A paper for all Ireland HISTORY: The desire to make Ireland a better place was one of the ambitions of the newspaper's founder FINTAN O'TOOLE

NEXT TO THE LONG editorial that announced the arrival of a new Irish newspaper on Tuesday, March 29th, 1859, was an ad for "Irish bog oak ornaments patronised by the Queen". The advertiser judged the tone of the fledgling Irish Times rather well.

The queen's patronage represented one side of its identity. It was, and remained for the first half of its existence, a paper for what the editorial called "Irishmen loyal to the British connexion". Yet it also saw itself as a distinctively Irish institution. If it could hardly claim to be as racy of the soil as ancient bog oak, its self-image was always inseparable from a sense of Irishness. What its founders could scarcely have imagined, however, is that this second side of the paper's identity would transcend and outlast the first. The Irish Times has lasted for 150 years because it turned out to be a more straightforwardly Irish institution than almost anyone connected with its establishment ever intended.

From the beginning, The Irish Times was a somewhat paradoxical enterprise – a newspaper for a country that did not really exist. Journalism is immediate, urgent and engaged. Its perspective is not Olympian. It reflects and reports on the conflicts and passions, the hopes and terrors, of its times. And the times of The Irish Times have been turbulent. They encompass the bloodiest conflicts in human history, the rise of mass democratic politics and the fall of empires, extreme and violent clashes of ideology, and the massive psychological and social disruptions of industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation, new technologies and globalisation.

More intimately, they span the often violent struggles for the control of the land of Ireland, the creation of an independent state and the maintenance of a continuing "British connexion". Much that is mundane, and much that is peaceful and pleasant has flowed through the pages of the paper, but blood and passion have never been far from the headlines.

Yet – and this is the paradox – the ideal that was laid down for the paper by its founder Lawrence Knox, was deliberately dispassionate. Knox told his first readers that "silly Radicalism", "dense Toryism", and every other shade of party opinion already had their representations in the Irish press. Given the names of the supporters of any particular proposal, he claimed, the reception it would receive in any of the existing newspapers would be entirely predictable. This was "the natural result of the intense divisions that have hitherto characterised our social state".

That era of division was, he imagined, drawing to a close. A new kind of Irish person was arising, indifferent to class, creed or party politics. This group would judge every issue on its merits, shun party loyalties, respect religious differences, and be motivated solely by the desire to make Ireland a better place. It was implicitly male and obviously drawn from the middle and upper classes, though it might eventually include "the more intelligent and well-conditioned portion of the working classes". All it needed in order to grow further was "an adequate organ in the metropolitan Press". That organ was, of course, the new Irish Times.

IN SOME RESPECTS, this was a heroic exercise in denial. If The Irish Times had depended on the growth of a class of dispassionate patriots, immune from sectarian and political prejudices, it would hardly have survived a year, never mind a century and a half. Knox's faith that the era of Ireland's "intense divisions" was drawing to a close was profoundly mistaken. The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in the US within a month of the first issue of The Irish Times. The Land Wars, the Fenian bombing campaign in England, the rise and bitter fall of Parnell, and the vetoing of the second Home Rule Bill all lay ahead, even in what remained of the 19th century.

Indeed, the foundation of The Irish Times was itself evidence of an increasingly open contest for public opinion. With the establishment of The Nation in 1842, and the conversion of the Freeman's Journal to the cause of parliamentary nationalism, the Catholic middle class had acquired its own journalistic voices. However fervently Knox may have desired his paper to remain above the sectarian fray and appeal to "the most independent, intelligent and truly progressive" sections of society, the reality was that a unionist newspaper could never really avoid being a Protestant one. The Irish Times became, in effect, an example of the virtues preached in its own leading articles, a solid, practical achievement by Protestants who, instead of standing aloof, threw themselves into the daily life of Ireland.

To some extent, therefore, The Irish Times survived, not because of the ideals of its founder, but in spite of them. In that first editorial, after setting out his broader aspirations, Knox summed up the task at hand as being the creation of "a first rate Irish newspaper". By and large, it was the fulfilment of this rather simpler desire that determined the paper's endurance.

Before it could be anything else – a rallying point for a new class of independent-minded patriots, or a marker of southern Unionist identity – The Irish Times had to be a newspaper. From early on, it developed a capacity to separate reportage from editorial opinion.

It employed journalists who were not unionists – its most important early foreign correspondent, William O'Donovan, was an active Fenian. It produced "the largest daily paper ever published in Ireland" (all of 12 pages) to cover the conference of Isaac Butt's Home Rule Association in November 1873. While the Land Leaguers often called it The Liarish Times because of its political stance, the paper gave detailed coverage to their meetings and programme. While it was editorially appalled by the 1916 Rising, it also produced by far the fullest reportage of the event. It was not for nothing that, by 1914, the Catholic Bulletin could complain about this Protestant paper being "patronised by certain indifferent Catholics".

This double culture reflected a class division within the paper's staff. It was a patrician institution: when Sir John Arnott took control after Knox's early death in 1873, his speech to staff included a promise to provide them with "neat and comfortable houses" at affordable rents. But, while the editorial line was the preserve of those who came from within the Protestant professional and upper middle classes, this was never true of either the business side of the house or of its reporting staff.

John J. Simington, one of the founding directors of The Irish Times Limited in 1900 and the long-standing general manager of the company, was a Catholic, educated by the Christian Brothers. There were even Irish Times employees among the rebels in 1916: a clerk, Edward Keegan, wounded in the fighting at the South Dublin Union, was subsequently dismissed for "disloyalty".

The news reporters were mostly drawn from the ranks of the educated working class, and their job had neither glamour nor social standing. As late as the 1930s, Lionel Fleming, an Irish Times reporter himself, believed the common assumption to be "that reporters are all seedy and rather unscrupulous men, with a taste for drink, an ignorance of grammar, and a capacity for never getting the facts quite right". Brian Inglis, who came from an impeccably "West British" background felt, on joining The Irish Times newsroom in the late 1930s, as if he were being sent to "a new school with menacing lower-class boys of the kind that at Shrewsbury we would have called oicks".

It was the work of these oicks, and of the commercial staff that built a resilient business, that allowed The Irish Times to function within Irish society while remaining at an angle to it. Yet that angularity was not a simple matter of political and social anachronism. Even in its heyday as the semi-official organ of establishment (which is to say, Protestant and unionist) opinion, The Irish Times could not be smug. Unlike the London Times, the establishment to which it appealed was not solid and deeply entrenched, but shifting and embattled.

It also mattered that the southern Irish Protestant professional class was becoming one of the most interesting sub-cultures in Europe. With its gradual but inexorable loss of political power, its leading intellectuals were struggling to reinvent themselves as a cultural force. They did so with extraordinary creativity and energy, producing in the process Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, John Synge, Douglas Hyde, Augusta Gregory and ultimately Samuel Beckett.

Though the worst charge that Yeats, in 1900, could think of making against Trinity College Dublin was that it had "turned our once intelligent gentry into readers of The Irish Times", Yeats himself became an important part of the paper's hinterland. The intellectual and artistic ferment of the literary and dramatic revival fed into The Irish Times, making it much less stolidly conservative than it might have wished to be. While, for example, the paper's editorial line was hostile to the Dublin workers during the epic 1913 lockout, it also published (for the first time) Yeats's poem September 1913 and George Russell's stinging open letter "To the Masters of Dublin".

This cultural context altered the texture of the paper and made it, especially under the editorship of R.M. Smyllie from 1934 to 1954, a bastion of intellectual life in Ireland. There can have been few newspapers in the world that devoted 6,000 words and a six-column headline to a review of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. There were certainly no newspaper columns anywhere with the surreal playfulness, the dazzling erudition and the literary genius of Myles na Gopaleen's Cruiskeen Lawn.

THE PAPER'S literary connections were one side of the angularity that was most obvious in the minority political space it occupied. That space was not simply unionism – it was southern unionism. Before the foundation of the State, the political expression of southern unionism was, on the surface, orthodox loyalty to the Crown, the Empire, the British military and Dublin Castle. But it was immensely complicated by the rise of Ulster unionism, whose overtly partitionist agenda was anathema to The Irish Times.

One of the ironies of The Irish Times, indeed, is that there is, throughout its 150-year history, a complete continuity of support for a united Ireland. In 1920, it accused Ulster unionists, in accepting partition, of having "re-established the Tudor Pale – save that on this occasion some half million of the King's loyal subjects are outside it". In 1937, it criticised Eamon de Valera's new Constitution on the grounds that it forfeited the last chance of ending partition. Over the succeeding decades, and especially under the editorship of Douglas Gageby, it consciously breached the new Pale, insisting on covering Northern affairs even when they were of relatively little interest to a southern readership.

This attitude to a united Ireland was a good example of the way The Irish Times accommodated itself to the State whose existence it had so long opposed. It was a majority position arrived at from a minority perspective. Thus, while the paper retained, in the words of the charter of the trust that was established as its owner in 1974, a self-imposed obligation to give special regard to "minority interests and divergent views", it gathered an increasing readership among the growing Catholic middle class. As a result, as Fianna Fáil's leading technocrat Todd Andrews recalled, "when anyone in the civil service offices told you that he had seen such and such an item in ‘the paper', you knew that he was referring to The Irish Times. Favourable comment from The Irish Times made a minister's day".

While that degree of establishment acceptance might have become stultifying, its heritage as the creation of an ethnic and religious minority allowed The Irish Times to retain a dissident edge. It took brave stances in opposing fascism and anti-semitism in the 1930s, in battling against obscurantism, censorship and the unhealthily close relationship between Church and State in the 1950s and 1960s, and in supporting, in the 1970s and 1980s, the rights of adults to make their own moral choices in areas of sexuality and reproduction. It embraced, and was immensely enhanced by, the rise of feminism and the increasing prominence of women in public life. It gave space to unpopular and awkward voices, including those that disagreed vehemently with the paper's own liberalism.

In all of this, the paper came to prove, perhaps accidentally, that Lawrence Knox was not quite so naive after all. Stripped of its typically Victorian assumptions about class, gender and empire, Knox's hope for his paper came down to two things. One was the belief that there would be a time in Ireland when sectarian and political passions were sufficiently cooled to allow for rational public discourse. The other was that there would be enough people in Ireland who could think for themselves and make independent judgments to support a newspaper that gave them a lot of information and a divergent set of opinions. Neither hope proved, in the long term, to be entirely wrong.