Ruth Dudley Edwards: I am horrified that Queen’s University has jumped on the Epstein bandwagon
I am sick of people rushing to judgment, and many of them are sick of me denouncing the herd mentality.
My latest offending behaviour was to suggest that Peter Mandelson’s championing of the Omagh families’ civil case against the bombers demonstrated that he had virtues.
Of course, as usual, this elicited condemnation from herd members.
Now that I’m about to complain about how Queen’s University has treated senator George Mitchell, I expect the same response.
Ah, well. Being accused of being in favour of paedophilia makes a change from being labelled anti-peace because I dislike Provo sympathisers.
I was fortunate enough to have been brought up by a mother with instinctive sympathy for underdogs and an historian father who was obsessed with the importance of objectivity.
Three childhood memories.
Coming home from senior infants and responding to my mother asking what we had done that day.
I said brightly: “We threw stones at the children from Greenlanes” (the neighbourhood Protestant primary school).
My mother was a fine teacher, and I took to heart her horrified response and explanation about why Protestants and Catholics were as good as each other and should be friends.
My parents were of one mind in their loathing of sectarianism and political violence, though my father was more single-minded about the importance of proof than my mother.
I remember her losing her temper because she had related at the table that the washing machine repairman had a glass jaw and – absentmindedly, for he was only half listening – my father enquiring if there were any independent witnesses.
The first time there was a Dail election that I remember, he collected all the leaflets delivered to the house and read them open-mindedly before judiciously numbering them from 1 to 11.
My mother voted only for the few candidates she didn’t actually loathe.
Republican Granny upstairs voted for her friend Kathleen Clarke, the widow of the executed Tom, the brains behind the 1916 rebellion.
Senator George Mitchell accepted from president Clinton the poisoned chalice of chairing the talks pre and post the Good Friday Agreement.
He had six years of hell but - having a strong belief in the importance of public duty - he stuck with it and consistently refused any remuneration.
From being lauded on both sides of the Atlantic, the 92-year-old Mitchell has now become one of the targets for ingrates, fools and knaves who have seized on the Epstein scandal to persecute anyone who seems to them to be fair game because their names appeared among the millions of recently released files - along with thousands of others.
I dislike being rude about Queen’s, which kindly awarded me an honorary degree in 2011, but I am horrified that it has climbed on this bandwagon.
Mitchell was its chancellor for a decade from 1999, but his bust has been removed from campus and his name from the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice before most Irish academic agitators have got into their stride.
Like thousands of others drawn into the Epstein web, Mitchell was friendly with him, but although there have been a tiny number of utterly uncorroborated accusations, there is no relevant physical, documentary or eyewitness evidence of any kind.
Who’s next?
Do I hear the herd galloping after chancellor Hillary Clinton?
l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions and also of Aftermath: the Omagh bombing and the families’ pursuit of justice