Name | Eoghan Harris |
---|---|
Nationality | Irish |
Office | Senator |
Constituency | Nominated by the Taoiseach |
Term start | August 2007 |
Term end | April 2011 |
Birth date | 1943 |
Birth place | Douglas, County Cork |
Party | Independent |
Otherparty | Official Sinn Féin,Workers' Party of Ireland |
Spouse | Gwendoline HalleyAnne Harris (div.) |
Alma mater | University College Cork |
Eoghan Harris (born 1943) is an Irish journalist, fiction writer, director, columnist and politician. He currently writes for the Sunday Independent. He was a member of Seanad Éireann from 2007–11, having been nominated by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.
Harris has held posts at various and diverse political parties throughout his career. He was a Marxist ideologue of the Workers' Party and its predecessor, Official Sinn Féin; a short-lived adviser to former Taoiseach John Bruton; an adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party and most recently a supporter of the Fianna Fáil-led 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 the Sunday Independent. Harris's critics accuse him of demonstrating ideological malleability, hypocrisy, neoconservatism and being bipolar and inconsistent. Harris is also noted for his screenwriting work; he lectures at IADT, the Irish national film school, and teaches a screenwriting workshop. Harris is also a judge on the Irish language talent show Glas Vegas, on TG4.
In the Cork Mid by-election in March 1965 he campaign for Sylvester Cotter standing for Poblacht Chríostúil, at this time he met his future wife UCC Student, Anne O'Sullivan.
In 1975, Harris won a Jacob's Award for his 7 Days documentary on the Dublin Bay petroleum refinery. He had refused a previous award in 1970 for his work on Féach, citing his objection to the involvement in the awards of a commercial sponsor.
As a writer, Harris is the author of Souper Sullivan which was performed at the Abbey Theatre for the Dublin Theatre Festival 1987. He also wrote several of the scripts for the UK television series "Sharpe's Rifles" etc. He lectures on screenwriting in the National Film School. Harris is also a judge on the TG4 television series Glas Vegas. He is involved with the Centre for Film Studies in UCD, and with Moonstone Labs.
According to Patterson in the Politics of Illusion, Harris's pamphlet the "Irish Industrial Revolution" (1975) was influential in shifting the party away from Republicanism. Harris continued to do media work for the Workers' Party of Ireland. However in 1990 Harris published a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Social Democracy in which he surmised that socialism would not survive events in Eastern Europe. Harris called for a shift to social democracy and that the party should seek a historic compromise with the social democratic wing of Fine Gael and the Labour Party. The document was initially submitted by Eamonn Smullen on Harris's behalf for publication in the party's theoretical magazine "Making Sense" but when this was refused Harris and Smullen published it themselves as a publication of the party's Economic Affairs Department of which Smullen was head. When the pamphlet began to circulate it was banned by the Workers' Party and Smullen was suspended from his position on the committee. Harris resigned in protest and Smullen resigned subsequent with many of the members of the Research Section of the party, a move which was the prelude to a bigger split in the party in 1992, when senior members of the party alleged that the supposedly moribund Official IRA still existed and was implicated in criminality and sought to move to some extent in the direction proposed earlier by Harris.
Harris gave media training to Ahmed Chalabi in advance of the invasion of Iraq, and wrote in the Irish Independent that:
I first met Chalabi in Washington in March 2001, in the company of Richard Perle, a few months after George W Bush had been elected, and met later in London where I gave him some media training. We bonded from the start, and the basis of the bond was his instinctive feel for Ireland.
Shortly before the election, Harris appeared on The Late Late Show on RTÉ, in which he praised Ahern and poured scorn on those criticising him over his personal finances. Harris's Late Late Show appearance coincided with a rise in support for the Government. Harris also claimed that other newspapers, namely The Irish Times and The Irish Daily Mail waged an anti-Ahern campaign. All other news outlets dismissed the claim, with most accusing Harris and the Sunday Independent of doing its own u-turn following a Cowen-O'Reilly meeting. (The paper had previously been highly critical of Ahern's failure to reform stamp duty, but after the meeting this criticism stopped. Soon thereafter Fianna Fáil promised to carry such reform, if re-elected. This is what later transpired.)
In February 2008, Director-General of RTÉ Cathal Goan and RTÉ director of news Ed Mulhall appeared before the Oireachtas Committee on Communications. Both men admitted that they were "uncomfortable" at Harris's appearance on the Late Late Show because it took place so soon before the election.
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. During the debate Harris had admitted that the decision to support the Government was taken because "we got what we wanted on stamp duty".
Eoghan Harris's ex-wife, Anne Harris, is deputy editor of the Sunday Independent. In December 2007, Harris married Gwendoline Halley, from Waterford, Ireland.
Harris has written about Wikipedia in the Sunday Independent.
Harris was featured on the front cover of the August 2007 edition of Village. Inside, Harris was the subject of a number of critical articles written by Vincent Browne.
It was reported in The Sunday Times (Irish edition) that Harris is at the centre of an internal investigation at the National Film School in Dún Laoghaire, where he lectures. Harris has also incorrectly but accidentally claimed to have received a Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in his entry in 'Who's Who' in Ireland, for his documentary Darkness Visible. Harris insisted that he did win the award, saying that the Berlin Film Festival "mustn't keep proper records". The award he actually received is the Prix Futura, awarded at the Berlin Television Festival. He has since corrected the mistake.
On the RTÉ Radio One programme News At One on 3 December 2007, Harris strongly defended Bertie Ahern, saying that the Irish Daily Mail was a 'lying newspaper', which practised 'sensationalist, sick journalism' and which had a 'record of fascist appeasement in the 1930s'. He also said that the Mahon Tribunal should be shut down because "there is no natural justice available", and that in ten years time "people will look back and say that the Tribunal time was scoundrel time". The Irish Daily Mail denied his allegations. In a debate with Fintan O'Toole on the RTÉ TV Primetime programme on 4 December 2007, Harris further alleged that "the entire (Mahon) Tribunal is a fantasy of (Tom) Gilmartin".
In another RTÉ related controversy in 2004, Harris was confronted aggressively by an angry viewer, Kilmacud Crokes star Hugh Gannon, regarding the Sunday Independent's editorial. This happened after an episode of Questions & Answers, with Gannon implying Harris was a lackey for Tony O'Reilly. Harris reacted angrily to this, dismissed Gannon as a "Shinner" and presenter John Bowman had to step in to separate the two men. Bowman suggested that the men agree to disagree, but Gannon, a former 1998 Leinster minor hurling medallist and staunch Fine Gael supporter, suggested "No. Let's agree that you agree with me."
During a heated interview on the TV3 programme The Political Party with Ursula Halligan broadcast on 9 December 2007, Harris threatened to walk out because he didn't wish to discuss Bertie Ahern's appearances at the Mahon Tribunal any further. He then changed his mind and demanded that the programme be re-recorded, but Halligan informed him that this was impossible. The show was recorded live and therefore could not have been stopped.
Harris has defended the Gaelic Poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh, who admitted buying lavish gifts for and having sex with 16 to 18 year old boys while on charitable visits to Nepal. Harris pointed out that Ó Searcaigh was not a paedophile but rather a paederast, a sexual preference which was common among the great philosophers of Ancient Greece, and that the age of consent in Nepal is 16. He also wrote that Nepal is a notoriously homophobic society, and that some of the accusers may have their own agendas.
Category:1943 births Category:Living people Category:Irish columnists Category:Irish journalists Category:Jacob's Award winners Category:Members of the 23rd Seanad Category:Alumni of University College Cork Category:Independent politicians in Ireland Category:People from County Cork
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