If humour could kill it would be safe in the hands of Will Hanafin

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Monday July 26, 2010 12:42 by indyjourno

Today’s Irish Independent features a rather poor attempt at a hatchet job of left wing activism in Ireland. Will Hanafin decided to hang around several left wing protests at the request of the Irish Independent. What emerges is a tale of him meeting middle-aged women and humourless platitudes. Of course maybe “far-left protesters” are just humourless individuals or idiots, as Hanafin seems to suggest.

Most people won’t have heard have Will Hanafin but he is ‘important’ enough for ‘somebody’ to have created a wikipedia page for him. I’m not suggesting that he created the wiki page himself, I’m just using the quotation marks in an ironic capacity just to be clear to all you humourless protestors.

Will is a producer of a radio show on Today FM and fancies himself as some sort of comedian having presented a segment on the difficulties listeners encounter in removing awkward stains. Having not had the desire or opportunity to listen to this I will presume he doesn’t view the Irish and Sunday Independent whom he writes for as the awkward stain most people do. He has also written a book called “De Little Book of Bertie” about Bertiespeak a “collection of the Taoiseach's confused and amusing utterances will keep you amused for hours”. There has been no confirmation as yet that Will’s follow up book will be ‘Little book of Sunday Independent’ about Sindospeak a collection of the Sunday Independents confused and amusing utterances. Another fact about Hanafin is that Gardaí questioned him over the nude paintings of Cowen, more of which we will come to later.

The article today contains Hanfin’s shadowing various protests and his attempt at humour to delegitimise these protests. Of course he attempts to do so while in the pay of Independent News and Media a company who has a vested interest in delegitimising these protests due to the corporate interests of its shareholders. Funny that isn’t it?

There is nothing new in the article just the standard childish repetitive nonsense that continually gets posted by right wing rags. Which must be disappointing for Hanafin as in a previous interview with the Sunday Tribune he is quoted as saying “We try to be positive and optimistic and we try not to be clichéd” he should obviously try harder.

The author was questioned by Gardaí over the 2009 paintings of Cowen that were hung in the Royal Hibernian Academy something that he branded as “crazy”. In an examiner article on the questioning “Mr Hanafin said the Garda, who had one of the two paintings — the one sneaked into the Royal Hibernian Academy depicting Mr Cowen holding his underpants — wrapped in bubblewrap under his arm, was "sheepish and apologetic" but he said he had orders from "on high" to investigate the incident.” It seems that Hanafin is all too aware of people in positions of power abusing this power for their own ends when it is he who is being questioned by Gardaí. However when a rogue state such as Israel murders members of an International flotilla in International waters he attempts to make a mockery of the activists who were arrested complaining that the Israeli soldiers used their credit cards by joking “They probably bought Israeli goods with them too!”

While there are many valid criticisms of left wing activism in this country, of which you will find plenty on this website, Hanafins article on the behalf of vested interests is not one of them. He ends his article with “you can't even agree on one speaker for a meeting of less than 100 people”. So folks, to please Hanafin, left wing parties who run separate electoral candidates under separate electoral platforms (with limited success) must all say exactly the same thing. I wonder would a sample of 100 people find his article humorous?