Comments on: CHARLIE BIRD AND TARIQ ALI, 30 OCTOBER 1971

By: Neues aus den Archiven der radikalen (und nicht so radikalen) Linken « Entdinglichung

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:08:53 +0000

[…] * League for a Workers’ Vanguard / Workers’ League – 1969 to c.1978 * CHARLIE BIRD AND TARIQ ALI, 30 OCTOBER 1971 […]

By: Jay Carax

Jay Carax — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:27:57 +0000

Similar to you, I had heard about them but had never seen the pictures. Thanks for uploading them.

By: Walter

Walter — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:04:32 +0000

Joe McAnthony, who deeply researched an exposé of the Hospitals Sweep and got the brushoff from Sindo and RTE, is a true hero of late twentieth century Irish journalism. Judge any new account of Irish investigative journalism according to whether it mentions or airbrushes the curtailed Joe McAnthony account of how Joe McGrath’s governance of the Sweepstake and his and others’ key personal earnings from the enterprise were protected from Dail scrutiny by cabinet ministers over so many years. Powerful players in Irish journalism did the dirt on Joe McAnthony and politicians covered up grave scandal.

This wikipedia account of the Irish hospitals sweepstake carries no reference to Joe McAnthony’s work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Hospitals%27_Sweepstake

Would some informed individuals care to improve on it?

By: Donagh

Donagh — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:30:34 +0000

What a great find Conor. I think the pictures are quite clear. However, every time I see anything to do with Charlie Bird these days I think of a story told by Joe McAnthony, the journalist who first broke the Ray Burke story back in 1974, and who wasn’t able to get work in Ireland as a journalist as a result.

“I went into professional exile just four months after breaking the Ray Burke story, in June 1974. In the fifteen years that followed, I got just one call of any kind from the Irish media. That came from RTE and is a story in itself. Michael Heney and Charlie Bird wanted to do an interview for a documentary about the Sweep. That was around 1978.

I agreed and they came to see me at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where I was then doing exposes for their current affairs programme - neatly called the fifth estate. We did a humungous interview on film in which I told them everything I knew. Needless to say, knowing RTE, I expressed doubt that it would ever get to air. They insisted it would.

They were right about the documentary. After a short delay, it lasted 16 years, it finally came to air in 1994. But my interview was not to be seen. In fact, the only mention I got was as having written an article on the subject. Some time later, curious as why not even a single sentence was used, I asked a knowledgeable source in RTE to look for the film and perhaps see the reason for the blanket rejection. He made an extensive search but the film was not to be found. In the archives or anywhere else.”