The best of Times, the worst of Times

Journalism: Most people who worked with Conor Brady during his editorship of The Irish Times between 1986 and 2002 saw him as a careful strategist, instinctively averse to upheaval and discontinuity.

Yet to compare the paper he inherited to the one he left behind is to encounter the most radical set of changes in its history. When he took over from the godlike Douglas Gageby, the general view was that he would do very well to maintain the status quo. Yet The Irish Times of 1985 is barely recognisable now.

It was a thin 16 pages, selling fewer than 85,000 copies a day. The masthead was flanked by small ads and a larger ad dominated the left side of the front page. Sport, rather bizarrely, was on pages 2 and 3. Literature, the arts, science, health, and that vast area of activity covered by the rubric of "lifestyles" competed for extremely limited space. Beyond London and Brussels, there were no full-time foreign bureaux. Even within Ireland, life outside Dublin and Belfast was the province of freelance stringers. The office in D'Olier Street still resounded to the crash of manual typewriters.

The expansion and transformation of the paper under Brady seems, in retrospect, relentlessly driven. He expanded its size, scope, reach and circulation almost beyond recognition. The new design, the technological innovations that placed the online edition among the global avant-garde, the new supplements, the vastly increased attention to sport, the arts, lifestyle and business, the Moscow, Beijing and Washington bureaux, the almost 50 per cent rise in circulation - all of these would seem to be the work of a hard-nosed revolutionary. That, on the contrary, all of it seemed to unfold steadily and unfussily points to Brady's somewhat enigmatic nature.

That nature is very well captured in his absorbing account of those years, which is easily the most revealing inside story ever published by an Irish national newspaper editor. For anyone interested in the workings of the media, Up with the Times offers a unique insight, and it will stand as a historic document in its own right. For anyone who already has something of an inside view, however, there is another layer of fascination. The book is very like its author. Calm, amiable, impeccably courteous and wryly undramatic on the surface, it has a sharp, steely interior.

At one level, the book is an account of the interaction between The Irish Times and some of the key public events of the 1980s and 1990s. Brady is well aware of the tendency of journalists to exaggerate their own importance. He remarks at the outset on "the myth of the excellence of The Irish Times" and acknowledges that while the paper was mostly a good one, he also "produced some very bad newspapers". Yet, within those limitations, The Irish Times does matter, not least because those in power tend to be obsessed with it.

CONTRARY TO THE general perception, Brady was well-disposed to both Charles Haughey and Albert Reynolds, initially at least. His editorials in the run-up to the 1987 general election were certainly more favourable to Haughey than to Garret FitzGerald. He adopted, as he acknowledges, a rather contradictory approach to the fierce assault on public spending by the Fianna Fáil administration that then took power, supporting the policy while attacking its effects. Along with most of the rest of the media at the time, he never quite made the connection between the crisis in the public finances and the massive tax evasion that was subsequently revealed. He also reveals that when he was editor of the Sunday Tribune, he received a photocopy of Haughey's massively overdrawn account with AIB, but "wrongly . . . gave Haughey the benefit of the doubt" and declined to publish the story.

Given that it was Geraldine Kennedy's stories in The Irish Times that did so much to bring down Albert Reynolds, it is also fascinating to be reminded of how warmly Brady welcomed Reynolds's appointment as taoiseach in 1992. If anything, Brady's attitude to Reynolds was generally less critical than his view of his old schoolmate, Dick Spring, whose coalition with Fianna Fáil overturned expectations that Spring himself had generated. Brady was also the only national newspaper editor to give consistent support to the talks between John Hume and Gerry Adams that led to the peace process on which Reynolds's place in history rests.

Yet Brady ended up marking Reynolds's resignation as taoiseach with an editorial whose last line he now says he regrets: "Public life will not be greatly the poorer for his departure from office."

What happened in the meantime is an engrossing case study in the way editorial integrity overrides personal disposition. The paper's coverage of the beef tribunal angered Reynolds. He became a serial libel litigant, a fact that, in Brady's view, threatened to alter the open relationship between media and government. And the infamous "X case" was revealed by The Irish Times and provoked Brady to an editorial that is a masterpiece of controlled ferocity. In all three cases, Brady showed the courage and sense of principle that ultimately makes editors great.

The other level of the book, however, is about The Irish Times itself, and it reveals a world no less contested, and no more free of machinations and power struggles, than that of national politics. Brady is quite frank about the deterioration of his relationship with the long-time chairman and chief executive of both the trust that owns the paper and of the board that runs it, the formidable Major Thomas McDowell. Frustrated though he was by the slow pace of change in the internal structures of the organisation, Brady turned down an offer from McDowell to make him managing director as well as editor. He came to regret having done so.

It was the vacuum of managerial authority that led Brady to extend his editorship beyond 1994 when he considered retiring as editor at the still remarkably young age of 45. What caused him to stay on was, he writes, the threat that the paper might "fall de facto under the hegemony of a family dynasty". That threat arose from the sudden appointment by McDowell of his daughter, Karen Erwin, as deputy managing director, with the stated intention that she succeed to the top job.

Though a highly talented lawyer and a smart, likeable woman, she had virtually no experience in the media. The struggle to prevent a dynastic succession sapped much of the energy that should have gone into the business side of the paper, and undoubtedly contributed to the financial crisis that overtook the company in 2001 and that unfairly overshadowed Brady's departure the following year.

INSTEAD OF DETRACTING from Brady's achievements, as it did for a while, that crisis really underlined them. That a fragile institution with sometimes Byzantine management had been so smoothly transformed and expanded over the previous 15 years was the ultimate testament to Brady's skill. That it eventually tipped over into crisis was less remarkable than the avoidance of crisis for so long.

It is worth remembering - and Up with the Times provides a vivid and valuable reminder - that nothing about The Irish Times matters very much if the paper is not serving Irish society. Its main claim to public trust is that it makes money in order to survive and does not survive in order to make money. In the most pointed sentence in the whole book, Brady notes that as he was leaving the job "people were increasingly talking about 'the business' or 'the brand' rather than 'the newspaper'." If Up with the Times gets people talking about the newspaper again, it will be another significant contribution by Conor Brady to an institution he served so well.

Fintan O'Toole is an Irish Times columnist. His most recent book, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America, has just been published by Faber & Faber

Up with the Times By Conor Brady. Gill & Macmillan, 286pp. €24.99