Australian journalist Tony Wright wrote a very interesting piece comparing local reaction in Canberra and Dublin to the Russian embassies in those cities [As Russian agents spread lies, Australians could learn from the Irish/April 8]. Wright, an associate editor and special writer with The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote that pro-Ukraine supporters outside the embassy waved signs encouraging passing motorists to honk their horns. The protest would have barefly registered with the diplomats inside the building who he said were busy on social media denying war crimes and the murder of thousands of civilians in Ukraine as fake news. They should consider themselves lucky to be posted to a part of the world where “the incessant honking of car horns” was as bad as it gets. He contrasted this with the situation in Dublin where he wrote the Russian diplomats discovered what it was like to be put into “deep freeze” by the locals who are traditionally “a wildly hospital people who have long been experts at giving the coldest of cold shoulders”. Mr Wright picked up on the story about how a local fuel provider refused to deliver diesel to the Orwell Road Mission, needed for heating and hot water. In fact every supplier the embassy approached refused their business. The Irish Mirror also reported that the embassy would have struggled to pay because its Bank of Ireland accounts had been suspended. “The Irish, wordsmiths without peer, clearly remembered the meaning of a word they gave to the world in 1880: boycott,” wrote Wright. He explained the origin and history of the phrase and how one Captain Charles Boycott, an agent for an absentee landlord, evicted tenant farmers who asked for a rent cut after suffering a bad season. Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Irish Land League said anyone who occupied the farm of an evicted tenant should be shunned. Boycott himself could not get anyone to work for him, businesses would not trade with him and even the postman would not deliver his mail. “And so was born the verb “to boycott”, which governments call “sanctions” and fools call “cancel culture”, added Wright. “With Dubliners reviving the art of the boycott this week, the Russian ambassador there was reduced to begging for help from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, which wasn’t commenting.” https://www.smh.com.au/national/as-russian-agents-spread-lies-australianscould-learn-from-the-irish-20220407-p5ablf.html
50 | THE IRISH SCENE
