(UPDATE to today's earlier post:)

My new hero Kevin Myers reports...

On the one hand, I expected some uproar in Ireland over my piece about Ethiopia on July 10. But there really wasn't any. On the other, I didn't expect an attempt to jail me by a state-sponsored body. Yet Denise Charlton, of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, has urged An Garda Siochana to investigate me under a special law, by which I could be tried and imprisoned for two years without even the benefit of a jury.

Oh, Denise, Denise, you silly, silly little girl: have you nothing better to do with your time and talents than to try to get someone jailed for saying something you dislike? So there we are. The apparatchiks of the equality industry merely have to contemplate the sector of their psyche wherein their self-righteous emotions reside: and if these are sufficiently overwrought, they decide that a hate-crime has been committed.

(...)

Measured hostility is what puts the gunman behind bars: it drives the mugger from the street and the burglar from our homes.

It also protects freedom of speech from those who would steal it from us -- most particularly in Ireland of today, the quango thought-police of doctrinaire liberalism, and single-issue vigilantes in the media.

This latter group is most conspicuous in Metro Eireann, the magazine of full-time, professional immigrants: that is, immigrants who write about immigration. Gosh: what interesting and varied lives you people lead!

(...)

So, "a lot of Africans" are "all very offended", are they? All of them? The poor dears. Well, if the countries on whose behalf they get so easily offended are so bloody marvellous -- Sudan? Rwanda? Zimbabwe? Sierre Leone? Congo? Somalia? Eritrea? Etcetera? -- why aren't they enjoying themselves back home?

(...)

One of these orthodoxies is that Africa's woes are the legacy of "colonialism". But Ethiopia (formerly Abyssinia, and far older than any European state) was never colonised.