Myers: fanciful frolics and fanciful facts

Although he has found a new home at the Irish Independent, Kevin Myers' output is largely unchanged from his days in the Irish Times. Roughly half of his columns fall under the category of "fanciful frolics". These pieces are intended to be humourous, although the humour is spoiled by Myers' relentless desire to show off his classical education and his obsession with men in uniform and rugby scrums.

The rest of Myers' output covers the standard themes of the right-wing polemicist: standing up for the powerful and standing up to the marginalised. In his first month at the Independent, Myers has gone through the repertoire of marginal groups to attack: gays, Travellers, Republicans, immigrants and cash-digging women. His impassioned plea against gay marriage, published on 18 May, came complete with the traditional "decent people quailing in abject horror". The following day saw a call for the suppression of Traveller culture, naturally enough for the good of the children.

Myers' lax approach to research and fact-checking has also survived the move. His first column in the Independent was a whimsical piece in which he awoke from a 26-year slumber (his period of service for the Irish Times). In describing the changes to the city, Myers noted that "someone has completely rebuilt Mountjoy Square" while "horrible old Gardiner Street appears to have been transformed into a boulevard in the 17th arrondisement". Amazingly, he picked two streets which have not been substantially regenerated in recent years. Mountjoy Square is still entirely Georgian and retains some of the few derelict buildings left in central Dublin, while the best that can be said about Gardiner Street is that some of the tenements have been rebuilt. It would seem his research didn't stretch to visiting the northside.

While such woeful inaccuracies are fairly harmless when dealing with fanciful frolics, they are much more insidious in his polemics against marginalised groups. His article of 30 May, entitled "Time to stem this flow of immigrants, before it's too late", opened with a lofty call for serious debate and accuracy.

He emphasised the crucial role of the media in facilitating this debate: "Language is the very thing that we in the media must get right... we should not spread falsehoods." Then he ignored these words and embarked on a typically inaccurate polemic.

The phrase "asylum seekers" was placed within quotes, indicating Myers' suspicion of the term. He also alluded to the "self-confessed Taliban rapist and torturer" who was among the Afghan hunger-strikers. This is untrue on a number of levels. None of the men made any such confession – the Sunday Independent made the claim. Furthermore, the original claim was that one of the men was a "rapist and murderer" – no mention of him being a torturer and Taliban member.

It is when Myers describes those who disagree with him that his inaccuracies are most unrestrained. He described a "self-appointed", "professional anti-racism" lobby who believe that "any outsider who says he is oppressed is ipso facto oppressed" and that "all immigration is ipso facto good for us" and that anybody who even questions these propositions is "ipso facto a racist". A review of media reporting of the Afghan hunger strike reveals a grand total of zero expressions of these opinions, nor are there any groups who expound them. If they exist, they're keeping an awfully low profile. p