The mainstream media in Ireland has been busy memory holing the story of Father Ted creator Graham Linehan getting arrested by the British police for sending some tweets the militant trans activists did not approve of.
Graham Linehan is the very well-known creator of the hilarious Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd. Chances are you know that. But much more importantly: He is also an Irish citizen.
Linehan was collared by the Old Bill when he arrived in Heathrow airport on Monday and by collared I mean arrested by five armed British police officers. They can be a pretty intimidating bunch these days. You are not talking about the old style Bobbies in their classic uniforms but the very scary, close to military – styled and armed British police officers you see everywhere these days. There they are, if not prowling the streets to prevent actual crimes, but certainly prowling the internet and Twitter to check if someone has Tweeted something the State, Two Tier Keir, the Home Office or the Transgender/LGBT militants don’t like.
Sure enough, Linehan was on the radar. Linehan explains in his own Substack:
“The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up.”
Mr Linehan was taken to Heathrow police station, detained for some hours, interviewed and then ended up in A&E due to high blood pressure. I think this is the critical observation: “The damage Stonewall has done to the UK police force will take years to mend.” It is not just Stonewall that has captured the UK police force. It is the diversity is our strength crowd, the pro- Hamas crowd and the LGBTY crowd. The rot goes deep.
Graham Linehan is an Irish citizen so I assumed this might be just a teensy – weensy bit of interest to the Irish media. No, it was not. Of course it wasn’t. You’d be a fool ever to imagine that it would be. Expecting fairness from these people is like expecting algebra from a kitten. They don’t know how.
I couldn’t find it at all on the national broadcaster website RTE and I had to hunt it down on the Irish Times. It is a good bit down in the Irish Independent site but below a story where a mother imagines her ‘trans child’ might be subject to abuse. They’re never not pushing “the message”, our journalists. That was an editorial choice, like every other one. You are not supposed to care about the man getting locked up for having an opinion, you are supposed to care about trans rights. It is not reporting, but propaganda and it is relentless. If you do not abide by the message, you get “The Treatment“. And boy is Linehan getting the treatment.
As Wednesday morning rolled on, a long list of British politicians came to Mr Linehan’s defence. The first was House of Lords member and head of the Free Speech Union Toby Young who is representing Mr Linehan. Then you had your senior Tory Sir James Cleverly who said the arrest looked like a “real overreaction” to what was “self-evidently a joke.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is expected to raise the case at a House Judiciary Committee in the US on free speech on Wednesday.
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick MP described the incident as “a complete waste of police time”, adding: “We desperately need to end this nonsense and go after actual criminals.” Even the governing Labour party was back pedaling hard, Wes Streeting MP doing his best to try to explain that the UK wasn’t turning into an authoritarian state.
Only the new leader of the Green party, who isn’t worth naming, thought the arrest was a good idea.
And what of Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin TD and Simon Harris TD who cannot shut up about the goings on in other countries? Silence. It is not known if Irish citizen Mr. Linehan received any consular assistance from the Irish Embassy in London, but it certainly wasn’t announced with pride if it did happen.
Nor will there be opinion piece after opinion piece in the Irish Times telling us what a warrior Mr. Linehan is for taking on the mighty British establishment. That is because he and his views are not fashionable or agreeable to the mainstream in the Irish media.
If it was Kneecap or Sally Rooney who was arrested by 5 armed coopers at Heathrow airport the fallout in Ireland would be scary. I can only imagine it now – wall – to wall coverage of how wrong it was, how this was the evil British Empire coming to silence the mighty Fenian warriors who were speaking truth to power.
There was even a piece in the Irish Times this week that tried to argue with a straight face that the British establishment were trying to silence the likes of Rooney and Kneecap.
Both Kneecap and Rooney have been given, quite literally in the case of Kneecap, actual platforms to say whatever the crazy things they need to say in the UK. Kneecap played Glastonbury (the headline festival in the UK) and Brockwell park recently (Brockwell park was very close to me in my days there, I once spent 10 hours, ten, in the playground). This is despite one member being on a terrorism charge. Don’t worry though, I am pretty sure his six lawyers will get him off that summary only offence.
Rooney’s books Normal People and Conversations with Friends were both made into series by the National Broadcaster the BBC. I assume they are still available on its platform BBC iPlayer.
This is the Irish media landscape 2025. Rank with hypocrisy, cowards, ruthless enforcers of group think by their own admission, who use George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 as a guidebook not a warning. Thankfully the internet exists and we are watching them.
But don’t ever imagine that they’ll change.