The Irish Times: 150 years of influence

Twentieth-century modernity

The “Aeolus” episode of James Joyce’s epic of Dublin life,

Ulysses

, is set in the office of the

Freeman’s Journal

(and

Evening Telegraph

). It is appropriate that this novel, the action of which takes place over the course of June 16th and early on June 17th in 1904 should pay an ambiguous compliment to the trade of journalism, which is so occupied by the quotidian.

Joyce, in this seventh episode of his masterpiece, satirises in brilliant parodies the high-flown rhetoric and dusty fustian of Victorian and Edwardian journalese, plays with the headline writers’ propensity to encapsulate complex affairs in pithy phrasemaking, and suggests that editorial high-mindedness depends on the less exalted business of advertising revenue.

Yet he also salutes journalism as the epitome of modernity, along with the much-vaunted Dublin tram system, bound up as it is with the machinery of production, circulation and distribution that comprises a 20th-century metropolis.

In the episode we hear the clang of the electrified tram echo with the "sllt . . . sllt . . . sllt" of the newspaper press in a kind of hymn to technological progress. The Irish Times, the Freeman's Journal's Dublin rival, had in fact composed its own anthem to progress in an editorial on the third day of the 20th century in which the city's tram system was included in a roll-call of Dublin's historic achievements.

In an article entitled “Dublin at the Close of Century” the paper expressed its gratification that the “Dublin of today presents the appearance of a handsome and prosperous city with broad streets, fine shops and stately edifices”.

For The Irish Times "locomotion" was a key indicator of progress and a source of urban pride: "It is admitted that in the system of electric tram service we have advanced far ahead, and made London and even Paris seem old-fashioned in this respect."

Although the "bitter cry of the poor" was "ever sounding" in The Irish Times's ears, the paper celebrated a city in vibrant motion: "The opening up of new districts and the communication established between them, as well as the means of easily reaching all the suburbs within a certain radius, are [incalculable] benefits."

Like Joyce's "Aeolus" episode in Ulysses, The Irish Times placed Dublin not on the periphery of Europe but at the heart of the modern world, as a city in which "steam and electricity have found their uses here as elsewhere".

Indeed, so ardent was the paper at the birth of a new century that on January 1st, 1901, it had indulged in some optimistic future-gazing:

“Let us look forward to a time when increased knowledge of one another has taught the nations that war is a fool’s game; when surgical science, aided by some new development of Röntgen rays, has made mental disease as easily curable as many physical ailments are now; when by the discovery of a light-weight accumulator electricity may be stored as readily as water and be the willing servant of the poorest household; when the working classes as a whole are as sober as the gentry today; when National Education has brought real culture into the humblest home; when the Government of the State will in the truest sense be an aristocracy – the rule of the Best.”

That modernity was, nonetheless, an ambiguous condition was poignantly evidenced at the turn of century when, as its possibilities were hopefully raised in its columns, The Irish Times reported the sad news that "an old woman named Catherine Lindley . . . was knocked down by a tramcar in College Green on Christmas . . . who died in the hospital on Sunday".

In coming decades the paper would have ample opportunity to ponder the mixed blessings of the modern age, but in the first decade of the century it reported zestfully on the quickening pace of technological development.

Donal Foley’s ‘babes’

Upon accession to the European Economic Community, on January 1st, 1973, one stale idea and practice was almost immediately blown away. The State was obliged that year under EEC law to pass legislation ending the “marriage bar”. This was the requirement that women in the Civil Service resign their positions on marriage.

That one of the earliest effects of Ireland’s EEC membership was a change of the law in respect of women’s rights was telling. For in subsequent decades European law would often be a powerful influence for Irish change in matters affecting family and personal life.

In the early 1970s it was one further element in a congeries of things making feminism a force that legislators could not ignore.

The media, with The Irish Times as a leading voice supporting the "women's movement", became heavily invested in this highly significant development in the country's social and cultural history.

One activist recalls of the period, when "the inimitable relationship between the women's liberation sector and the media in Ireland was a critical factor in advancing the movement, as a whole, in the early 1970s": "The two key resources were RTÉ and The Irish Times. They recruited very independently minded women who 'got away with murder'."

Since the mid 1960s The Irish Times had, indeed, been recruiting a cohort of women journalists, discovered and given their head by Donal Foley. (They were often referred to, quite admiringly, as "Donal's babes".) His sensitivity to social change was acute, as his determination to have skilled women writers on The Irish Times's team proves, but he cannot quite have realised as the paper recruited such figures as Mary Maher, Maeve Binchy, Mary Cummins, Elgy Gillespie, Christina Murphy and Nell McCafferty, that they would make columns of the newspaper sometimes serve almost as the house journal of the Irish women's liberation movement.

Various factors were at work to make feminism a force for change in the Irish media in the early 1970s. Accession to the EEC, with its progressive social legislation, certainly inspired women to demand equality of European citizenship. But the impetus for change was already having its effects by the time Ireland joined the EEC.

The papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, issued in 1968, with its proscription of artificial methods of contraception, had made the topic of human reproduction and the female role in it widely discussed in the media with a frankness that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier.

The liberalisation of the Irish censorship laws in 1967 had signalled a freer social atmosphere in which such debate about contraceptive methods could uninhibitedly flourish.

The government's establishment in 1970 of the Commission on the Status of Women was a response to this widespread shift in consciousness about what became known as gender politics. The roles played by women in The Irish Times in this period reflected the social changes that were at work.

In 1965 the American-born Mary Maher was appointed to the paper; she was soon producing, at Foley’s behest, a Women First section, a half-page of the paper that confronted the kinds of social problems that Michael Viney and John Horgan had been writing about earlier in the decade (with increased awareness of the conditions endured by the Irish poor, but with a distinctly female slant).

When, in 1968, Maher returned to her first love, the newsroom, Maeve Binchy was appointed women's editor; she was at this post when the Irish Women's Liberation Movement became a story in itself, with some of The Irish Times's journalists personally active in the cause.

The fact that this was also the moment when the “new journalism” of the 1960s United States, in which the journalist is a protagonist in her or his own story, was a style to be emulated made the copy submitted by Donal’s babes some of the most immediate and vivid in the paper.

The vital impression that they were writing out of convictions rooted in personal experience gave their contributions an edge and authority that could not easily be set aside. The concept of the patriarchy was being made a near-unassailable category of thought in the public domain.

Women writers, too, in the paper were able to pose questions to their society in a way that many men would have found off limits. Indeed, Irish literature in the 20th century not only had been restricted in its exploration of human sexuality by the rigorous literary censorship but also had struggled to represent the erotic outside the context of Catholic guilt.

So there was something beguilingly and creatively subversive about the freelance journalist Mary Leland’s “In Defence of Eroticism”, with its opening question, “What is so terrible and calamitous about eroticism?” In this article, Leland, subsequently a distinguished writer of fiction, allowed herself to surmise:

“I do believe that some sexual experience before marriage can only help the relationship of a married couple . . . Eroticism, of course, is awareness. It is a conscious delight in sexuality, and without its common and unhappy abuses, should in fact be a power for good. It should reveal our common physical structure and make it easier to express concern, sympathy, pleasure, and the love that is called charity, in simple physical ways.”

Charles Haughey’s wealth

In an article on December 14th, 1979, Frank McDonald, then one of the newspaper’s young journalists, painted a picture of the opulence enjoyed by Charles Haughey, the “richest man to hold the office of Head of Government since the foundation of the State, far outstripping in wealth any of his six predecessors”.

A connoisseur of art and fine champagne, the Taoiseach led the life, McDonald implied, of a chieftain, to which he believed he was entitled. How he came by the wealth that sustained it, Haughey, when questioned on the matter, chose not to divulge, although McDonald’s careful sifting through the available evidence could be read to suggest that “dodgy” land deals had played their part in Haughey’s spectacular rise to fortune.

McDonald summed up with nicely honed irony:

"Life has been good to Charlie Haughey, and he clearly enjoys it. With his estimated wealth of £3 million, he has come a long way from his Donnycarney days when he was the scholarship boy who had nothing. But there is persistent speculation about his involvement in business deals in Dublin and other parts of the country. However the truth will probably never be known, at least not until there is a provision obliging Government Ministers and even Dáil deputies to disclose the extent of their wealth and income, and declare their interests in any activities outside parliament. Certainly, Mr Haughey, himself, seems to be in no rush to make a full declaration. All he would say on the subject of his wealth at his press conference last Friday was: 'Ask my bank manager'."

Haughey’s suave truculence about the sources of his flaunted opulence was bred, it is fair to say, of a conviction that in some degree the State did belong to him as leader of a formerly dispossessed people who would brook no interference in their rise to the power that wealth can help command. His emulation of the Protestant ascendancy’s lifestyle was an ebullient, self-aggrandising statement of who was now in charge.

And Ireland, with Charles J Haughey as taoiseach, could happily abandon any illusion that national identity was bound up with de Valera's vision of frugal comfort as a desirable ideal. So if the brash release of a long-denied materialism in Haughey's Ireland meant that developers and property speculators could cut corners here and there in the planning regulations, the strong suspicion that Haughey's enrichment was itself "dodgy", in The Irish Times's term, gave a kind of licence to the unscrupulous.

For the more civic-minded, who hoped for an Ireland properly answerable to the public good, Haughey represented the embodiment of an unbridled will to personal power and wealth.

There was indeed a sad irony in the image of Haughey living in the splendour of a renovated Palladian mansion on the outskirts of a Georgian city that since independence had fallen into near terminal decrepitude, supinely open to the depredations of speculative building.

In November 1979, just before Haughey came to power, McDonald had published in The Irish Times an important series of articles that registered how far things had in gone in the city centre.

In advertising the series the paper regretted how “Dublin, once beautiful, is now probably one of the ugliest capitals in Europe”. McDonald’s first article, which evoked Dublin as a “shabby city rotting to the core”, confessed: “The sad truth is that one can no longer be proud to call oneself a Dubliner. The condition of the city is a cause for shame, a cause for outrage. There is degradation almost everywhere.”

He was especially appalled that developers had been demolishing buildings and then erecting structures with fake Georgian facades, and that the city fathers had passed no bylaws to prevent the alteration of interiors in listed buildings.

“And what,” he asked, of “Dublin’s new buildings, the glass and concrete office blocks of the 20th century? To many people, they are the creation of the ‘architecture of avarice’.”

An editorial in The Irish Times on November 17th, 1979, accepted McDonald's grim verdict on the fabric of the capital city; even Belfast, it was suggested, had done better with poorer resources. In comparison Dublin was "a heartbreak . . . For all its past inequities, it had a certain nobility of mien, a dignified bearing, and now is reduced architecturally almost to the provincial squalor of one of England's scrap-heap towns. And all done by ourselves." In all this Dublin Corporation was inert or complicit, with its road-widening plans, alongside "get-rich-quick builders".

These are edited extracts from The Irish Times: 150 Years of Influence, published by Bloomsbury