Eoghan Harris

Eoghan Harris is a controversial and outspoken Irish newspaper columnist and polemicist. He currently contributes to the Sunday Independent newspaper. He has variously been the chief Marxist ideologue of the Workers Party and its precedessor, Official Sinn Féin, a short-lived advisor to the Christian Democrat leader of Fine Gael John Bruton , an advisor to the Ulster Unionist Party , and most recently a supporter of the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats government of Bertie Ahern. At one stage, an Irish republican he is now a bitter critic of modern day Sinn Féin, expressing his political views in trenchant terms in the Sunday Independent. His critics accuse him of histrionics, unpredictability, inconsistency, irrationality, and idealogical malleability .

Early career

Harris was educated at University College, Cork where he studied History. He later worked at RTE, the Irish television broadcaster. He did a documentary on mental illness called "Darkness Visible" .

As a writer Harris is the author of Souper Sullivan which was performed at the Abbey Theatre for the Dublin Theatre Festival 1987, and of the television series "Sharpe". He lectures on screen writing in the National Film School, in the Centre for Film Studies in UCD, and at Moonstone Labs in Europe.

Leading Marxist

Harris was a leading Irish republican in Official Sinn Féin in the 1960s, and was an important influence in the party's move from Irish nationalism to Marxism, a political ideology which Harris currently claims to abhor. He was close to leading Official Sinn Fein members Eamonn Smullen and Cathal Goulding, the latter of whom was at the time Chief of Staff of the paramilitary Official IRA, an organisation the demonisation of which Harris has built his recent journalistic career upon. The movement's eventual move to Marxism led to alienation from its working class base at the start of The Troubles, and its subsequent eclipse by Provisional Sinn Féin and its violent military wing, the Provisional IRA.

According to Patterson in the Politics of Illusion, Harris's pamphlet the "Irish Industrial Revolution" (1975) was influential in shifting the party away from nationalism. In 1988 Harris published a paper in which he surmised that socialism would not survive its east european crisis. Harris called for a shift to social democracy and that the party should seek an historic alliance with the social democratic wing of Fine Gael. When this pamphlet was banned by the Workers Party he resigned with most of the members of the Research Section of the party, a move which was the prelude to a bigger split in the party in 1990, when senior members of the party discovered that the supposedly moribund Official IRA still existed and was implicated in criminality.

RTÉ

Harris was once a central figure in shaping the current affairs output of Radio Telifís Éireann. He pushed the organisation, in line with his grievances, towards a heavily critical perspective on Sinn Féin and the IRA, and on nationalism in general. The tensions within the organisation between traditional nationalists such as Mary McAleese and Marxists led to major disagreements within the station, and criticism of what was perceived as the station's left wing political agenda.

Working with Robinson

In 1990 the Labour Party nominated former senator Mary Robinson to be its candidate for President of Ireland. Harris's boisterous attitude led him to be kept at arms length by the Robinson campaign. While his strategy proposal is thought, by some, to have been significant in the rebranding of Robinson, just how influential Harris was remains a matter of much controversy, with her campaign team and the President herself blaming him for a crucial and fatal change in tactics - having previously been non-compative in dealing with the controversies that had engulfed dismissed Tánaiste Brian Lenihan, Harris pressured Robinson into going on the offence on a Tonight Tonight live debate, an action which was generally seen to have backfired horribly. Harris made three election videos, and claims to have been reponsible for the memorable line from Robinson's acceptance speech "the hand that rocked the cradle rocked the system."

Working with Bruton

After this campaign, the success of which Harris had litle to do with, He was asked to work for Fine Gael by its leader John Bruton. However he received universal criticism both within and outside the party in April 1991 when he wrote the script for a sketch for the Fine Gael Ard Fheis in which a cleaner (played by the comedy actress Twink), interrupted the leader's speech by Bruton. The sketch was universally criticised as being in bad taste and tacky, particularly in its references to a controversial incident that had made the news, whereby a female reporter from RTÉ had allegedly been groped by an inebriated Fianna Fáil TD. The catchphrase "Una gan guna" (Una without her dress, in Irish) was sexist and demeaning of a victim of alleged improper conduct.)

Attacking McAleese

In 1997 Harris denounced Fianna Fail presidential candidate Mary McAleese, calling her a "tribal time bomb" and writing "if she wins not on a technicality but because so many people gave her their number one, then I am living in a country I no longer understand." McAleese won the election with a side splitingly laughable, miserable, 21% of the electorate.

Attacking John Hume

Harris, along with fellow Sunday Independent columnist Eamon Dunphy, became an outspoken critic of Social Democratic and Labour Party leader John Hume over Hume's decision to hold talks with Sinn Féin prior to an IRA ceasefire. Hume argued that he was seeking to convince republicans to abandon violence. The resulting Belfast Agreement was strongly praised by Harris. In the late 1990s he became the first Roman Catholic political advisor (and the first ex-Marxist advisor), to David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. He wrote some of his speeches, one of which included the infamous line that Northern Ireland had been "a cold house for Catholics." He was invited to address the UUP annual conference in 2003 where he described the Belfast Agreement as "an Amazing Grace" and urged the UUP to make a leap of faith in Sinn Fein. The UUP subsequently imploded and is no longer a significant force in Northern Irish politics.

Supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Harris strongly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and unlike many other neo-conservatives is unrepentant about the morality of removing Saddam Hussein, declaring in the Sunday Independent that "hindsight history has no moral status." He has been bitterly critical of Middle East journalist Robert Fisk. Fisk has, unlike Harris, actually been to the Middle East. In November 2003 he wrote, "Far from wanting to pour venom on Fisk, I think he does us a favour by being so forthright. For my money his analysis of Middle East politics is a first cousin to believing that aliens take away people in flying saucers." Fisk's books on the Middle Eastern conflict have continuously topped international best-seller lists. Harris himself is soon to publish a book on the Middle East.

Endorsing Fianna Fáil

Harris, a one-time Marxist republican, then an advisor to Fine Gael and the Ulster Unionists (prior to their implosion), in the mid 2000s began endorsing the centrist, populist Fianna Fáil, which was in a coalition government with the neo-liberal Progressive Democrats. Harris was one of a minority of journalists to support Bertie Ahern during the "Bertiegate I" crisis, amid questions over Ahern's financial propriety. Harris, like his paper, heavily supported Ahern and Fianna Fáil in the 2007 general election, while denying that the Sunday Independent's editorial stance, a u-turn from its previous criticism, was the result of a meeting between the deputy leader of Fianna Fáil, Brian Cowen and the owner of Independent News & Media, Sir Anthony O'Reilly.

Harris controversially appeared in a later criticised edition of The Late Late Show on RTÉ in which he and another panelist heaped praise on Ahern and poured scorn on anyone who criticised him. Harris also claimed that other newspapers, namely The Irish Times, The Irish Mail, and the Sunday Independent's daily newspaper, the Irish Independent, waged an anti-Ahern campaign.[1] All other news outlets dismissed the claim, with most accusing Harris and the Sunday Independent of doing its own u-turn following the Cowen-O'Reilly meeting. (The paper had previously been highly critical of one of Ahern's policy stances, but changed its stance after the meeting. The paper claimed that its change was because Ahern had changed policy on stamp duty.) During a live radio debate on Today FM's The Last Word with Matt Cooper (Election special 26 May 2007), when an Irish Times columnist, Fintan O'Toole denied Harris's claims of an Irish Times campaign against Ahern, and accused the Sunday Independent of having its own political agenda, Harris stormed out of the studio mid-debate.[2]

Eoghan Harris's ex-wife, Anne Harris, is deputy editor of the Sunday Independent. She lives with the paper's editor, Aengus Fanning.

Harris has written about Wikipedia in the Sunday Independent.

References

• Irish Daily Mail-May 7 2007
• Magill - November 1997
• Sunday Independent - May 11 2003
• Sunday Independent November 23 2003