PRAISE CONTINUES FOR FR. MC MANUS’ MEMOIRS

Posted By: June 28, 2014

By: Bryan T. McMahon,publisher, The Ponchatoula Times    Article published in The Ponchatoula Times and in The Independence Times

 

Date: June 27, 2014 at 2:56:57 PM EDT

Fr. Sean McManus an equal opportunity flail when it comes to international injustice. “My American Struggle for Justice in Northern Ireland . . . and the Holy Land,” 400 pages, Irish National Caucus Publications, 2013. By BRYAN T. McMAHON

That nettlesome (to the English, and now to the Israelis) Irish Catholic priest Fr. Sean Mc Manus, a native of County Fermanagh in the Irish province of Ulster, has released this must-read tome for anyone interested in the long struggle for full Irish freedom. The book documents the priest’s successful struggle to incorporate the Mac Bride Principles (business ethics for American companies doing business in the north of Ireland) into U.S. law.

This is not a work of fiction, though the herculean task Fr. Mc Manus set for himself and his Irish National Caucus lobbying effort on Capital Hill would appear to qualify as such. At its essence, the Mac Bride Principles (named for Irish Nobel laureate Sean Mac Bride) embody a distinctly American approach to doing business in an ethical manner, especially when dealing with regimes who rely on systematic discrimination to keep their own people down, or at least that population the regime seeks to bully.

In Northern Ireland (the name of the 6-county gerrymandered entity that early in the last century cut out three Ulster counties to achieve a pro-England majority), that meant American businesses refusing to turn a blind eye to employment practices meant to demean and impoverish the Catholic working population, and certainly to not participate in the English discrimination against the Irish.

In terms of international trade, Fr. Mc Manus’ organization is credited with cutting off U.S. arms shipments to the English-backed paramilitary groups known for atrocities against the Catholic population in the north of Ireland. His was the first pro-Irish lobbying group to offset the entrenched English propaganda machine in our nation’s capital.

As you might imagine, Fr. Mc Manus is in no danger of being knighted by the English queen. Noting the similarities between an English-partitioned Ireland and an English-defined Palestine, bringing with it the same pattern of discrimination against the native population, Fr. Mc Manus now advances his Holy Land Principles, essentially that “American principles should follow American investment.” Application of that observation is not dealt with until the very end of the book, leaving the thoughtful reader to look forward to the naturalized American clergyman’s next book on the subject.