Strange Omission From Times

“GOOD News from Northern Ireland” was the title of The New York Times editorial last Saturday about developments in the peace process.There was a very curious omission in the piece, however.

The relevant paragraph reads as follows“An impressive array of political leaders — Irish, British, Roman Catholic and Protestant — have helped Northern Ireland get this far. These include Mr. Blair and Mr. Ahern, who did much of the coaxing, and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, who persuaded the IRA to give up its arms, its terror and its organized criminal activities.”

Amazing, there was no mention all of the role of Americans in helping “Northern Ireland get this far.” No mention of President Bill Clinton, for instance, without whom none of this could have happened.

No praise either for Senator George Mitchell, who single-handedly saved the process in the run up to the Belfast Agreement in 1998.

Also no mention of Bush’s first envoy to Northern Ireland, Richard Haass, or New York businessman Bill Flynn, who has played a huge behind-the-scenes role.

Also excluded from the Times were Gerry Lynch and Kathleen O’Toole, members of the Patten Commission on policing who created the framework for the most extraordinary revolution in policing in any state in modern times.

Seems like The New York Times has forgotten to mention that, of all the foreign policy challenges the U.S. has faced over the past decade and a half, the role this country played in the settling of Northern Ireland has been perhaps the most obvious success. Strange that very relevant fact did not merit mention.

Fitzgerald for Clare

FOR most of the past year Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the Valerie Plame CIA leak, has been one of the most sought after figures in American life.

Journalists door-stepped him for months, but the prosecutor refused to grant any media availability or to speak publicly about the case he was pursuing until he was ready to do so.

Fitzgerald’s investigation of the leaked information that Plame, wife of Joe Wilson, an arch critic of the war in Iraq, was a CIA operative reached into the highest levels of the White House and resulted in the resignation of Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby currently faces charges in relation to an alleged cover up of the leak.

Fitzgerald has at last surfaced publicly, but hardly in the forum that you might think. It is not Meet the Press or Face the Nation, or even an exclusive interview with The New York Times.

Rather, he will accept the accolade of Clareman of the Year at the Co. Clare Association of New York’s annual dinner in New Hyde Park, Long Island, later this month.

Fitzgerald is described as “a native New Yorker and descendant of Kilmaley and Feakle, Co. Clare,” which is obviously how he would like to be characterized.

The invite also does mention that he is a “distinguished honoree, as well as the “United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.”

It will be intriguing to see what Fitzgerald talks about when he finally does speak. His parents emigrated to New York and he is the son of a building superintendent. His rise to fame has not meant he has lost contact with his roots, obviously.

The Origins Of Jazz

WHERE did the word Jazz come from? It appears there is now a major dispute between linguistic scholars as to the origins of the word, or so this column has been informed.

On one hand are the Africanists, who claim it came from an African word that found its way into English at the beginning of the last century to describe the music that African Americans were playing.

While that may be the politically correct version, the facts are that there is no reliable linguistic evidence whatsoever to bear out that tale. Indeed, black musicians at the time almost always referred to the music as “ragtime.”

On the other hand, the notion that the word came from Gaelic is actually well documented. The word first appeared in a San Francisco newspaper in 1913 used to describe the fact that the local San Francisco Seals baseball team had lost their “jazz,” meaning their spirit and winning ways.

Turns out the writer who coined the word and used it first was an Irish American kid from an Irish neighborhood in San Francisco.

The 1920 census denoted that the particular neighborhood he hailed from had a very high percentage of native Irish speakers.

Among them the word “teas,” pronounced “teeass,” meaning heat, was widely used. It appears the reporter phonetically heard the word jazz and started using it.

Incidentally, the word “kid” apparently came form that same Irish neighborhood from the Gaelic term “cuid,” pronounced quid, meaning part of or son of.

You never know what you will find out in this job!

Irish Team inThe Playoffs

AS we are on the topic of baseball and it’s almost World Series time – quick, name the only Irish team left in the playoffs?

No, it is not the Mets or the Tigers or the Cardinals. It is in fact the Oakland A’s, who proudly wear the green and gold of Ireland on their uniform.

Their original owner, one Charlie Finlay, was especially proud of his Irish heritage and insisted that his team don the colors of Ireland when they took the field.

So if you are not a Mets, Tigers or Cardinals fan, root, root, root for the green team on this occasion.