Centrestage THE ARTS: The arts have always been close to the paper's heart GERRY SMYTH

IN THIS famous cartoon from the Dublin Opinion magazine of the 1940s, the legendary Irish Times editor R. M. Smyllie is depicted with a gathering of his cronies from the Dublin literary and arts scene. Smyllie was most at home in such company where he placed himself at the centre of an inner circle.

Alan Reeve's cartoon shows him in the Palace Bar surrounded by, among others, the poet F R Higgins, playwright Brinsley McNamara, poet and editor of the Dublin Magazine, Seamus O'Sullivan and the painters Sean O'Sullivan and William Conor. The Belfast artist Conor was a particularly close associate whose very fine portrait of Smyllie has looked down on every editor to succeed this unconventional maverick who reputably kept one of his fingernails shaped like a nib, in imitation of the poet Keats.

Arts journalism – and coverage of literary and other art-forms – is one of the paper's core editorial activities. This has especially been the case since the establishment of the Arts and Studies page in the 1970s. Increasingly since that era, the arts have been covered in more detail and diversity, with specialists reflecting trends in cinema, the visual arts, classical and popular music, books and theatre. Not only has Irish Times commitment to the arts been in print and online, but also through sponsorship, particularly title sponsorship of literary and theatre awards.

In the earliest days of the paper, attention to the significant cultural figures of the day tended to be as news items rather than critical appraisal of their work. On December 4th, 1878, the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker married Florence Balcombe in St Ann's Church on Dawson St. The following day a wedding notice appeared on the front page. There had been one guest at the wedding. A more lavish literary wedding was reported in the paper in May 1884. Florence Balcombe's former beau Oscar Wilde, married a Miss Lloyd and The Irish Times eyewitness thought that the bridegroom "looked less like George the Fourth than usual".

The opening night of The Abbey, in 1904, was enthusiastically greeted: "… the occasion was an experiment and possibly an epoch-maker, invested with unique interest". However, the critic whose job was to review the plays in the fledgling National Theatre apparently managed to do so without entering the theatre. "Plays depress my spirit", he is reported to have said. WB Yeats wasn't impressed.

Dublin's new Municipal Gallery, which opened in 1908, was "a jewel of singular beauty and distinction", according to the paper which had taken part in a campaign to raise funds to secure some of the paintings the gallery's founder Hugh Lane was seeking for the city's modern collection. When the Lane picture bequest was subsequently mired in a legal dispute between London and Dublin, the story was closely monitored and kept letter-writers busy.

Under Smyllie's editorship, however, there was a much keener interest in broader scrutiny of the arts and especially literature – the first books page was introduced into the Saturday edition. In an interview with Maeve Binchy in the 1970s, Samuel Beckett's memory of him was that "he ran his newspaper from the pubs and that there were circles around him, listening to what he wanted to do and running away to do it". Beckett had made his own contributions to the paper – as a reviewer, but more particularly as a poet. His four-line poem Dieppe appeared on the Saturday books page where a poem "in those days commanded a certain amount of attention", according to Anthony Cronin in his biography of the playwright.

Another of Beckett's shorter poems, and one of his finest, Saint Lo, appeared in the books page in June 1946: as a Red Cross worker Beckett had witnessed the wartime devastation of the French town a year earlier.

In his biography of Yeats, Roy Foster, calls the relationship between the poet and the newspaper a symbiotic one. The story of how WBY first came to hear that he had won the 1923 Nobel Prize, has become part of literary lore. Informed by Smyllie in a late-night phone call, the Yeatsian response was direct: "Get to the point, how much is it worth?"

There was a clear concurrence of views between poet and editor on the "ridiculous and humiliating" censorship legislation of 1929. In its first editorial that year, the paper declared the act to be an open war on liberal culture and denounced the Free State government for a policy "which is operating, each day more surely, to isolate Ireland from an educated and progressive world". Like Yeats, the paper kept up a determined but ultimately unsuccessful campaign.

On the occasion of the Nobel Prize winner's 70th birthday in 1937, The Irish Times produced two pages of homage to mark the occasion. The editorial could not have been more laudatory, describing WBY as occupying "an almost unique position in Irish life; for he is virtually the first man since Swift who has been able to bring the Anglo-Irish tradition into line with a positive nationalism … there is no other Irishman of his day and generation who has done one tithe of his work for his native land".

If Smyllie was the author of that eulogy, it could hardly be said that Yeats returned the compliment. He mocked Smyllie in his poem, Why Should Old Men Not Be Mad?

Why should old men not be mad ?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist.

The raison d'etre of the two institutions could not have been more different at the time: Yeats and his Abbey Theatre co-founders seeking to forge a new national identity – and destiny, and the newspaper still very much the mouthpiece of the ruling Unionist ascendency.

Following extensive daily coverage of the disturbances that greeted Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, a reviewer urged the "plucky players" to play on and noted that the "screamers do not know what they are missing".

Almost 20 years later, when audiences vented their disapproval of O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, the paper's daily accounts of each previous evening's "wild scenes" were given in lengthy and explicit detail.

When Yeats – then a senator – took to the stage to excoriate the audience but failed to be heard above the din, he decided his message was best delivered through the pages of the paper where his speech appeared the following day. According to Roy Foster's biography, Yeats later admitted that it was in The Irish Times office that he wrote "the speech the audience thought I had given". He even obliged by writing it in the style of an editorial: "You have disgraced yourselves again … Is this to be an ever-recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius?"

Spotting the genius of Flann O'Brien was another example of Smyllie's perspicacity as an editor. Setting up the author, a Gaelic scholar, as the humourist Myles na Gopaleen in a Irish-language column in the first instance was unexpected in a paper that at the time had no reputation for championing the revival of the language.

Writing in the literary journal, The Bell, Vivian Mercier said "It goes without saying that no Irish paper except The Irish Times would print a Gaelic column so unorthodox as Myles's". Cruiskeen Lawn conferred celebrity status on Myles/Flann and became such a talking point that Gaelic was soon jettisoned for the wider appeal of English.

The paper, or its eminence grise Smyllie, acted in a spirit of patronage to several impecunious writers. As well as getting work as a book reviewer, Patrick Kavanagh appears in the pages in the 1940s as an art critic, not a talent for which the Monaghan poet was noted. His notices were dismissive of some of the major names in European art. Monet paintings were derided as "ideal decorations for a bungalow in Killiney".

Much more significantly, several of his most celebrated poems appeared first in the paper, including Spraying the Potatoes, To the Man After the Harrow, Advent and Pegasus. Austin Clarke, who for many years was poetry critic, also published key poems in the pages, including The Blackbird of Derrycairn. September 1913 was among a number of major Yeats poems that were first seen in the paper. Mercier, in his Bell article, said of the Saturday book page that it was "the only real focus for Dublin's writers outside this magazine".

As the paper developed and expanded under editors who succeeded Smyllie, so too did the space devoted to literary and cultural matters. New relationships were forged between it and emerging literary talents: playwright Brian Friel wrote a column from Donegal in the early 60s, and the poet John Montague was a Paris correspondent later in the same decade.

For almost a decade from the 60s until his death in 1977, the poet Sean O Riordain contributed a column in Irish that won wide appreciation for the quality of the writing. One of the most influential figures in the revival of traditional music, Sean O Riada, also had his own series of imaginative columns that showed a literary side to the musician and composer.

The other notable writers who had regular slots were poet and Aosdána founder-member Anthony Cronin, whose weekly discourse in "Viewpoint" covered diverse subjects from the arts to politics; to one of the column's young readers, the writer Dermot Bolger, it was "a ray of subversive light". When the poet Derek Mahon went to teach in the United States in the 1970s, he sent a regular letter.

The novelist Terence de Vere White, who was literary editor in the 60s and 70s, widened the circle of literary names in the review pages and gave space and encouragement to the new generation of poets then emerging – Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney, whose own Nobel achievement was carried over several pages in 1995. The paper's strong literary connection was maintained with the appointment of novelist John Banville as literary editor in the 1990s. Michael Longley's poem Ceasefire, one of the great poems of that period, made what Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill has described as its "first electrifying appearance" in print in The Irish Times within days of the truce in the North being declared.

Another Northern writer, and one of our most innovative playwrights, became the Irish Times's first critic of popular culture. Stewart Parker's "High Pop" column came in just as the Beatles were making their exit; his first review in May 1970 was of Paul McCartney's debut solo album.

Back in November 1963, the group's arrival in Ireland made the main front page story, though this had more to do with the mayhem in the city centre caused by fans than the music. There was no review as such, apart from a few comments that acknowledged the "sheer showmanship and real ability" of the group. "Dublin had never seen anything like The Beatles", it stated.

A year earlier, The Irish Times noted the presence of "cats" and "squares" at Cliff Richard's concert in the National Stadium. When a fan called to the performer to spit on her, the reporter was prompted to describe the occasion as "a lush pasture for an Irish sociologist". Whatever about attitudes to this "pleasant young man", when an article on the rock'n'roll lifestyle of the Rolling Stones made it into the columns of the paper in 1964, it was published in French.

Another Sixties icon who was to make a defining impact on modern culture was Bob Dylan. His debut Irish performance in 1966 was reviewed by George D Hodnett, a jazz pianist and composer, renaissance man and social activist, who as reviewer became a familiar figure on Dublin's flourishing rock and pop scene in the 60s and 70s. Hodnett's generally positive reaction – some quibbles about the bard's harmonica technique – cautioned that "one cannot apply the ordinary criteria of musical criticism to this type of performance … this isn't music but something else; something sociologically interesting". According to his account, Hodnett managed to hear a Dylan gem that has not been heard since called Ballad of a Lampshade.

The paper's rock columnist in 1979, Joe Breen, met a young Dublin band for their first Irish Times interview. Breen's assessment was that the band, "with an average age of 19, are one of the most promising acts to come out of the Irish rock scene for many a year".

U2 was the subject of a special supplement in August 1993, the first of its kind produced by the paper. A few days later, a letter from one reader criticised this gesture towards popular culture: "So now The Irish Times has resorted to publishing a 24-page colour tabloid supplement on the rock band U2. Does this now signal the complete takeover of your newspaper by rock journalists?".

But the paper was merely keeping up, as it had always done, with the changing cultural times.

Gerry Smyth is managing editor (arts and features)