In the whipping up of a persecution complex, marchers were asked to be foolish enough to buy a fresh conspiracy, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

WITH SO many big lies abounding, the small ones perhaps hardly matter. But since one of the lies at the Quinn family rally in Ballyconnell on Sunday evening concerns this column, it cannot go unchecked.

The Quinns’ “war” (Ciara Quinn’s word) to hold on to half a billion euro of public assets involves, as the courts have found, the forgery of documents (by backdating contracts), attempted destruction of records and the giving, under oath, of evidence that could not be true.

But a secondary strategy is the whipping up of a persecution complex. This is a pretty daring idea – to be successful, you need to persuade people that the stripping of public assets is a heroic communal endeavour. Not only do you have to convince them that you’re a victim – you have to convince them that they’re victims too. You have to tell them that they too are being persecuted.

But who’s doing the persecuting? Who’s running the conspiracy? At the previous Quinn rally, the finger was pointed largely at the courts. Perhaps because various Quinn cases are now back before the courts, this was evidently thought not to be the best strategy this time. So there was a need for another sinister plot – run by the media. This is standard stuff – people like Michael Lowry have been playing it for years. But this time, the attack was particularly hysterical and violent. Peter Quinn set the tone by calling journalists “bastards”.

Just one particular bastard was mentioned in the speeches, however – myself. Patricia Gilheaney, who speaks for the pro-Quinn campaign, told those at the rally that I had called them horrible names: “The people who attend these rallies have been called morons, culchies, idiots by the likes of Fintan O’Toole and co.”

I have never, in public or in private, called the people who attend pro-Quinn rallies morons or culchies. I did use the word “idiots” in a column after the first Ballyconnell rally. It is worth giving the full paragraph in which the word appears (on August 7th last): “Very significant numbers of decent, respectable Irish people – not a majority but not a tiny minority either – are in literal contempt of the courts. They really don’t give a damn what the courts find – if those findings come into conflict with their own deeper loyalties. They know that two separate High Court judges – Judge Dunne and Judge Kelly, both used to dealing with very bad stuff – have used language of rare vehemence about the actions of the Quinns in stripping €455 million worth of assets from public ownership: ‘dishonesty and sharp practice’, ‘blatant, dishonest and deceitful’, ‘as far removed from the concept of honour and respectability as it is possible to be’. Some idiots among them truly believe that the judges are part of a giant conspiracy against the Quinns. Most know damn well that this is nonsense, but they simply don’t care.”

Any literate person can grasp that two things are being said here. One is that those supporting the Quinns are in the main “decent, respectable Irish people”. The other is that there are “some idiots among them” who actually believe that Judge Dunne and Judge Kelly are conspiring with others to do unlawful harm to the Quinns.

I make no apology for describing anyone who holds this belief as an idiot. There is not the tiniest shred of evidence for it. It is not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense – deeply subversive of the rule of law on which our democracy is based.

And there clearly were some such idiots in the crowd at the rally in July. Banners held aloft alleged, for example, “Quinn held for ransom”, suggesting that the courts are involved in kidnapping and extortion; “Irish Gov Kidnap Quinn”, suggesting that the court had not merely illegally detained Seán Quinn jnr but done so at the behest of the Government; “State sponsored conspiracy”, which speaks for itself; and “Irish court allows IBRC to sentence Quinn”, meaning that the High Court handed over its powers to a third party and/or conspired with that third party to send a man to jail.

I assume that the Quinns themselves were ashamed of these disgraceful allegations – hence a conspiracy by judges has now been replaced in their demonology by a media conspiracy exemplified by myself. The new conspiracy is as much a sham as the old one. It is based, not only on a false allegation about what was written here, but also on a direct implication that myself and other journalists are, for mercenary reasons, taking instructions from senior civil servants.

Peter Quinn, who is not an idiot and who knows exactly what he is saying, asked the rally, rhetorically, “Could it be that the State’s advertising is now the main source of income to the media business in this country or that the Department of Finance told them not to investigate it?” He knows very well that the answer to both of those questions is “no”, but he presumably hopes that many of his listeners are foolish enough to think otherwise. So who’s taking who for an idiot?