I frankly don’t believe that counts as a ‘personal communication’ or a private one unless email abuse is somehow something we now just hand wave away as some sort of norm of political discourse, which of course is cobblers. Let me be clear if anyone here did likewise to me I would have no hesitation in publicising it.

Now rather than bringing that up in subsequent threads Paddy H focused on the issues. On this thread because the resignation has been quite unusual Paddy H queried aspects but I don’t believe in reading it it went anywhere near as bad, indeed not an iota as bad, as the email mentioned above. Yet he received considerable abuse from others. If his patience snapped that is understandable.

And given that email wasn’t public knowledge at least not from Paddy H there was no response ‘in kind’ and no excuse for same.

As for Paddy H being personally vindictive perhaps you should read the email he received and contrast with his quite measured approach subsequently.

BTW I’ll just add that I stand by my contention that this was not an appropriate forum for posting the email hence as soon as my attention was drawn to it it was immediately removed.

Given Paddy is essentially personally attacking Frank as there is no possible left wing or campaign benefit to be gained from what he is saying I’m not surprised some people have responded in kind. The fact Paddy has now stooped to attempting to publicise private correspondence only reinforces the sense his motives are sectarian or personally vindictive or both. Perhaps you could take this into account too WbS in your efforts to be evenhanded.

I think that his introduction of the email was not appropriate, though partially explicable in the context of his patience finally giving way given the hostility he has been exposed to here and in the original email which for the record was sent to him long before this thread came into existence.

Moreover having read the email that I have removed which PH posted up I have to admit to some sympathy for his position and his patience given that he was subject to an exceedingly hostile and insulting attack in said email, an attack which was by any measure unprovoked by him given that it was a response to a political document that he had issued publicly on an email list.

I’m not a political ally of PH, I’ve never met the man though I’ve been at meetings with him. I have no horse in this race – unless one counts the fact that I’ve worked consistently for the CAHWT across the last year, but as a neutral party I think the inability of some to engage with a critique without resorting to personalised attacks reflects extremely badly on them (I’m not including CMK in that). There are entirely reasonable critiques of Paddy’s position and indeed what he has said here which can and should be made, just as there are the opposite.

At a time when we need to be working through how the CAHWT didn’t work and what lessons to draw in regard to other future campaigns I have to ask again that people in discussions here avoid all personalised attacks. There’s no place for them whatsoever. These are serious issues and they deserve serious engagement.

Again if thats an accurate email and really its going beyond weird if Healy took the time to forge it so I think its probably is then Gallagher’s sense of socialism doesnt extend to anywhere you can drive 80km an hour.

He aint not socialist based on that email.

it makes me think how in this supposed age of ‘big data’ there’s comparatively little effort to compare figures across different sources – for example, how does this decline match broader measures of consumer spending, or declines in previous years. part of it is journalism works on speed and there’s still a fair amount of work in interpreting figures even if you have access to them, and part of it is probably people’s healthy distrust of statistics (lies, damn lies…). I feel with the potential of the internet there ought to be more cohesive efforts brought to bear on the media’s generally partial use of them.