If you have made a few quid writing teenage romance novels the question is, what do you do with the profits? The Irish novelist Sally Rooney has decided to fund terrorism. Fair enough you might say but it does raise a few interesting questions.
Ms Rooney was never like her fellow writer Carrie Bradshaw (who also wrote about sex and relationships) and spent all her money on Manolo Blahniks, the expensive shoes.
I just love that scene in Sex and the City where Miranda explains that the reason why Carrie cannot afford a $40k deposit to keep her apartment is because she owns 100 pairs of Manolo Blahniks at $400 a pop. Don’t worry though, Carrie was given a financial bailout by Charlotte who was given a bail out of her own. But I digress.
No, Ms Rooney’s house is unlikely to be stuffed full of Manolo Blahniks nor like J.K. Rowling will she fund various ‘gender critical’ causes. It’s the old terrorism for Ms Rooney.
The UK government has decided in its wisdom to make the group Palestine Action a proscribed terrorist group. This has caused a bit of a brouhaha. I remain neutral on the necessity of this action but I suspect it will generate more work for the lawyers than anything else.
At least 500 people were arrested in protests on the weekend of August 9th in support of Palestine Action and although all these elderly protesters will not get the benefit of the army of KCs like the Kneecap singer has, there will be plenty of lawyers lining up to take their case. As I said before, and Lord knows I’ll say it again, the left look after their own.
Whether Ms Rooney will need a few KCs of her own in the future is yet to be seen. She has decided to continue funding the new terror organisation and unlike most funders of terrorism has taken to a national newspaper the Irish Times to tell us all.
I’d like to know just how this funding is going to happen. It is not as simple as just hitting the donate button on the Palestine Action website. Their website now informs me helpfully that they are a proscribed organisation that can’t be viewed in the UK and offers some alternative that looks a bit dodgy. Well I’m in Ireland and I still can’t view them, which is a free speech outrage.
Is Ms Rooney going to carry out a simple bank transfer via AIB or Bank of Ireland? Although given her politics it might be the Castlebar branch of the Credit Union? If so, what is the bank charge on ‘funding terrorism?’ Will she get a lot of phone calls and general hassle from the bank because I can tell you if she gets less hassle than my husband did when trying to sort out our mortgage with AIB when we moved to Ireland I will not be happy.
On that note, I can assure readers that mundane expenses like the mortgage is what my small share of your Gript subscriptions get spent on. Boring things like the mortgage to put a roof over the heads of myself, husband and 4 children. The big shop from Dunnes and the family holiday. Now my husband funds 99% of this but now and again I chip in.
I haven’t found a terrorist organisation I want to fund yet. I despise the IRA and neither al-Qaeda nor Islamic State do it for me. But there are new ones coming online all the time now and if I do decide to use my Substack fees to fund them, like Sally Rooney, I’ll announce it to all the world.
There is simply no point in funding boring non-terrorist groups like charities anymore. The St Vincent de Paul who help the hard up here in Ireland are not edgy enough. Or even Medecins Sans Frontieres who are working in Gaza and other conflict zones are not good enough either.
This does remind me that I have been a bit crappy on my own charitable giving, even though it is a Christian virtue, so I’ll sort that out today. Maybe a women’s refuge. And it will be a shamefully small amount. Anyway, where was I?
Palestine Action however don’t do the old people or the homeless people or even the sick kids in Gaza. As Ms Rooney explains, “since its foundation in 2020, Palestine Action has primarily organised direct-action protests against weapons manufacturers: defacing buildings, breaking windows and occupying factories. This summer, as the UK continued to offer material and diplomatic support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, activists broke into an RAF airbase and used spray-paint to vandalise two aircraft.” In other words and putting their case at its highest PA aim to directly disrupt the ‘Israeli war machine’ and alleged genocide in Gaza. In addition again in Ms Rooney’s words, “Palestine Action, proscribed under the same law, is responsible for zero deaths and has never advocated the use of violence against any human being.”
Explaining her position Ms Rooney says, “I want to be clear that I intend to use these proceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can. If the British state considers this “terrorism”, then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith and the BBC.” Crikey, the BBC have a bad summer and WH Smith now must deal with this as well as putting the 3 for 2 stickers on all the books. They just can’t get a minute.
But as I said before I want to know the bank charge any Irish banks have for the old ‘transferring funds to terrorist organisations.’ When I transfer money it asks me what it is for, paying an invoice or a friend etc, and funding terrorism is not an option. So that needs to be updated on the AIB app pronto.
Also and I hate to be picky but just why is Ms Rooney outsourcing her direct action/terrorism activities? I mean if we are talking genocide here then why isn’t she hopping on a plane to Gatwick and getting her bottom to the nearest RAF base and smashing up a few planes herself? She’d want to be careful though to distinguish between the hardware that was aiding the Israelis and those that were flying in 20,000 Afghans to the tune of £7 billion, a secret scheme that the UK government sought to suppress with an unprecedented super – injunction. If Ms Rooney gets her planes mixed up then she could quickly become a Right Wing Thug. It can be hard to keep up.
If Ms Rooney doesn’t fancy flying because of climate change I am sure there are some military bases in Northern Ireland she could take a sledge hammer to. But I understand also that there are time constraints, schedule clashes and other duties to attend to. Those lengthy romance novels don’t write themselves you know.
Female writers these days are an interesting bunch. JK Rowling wrote about wizards and uses the proceeds for her pet projects. Rooney writes about Normal People and funds terrorism. It was Harriet Beecher Stowe however who wrote the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin about slavery, the abomination she was so outraged about.
When President Abraham Lincoln meet Harriet Beecher Stowe he said “so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” And Harriet Beecher Stowe did it all without a banking app or Twitter. That’s direct action right there.