`Gazette' reflects proud tradition of free speech

At first sight, the Church of Ireland Gazette looks like any other worthy and rather dull religious newspaper. The front-page story in this week's issue is headlined "Mothers Union members help the homeless". There are snippets of church news, expositions of hymns, book reviews and advertisement for organists and clergy benevolent funds.

However, it is the editorial on page 2 which attracts the attention. This week it is about human cloning. It is very often about our own homespun Irish disputes.

The letters page carries a strongly-worded letter from Dean John Paterson of Christ Church Cathedral attacking last week's editorial on President McAleese's taking of Communion in that cathedral. The dean calls the Gazette's view of the controversy "insensitive, not to say crass". The paper had accused the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Connell, of "muddled thinking" on the issue.

This is not the first time editorials in the Gazette have caused princes of both main churches, as well as political leaders, to see red. Last June it angered many Southern church members, led by the Bishop of Limerick, Dr Darling, when it reacted to Bishop Willy Walsh's remarkable apology for the historical hurt of the Catholic Church's Ne Temere mixed-marriage decree by criticising him for "almost naive innocence". It accused him of wrongly implying that the inter-church marriage problem was a thing of the past.

When the paper was being run by Canon Houston McKelvey in the 1970s and early 1980s his rumbustious Protestantism and unionism led to letters of complaint from both Bishop Cahal Daly and Charles Haughey.

His successor, Canon Cecil Cooper, a Southerner who has lived in the North since 1965, takes a more even-handed position. But the tradition of outspoken editorials and interventions in Irish politics has lived on.

In the blunt language of plainspeaking Ulstermen, the Gazette castigated Albert Reynolds for the selective way he released the beef tribunal report and condemned the "shameful" events surrounding his resignation.

In the North, it called for Ken Maginnis or John Taylor, as the men most likely to open dialogue, to be made leader of the Unionist Party; criticised President Clinton, in his role as Northern peacemaker, for being a mediocrity and a "showman"; and counselled unionist MPs not to prop up John Major's government.

Perhaps most courageously, in the aftermath of Drumcree it called on the Church of Ireland to rethink its links with the Orange Order and questioned the role of the church in providing a venue for such a dangerous stand-off.

There are a number of reasons for the prominence of the voices emanating from this little 142year-old church newspaper with a circulation of just 5,000.

Most important is its independence. Although the company which currently owns it was set up by the Church of Ireland's Standing Committee, the church's ruling body between synods, its board, with a 10-2 lay majority, stands firmly behind the senior clergyman who works as its part-time editor.

Under Canon Cooper, it accurately reflects the church's pluralism. This was encapsulated in recent years by the juxtaposition of two outspoken pseudonymous columns: one by a crusty Northern unionist, Canon John Barry, the retired rector of Hillsborough; the other, until his death in 1994, by a rare southern Protestant radical, the Dean of Cashel, the Very Rev David Woodworth.

Finally it has a good journalistic pedigree and contacts. Two journalists, Patrick Comerford and Douglas Sloan, currently sit on its board, and the former editor of The Irish Times, the late Fergus Pyle, was one of its editorial-writers.

The Church of Ireland provides the paper with only £3,000 a year in direct assistance, mainly to subsidise the posting of copies to rural subscribers in the Republic. But Canon Cooper is confident that the freedom of speech which is the hallmark of the church's annual synods will ensure that if it is ever endangered, either by financial problems or excessive outspokenness, the bench of bishops will stand by it.