MEDIAAn insider's history of The Irish Times, as it moved from pro-Home Rule to pro-Union and on into the modern era
I AM delighted to have been asked to review this book as I have been a contributor to The Irish Times for half of its existence. True, I was only eight years old in 1934, but in the early days of An Irishman's Diary (Quidnunc), that column was compiled from contributions not just from the paper's staff (as the author asserts), but also from the general public. So, my 14-year-old brother Fergus and I sent in several pieces, at least one of which was published - for which we were paid three shillings and six pence. My share was probably one shilling, the equivalent of four weeks' pocket money (I had recently been promoted from 2d to 3d per week).
The lesson I learnt from that, and implemented from the age of 20 onwards, is that whatever career one pursues, outside of political office, journalism offers not merely a way of informing the public of facts and ideas, but also a potential source of additional income.
As an Irish Times addict, I greatly enjoyed this book. Its author joined the advertising side of the paper more than 60 years ago and spent half a century in its employ. Consequently, much of its content derives from his own experience - which included contacts with older members of its staff, one of whom, at the time he joined, had been employed there since the late 1870s. The book, incidentally, is very well illustrated, and it reads easily - although its contents sometimes escape chronology, and events that were spread over quite long periods are occasionally made to seem almost contemporaneous.
FROM ITS EARLY chapters I learnt something of which I had been unaware: that, although established as a conservative organ to serve mainly the Protestant community outside Ulster, during the first quarter of a century of its existence it supported Home Rule, becoming a unionist organ only in the 1880s.
But even after that switch its partisanship was sometimes muted and it generally strove to achieve a measure of objectivity. Like the nationalist press, it was strongly opposed to the 1916 Rising - but was less extreme in its comments than the Irish Independent, whose bitterness may have reflected the animus of its proprietor, William Martin Murphy, against James Connolly because of his role in the 1913 Dublin Lockout.
The Irish Times supported the abortive Home Rule Convention of 1917, and accepted the foundation of the new State with good grace. Its support for the 1921 Articles of Agreement (commonly but incorrectly known as the Treaty), meant that it was opposed to de Valera and Fianna Fáil. In relation to the Economic War, launched by de Valera over the issue of the payment to the land annuities (farmers paying off the cost of the late 19th-and early 20th-century land reform that had been financed by the British exchequer), it commented that de Valera "blandly refuses to believe that the English people . . . will defend themselves when attacked. In effect Mr de Valera's faith in England's generosity, magnanimity and power of self-sacrifice is far greater than our own."
The paper's concern to keep open the possibility of Irish re-unification by consent made it critical of aspects of State policies on the Irish language, and of de Valera's weakening of links with the Commonwealth, but its response to John A Costello's 1949 Declaration of the Republic was nevertheless restrained. Dermot James records its comment that "the birth of a new Republic was welcomed throughout the country".
Moreover, the paper welcomed Irish neutrality in the second World War, commenting at its outbreak that, "For the moment, at any rate, we in Ireland have the good fortune to be remote from the turmoil of Europe's strife, and every night pray to God that this happy condition of affairs may continue", and it hoped that "every Irish citizen worthy of the name will stand four-square behind his government and will be ready to defend the national interest with his money, his labour, and, if necessary, even with his life". (Note the repeated "his" - no "hers".)
Of course, the paper was strongly supportive of the Allied cause, and its editor since 1934, the eccentric and disorganised, but brilliant, Robert Maire Smyllie resented - and, as far as he could, resisted - Frank Aiken's heavy-handed censorship of any expression of this view. Nevertheless the paper's instant support for Irish neutrality demonstrated just how far it had moved from the unionism of the later years of British rule.
The fact is that, although many nationalists were slow to recognise this reality, throughout the first half-century of Irish independence, The Irish Times both reflected and led the process by which the Protestant community in the State abandoned any ambition to restore the political union with Britain. To such an extent, indeed, that quite a few years ago, when I asked an Anglican archbishop of Dublin whether he had ever encountered a member of his flock who was in that crucial sense a unionist, he replied that he never had.
This gradual, and eventually complete, integration of the Protestant minority into the Irish national community - despite the State having in its early decades been a cold place for people of those churches - is a little-noticed and yet-to-be-celebrated feature of our State. And it is one to which The Irish Times, especially from the time Robert Smyllie became its editor three-quarters of a century ago, notably contributed. It is also a phenomenon that permits us to hope that, perhaps several generations hence, the two parts of our island may find it possible to come together again in amity.
The author refers to the coverage that The Irish Times gave to Pope Pius XII's address to Catholic medical practitioners, I think in 1953, in the course of which he referred to contraception. I recall a tea-break discussion on this matter with my small staff in Aer Lingus at that time, during which I was moved to observe that as the Irish Independent's sense of delicacy about sexual matters prevented it from citing the pope's remarks on this subject, Irish Catholics had to rely on the "Protestant" papers, The Irish Times and Evening Mail for papal guidance on this matter. Of course, some Catholics had always been Irish Times readers. My parents took both The Irish Times and the Irish Independent - the latter word having been the first long word I learnt to spell.
IN 1961, JACK WHITE, the remarkable features editor (who in 1954 had encouraged me to write on economic matters - of which I then knew nothing - and as a result to embark a few years later on a new career in academic life), left the paper to join RTÉ when Irish television was launched. After his departure, and the sacking of Smyllie's successor, Alec Newman, in Jack White's absence Alan Montgomery was appointed editor, but two years later abandoned the editorship for a much more lucrative post as public relations officer to Guinness. It was then that Douglas Gageby, already the paper's managing director but with an earlier distinguished editorial career elsewhere, was appointed to the post.
The author refers to Gageby's "romantic nationalism", which, he says, led him to be suspected (by who?) of being "'soft' on the IRA" - a belief that the author eccentrically puts down to Gageby having been "supportive of . . . the SDLP, and, in particular to its leader, John Hume". It was Gageby who gave a priority to Northern Ireland news that has ever since remained a hallmark of the paper.
It was under the brilliant editorship of this nationalist Protestant, (who I had known since he had served in the Army during the War with my next brother Fergus), that The Irish Times became the preferred organ of so many Catholics that during his time its circulation more than doubled from 37,000 (a mere 9 per cent of the circulation of Irish daily papers) to 85,000. Today, with a circulation of more than 119,000, steadily gaining ground against the populist Irish Independent, it holds a four-times larger share of that market - a growth in circulation share that must have few, if any, rivals among the world's quality newspapers.
Dermot James refers to the reduction in VAT on newspapers that the government that I led conceded more than 20 years ago. Perhaps it is worth recording that both this decision and an earlier one, I think by my first government, to remove price control on newspapers, arose from representations made by Eamon de Valera jnr on behalf of the Fianna Fáil Irish Press. Concern on the part of government members to preserve a multiplicity of daily papers precluded any thought of letting that Opposition paper fail. But this turned out to be a futile attempt to save the Irish Press.
Garret FitzGerald is an author and a former taoiseach
From the Margins to the Centre: A History of The Irish Times By Dermot James Woodfield Press, 303pp. €45