Anna Corrigan has no competent medical knowledge and has fabricated a story about the Tuam Children’s home. Former advisor to Dick Spring, and former CEO or Barnardo’s children’s charity, Fergus Finlay falsely claims that nuns got rich from starving children.
Ignorance is the oxygen of the Irish mother and baby homes scandals.
Catherine Corless is an amateur researcher who jumped to many fantastical conclusions due to a lack of knowledge, skillset and education in the area of Irish history. She has falsely alleged that children and mothers were abused at the former Children’s Home in Tuam Co. Galway. From the get-go, she has blundered out one falsehood after another, including renaming the institution the ‘Tuam mother and baby home’. She was recorded on many occasions stating that the home ‘was specifically only for unmarried mothers’. However, the government’s commission of investigation had to restate the truth that ‘it was never exclusively a mother and baby home’. In fact, the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes was set up as a direct result of her allegations, and found that there was no evidential basis for her claims.
Competent historians all knew that the allegations as stated by Mrs Corless were not supported by the historical evidence, but sensationalism attracts an audience ant that earns bucks from advertising. Truth and honest reporting are not core values of most media businesses today, including those once considered broadsheet. The bottom-line is that lies make money, make unimportant people feel important, while the truth, noble as it is, remains trodden under the jackboots of greed and megalomania.
VIDEO – Marasmus was never used by medics of the past as a synonym of starvation. However, in spite of the evidence, Catherine Corless continues to spread this malicious lie because it is the foundation stone for her false allegations that children were starved to death at the Tuam Children’s Home.
Alternative Link
Jennifer Zamparelli has made it her mission to broadcast the flatulence of Irish self-loathing from the basement of the RTÉ radio centre on each weekday morning. 2FM is a popular music station with a previous reputation for good music combined with frivolity. Currently such frivolity is provided by Doireann, Donncha and Carl in the early morning and the two Johnnies in the late afternoon. In between is the Jennifer Zamparelli Show, which runs from 9am to midday. During that time Zamparelli never misses an opportunity to claim that her parents were backwards. In fact, not only were her parents backwards but her entire family along with everyone else in Ireland was backwards until very recently.
Such self-loathing is a very common prejudice among the Gaelic Irish and as the name Zamparelli, is not Gaelic, I was a bit surprised to find the prejudice with the same force of strength as the native Irish. I confess to not knowing much about her background and I have never listened one of her shows in its entirety. Occasionally however, while channel hopping on a break from work, I land on 2FM only to find Zamparelli banging on about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual and Queer issues, and using them to sneer at the Irish nation. It’s her favourite subject and hardly a show goes by without herself or a guest falsely rewriting history to claim to be a victim.
A one trick pony, talking about sex is her main strategy to attract an audience and so on one of recent shows, she ventured into the world of pornography. Andy, who is an Irish porn star. revealed that he is a bisexual actor with a reputation for being well endowed in the trouser department. Zamparelli, true to form, used it as another opportunity to engage in self-loathing. He told one story about how he was deported from France after attempting to shoot a porn film along with two women, in the open air, using the Eifel Tower as a backdrop. The French police did not take kindly to their actions and the only word Andy said he could make out in French was the word, “disgusting”. He also used the word deported but I have never heard of anyone being deported without a court order. He said he drove with to a channel port to leave France with all due haste. I can only surmise that the Parisian police told them to get out of France quick or he and his lady colleagues would be in big trouble.
Oddly enough Andy revealed that his family still lives in Ireland, and with a lot of encouragement from Zamparelli, he revealed that they were subjected to a bit of slagging thanks to his chosen career. Andy was cajoled into saying that ‘it only happened in Ireland’, and that he got no grief about being a porn star while living in England. Zamparelli then used the story to directly accuse the Irish of backward behaviour because Andy’s family were not abused in England. Despite them not living in England!
Zamparelli has a habit of prefacing her prejudiced utterings with the phrase ‘this country’. I have no problem with people criticising Ireland when such criticism is valid but using the phrase ‘this country’ singles it out from all other countries but never is a valid comparison made with other countries.
Had porn star Andy been English, or of any other nationality, I’m one hundred percent sure that when it became known locally, that his family members were related to a man who is famous only for the public display of his big Mickey and the practical demonstration of its secondary function, they too would get ribbed about it. There is nothing uniquely Irish about such behaviour. All famous people are the subject of comment, ranging from mild to abusive, untrue to plausible and unacceptable to invasive. Most of it carried out by journalists, to feed the insatiable appetite of the broadcast and print media, who in turn feed it to the braying masses.
It turns out that Zamparelli is her married name and that her maiden name is Maguire. A more Gaelic Irish name one could not have, and so the strength of her self-loathing now makes sense and is explained by her family origins.
Born in 1980, Jennifer Maguire is of a generation who were deprived of a complete education in Irish history. The British rule of Ireland is a story of appalling abuse, economic, physical, and governmental. Consequently, our true history has the power to incite resentment and hatred of the British. Therefore, in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the Northern Troubles were at their height, the Irish government took the decision to de-emphasise the British crimes, violations, and economic embezzlement within the schools’ Irish history curriculum.
Whether the Irish government intended it or not, the net effect of its education policies has been to instigate an about-face. It took the British from being the villains of history to the white knights, who quixotically set about to rescue the Irish from their backwardness.
The Maguire clan the full brunt of the English reconquest of Ireland, they, like many others, ended up losing their land, lives, and titles but more importantly their social status.
Forcibly impoverished and socially immobilised, the Gaelic Irish were left with only one road open for those who wanted to advance their social status. The road still runs through the Valley of Sneers even today. Nowadays, when people want to feel superior to others, the buy an expensive German car (on a PCP or hire-purchase), join a golf club, stay in a five-star hotel, move to an upmarket neighbourhood and so on. If no such routes are open, then one can create illusions of superiority by putting people down, mostly expressed through sneering.
The vanquished Maguires together with many other once noble clans, desperate to reclaim some of their former status, took to siding with their British masters. However, entry to the British club required that the British be lauded, and the Irish sneered at.
To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason? I am a Paddy. – Paddy Shylock, Act 3 Scene 1, The Merchant of Ennis.
Jennifer Zamparelli is almost completely unknowledgeable about Irish history and society. The little knowledge she has managed to acquire has come from a barstool bore, and not from the expending of energy on scholarship.
Trying to feel big by sneering at others is the most enduring historical pursuit of Gaelic families even today. However, when sneering at the Irish they also sneer at themselves, hence the term self-loathing.
I would suggest that an ignoble award is appropriate. I will call it “the Zamparelli acronym” — Leave Gaelic Bull-manure To Quarrellers
Even at 42 years of age it is never too late for a little bit of homework…
What could a woman do that could have a man tried and executed?
The answer… have sex with another woman. Yep, lesbianism was never banned in these islands. Why? Queen Victoria refused to believe that women would engage in such acts. However, having no truck with British discrimination, it was proposed that after Irish independence, the Dáil would give equality to women by criminalising female homosexual acts, alongside those of males. It was, however, never enacted.
The English executed dozens of men for allegedly having sex with other men. I can find evidence of only two men who suffered a similar fate in Ireland. John Atherton and his alleged lover John Childe. They were not hung by the Irish, but by the English authorities in Ireland.
Atherton was the Anglican Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, who spotted that the Irish had no law banning male homosexuality. He became one of the prime advocates for such a law. Ironically, when it came into force, he and his servant became its first and only victims. They were both hanged on St Stephens Green on 5 December 1640. It is now thought that Atherton was innocent, the victim of character assassination.
The naive Irish Brehon Laws show an awareness of homosexuality, but it was never outlawed. The first time it became outlawed in Ireland, it was due entirely to the British.
The first of what might be interpreted as anti-gay laws on the continent were brought in to protect boys from pederasts. David Norris, Ireland’s most famous gay rights activists, was forced to withdraw as a candidate from the 2011 Irish presidential election when he declared support for pederasty. Pederasty, in Norris’ mind, was where a man takes a boy to live in his home for sexual relations who, in return, receives free board, lodgings, and an education. Norris, always popular with the Irish public, was the favourite to win the election but has since dropped out of public view.
Gay people were always well tolerated in Irish society. Even in the 1970s, when the British Gay Liberation Front was in full flight, RTÉ carried many British shows with gay themes. Dick Emery was especially popular, and one of his gay catchphrases, “Oh hello honky tonks”, became a common greeting in Ireland during the 70s. Emery was joined on Irish screens by a plethora of camp and gay characters, presenters, and actors in popular TV shows like Have You Been Served and films like, the Carry On series. The Kenny Everett Show was one of my favourites. Kenny was famous for being gay in real life and for his portrayal of outrageous characters, many of them gay.
The reality is that the Irish are one of the most tolerant nations on earth. They continue to victims of racism from their own kind and tolerate it with gay abandon!
EJ
Picture this scenario: You visit a doctor who diagnoses you with a kidney infection and suggests that the only effective remedy is to remove your kidney. Your initial reaction might be to question your doctor’s sanity, and rightfully so. It’s astonishing that in Ireland, there exists a doctor who advocates the removal of body parts to treat an infection.
Dr Peter Boylan, acting as an expert witness at the inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar, stated that had she “been offered a termination on either the Monday or Tuesday of her admission […] that this could have saved her life”.
Savita, a pregnant mother to be, died in October 2012 at University College Hospital, Galway after she developed a case of severe sepsis which arose from an infection of the two sacks (corium & amnion) surrounding her foetus. The infection was caused by a virulent and multi drug-resistant organism, E. coli ESBL. Commonly called a superbug, the term ESBL means that the bacteria are capable of producing an enzyme that can defend itself from attack by all but the strongest antibiotics.
Between 2008 and 2010, twenty-nine women died in similar circumstances from obstetric sepsis in the UK. Abortion was easily available during that time, but no medic advocated for such a procedure to save the lives of these women. Why is that? The answer, abortion, cannot be used as the cure for an infection.
Sepsis arises from an overreaction of the body’s immune system to an infection. Blood poisoning is the more common term, which often refers to both septicaemia and sepsis. However, septicaemia is the presence of bacteria in the blood, while sepsis is a body-wide inflammatory response to that infection, which can lead to organ failure or death. It is not just pregnant women who are at risk from sepsis, it is a life-threatening medical emergency that kills 270,000 Americans every year, and millions more worldwide.
Not surprisingly Dr Boylan’s comments drew very public criticism from some of Ireland’s top obstetric and gynaecological consultants, who, alongside a consultant microbiologist and emergency medical consultant, put their names to a letter which was published in an Irish national newspaper. Essentially, they argued that Dr Boylan’s opinion was not supported by medical science and that by politicking with Savita’s death — using it to advocate for the legalisation of abortion — he was detracting from the real issues which had caused her death. Thereby allowing a continued a risk to the lives of pregnant women by failing to learn from the mistakes made by medics.[1]
Even if the correct medical protocols had been diligently followed in Savita Halappanavar’s treatment, there remained no absolute assurance of her survival due to the formidable nature of a multi-drug resistant infection, often referred to as a superbug. Superbugs, though frequently associated with hospital settings, are now increasingly prevalent beyond hospital walls.
Regrettably, the medical procedures essential to her case were not adhered to by the healthcare professionals involved. This failure was underscored in three distinct investigations into her tragic demise, each carried out by different authorities: the Health Service Executive (HSE), Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA), and a special court presided over by a judge, the Coroner for West Galway, and featuring a jury.
It’s crucial to note that none of these investigations concluded that an abortion could have saved Savita’s life. However, during that time and persisting to this day, the Irish media has been rife with claims asserting that abortion was the appropriate remedy and it could have preserved her life. These claims, importantly, lack a foundation in medical knowledge or scientific understanding. Furthermore, Irish law did not prohibit the removal of a fetus — even one with a heartbeat — when a miscarriage was judged to be inevitable by all the medical professionals responsible for her care.
The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) were scathing in their report into Savita’s death, stating:
The consultant, non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs) and midwifery/nursing staff were responsible and accountable for ensuring that Savita Halappanavar received the right care at the right time. However, this did not happen.
The most senior clinical decision maker involved in the provision of care to Savita Halappanavar at any given time should have been suitably clinically experienced and competent to interpret clinical findings and act accordingly.[2]
A diplomatic way of stating that everyone involved in Savita’s care failed to fulfil their responsibilities as expected. Notably, the consultant obstetrician, who was the team leader. She lacked the requisite experience and failed to adhere to established medical protocols and guidelines.
A severe indictment of all parties involved, with the consultant obstetrician bearing the greatest responsibility.
Following Savita’s tragic passing, it seemed apparent that the consultant foresaw an impending investigation and sought to deflect some of the blame away from herself. The most apparent recourse appeared to be attributing fault to the 8th amendment of the Irish constitution, which granted equal right to life for unborn children as that of the mother.
It should be noted that had the medical team adhered to the proper protocols, there is a chance — albeit not a guarantee — that Savita may have been spared from sepsis-related death. What is unequivocal, however, is that abortion is not a suitable treatment for an infection.
The Irish media pretends to be concerned about women’s health, but their primary focus, even when dealing with tragic events, is profiteering through sensationalism and inaccurate reporting. Mainstream Irish newspapers have failed to provide comprehensive information and analysis regarding the circumstances surrounding Savita’s death. Notably absent are facts such as the discovery, during the year of her passing, of five similar cases in the UK, where women, particularly those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds like Savita, were at a higher risk of developing severe sepsis during pregnancy.[3]
The death of Savita Halappanavar was used disgracefully as a political football by many vested interests to further their pro-abortion agenda. It is clear from the ensuing debate that the lives and health of women were of no concern — and remain of no concern — for many pro-abortion organisations, including the Irish media. The stain on their reputation and the slurs cast upon the Irish nation will take years to be fully realised.
A period in Irish history that will become known to posterity as the Clurichaun Ascendency.
EJ
Acosta, Colleen D., Jennifer J. Kurinczuk, D. Nuala Lucas, Derek J. Tuffnell, Susan Sellers, Marian Knight, and United Kingdom Obstetric Surveillance System. ‘Severe Maternal Sepsis in the UK, 2011–2012: A National Case-Control Study’. PLoS Medicine 11, no. 7 (2014): e1001672.
‘Investigation into the Safety, Quality and Standards of Services Provided by the Health Service Executive to Patients, Including Pregnant Women, at Risk of Clinical Deterioration, Including Those Provided in University Hospital Galway, and as Reflected in the Care and Treatment Provided to Savita Halappanavar’. Health Information and Quality Authority, 7 October 2013.
Monaghan, John, Cyril Thornton, Eamon Mc Guinness, Hayes Hayes, King King, Eileen Reilly, John Bonnar, et al. ‘Lessons of Savita Case’. 1 May 2013, Irish Independent edition, sec. Opinion – Letters to the Editor. https://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/public-and-private-sectors-must-fight-austerity-29233703.html. (second letter on the page, Lessons of Savita case)
[1] Monaghan et al., ‘Lessons of Savita Case’.
[2] ‘HIQA Investigation into the Death of Savita Halappanavar’.
[3] Acosta et al., ‘Severe Maternal Sepsis in the UK, 2011–2012: A National Case-Control Study’.
Brains are not only in very short supply at the state broadcaster, it is highly doubtful that they have even two brain cells to rub together between them all. Last night, it aired a documentary on the subject of the crash of on Aer Lingus airliner in 1968, and the mystery that still surrounds its causes to this very day. The programme was as far from an erudite attempt to solve the mystery, and so they chose to cause a bit of excitement by interviewing conspiracy theorists and let their ravings go unchecked. I’m afraid I could not take it any more after one particular barstool bore, stated that the air accident report was not alone quite short but was full of technical detail. He barrelled out that “61 people fell out of the sky and nobody gave a shit”. At that point I could not take any more and went in search of something else to watch. Luckily, I found Dr Pixie McKenna on an English TV station who had gathered a group of women in a launderette to examine and smell various types of vaginal discharges. It turned out to be infinitely more educational than any of the historical effrontery emitted from Dublin.
I qualified as a pilot many years ago in pursuit of a childhood dream, and have a lifelong interest in all matters connected with aviation. Over the course of my lifetime, I have read many aviation accident reports, including the one on this accident, sometimes labelled the Tusker Rock crash. I can confirm that every single aviation crash investigation report from Ireland or elsewhere is full of technical details. If “nobody gave a shit”, there would have been no investigation, no accident report and no reinvestigations. Like that of an international investigative team who re-examined all the evidence and published their report as recently as November 2000.
The barstool bore also claimed that the report was deficient because it was too short. In reality, the original report, published in 1970, contains all the details one would expect to find in such a report. The reinvestigation by the international team found that there were some errors in the 1970 report. However, these errors, if they were corrected, could not solve the mystery of the causes of the crash.
It has long been speculated that the aircraft was brought down by either a British missile or a drone. This has been definitively ruled out. The likely cause of the crash was a loss of function to the control surfaces on the aircraft’s tail. The Viscount aircraft had strayed off its planned flight path, most likely indicating that the crew were battling for half an hour to regain some control of the aircraft. Regaining control was impossible, and so the aircraft crashed.
The failure could have been due to many reasons including a bird strike, a structural failure, a door falling off, and so on. However, the engineering maintenance procedures at Aer Lingus were also found to be deficient, and so these remain as a likely possibility of being a major contributory factor.
However, nobody can know for sure what caused the crash, as the evidence to reach a reasonably certain conclusion has not yet been found. A more competent documentary maker would have hired a team to search the seabed for new evidence. It would have made a watchable and more interesting programme, even if no new definitive evidence was found. However, RTÉ, the cash strapped broadcaster, could not afford to do a real investigation and so chose the cheaper gutter journalism option, warming up old conspiracy theories using musings of Ireland’s over supply of barstool experts.
The abuse of Amnesty International in the wake of its report examining the misbehaviour of the Ukrainian military, exposes the ineptitude of the western media to report about war with honestly.
Students of military history and history in general are taught to be sceptical of claims and accusations made by all sides of belligerent divide in war. The truth is the first casualty of war and the search for it, in its hospital bed, is always fraught with difficulty. The western media has not even bothered to go in search of the truth, relying on Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to form their opinion for them. Conversely, expressing opinions based on evidence will be met with a torrent of abuse, not only from Zelenskyy himself but from all the cheerleaders of war.
Zelenskyy has not been honest with the public. One could argue that no leader in history has ever valued honesty above the need to rally support and to make their people fight. Accordingly, impartial reporters will not take the information from either side in a war without subjecting it to critical analysis and seeking confirming evidence. That is not happening in the western media, and the information coming from western governments is managed in a way not to damage support for Ukraine.
The Ukraine military has been involved in false flag operations since the start of the war, however despite such tactics being a common propagandistic tool, it took Amnesty International six months to cop-on to what was happening. The Ukrainians have been putting the lives of their own civilians in danger, using them as human shields and by making civilian infrastructure look like military installations to draw enemy fire. When the enemy eventually attacks, the Ukrainians claim it as a war crime and use it to feed their propaganda machine. It also appears that the Ukrainian military are willing to carry out attacks with little care for the lives of their own citizens unfortunate to be in the line of fire. The attic is to lay the blame for all civilian deaths on the enemy.
It is obvious to any competent war observer that false flag operations have been in use since the very start of the conflict by the Ukrainian side. I wrote about this last April. Thankfully, my opinion does not carry the same weight as that of Amnesty International, and it did not enrage the Ukrainian establishment as much as they did.
However, despite Ukrainian government claims, nothing in the Amnesty report justifies the actions of Russia, even if it confirms that at least some Russian claims are true.
What’s truly astonishing is not the fact that some vested interests within Amnesty International tried to have the report stopped or watered down, it was their attempt to cast aside any semblance of impartiality, thereby confirming bias within the organisation. The Ukraine office of Amnesty International in particular has questions to answer after it tried to stop the publication of the report, which was compiled by foreign observers, without any assistance from local staff. This may account for why Amnesty International was so slow to observe and report from the war impartially in the first place.
However, Amnesty International is standing over their report, and we might be impressed that the organisation had the good sense to suspect the local office was filtering out information and decided to send in an independent team to check facts independently.
That said, the Irish office of Amnesty International is still a biased gobshite organisation and the parent organisation should also send in a team to investigate its crackpot behaviour.
Finally, the Irish Times continues to wallow in the gutter, telling readers that the “report by human-rights body gave Russia a blank cheque to continue trying to justify atrocities committed in Ukraine”. It’s titling pornography, not impartial reporting, and it is puerile in the expectation that its readers are so gullible.
EJ
References
Many Irish feminists, particularly those of the crackpot variety, are not very bright and do not possess the ability to read and comprehend plain English or indeed Irish. They have, for decades, been promoting the lie that the Irish constitution stipulates that a woman’s place is in the home. In other words, all women are given the role of home-makers and should be frowned upon for taking up a career. However, that is not what is written in the constitution! Moreover, the protection it should give to women who want to stay at home has never been afforded to women by the Irish government.
Many couples today have been forced into debt slavery due to astronomical house prices and accommodation rental. The result for most people in Ireland is that it takes two incomes to get a mortgage and to service it for three or more decades.
Article 41.2 foresaw this situation and stipulated that the government should make provision for mothers who wanted to stay at home and look after their children. In other words, such women should not be forced out of the home to take up work through economic necessity.
Fast-forward 50 years when the rumour began to spread that the Irish government wanted to suppress women and had even enshrined in law that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’. It’s pure crackpot stuff, the love child of the Irish culture of self-loathing and catastrophising females.
Take the opinion of Heather Laird and Emma Penney as a prime example. Both women associated are with University College Cork, who declare that “Article 41.2 was built on the myth of the male breadwinner, which impacted women differently depending on their background […] suggesting that women do not require the same freedom of choice as their male counterparts.”
ARTICLE 41
Laird and Penney’s interpretation of this article requires reading into the article text, which is simply not there. It takes a massive stretch of the imagination to see this as restricting the freedom of choice of women. Moreover, it shows that reason and logic have deserted the Irish universities.
Ireland’s state broadcaster RTÉ gives over part of its website to academics in a section named Brainstorm. However, much of the history on this part of the website is of similar quality to this particular article, and so the site would be more correctly named Brown Stuff Storm!
EJ
RTÉ – The issues with Ireland’s ‘women in the home’ constitution clause
Arthur Beesley knows little of the history of Ireland and less about the medical history of the nation, but he feels himself qualified to write articles which are not historically accurate but are continually propagated to warm the cockles of every self-loathing leprechaun. Beesley is listed on the Irish Times website as their Current Affairs Editor, listed elsewhere with only a qualification in journalism from Dublin City University. In a recent article in the Irish Times Beesley repeated the hogwash and false history surrounding the Irish nation’s battle with Tuberculosis. Beesley states:
“It was only after a crusade led by Dr Noël Browne, health minister from 1948 to 1951 in the first coalition government, that control was finally asserted over the disease.”
Browne of course was not only a keen promoter of this myth but the actual founder of it. He set himself up as the darling of the nation, one of our national superheroes but he was in fact claiming credit for work of other people, chiefly that of Dr James Deeney. Many historians have remarked of Brown’s autobiography that it was notable for its dishonesty. However, Browne continues to fool the likes of Beesley who have no knowledge of the subject and have not read any independent analysis of the claims made by Browne.
Beesley even manages to credit Browne as the instigator of “a huge programme to build hospitals and sanatoriums”. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of history or the ability to do basic historical research will know of the Tuberculosis (Establishment of Sanatoria) Act, 1945. Yes, three years before Browne came to power, the Irish government had set about its huge programme “to build hospitals and sanatoriums”. The programme was formulated by Dr. James Deeney, who at that time was the Chief Medical Advisor to the Government and his officials at the department. The ambitious building and reform programme was stalled because of the second world war, but the officials wasted no time at the war’s end, to set about reorganising healthcare within the state. One part of their reforms was to create a separate department of health in 1947. Dr. James Ryan was the first Minister for Health and Browne quite by accident, became the second Minister for Health in 1948.
When the Regional Sanatoria building project was about to go ahead, the Canadian tuberculosis establishment had offered to take Irish doctors to train and study with them in Canada. Accordingly, Dr. Deeney invited a group of sanatoria officials to discuss the selection of candidates. The group arrived with Dr Noel Browne as their secretary.
Deeny later recalled of the meeting:
The discussion proceeded pleasantly until Browne took over. He made a lot of scathing remarks and was downright rude and insolent. Now I had stuck my neck out on this thing, had taken it in hand, got it going and was producing results. So I was not about to take calculated rudeness from a young sanatorium assistant, no matter how able, whose experience was extremely limited and whose remarks anyway were not helpful. Since he continued and no one could stop him, I terminated the meeting.
The next day someone from the group rang again on their behalf and apologised and asked might they return and I said ‘yes but without Browne’. I saw them again, they came as often as the wished and our relations were pleasant and their advice valuable. The day after Browne rang and asked might he come in. I said come along and he did and apologised for his remarks. We discussed things in a completely friendly way. In the conversation he said that he appreciated what I had managed to do so far and asked whether I would have any objection to his raising the matter of TB in public outside of medical circles.[1]
Browne had no hand act or part in the establishment of the TB campaign. All the work had been done by the time Brown arrived in power, just in time to take all the credit.
In reality Browne had big issues with his bad temper and loss of self-control, and it was this issue that was the main cause of his political downfall combined with his capacity for devious dealings.
For the real Noel Browne story, see this article.
For a far better history of the subject see…
Deeny, James. To Cure & to Care: Memoirs of a Chief Medical Officer. Glendale Press, 1989.
History is always great craic as there are many people who have their own version of it and swear their version is true, despite contraindicatory evidence. I told a story during a recent interview in relation to the false claims made by Catherine Corless and others that children were starved to death by the women who ran and managed the Tuam Children’s Home. My story was to contrast the true story of children who were killed off by medical doctors with the approval of their government.
I told the story thus: it started after a woman (and her husband) wrote a letter to the Prime Minister to have their profoundly disabled son killed off. The letter reached the Prime Minister himself, who decided to call in his personal doctor and ask his advice. The doctor agreed with the parents but told the Prime Minister that all disabled people were ‘useless eaters’ and should also be killed off.
I used the term Prime Minister to throw people off the scent until the punchline could be delivered. It was of course the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler. His doctor, in this story was Karl Brandt who was one of seven doctors executed for crimes against humanity, after they were found guilty at the Nuremburg trials. The ‘euthanasia’ programme was code named Aktion T4 named for the Chancellery offices that directed it from the Berlin address Tiergartenstrasse 4.
Well, the next day I received a message from a man telling me that the whole story was untrue, that I was not much of a historian and that I should not be trusting history written by Jewish authors and…
As to those convicted at Nuremberg, you as an historian SHOULD know that those trials were a travesty of justice. No German was ever allowed to refute any allegation to the ludicrous assertions made by the prosecutors.
[…]
Thus The Nuremberg Trials are no yardstick to judge any German by at that time. As an historian I would have thought you would know this but likely like most “historians” when it comes to World War 2, you have a blinkered approach and simply repeat what the victors of that terrible war say.
[…]
According to you Herr Hitler gave permission for such a program. Since you call yourself an historian and have therefore presumably thoroughly researched this incident, I have a few questions for you:
I am reminded of the old joke where the Japanese officer in charge of a POW camp authorised the British officers to select three men at random who would be freed in exchanged for Japanese POWs. Three men were selected by lottery, with the proviso that each man had to answer a single quiz question correctly but if he failed to answer correctly, he would be passed over and the chance would go to the next man in line. The first man up was an English man. The officer asked what was the name of a famous ship which sank in 1919. The Titanic Sir. Correct. The second man up was Scottish, and his question was, how many people died on the Titanic. 1,513 people died Sir. Correct. Next up was an Irish man. The officer asked him to name all those who died.
The Titanic is a good case in point as the number of people who died is an estimate, not the actual figure because it remains unknown. That’s history for you, all of the documents needed for total accuracy are seldom if ever available. So does that mean that the Titanic never sank, or that we can state that nobody died, or that the estimates are inaccurate! Even if all the documents were available there would still be a discussion surrounding their accuracy because all records contain mistakes.
I responded to my challenger sending him a copy of the letter of authorisation, signed by Hitler himself, written on official notepaper and dated 1 September 1939. Obviously, the text is in German but the letter itself is widely available on the internet along with a translation into several languages. I also gave him the name of the child, Gerhard Kretschmar. The name of his mother is quite obviously Frau Kretschmar, but I had anticipated that it would be not good enough for my intrepid challenger. It was of course a test of his ability and inclination as her first name, along with the name of his father is also widely available on the internet and is easily findable by anyone with the most basic of historical skills. That is indicative of a great problem with history, people can develop strong opinions and yet not be able to find basic evidence to support or disconfirm their opinions. Moreover, when such skills are lacking, people begin to make assumptions, just like Catherine Corless, so that when assumptions go unchallenged, a full-blown conspiracy theory appears and grows fatter with every retelling of the story.
So, can historians write off all the evidence presented at the Nuremburg Trials because some people regard it as a ‘travesty of justice’? Are the present-day memorials at the site of Tiergartenstraße 4 and elsewhere just figments of the imagination, particularly the Jewish imagination?
In my second reply, I sent my challenger a photo of the Aktion T4 monument in Berlin to which he responded with this comment about another memorial in Berlin, the Holocaust Memorial:
It is a grotesque collection of concrete blokes to do with the “holocaust” – an alleged event for which there is not one shred of actual evidence to prove any deliberate attempt was made by Germany to murder millions of Jews or homosexuals or gypsies.
If you are beginning to think this guy is a Neo Nazi, then I think his other comments would bolster this view.
Just to get you started Herr Hitler himself volunteered to fight in the trenches of WW1 in which he spent four years during which he was highly decorated on ma[n]y occasions for his bravery. Another little nugget would be for you to consider the number of peace attempts made by Herr Hitler in the 1930’s in an attempt to avoid war. Another might be the Bromberg massacres. I could go on but you get the idea I’m sure.
He is right here; Hitler was decorated during the first world war receiving the Iron Cross First Class and Second Class. The problem is that getting at the truth of Hitler’s story is made almost impossible by the popular view of him as the evilest man in history.
I have been to Germany many times and I have visited many historic sites including the House of the Wannsee Conference, now a museum commemorating the notorious Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. It was at this meeting that the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ was coordinated and implemented. What struck me most, apart from the callousness of the individuals involved, who had no difficulty in advocating for the industrialised destruction of millions of human beings, was that of the fifteen people present, eight of them held academic doctorates. Academia has a lot of blood on its hands but has gotten away with it, at least as far as official history is concerned. Maybe it is because nowadays, it is the academics who write all the history.
The official history of both world wars is not a totally accurate account of the events which took place. Official history, that which appears in schoolbooks, is written by the victor and such histories are written as a justification and vindication of their actions combined with a vilification of the vanquished. Among the many problems with victorious histories is that they leave many unanswered questions, often defy logic and give off a whiff of dishonesty which leaves much room for suspicions to be germinated and grown. Suspicions themselves can create all sorts of alternative histories, ranging from plausible to the downright daft.
So as a historian my job is not to tell my audience how or what to think. I always advocate that when historians are writing for a general audience, they provide the available evidence, explain it as impartially as possible and let their audience make up their own mind.
Accordingly, I present some of the evidence here for the existence of the Aktion T4 programme which you can use alongside your own research to decide if it the programme ever existed. I will also leave the comments open at the bottom for you to present arguments for and against. However, the denial of the Holocaust is a no-go area and comments in support of such nonsense will be filtered out.
If anyone was killing children in Ireland, they would have gotten a belt of a Catholic crozier, just like Adolf Hitler. Clemens August Graf von Galen was the great man who stood up to Hitler. The Nazis planned on killing him after they had won the war.
Get the full story from these links…
The Lion of Münster: The Bishop Who Roared Against The Nazis
Clemens August Graf von Galen – The Angel Of Aktion T4
Amboss-Denkmal zum Gedenken an Clemens August Graf von Galen (story of the monuments pictured above in English)
Hitler authorises Bouhler and Dr Karl Brandt to start killing off disabled people. The document was written in October 1939 and backdated to the first of September, perhaps to cover Brandt who started his killings before he had legal cover from the Chancellor.
The picture of the document was taken at Nuremberg documentation centre museum. Written on Adolf Hitler’s personal stationery, it reads: “Reichsleiter Bouhler und Dr. med. Brandt sind unter Verantwortung beauftragt, die Befugnisse namentlich zu bestimmender Ärzte so zu erweitern, dass nach menschlichem Ermessen unheilbar Kranken bei kritischster Beurteilung ihres Krankheitszustandes der Gnadentod gewährt werden kann. – A. Hitler”
In English: “Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are assigned the responsibility for expanding the powers of specific doctors so that, where according to human judgment patients are incurably ill, they may be granted euthanasia following a critical assessment of their state of illness. – A. Hitler
The handwritten comment reads: “Von Bouhler mir übergeben am 27.8.40 – Dr. Gürtner” (English: “given to me by Bouhler on 27.8. [August] [19]40; Dr. Gürtner”). Franz Gürtner was Minister for Justice (Reichsjustizminister) from 1932 to his death in 1941. Philipp Bouhler was an SS-Obergruppenführer and leader of Hitler’s Chancellery (Kanzlei des Führers; KdF).
The parents of Gerhard Kretschmar were named Lina and Richard.
Since the war began in Ukraine, Ireland’s state broadcaster has begun nearly every one of its news bulletins with the gospel according to Zelenskyy. The Irish people, along with the people in most western countries, have been given a blinkered view of events and their causes, not because they cannot be trusted to do any thinking of their own, but mainly because of journalistic ineptitude. RTÉ journalists are not clever enough to be able to manipulate people’s opinions, rather they just freewheel along with popular notions, collecting a pay cheque each time they pass go. Real journalism has left Ireland a long time ago, but other countries still have people willing to stand up for the truth. The truth does not turn Vladimir Putin from ‘an evil dictator’ into a liberator, nor Zelenskyy from a comedian into a clown, as the truth is on no one’s side but its own.
If you are interested in finding the truth, then I propose you ponder these three videos. The first is a song by Vika Starikova, a nine-year-old Russian girl, from 2019, with 132 million views on YouTube! The video tells starts off with the view common in Russia that the nations of the world are ignoring her, and a child’s three wishes awakens them. It’s a belter of a song, even if you don’t speak Russian.
The second video is also a song by Natalya Kachura & Margarita Lisovina designed to rouse support for the cause of Donbass and praising Russia for its support. The video was shot at two Ukrainian Soviet war memorials. The first is ‘the Monument to the Liberators of Donbass’, the second is the ‘Savur-Mohyla memorial’, which was destroyed by the Ukrainian army during fighting with Russian separatists in 2014. The destruction of memorials in former Soviet Republics, especially those dedicated to the millions of people who died fighting the Nazis, is a particular emotive issue for Russians. So strong is the insult to the fallen felt, that the producers of this song have used it to rouse support. Also, unlike the Soviet soldiers who fought as atheists, often forced atheists, take note, God has made a big comeback in Russia.
The third video is by Russell Brand, railing against the lies and inventions pedalled out daily by the western media. He is always entertaining and has a quite interesting take on the cause of the current conflict.
As we all know, the truth is the first casualty of war, but while she is impossible to kill, she can be gagged and silenced. We can however hear her mumbles if we seek out the other side of the story. Every story, we are told has at least two sides and so one-sided stories should always arouse your suspicion.
Btw, I am struck with the number of parallels between Irish history and the history of former soviet republics. Post-independence Ireland had to deal with its own separatist region and had military bases belonging to the former colonial power. We blew up one or two colonial monuments like Nelson’s pillar in Dublin. Three years after Nelson went up, the separatists travelled from their region, to blow up the O’Connell monument and the Wolf Tone monument at Bodenstown and threw in the RTÉ TV studios for good measure!
I surmise that there is at least one big difference, Nelson, O’Connell and Tone had all faded from memory while monuments to the élite are less valued by the people than monuments dedicated to their recent ancestors and relations.
EJ
