A short history of 1984

1984

A bed, a lecture, the cold, hunger, women… and cider.

Eoghan Harris : Remembering a Scoundrel

The Eoghan Harris Wiki page supplies all the background and context to this Irish character and the ignominious end of his career. This is just a personal, youthful recollection of him in action…

In late 1982 I was a mere first-term fresher in Maynooth when Harris showed up with a small posse of Stickies (incl. the then RTÉ current affairs reporter Barry O’Halloran). He was to give an evening lecture in Theatre 1 in the Arts Block. The lecture wasn’t about the North. It was some broad-ranging Stalinist raving. This was when Forty Coats was still (somehow secretly, in RTÉ terms) in the Workers’ Party.

Perhaps it was my tactical error to sit at the front but, anyway, after Harris had got on to the topic of agriculture, I asked him a mild-mannered question about low food production in the USSR. He almost spat on me as he suddenly leaned forward and exploded with a sneer, “I know what you are! You and your petty bourgeois mentality…”

He may well have called me a “sleeveen” too but I’m not entirely sure if that was the exact word he used. I was eighteen and thinking ‘This ignorant bx is worse than school’ but anyway here he was in what everyone in Ireland long since knows as his classic mode, carrying on like a card-carrying Kapo of a teacher. All that was missing was the swinging leather.

When I asked for the right of response he went, “No, go away, I’m not listening to you anymore!” Apart from his few comrades, though, the rest of the audience didn’t take him lying down. The general Q&A degenerated into shouting at/with other members of the audience. Two of the Stickie posse were however of my acquaintance and they told me at the door afterwards that they thought he had answered me perfectly well. In other words, he was a great fella.

To see him now finally disgraced as an unscrupulous, hypocritical guttersnipe is inevitably rather sweet. It’s a good day for Ireland when some such poison is finally drawn… and quartered.