Cancelled, Irish style

Cancellation doesn’t exist, apparently. It is a self-pitying myth invented by petulant conservatives to cover up being on the wrong side of history. Yet “they had it coming” is also audible. It’s what the American journalist Rod Dreher calls the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” Let us therefore consider someone who was most definitely cancelled — and remains so in his native Ireland — and see what the case of Kevin Myers teaches us.

The gleeful controversialist’s memoirs are reviewed in this issue by Simon Kingston. His cancelling offence had been to write a column in the Sunday Times’s Irish edition which reproached female BBC journalists whose agents brokered them lower salaries than their male peers. But it clumsily extolled two Jewish personalities whose agents did a sharper-elbowed job. In short, Myers exhibited that distinctive species of antisemitism which is admiring of its supposed target.

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When the opportunity came for O’Toole and Greenslade’s long, grudge-laden memories to act up, they seized it, as did Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE. Idiotically, and ultimately very expensively, RTE proclaimed Myers a Holocaust denier in addition to being the klutz he had apologised for being over BBC salaries.

Myers’s vindication in court was a long time coming, however. As the storm broke around him, the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland had fruitlessly defended him: the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar happily joined the hunt. Vainly the JRCI pleaded that, more than any other Irish journalist, Myers had put the Holocaust before often indifferent Irish eyes. It did him no good then, any more than his legal victory over RTE has done him since.

Who are his critics? The prim O’Toole evidently despises the Rabelaisian Myers. Over the affair of the women’s salaries, “Myers would still be in that pulpit if he had stuck with straight misogyny,” wrote O’Toole in 2017, though his tune changed when his friend Ian Buruma was evicted from the editor’s chair at the New York Review of Books in 2018 (for running a piece by a man accused of formidably graver #MeToo offences than Myers has ever been). “If all those who take wrong turnings are instantly thrown overboard, the whole ship will be sunk,” O’Toole now wailed.