BOOK OF THE DAY: MICHAEL FOLEYreviews A History of the Media in IrelandBy Christopher Morash Cambridge University Press 244 pp. £45.00
THERE IS a scene described by Chris Morash in his A History of the Media in Ireland. It takes place in 18th century Dublin and illustrates the communal nature of early media. In coffee houses, such as Dick's Coffee House in Skinner's Lane, as well as drinking coffee, customers could read The Flying Post, printed and edited in the same premises, and debate issues not just with each other, but with the editor as he set up print and wrote stories.
The housing of printing works in coffee houses was common in Dublin. It was also the practice at the time to leave a half page blank for late news that could also be used for comments on the news. The newspaper could then be left for the next reader, who not alone would read the news as selected by the editor, but commentary by other customers.
This was a real public sphere, where issues were discussed and arguments developed by those who published them – but also by the readers. This was not the start of media in Ireland, but it was the start of it being a major player in public affairs, of creating a public opinion.
In the 19th century we see Ireland in the centre of a media world created by the shrinking of time and space, where, far from being on a periphery, it is at the centre of a world shaped by the telegraph and the press.
As we enter the 20th century, the Irish Free State comes of age with radio. For the next 40 to 50 years, the State and the Catholic Church, Canute like, tried to distance Ireland from the media world that has shaped it.
Censorship was meant to make us more Irish; Radio Éireann was to be an alternative to the BBC; the Committee on Evil Literature was to protect us from books and English newspapers.
But young people listened to Radio Luxembourg and even the seemingly timeless folk culture of Ireland was facing major change by being recorded via new media technologies. It was suddenly possible for a Donegal fiddler to hear a sean nós singer from Kerry – who had been recorded in Brooklyn. The tensions between the world of the child listening to pop music under the bed clothes and that of a world of censorship was most evident the night Telefís Éireann started. On New Year’s Eve 1961, as Ireland symbolically embraced modernity.
What Morash does particularly well is consider the relationship between media and Ireland’s history. He suggests the defining feature of Irish culture is neither prosperity nor poverty – but a “deeply engrained, mediated connectedness between Ireland and the rest of the world”.
We could go further, he says, and discard the concept of a peripheral, geographically defined Ireland, replacing it with a concept of Ireland as an idea or a space that, to differing extents and in differing ways, has been produced by media. It is a radical, intriguing idea, given that the number of books analysing media in Ireland could be counted on one hand and concentrated on broadcasting or film.
Historians, when they engaged with the media and the press, saw it as a source of information and never questioned its role or impact. Here it is suggested that a consideration of media is central to any understanding of Ireland, its place and culture.
Chris Morash is professor of English at Maynooth and has an integrated cultural perspective, linking book production, journalism, film-making and technology. He does an excellent job bringing together existing research and setting it alongside original analysis.
Michael Foley is head of journalism at the School of Media, DIT
