My short statement in defence of Solicitor Peter Madden after Mairia Cahill’s offensive and insinuating attack on him today on Twitter
John and Geraldine Finucane with solicitor Peter Madden (r)
I don’t follow Mairia Cahill on twitter. I don’t regularly check to see or hear what she has to say. I hardly need to, given that any statement she makes is given blanket and largely uncritical coverage by a willing Irish media. Make of that fact what you will dear readers.
However, my attention was drawn to Mairia Cahill’s tweet below, which I view as an outrageous and dangerous slur on Peter Madden - a person for whom I have great respect.
There can be no doubting the purpose of the above tweet. It raises the suggestion that this veteran solicitor and human rights lawyer is receiving payment from a dubious source for his work in defending clients (subsequently declared innocent) affected by the Mairia Cahill case – more than likely (people will adduce) from the Provisional IRA.
This is exactly the same type of 'whispering campaign' allegation that fed into the assassination of Peter’s legal partner Pat Finucane and the above insult is therefore doubly reprehensible, not least from a person who comes from an Irish republican background and must be aware of the possible consequences of such language.
I have known Peter Madden for over twenty years and whilst I cannot say we are close personal friends, I have always found him to be a decent, erudite and considerate man. About two years after Pat Finucane’s murder in February 1989, we began to play five a side football together and I always marvelled at his kind manner and belief in the goodness of people after what had happened in his life so recently.
With the full echo chamber of a hypocritical media and politicians who, for their own tactical reasons, have blithely ignored her recent past as a dissident republican, Mairia Cahill has complained relentlessly about Kangaroo Courts, yet here she is casting out a scurrilous assertion, a lazy calumny, safe in the knowledge that the likes of RTÉ or the Irish Times will not be challenging her on it anytime soon.
It is my fervent hope that after Mairia Cahill’s crossing of the Rubicon of decency with the above slander, some person who truly cares for this troubled woman will take her to one side and manage to persuade her to withdraw from the public fray. For in the long term, with baseless, immoderate and high-wire personal attacks like this on a really decent man, she does her own cause no good whatsoever.
This offensive tweet should be deleted forthwith.
Paul Larkin
Gaoth Dobhair
Mí na Samhna 2014