Aoife Dooley abused online after her article appeared in Junior Cert paper!

Odhinn wrote: »

That, along with parcels of shite to Patrick Kavanagh for being a miserable bollix, sort of missed the window, timewise.

In late 1939, as German forces marched into Polish territory, a solitary, 35-year-old Irish poet, novelist and critic marched 80 miles from his small farm holding in Mucker, Co Monaghan, to Dublin.... Financed by £2,000 from his younger brother Peter, the Weekly criticised the lack of vitality in Ireland in the 30 years after Independence: “All the mouthpieces of public opinion are controlled by men whose only qualification is their inability to think.”.... In October 1952, The Leader magazine published an unsigned, one-sided, unflattering profile of Kavanagh. Kavanagh failed to unmask the author(s) of the offensively hostile piece, with Valentin Iremonger (Irish career diplomat and poet, who also produced translations from the Irish language) and Brendan Behan among his (many) suspects.

The profile caricatured Kavanagh “hunkering over a bar stool” in McDaid’s, presiding over a coterie of much younger submissive acolytes, sponging drinks, coughing and gambling, while fantasising about London’s literary scene. It depicted Kavanagh as a poseur, unsubtle, opinionated, and overbearing. It also contained a (false) suggestion that his poem The Great Hunger had been banned in Ireland.

Kavanagh issued libel proceedings against the magazine and its printer, hoping for an out-of-court settlement of some £500. He had already lost a libel action taken against him in 1938 by Oliver St John Gogarty, who was awarded £100 damages plus costs of £300 over a reference in Kavanagh’s loosely autobiographical book The Green Fool, suggesting Gogarty had a mistress.

On 3 February 1954, the 49-year-old Kavanagh sat in the witness box in the Dublin High Court, waiting for the first of a total of 1,267 questions in what would be a gruelling 13-hour cross-examination by a man 13 years his senior – one of Ireland’s most powerful and influential political and legal figures: John A Costello, former taoiseach and leader of the opposition party....