Dublin's notorious brothels had been subjected to increasing pressure from the police, but had merely been driven "under the surface". Girls were taking to drink and all-night dances. Looser attitudes were not confined to the cities: "Now the Churches have cause to be as much concerned for country as for city morals, and it becomes daily more difficult to defend our old traditions of rural innocence." And, the paper hinted darkly, "an honest statement of the present ravages of venereal disease in Ireland would startle the public conscience."
For a long time after independence, The Irish Times was still suffused with nostalgia for the lost world of British Ireland, partly because, with no pension scheme to allow for retirement, staff from the old imperial days were still employed. As late as the eve of the second World War, there was still a reporter in the newsroom, John Collins, who claimed that his first journalistic assignment had been to cover the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
But even for some of the young Protestants coming into the paper at this time there was a certain distance between themselves and the most immediate aspects of the world outside the front door. One of Brian Inglis's first assignments, for instance, was to check on reports of a Garda baton charge on proIRA demonstrators. The news was happening literally on the paper's doorstep in Westmoreland Street. But Inglis had no idea where this place might be. Told to go to "West Moreland Street", he was puzzled. Only when he reached the front door and saw the Garda dragging some men into a van did it dawn on him that "the scuffle had been in what I had always pronounced, as our set had always done, as `Westm'land Street'."
Clearly, a newspaper whose young reporters are so unsure of their immediate environment, could not hope to survive for long. The Irish Times might well have died in the 1940s had it not been able to break out of its genteel ghetto and find a larger place for itself in the new Ireland. The man who guided the paper from Westm'land Street to Westmoreland Street was the memorable Robert Smyllie. Even if he had not been a crucial figure in the paper's history, he would not have been easily forgotten. As Patrick Campbell, one of Smyllie's most brilliant recruits, recalled in the Spectator in 1959, "When, in these trying times, it's possible to work on the lower slopes of a national newspaper for several weeks without discovering which of the scurrying executives is the editor, I count myself fortunate to have served under one who wore a green sombrero, weighed 22 stone, sang parts of his leading articles in operatic recitative, and grew the nail on his little finger into the shape of a pen nib, like Keats."
Yet for all his eccentricity, Smyllie managed to transform the paper from a vestige of the old regime into an integral part of Irish culture. The ardent republican Todd Andrews, Fianna Fail's leading technocrat, paid him an unlikely tribute in his autobiography Man of No Property, crediting him with having "integrated The Irish Times and what it stood for into the Irish nation".
One important reason for this new position of influence was that the paper was becoming less closely associated with Cumann na nGaedheal and its successor party Fine Gael. The rise of fascism, in fact, was a crucial factor in establishing the independence of The Irish Times. With the formation of the quasi-fascist Blueshirts and their subsequent incorporation into Fine Gael, Smyllie effectively withdrew the paper's previous support from the Cumann na nGaedheal wing of Irish nationalism.
And this more independent stance was in turn reflected in the paper's coverage of fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the following year.
The paper was also markedly sympathetic to the plight of Germany's Jews and its reporting gives the lie to subsequent claims that few people outside the inner circle of the Nazis could have grasped their appalling fate. When the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws came into effect in 1935, an Irish Times editorial entitled "A Jewish free land" noted: "The resolve of the Hitlerites to bring about the complete elimination of Jewry from German life".
The Irish Times also raised an awkward subject that would be largely erased from history until the 1990s: Irish sympathy for the Nazis. In April 1937, it published a translation of an interview given by the Irish envoy in Berlin, Charles Bewley to the evening newspaper Uhr Blatt. Bewley said, among other things, that "my government will always do everything to promote the old friendship between Ireland and Germany" and that Hitler and his colleagues had "many admirers among our youth". In an accompanying leader, the paper asked how "a democratic state administered by a democratic government, which has made no secret of its abhorrence of dictatorship . . . could approve the German system".
In the early days of the war, the paper, as Robert Fisk has remarked, "sometimes exhibited more confidence in British victory than the British did themselves", predicting, for instance that the German tactic of using submarine U-boats to attack military and merchant shipping would surely fail. Increasingly, however, the paper's ability to comment on, or even to report, the progress of the war was hampered by the imposition of heavy-handed censorship. The Government's determination to prevent any "expressions likely to cause offence to the peoples of friendly states" was so extreme that, for example, Charles Chaplin's anti-fascist burlesque, The Great Dictator was banned in Ireland and the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive Measures, Frank Aiken, prevented the reporting of a speech in favour of the Allies by the Fine Gael TD James Dillon or the most basic factual accounts of Nazi atrocities.
Smyllie had to be content with small victories. When a former Irish Times journalist, Johnny Robinson, was rescued from a Royal Navy ship sunk off Singapore, the paper sneaked in a report that "The many friends of Mr John A. Robinson, who was involved in a recent boating accident, will be pleased to hear that he is alive and well." On VE Day, May 8th, 1945, the paper expressed its delight and got around the censorship at the same time by carrying on the front page a series of portraits of Allied leaders arranged in the shape of a "V" for "Victory".
Such gestures enhanced the paper's appeal to liberal intellectuals, but it was not matched within the ranks of what its great columnist Myles na Gopaleen called "the Plain People of Ireland". The attitude of conservative Catholic Ireland to The Irish Times in this period is summed up by Frank McCourt's experiences, recounted in Angela's Ashes, of applying for a job with the distributors Eason's in Limerick. The manager gave him a warning: "Another thing. We distribute The Irish Times, a Protestant paper, run by the freemasons of Dublin. We pick it up at the railway station. We count it. We take it to the newsagents. But we don't read it. I don't want to see you reading it. You could lose the Faith and by the look of those eyes you could lose your sight. Do you hear me, McCourt?" When McCourt's delivery bicycle slips on the ice, shops complain that "The Irish Times is coming in decorated with bits of ice and dog shit". The manager, however, "mutters to us that's the way the paper should be delivered, Protestant rag that it is."
The paper tended to return the compliment, looking sceptically at occasions that became part of the mythology of modernising Ireland. The visit of the US president, John F. Kennedy, in June, 1963 provided an astonishing image of Irish Catholic success in the modern world, and Kennedy was greeted almost as a god. But The Irish Times reported the remarkable behaviour of the elite of Irish society at a garden party in the grounds of Aras an Uachtarain. Tom McCaughren described the scenes as the invited guests "literally mobbed" Kennedy and the "obviously distraught" Eamon de Valera. "Toes were trampled on, high heels sank into lawn, shoes were lost, beautiful hats were crumpled, guests fell over chairs which had remained upturned on the lawn, unused because of the rain. One man determined to get out of the surging, swaying crowd found his shoulder caught under the scarlet cape of a bishop. But too late. The bishop was almost pulled to the ground and his cape was ripped. A pleasant man, however, he was most forgiving. All the while Mr Kennedy shook as many of the grasping hands as possible, including the white-gloved hand of a woman who shouted and waved frantically over the heaving shoulders of the security men, "Jack, Jack, my hand, shake my hand." When he did, she turned away and adjusted her hat, and expressed her utter satisfaction to her friends and to the others on whom she had trampled."
Yet the paper was, at the time, also seeking out its own embodiments of a new kind of Irishness and in May, 1964 was instrumental in bringing a 27-year-old Derry teacher and community activist, John Hume, to public attention. The Irish Times published two articles by Hume under the title "The Northern Catholic", representing the first significant statement by a man who was to be one of the most important Irish political figures of what was left of the century. What they suggest over a distance of 35 years is that foresight can be as useless as hindsight and that even those who can see the nature of an unfolding disaster may be powerless to prevent it.
In the articles, Hume criticised both unionism and nationalism and argued that "One of the great contributions . . . that the Catholic in Northern Ireland can make to a liberalising of the political atmosphere would be the removal of the equation between nationalist and Catholic." He argued that "Nationalists in opposition have been in no way constructive. They have - quite rightly - been loud in their demands for rights, but they have remained silent and inactive about their duties. In 40 years of opposition they have not produced one constructive contribution on either the social or economic plane to the development of Northern Ireland . . . leadership has been the comfortable leadership of flags and slogans." Hume called on Northern Catholics to face "the realistic fact that a united Ireland, if it is to come, and if violence rightly is to be discounted, must come about by evolution, i.e. the will of the Northern majority". He also urged them to accept that the Protestant tradition in the North was as strong and as legitimate as their own. And Protestant prejudice, he urged, would have to be replaced by an acceptance that Catholics were reasonable and responsible people, anxious to secure a better future for their children. If these steps were not taken, Hume warned, Northern Ireland would be in trouble: "Unionists must realise that if they turn their backs on the present goodwill, there can only be a considerable hardening of Catholic opinion . . ." In the event, these warnings were to prove all too prescient.
Yet when conflict broke out, the paper was inclined to see it as a short-term horror which would quickly lead to a new Anglo-Irish settlement. Even in the midst of the arms crisis in May, 1970, The Irish Times seemed confident that Irish unity would come about within the foreseeable future and by peaceful means: "Forces in Britain and the weight of our EEC membership must render the Border anachronistic in a relatively short time." Even during the internment crisis, the paper was still inclined to see the chaos as the prelude to a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
An editorial shortly after the introduction of internment explained that "we are watching . . . all the tactical errors, that are made on the routine road to a withdrawal. It has been seen before in more distant parts of the world."
There could be no more striking example of the impossibility of reading the present through the prism of history. And yet, as the 20th century drew to a close, Ireland became a strange place in which it was not always possible to distinguish between history and current affairs. We are at the moment living through a time when the most up-to-date news reports are about what was really going on, but could not be reported, five or 10 years ago. Instead of yesterday's headlines providing the material for today's history books, yesterday's history is providing the material for today's headlines.
The Irish Times Book of the Century, by Fintan O'Toole, is published by Gill & MacMillan at £25.
fotool@irish-times.ie