It’s an unusual thing, at the best of times, to find oneself being denounced as some sort of racist crypto-paedophile. It’s more unusual still, when you find out about it while in the middle the kitchen aisle at Super Valu, trying to decipher your wife’s shopping list. (Since when is “extra strong tin foil” a thing?)
So, when the phone vibrates in your back pocket, and it’s a text message from a journalist asking if I have seen the “mad shit Paddy Cosgrave is posting about you” (direct quote), it’s a little surreal.
Here it is, for the sake of transparency. This is just tweet one of a thread, so be sure to read the whole thing for a full accounting of my alleged shame.
Below are a dozen of @john_mcguirk’s tweets that exude racism, misogyny & homophobia. But first are his odd tweets about teenage girls. The Irish media’s love affair with John McGuirk, in particular those in the @IrishTimes and @rte, is in my view worrisome pic.twitter.com/I3BdfEAvB9
— Paddy Cosgrave (@paddycosgrave) December 23, 2021
We’ll address the content of those historic tweets in a second, but first, a word on Mr. Cosgrave. Readers have no reason to know this, but Paddy and I know each other reasonably well, or at least, used to. Twenty years ago, in 2002, 3, and 4, we moved in the same social circle in Trinity College Dublin. And, though we were never friends, we were, so far as my memory of it goes anyway, broadly friendly. Indeed, my memory is that I admired Paddy greatly: He had, and presumably retains, incredible talent as a networker and organiser. He is one of those people who managed to be friendly to, and well-regarded by, everyone. His subsequent success with the Web Summit was no surprise: Paddy had a gift for making people feel wanted, and needed, and valuable, and a rare talent for bringing people together. It was always going to be, for him, the web summit, or a spectacular career in politics or showbusiness.
But that was twenty years ago, and people change over time. Sometimes slowly; Sometimes, dramatically. It is fair to say that both Paddy Cosgrave, and I, are very different people today. He appears to have lost that talent for making people feel valued, and is now being sued by an array of former business partners, accused, amongst other things, of bullying, oppressing fellow shareholders, and failing to observe norms of corporate governance.
In recent years, Paddy has reinvented himself as the bane of official Ireland, a sort of Irish Bruce Wayne who runs a business by day, and shreds the corrupt villains ruling Ireland by night. That crusade, in the last year, has seen him sued by at least one person close to Leo Varadkar, and others, for making defamatory claims. He also got himself into significant hot water for claiming that four nurses had died, in Ireland, in March 2020. No such thing had happened.
His attack on me, this morning, follows in that pattern. And it does not come without provocation. In 2019, Gript published a piece about Paddy’s close associate, Chay Bowes. Mr. Bowes, with Paddy’s encouragement, is suing us for defamation. The case has not yet been heard, and our lawyers would kill me if I went into the details here, but suffice to say, we are confident that we will prevail. And suffice it to say, Paddy’s assault on my good name came within days of a new development in that case.
That, I suspect, is the reason why my Christmas shopping was, this morning, so oddly disturbed.
So, let’s get into the accusations Paddy has levelled at me. He says that my tweets, all dating to 2010-2013, about teenage girls are “odd”. And to be fair, when you look at them in the way he has posted them, they are. Some of them are unnecessarily pass-remarkable. Was it necessary to remark about the skirt length of attendees at a teenage disco in Dundrum? No, on reflection, it was not. But it was also not, in any way, an attempt to oogle the attendees. Precisely the opposite, in fact: I was saying that it did not to me seem healthy to have teenage girls attending teenage events dressed in a hyper-sexualised way. Every tweet about a “teenage girl” falls into that same category. The “Tulisa” one below, for example, is actually a comment about how many grown men were seeking out pornographic video involving a teenager. It is not an endorsement of same, which is how it is presented by Paddy.
Paddy also accuses me of racism over the use of the term “blacks”. He does that here:
Newsflash: John McGuirk shares more “views” pic.twitter.com/ayybTzpA2S
— Paddy Cosgrave (@paddycosgrave) December 23, 2021
Let’s note that three of these tweets are not my own views at all, but highlighting a story that was in the news in 2012: Then, Ron Paul, the long term US Congressman, was running for the Republican Nomination. There was a scandal at the time about his views about black people. The tweets in question are all quotes from Ron Paul:
Ron Paul is bristling over a new round of questions over a newsletter he published in the 1980s and 90s espousing radical fringe views, at one point walking out of an interview on Wednesday.
Paul has claimed that the newsletter, which compared African Americans to zoo animals, warned of a coming race war, and generally promoted racist, anti-semitic, and fringe militia views, was written by other authors and that he was unaware of its content — even passages written from his perspective. He has not offered up any of the names of the six to eight writers he said were responsible for writing the incendiary material, however, and reporters are pressing him for more details.
I was tweeting those things not because I approved of Ron Paul, but because I disapproved. Paddy is not stupid, and knows this. He is simply hoping that others do not.
The remainder are tweets from conversations, or threads, largely taken out of context.
There are some, though, which I genuinely regret. The tweet about the Priesthood – though, for a while, I was considering the priesthood, circa 2010 – is, on reflection, a very, very, ugly one. It was, no doubt, intended as a joke at the time, but still, I can only apologise for it.
The thing about social media, when you’ve been on it for as long as I have, is that it is as much a record of shifting views as you grow older than it is anything else. When these tweets were sent, I was between the ages of 24 and 28. I am now 38. Lots of things have happened in the decade in between: I came close to personal bankruptcy, and recovered. I got married. I bought a house. I lost loved ones.
Growing up is not a singular process, which magically happens between the age of 17 and 18. It is a permanent process. No doubt, there are things I will write in 2022 which will embarrass me, if I am still around, in 2032. That’s the nature of recording your views, and thoughts.
Social media is a very valuable thing. At the time these tweets were written, it was also a much more open, engaging, safe space. That was before the era where every single thought had to be run through a “will this get me cancelled” filter. It was perfectly possible to post whatever nonsense was in your brain on a given day, and joke about it.
That is no longer the case. In many ways, that is regrettable.
But the objective here, from Paddy, is not to improve society. It is to personally shame me, and make people think that I am some sort of deviant. Few of those sharing those tweets are, really, very offended by them. They’re just excited that the baddy – in this case, me – is getting some comeuppance.
That’s the nature of the world as it is today. I won’t lose much sleep over it, and nor should anybody else. Merry Christmas, Paddy. It’s sad that it’s come to this.