"By Friday, the McCartneys will be very old news"

BBC/Rallying to Adams vs the inconveient women?

So says Niall O'Dowd, publisher of the Irish Voice newspaper and one-time fixer of the peace process. Lest anyone think he's misquoted, it's from an astonishing article under his own byline in the London Independent.

The McCartney women are in and Gerry Adams is out, out of the White House, out of Ted Kennedy's office and if we are to believe the reports, also out with many ordinary Irish-Americans, except nobody has really bothered to ask them.

Unlike, of course, Niall O'Dowd - who apparently speaks for them. He continues, voice drenched in more contempt than Martin McGuinness' sneering 'be very careful' threat to the McCartneys.

Little matter that the media caravan will trundle out of town the second Saint Patrick's Day is over. For now, it is McCartneys all the time. The women have excellent media presence, have suffered a grievous wrong and their story deserves to be told.
Yet by Friday morning, the McCartneys will be very old news. The attention-deficit disorder that inflicts about 95 per cent of the American media will become evident. If it's Friday it must be Martha Stewart, or Michael Jackson or those midget twins on the flying trapeze. Where's the next grist for our mill?

O'Dowd might be right about Big Media's attention span. But is it just us, or does he seem to be impatient for these inconvienent women to leave the stage?

Now for the big finish, explaining why, despite making sane-sounding noises to the effect of 'wouldn't it be nice if the IRA went out of business', Congressman Pete King(R-NY) is hosting Adams on Capitol Hill, and guests will include Congressmen Jim Walsh(R-NY) and while Ted Kennedy has snubbed Adams, other Massachusetts Democrats Richard Neal, Martin Meehan and William Delahunt will join a few other die-hards who think getting your picture made with Adams is still something to queue for:

Activist Irish-Americans believe they see through this. They know that the McCartney story is important but the fate of the peace process is far more so in the long run. They believe that the same, maligned Gerry Adams is the only one capable of putting it back on track.
He and Martin McGuinness pulled off the IRA ceasefire in 1994, which was a remarkable act, and they have continued to advance the process, often in an agonisingly slow manner for the past decade or so. Now Sinn Fein hase (sic) lost the initiative and needs to win it back if the process is to be saved. After numerous meetings this week, Irish-Americans are more convinced than ever that Gerry Adams can bring this about. That is the real story this Saint Patrick's Day. Not very sexy for news headlines; those boring old Irish Troubles rarely are.

Now, we've been a fan of O'Dowd over the years. On Monday, we highlighted his cloak-and-dagger role in helping broker the 1994 ceasefire. And his longstanding commitment to a just settlement in Northern Ireland. So perhaps it's understandable he wants to protect the Good Friday Agreement he helped set in motion.

But we find O'Dowd's eagerness for the Big Media to move on away from the story of the inconvenient McCartney women, so that he and "activist Irish Americans" (read: Pete King, Jim Walsh, Fr Sean McManus and co) can get on with going back to dealing with Adams at any cost, simply reprehensible. But at least those getting behind the anti-McCartney backlash are showing their cards.

Because if O'Dowd really wanted to keep the McCartneys' story alive and put pressure on to get the IRA to disband, he could. He does, after all, publish a newspaper read by the very Irish American audience the McCartneys are trying to reach.

Fortunately for the McCartneys, the blogosphere's memory and stamina is greater than Big Media's - and, much as it pains us to say it, O'Dowd's.

Tags: ireland, Northern Ireland, irishblogs, Sinn Fein, Robert McCartney, IRA, Irish America