy never existed, and Cassidy is rejected by linguists because is ‘work’ is shoddy, stupid and without evidence.

Because of the liars who have supported this narcissistic dimwit, ten years on we are still finding people on line claiming that this or that piece of nonsense from Cassidy’s book is true or that his book as a whole should be treated as real scholarship. Just a couple of days ago, another of these people popped up on Twitter. Mary Ann Pierce advised people doing research on the history of spoken Irish in the USA to ‘read the late Daniel Cassidy “How the Irish Invented Slang.”’ Whenever I see some random fool encouraging people to waste their money on Cassidy’s fraudulent book, I look for evidence of conspiracy. Why? Well, there most certainly is a conspiracy in relation to Cassidy’s book. A conspiracy of over-privileged arseholes in America who have decided to suppress the truth about Cassidy and treat the Irish language with disdain and contempt.

There are various pieces of biographical information about Mary Ann Pierce on line. She was involved with a campaign to save a church along with – wait for it – Peter Quinn, Cassidy’s best friend, and (John) Joe Lee, who wrote a glowing review of this rubbish for the back of the book. She is also associated with the Irish American Writers’ and Artists’ Association, which was co-founded by Cassidy. Whenever anyone praises this book, there is almost always evidence of this horrible parcel of phoneys trying to suppress the truth and I have no reason to suppose that this is an exception.

More On Peter Quinn

I have been looking at the people whom I have criticised over the years, and I have decided to post again about Peter Quinn, who has been criticised greatly and often here for the support he has given to the fraud and liar Daniel Cassidy, author of the ludicrous book, How The Irish Invented Slang.

Peter Quinn is a writer from New York who never missed a chance to praise his friend Cassidy in public. Quinn and people like Quinn are to blame for ignorant people thinking that Cassidy was right and that there was a grain of truth inside all of the lies.

However, the person who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas. And people like Quinn, who give resounding praise to fakes and liars because they happen to be friends of theirs are worthless people.  

 

Amadán na Míosa – Lúnasa 2018

Bhí mé ag amharc ar na daoine a cháin mé thar na blianta, agus rith sé liom gur chóir dom níos mó a rá faoi Peter Quinn, duine atá cáinte agam go mór agus go minic anseo as an tacaíocht a thug sé don chaimiléir agus bréagadóir Daniel Cassidy, údar an leabhair How The Irish Invented Slang.

Is scríbhneoir ó Nua-Eabhrac é Peter Quinn, duine nár chaill deis riamh lena chara Cassidy a mholadh go poiblí. Tá an locht ar Quinn agus a leithéidí gur shíl daoine aineolacha go raibh cuid den cheart ag an Chaisideach agus go raibh croí fíor taobh istigh de na bréaga go léir.

Ach an té a luíonn le madaí, éiríonn sé le dreancaidí. Agus daoine mar Quinn, a mholann caimiléirí agus bréagadóirí go hard na spéire cionn is gur cairde dá gcuid iad, ní fiú sop féir iad.

An open letter to the advisory board of the San Francisco Irish-American Crossroads Festival

To:

Charles Fanning

Katherine Hastings

Caledonia Kearns

Daniele Maraviglia

Linda Norton

Miriam Nyhan

Nancy Quinn

Peter Quinn

James Silas Rogers

Tim Sullivan

 

Sometimes, our heroes turn out to have feet of clay and even when they were responsible for establishing valid and worthwhile institutions, it can be difficult for those institutions to avoid being contaminated with the scandal associated with a toxic founder.

In the case of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, it rebranded itself as the Livestrong Foundation when Armstrong was exposed as a drugs cheat. It continues to raise money but it is not as successful as it was. Its new name suggests a link to Armstrong (L – strong) but the information on its website gives no indication of the organisation’s history or Armstrong’s role in it.

In the case of the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust, when the shit hit the fan, it initially considered rebranding itself to remove all links to the serial rapist and paedophile who founded it but a few weeks later, it declared that it was shutting up shop. The scandal and the stigma were just too great.

As for the New College of California, the exposure of its founder as a predatory paedophile came shortly before the wheels came off the institution itself. The exposure of John Leary as a sexual predator was not responsible for the collapse of the institution but it probably didn’t help. Had the college survived, it would have been necessary to remove or rewrite material like this about its founder to reflect the fact that Leary was kicked out of Gonzaga for a sexual assault on a young boy: “Jack, a Jesuit priest and teacher of philosophy, had recently resigned as president of Gonzaga University in Washington state because of his dissatisfaction with the current American model of undergraduate education. He wanted to start over. And so New College of California began as a handful of students and teachers meeting in Jack’s Sausalito living room.”

The San Francisco Irish-American Crossroads Festival was founded by Daniel Cassidy, a ‘professor’ at New College in 2004. After Cassidy’s book was published, Cassidy was criticised immediately by genuine scholars for his poor research but it is only in the last few years that the full extent of Cassidy’s dishonesty and criminality has come to light.

As I have said before on this blog, the In Memoriam section of the Festival’s website gives a fictional and sanitised account of the founder’s life. According to this account, Cassidy had degrees from Columbia and Cornell. In a radio interview with Myles Dungan, Cassidy talks about his Bachelor’s degree from Cornell and taking some ‘graduate’ classes at Columbia. Cornell University has stated that Cassidy was removed from Cornell without gaining a degree and his sister has stated here that he never went to Columbia. This in itself is clear evidence that Cassidy was a fraudster. Cassidy had no degrees or qualifications at all. He was not a real professor.

His book, How The Irish Invented Slang, is one of the most dishonest, ignorant and badly-researched books ever written. Far from being a revelatory work of etymology, it is an insult to the world of scholarship, to the Irish people and to anyone who cares about basic standards of honesty and fair play. This dim-witted collection of disinformation is totally antithetical to the mission statement of the Festival: “Founded in 2004, the Crossroads Irish-American Festival promotes the discovery and understanding of the Irish experience in the Americas to ensure that the richness of the arts, culture, history and traditions of this heritage are both held in great esteem and preserved for generations to come.”

I cannot force the people at the Irish-American Crossroads Festival to tell the truth about Cassidy. All I can do is to point out once again that Cassidy should be held to account for his fraud and criminality, not held up as an inspiration and a good example. Anyone who allows lies like this to be associated with their name is not a decent human being. If you wish to protect your reputation, demand that those responsible for the website remove the lies about Cassidy. If you support Daniel Cassidy and his insane theories, directly or indirectly, you are a willing accessory to this puerile, dishonest nonsense which has been used to swindle tens of thousands of people out of their hard-earned money.

How Words Get Borrowed

In this, my first post of 2017, I would like to examine an issue that I have touched on before but never really dealt with properly, the question of how words are passed from language to language.

Cassidy’s methodology was simple. He looked at words and phrases in English, especially slang expressions, and then hit the Irish dictionaries and cobbled together ludicrous phrases which he thought sounded like these English terms. Of course, Cassidy was badly educated and did not speak any Irish.

What really happens when words cross language boundaries in situations like this? (Of course, we need to remember that similar processes were involved in Ireland itself, where the issue was colonialism, not immigration.) Well, basically, a group of speakers of Irish (or any other language) turn up as immigrants. At first, they are unable to communicate with the society around them. Some of them never learn the new language. Others manage to pick up a basic knowledge. As they learn the majority language, they retain grammatical structures and certain words and phrases from their own language. Thus we might hear sentences like this:

“There is whiskey go leor in the jug there.”

“Sure I’m after seeing Lannigan out there, the old amadán!”

“Sure, I’m away to the síbín for a drink.”

Because lots of people in the initial generation of learners use these expressions, they are continually heard and learned and used by the younger generation. Before long, people who speak no Irish are using galore and ommadawn and shebeen in their English.

Note that nearly all of these borrowings are single words and nearly all of them are nouns. There’s a reason for this. It wasn’t enough for a phrase to be used once by one individual. These had to be expressions which were commonly used by that first generation of bilingual English and Irish speakers, by thousands of people in different contexts.

And of course, that’s not what we find in Cassidy’s moronic book. We find that according to Cassidy, Irish speakers supposedly stuck the word án onto lóinte to make something sounding like luncheon (even though the phrase lóinte ána was unknown in Irish until Cassidy invented it), or that sách was used as a noun meaning a well-fed person and that that word always had úr (fresh) stuck on to the end of it. Apparently nobody ever separated the two words. They never said that there was a good sách, or a handy sách, or a stupid sách, or a big sách. No, it was always a fresh sách, so that it would sound like sucker. Yeah, right. You’d need to be a real sucker (which comes from the English suck) to believe that.

Pretty much all of Cassidy’s ‘Irish’ candidates rule themselves out because they are absurd and improbable phrases. Things like n-each as the origin of nag are simply laughable, because nobody is going to pluck a random inflected phrase out of conversation and use it. (Plus the fact that each ceased to be the usual Irish word for a horse hundreds of years ago!)

The question of pronunciation is another tricky issue. People learn English and throw the odd word of Irish into their conversation. The next generation grow up hearing these words and use them themselves. They pronounce them the way the older generation did. There would be no reason for them to mispronounce uath-anchor as wanker or sciord ar dólámh as skedaddle or éamh call as heckle or gus óil as guzzle, because there’s an unbroken chain of transmission and there is no stage at which this kind of mangling could take place. (And please note that none of these Irish phrases exists anyway. They were all invented by Cassidy, along with nearly all of the Irish in How The Irish Invented Slang.)

The bizarre changes of meaning posited by Cassidy are also problematic. Why would shanty come from seanteach if a native Irish speaker would call their hut a bothán or a cró or a cábán? Why would loingseoir, a word meaning a sailor, become a word for a landlubber who works on the dock? Why would a native speaker of Irish say “Sure, I hate living here in dis is lom é?” if they wouldn’t say “Dhera, is fuath liom bheith I mo chónaí san is lom é seo?” The answer is, of course, they wouldn’t and they didn’t.

In other words, this isn’t the way that words cross from language to language. Cassidy’s ‘research’ was entirely fake, like the man who invented it. I don’t know why people like Michael Patrick MacDonald or Peter Quinn or Joe Lee still support this dishonest garbage. It seems a very high price to pay for friendship but then I suppose it’s a sad fact that some people really are that desperate for friends – desperate enough to betray everything they claim to believe in for the sake of a worthless fraud like Daniel Cassidy.

President Evil

I would like to express my horror and disdain at the election of Donald Trump to the White House. While we should not forget that Hillary Clinton won the majority of the votes, it is deeply shocking that a man like Trump was able to win sufficient support to take the Presidency. It is appalling that millions of people put their trust in this New York narcissist and alumnus of the New York Military Academy, a man who lied incessantly to get what he wanted, a man given to bullying and sexual harassment, and a man who accused anyone who challenged him of being an elitist and a pawn of the establishment. I am sure Corinne Marrinan and Peter Quinn and Michael Patrick MacDonald and Peter Linebaugh and Niall O’Dowd and Sean Sweeney and all the rest of them are as dismayed as I am at the result.

However, as these people have spent the last nine years defending Daniel Cassidy, a New York narcissist and alumnus of the New York Military Academy, a man who lied incessantly to get what he wanted, a man given to bullying and sexual harassment, and a man who accused anyone who challenged him of being an elitist and a pawn of the establishment, you’ll perhaps understand why I don’t have a lot of sympathy for these people. Welcome to the ‘post-truth’ world you helped to create, a world where facts count for nothing and any lie is justifiable in the service of your own particular ideology. As you can see, this kind of dumb-ass relativism cuts both ways. If smart metropolitan liberals can support mindless fact-free bullshit when it suits them, they don’t really have the right to get angry when knuckle-dragging dim-witted fascists do the same thing.

So, God help the American people, and God forgive all the morons  like Corinne Marrinan and Peter Quinn and Michael Patrick MacDonald and Peter Linebaugh and Niall O’Dowd and Sean Sweeney who helped to make this ‘post-truth’ nightmare a reality by not insisting that a lie is a lie is a lie, even when it comes from your friends.

Cassidy and Sexual Harassment

I haven ‘t been posting much recently but I decided that it was high time I gave a brief update.

In spite of what Cassidy’s friends and supporters say, there has never been any doubt about the worthlessness of Cassidy’s research. Anyone can log on and examine an online Irish dictionary to discover that almost all of Cassidy’s claims about the Irish language are untrue. And if that isn’t enough to convince them, they can look up etymological dictionaries of English to see how Cassidy lied and distorted the truth about the known origin of the words in Cassidy’s book.

In addition to that, it has often been claimed that Cassidy had degrees from Cornell and Colombia Universities. In fact, Cassidy attended Cornell but never received a degree, and he certainly never received any qualifications from Colombia. Not only was his ‘research’ a fraud, but Cassidy himself was a fraudster and a criminal.

Then a couple of weeks ago, we received a message from Colleen Whalen, who studied at New College of California for a semester and was unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of Cassidy’s bullying and arrogance. She also informed us (and this is an allegation I find entirely convincing) that Cassidy often sexually harassed female students at New College.

So, Daniel Cassidy was incompetent, arrogant, a fraud, a criminal, a plagiarist and worse still, he was apparently a letch. A worthless piece of shit. Yet for some reason, many people still choose to defend this creep. None of Cassidy’s Cronies has repudiated him or accepted the truth about this lying sleazebag. They are probably comfortable enough with maintaining their silence. After all, this blog has only had about 23,000 hits in its history. Apparently, it doesn’t bother the Cronies, people like Peter Quinn and Michael Patrick MacDonald, that the few thousand people who find their way to this site know that their friend was a criminal fraud and that they don’t care enough about the truth to put things right. However, the fact is, the readers of this blog and the many people who have stopped by to lend their support and provide information know exactly what kind of person Cassidy was and what kind of people his supporters are. And the people who support him know what they are, even if some them aren’t prepared to admit that, even to themselves.

More on Medbh

In a post on Cassidy’s strange ideas about the Irish origins of jazz, I gave a link to a Wikipedia debate between John M. Baker and an unknown individual called Medbh. This is the link here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Medbh. There seems little doubt that Medbh was a sock puppet for Cassidy himself. The crazy half-baked ranting is exactly like that used by Cassidy himself and a host of sock puppet identities used by him on various sites. At one point, Cassidy lets the mask slip completely, and Baker picks up on it:

Actually, I did not characterize CounterPunch Books as a vanity press, nor did I say anything about how many books it sells. I said only that it is not a peer-reviewed scholarly publisher. I do not have an opinion on whether or not it is a vanity press, nor how many books it sells. I don’t consider the number of books it sells at all relevant – many scholarly publishers sell few books, and many nonsensical books have become best-sellers. How do you know that Cassidy signed a standard author’s contract? I thought you said earlier that you are not Cassidy.

It is worth reading these debates, as they show clearly that Cassidy was dishonest, ignorant and full of crap. However, for those who can’t be bothered looking at the original source, here are some interesting notes.

When Baker said that Cassidy was an ‘academic administrator at NCoC’, Medbh/Cassidy responded by saying that ‘This is utter nonsense. Cassidy is a tenured faculty member at New College of California, where he teaches media studies and Irish Studies. Prior to that he was on the graduate faculty of the Film Department at SF State. He is NOT an administrator at New College.’ What the sock puppet doesn’t say, of course, is that Cassidy had no right to be anything in a university but the janitor. He had no degrees, no qualifications. Nothing. This is the elephant in the room. How did Cassidy become ‘a tenured faculty member’ in a university without having a degree? Did he lie to get the job? How else did a man with no qualifications become a professor?

The sock puppet cites a number of people who have supported his work, with comments like this: Alex Cockburn is from Cork, Ireland, and studied the Irish language for the first six years of his schooling. He reads Irish and speaks it. He is a crank too, since he does not know who Grant Barret is. Of course, Cockburn was a good friend of Cassidy’s, so whether he was a crank or not or spoke Irish or not is of no importance.

Here is a list of the supporters mentioned and their known involvement with Cassidy:

Professor J. Joseph Lee of NYU and University College Cork – a friend of Cassidy’s.

Professor Robert Scally, associated with NYU Glucksman’s Ireland House – also a friend of Cassidy’s.

Professor Peter Linebaugh – friend of Cassidy, guested at his Irish Crossroads Festival in 2004.

Esther O’Hara (University of California, Berkeley) – former colleague and friend of Cassidy at New College of California

Pól Ó Muirí, journalist – no known connection.

Frank McNally, journalist – no known connection

Reyhan Harmanci, journalist – no known connection

Eamonn McCann, Journalist – friend of Cassidy’s, appeared in his 1995 documentary Uncensored Voices

Alexander Cockburn, journalist – friend of Cassidy’s

Peter Quinn, writer – described Cassidy as ‘my best friend’

Maureen Dezell, writer – friend of Cassidy’s

In other words, out of 11 people cited as supporting Cassidy, only three have no known connection to Cassidy. Cassidy himself, using an unconvincing sock puppet identity, gave a list of his own mates, without the slightest hint that he knew any of them, as support for the idea that he should be taken seriously as a scholar of language! What a total fraud!

However, the thing I found most astounding is the point raised by Baker about ‘peer-review’. Peer review is a specific process, where academic writing is assessed by academic peers in a formal way. Cassidy (Medbh) seems to have thought that peer-review was about getting reviews in newspapers! This is yet one more piece of evidence that Cassidy was a total moron who knew nothing about the world of scholarship and had no business teaching in a university.

An fód a sheasamh ar son an chomhionannais – Standing up for equality

Bhí rud éigin ar IrishCentral ar na mallaibh faoi Mhórshiúl clúiteach na Féile Pádraig i Nua-Eabhrac. Faoi dheireadh thiar thall, ligfear do dhream LADT (Leispiach, Aerach, Déghnéasach agus Trasinscneach, nó LGBT i mBéarla) bheith páirteach sa mhórshiúl. Ba mhaith liom comhghairdeas a dhéanamh leo anseo. Tá súil agam, ní hamháin go ligfear dóibh bheith páirteach, ach go gcuirfear fáilte fhial fhairsing Ghaelach rompu. Is Gaeil iad, agus tá an ceart acu bheith ansin.

Luaitear Peter Quinn, cara mór le Cassidy, san alt chéanna. De réir cosúlachta, bhí seisean páirteach san fheachtas le stop a chur leis an éagóir a bhí á déanamh ar Ghaeil LADT na cathrach. Tréaslaím a shaothar leis, agus tréaslaím a saothar leis na daoine eile atá luaite san alt, Loretta Brennan-Glucksman agus Malachy McCourt ina measc. Sa chás seo, tá an rud ceart déanta ag Peter Quinn agus ag na daoine eile.

An gciallaíonn sin go bhfuil mé sásta maithiúnas a thabhairt do Quinn as tacú leis an ghealt uafásach sin Cassidy? Is dócha go bhfuil freagra na ceiste sin ar eolas agaibh cheana féin. Tá mé sásta a fheiceáil go bhfuil Quinn ar thaobh na n-aingeal sa chás seo. Ach an ndéanann dea-ghníomh cúiteamh as drochghníomh? Níl mé róchinnte.  Is é rud é, gur thug Quinn tacaíocht do Cassidy. Dhiúltaigh sé an fhírinne a insint agus dhiúltaigh sé a admháil nach raibh sé ceart ná cóir an tacaíocht sin a thabhairt don chaimiléir agus don bhréagadóir is mó i stair na nGael i Meiriceá.

Tá Peter Quinn agus a chairde le moladh as tacaíocht a thabhairt don chomhionannas agus do chearta daonna maidir leis an mhórshiúl. Ach tá a fhios againn gur ghlac Cassidy leis an phost mar Ollamh in New College, in ainneoin nach raibh céim ar bith aige, in ainneoin nach raibh sé cáilithe, in ainneoin nach raibh foilseacháin acadúla ar bith foilsithe aige agus in ainneoin nach raibh Gaeilge ar bith aige. Bímis ionraic faoi. Ghoid Cassidy an post sin. An amhlaidh nach raibh duine aerach ar bith ann a raibh céim nó céimeanna aige nó aici i litríocht na hÉireann san am sin? An amhlaidh nach raibh duine de bhunús Afracach nó Easpáinneach a raibh céim aici nó aige sa Léann Éireannach sna Stáit in 1995?  Níl a fhios againn cén sórt daoine a bhí ann, réidh leis an phost sin a dhéanamh agus a dhéanamh go maith, cionn is nach bhfuair siad an deis. Ghoid Cassidy an post agus an t-airgead a bhí ag gabháil leis. Agus daoine cumasacha a raibh cáilíochtaí acu, fágadh amuigh san fhuacht iad ionas go dtiocfadh leis an liúdramán seo ligean air gur ollamh léannta a bhí ann os comhair an tsaoil.

Maith sibh as balla gloine amháin a bhriseadh agus ligean do dhaoine a gcearta a bheith acu. Ach ná déan dearmad ar an chara s’agatsa, a Peter, a dhruid an doras ar dhuine éigin anaithnid d’fhonn tuarastal agus stádas nach raibh tuillte aige a choinneáil chuige féin.

Nach bhfuil sé in am duit cuimhneamh ar an éagóir a rinneadh ar an duine anaithnid sin, agus an rud ceart a dhéanamh sa deireadh thiar thall?

 

 

There was something on IrishCentral recently about the famous St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York. At long last, an LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) group will be allowed to take part in the parade. I would like to congratulate them here. I hope that not only will they be allowed to take part, but they will receive a generous Irish welcome. They are Irish people, and they have a right to be there.

In the same article, Peter Quinn, a big friend of Cassidy’s, is mentioned. Apparently, he was involved in the campaign to put a stop to the injustice to which the LGBT Irish people of the city were being subjected. I applaud his efforts, and I applaud the efforts of the other people who were mentioned in the article, Loretta Brennan-Glucksman and Malachy McCourt. In this case, Peter Quinn and those other people have done the right thing.

Does that mean I’m happy to forgive Quinn for supporting that horrible nut-job Cassidy? You probably know the answer to that question already. I am glad to see that Quinn is on the side of the angels in this case. But does a good deed make up for a bad deed? I’m not so sure. The thing is, Quinn supported Cassidy. He refused to tell the truth and he refused to admit that it was neither right nor proper to support one of the biggest fraudsters and liars in the history of Irish America.

Peter Quinn and his friends are to be praised for supporting equality and human rights in relation to the parade. But we know that Cassidy accepted the job as Professor in New College, in spite of the fact that he had no degree, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t qualified, in spite of the fact that he had no academic publications to his name, in spite of the fact that he had no Irish. Let’s be honest here. Cassidy stole that job. Were there no gay people who had a degree or degrees in Irish literature at that time? Were there no people of African or Hispanic origin with a degree in Irish Studies in the States in 1995? We don’t know what sort of people there were, ready to do the job and do it well, because they didn’t get the chance. Cassidy stole the job and the money that went with it. And talented people who had qualifications were left out in the cold so that this moron could pretend to the world that he was a learned professor.

Well done for breaking one glass wall and allowing people to have their rights. But don’t forget, Peter, that your friend closed the door on some unknown person in order to keep a salary and a status which he hadn’t deserved for himself.

Isn’t it time you remembered the injustice that was done to that unknown person and finally did the right thing?