It’s time to stop buying the Hollywood version of the world

MY mother and father were salt of the earth types, both reared on remote hillside farms in rural Ireland at a time when educational opportunities were limited, money was tight and emigration was an everyday reality.

That background shaped their lives, made them who they were. And, of course, they were Catholic to the core.

I grew up in a house where in childhood we said the rosary every night, went to confessions every week, and on Sunday not only did we go to Mass but in the evening at 6pm we used to go to Benediction.

All this shaped us to see the world through a narrow prism of good and bad. It was also the era where questioning the authority of ‘your betters’ was frowned upon.

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You don’t need Einstein to work out that this tunnel vision of life was way, way too simplistic. We were so naïve, we almost literally bought the Hollywood version of the world, not the real one.

Looking back on it now, you just have to ask yourself why, to use a simple example, as children we ended up playing cowboys and Indians when neither cowboys nor Indians had any connection with Ireland or its history.

Why weren’t we playing hurling like Setanta and his famous hound? Or thinking we were Michael Collins fighting the Black and Tans?

Why did we never think to query the narrative that the Indians were evil savages and that John Wayne was always the good guy?

I remember too as a wee boy loving Randolph Scott. He came across as the gruff, macho man who always did the right thing.

And what about the incredibly good-looking Rock Hudson, the man every young girl I knew just adored. He was the epitome of ‘tall, dark and handsome’.

Here’s the thing, both were gay. No big deal for sure, but not exactly what it said on the tin, was it?

And, in politics, we were sold more than one dummy on the field of play.

Most of the press coverage I read back in the day of US President John F Kennedy and British PM Harold Wilson was that they were great family men who were paragons of virtue.

In our house back in the day, there was a triptych of Jesus, the Pope and President Kennedy. He was sort of venerated as being an archetypal role-model for young lads like us.

According to the PR at the time, Kennedy was the all-American good guy, loving husband, father, a man who never went anywhere without his rosary beads.

What we never heard was that he had numerous sexual encounters, not least a dodgy long-running affair with the greatest sex symbol of the age, Marilyn Monroe.

And as for ‘Uncle Harold’, who was PM in the 1960s/early ’70s, he was, by all accounts, quite the ladies’ man behind his avuncular pipe-smoking image.

He had at least two long-running affairs, and went to his grave without the public ever getting a whiff of the scandal.

I got a rude awakening from this naïve belief system when I joined the cynical world of journalism.

Some things I had thought black were white, some things I thought white were black, and there was a hell of a lot of grey everywhere else.

For instance, who knew that the somewhat saintly John Hume could be really grumpy on occasions? Or that the ‘terror warlord’ Martin McGuinness wrote poetry?

Or that Bishop Edward Daly was a really shy man? Or that Brian Friel hated, really hated, getting his photograph taken?

And that’s only the examples I can use here without fear of libel.

The word manipulation came to mind while watching American Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security conference at the weekend.

Unlike a previous occasion where he lambasted Europe, this time Rubio was all sweetness and light. In honeyed words, he said America was ‘a child of Europe’ and that ‘we belong together’, before going on to sell full-on American fascism 101.

What he actually said can be distilled to a few core elements – Europe should abandon its woke climate policies, close its borders, embrace Christianity harder, spend more on defence, and become a right-wing, authoritarian community of nations, just like the USA under Donald Trump.

And he got a standing ovation from those in the room.

America has, according to various estimates, 500 million guns in private hands. It’s primarily thanks to that statistic alone that there were 408 mass shootings in the US in 2025.

I checked with ChatGPT and could only find evidence of ‘between 2 and 5’ in Europe.

Currently ICE agents, with neither warrants nor accountability, are allowed to snatch people off the streets and put then on rendition flights to hell-hole prisons in places like El Salvador. You have probably seen videos of the two people they have shot in public.

America has by far the biggest prisoner population in the western world.

Life expectancy in Europe is way ahead of the US.

American health care is amongst the most expensive in the world, and if you don’t have health insurance, forget it.

Workers in the US work longer hours, have fewer holidays and fewer job protections.

And as for Rubio’s so-called freedom of speech criticism of Europe, it’s risible.

Curtailing American tech giants from getting rich selling porn or parroting uncensored hate speech is not an attack on free speech but protections for civilised societies.

Does anyone with a brain seriously believe Rubio’s vision is the way to go?

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