Sir, – RC Corish’s moving tribute to his father PN Corish (Letters, June 19th) makes us think about what a newspaper – and by extension its letters page – is actually for.
Jean-Paul Sartre, reflecting in conversation with Nina Sutton in The Guardian in 1973, was characteristically direct: press freedom, he argued, is not a right belonging to journalists but to readers – to “the people working in offices, the people working in factories, who have a right to know what’s happening”. The best press, he concluded, is one that lets “the people talk to the people”.
PN Corish, across his long years as a reader and correspondent, lived this out.
He took the physical form of the newspaper no less seriously than its philosophical purpose. Writing to this page in June 2020, he weighed in on a proposal to convert The Irish Times to tabloid format, finding against it on grounds both practical and unanswerable: a tabloid was too voluminous to fold properly, impossible to keep tidy, and – the clinching objection – “won’t stay propped up against the teapot”.
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Here was a man who knew precisely what he required of The Irish Times.
This weekend, in his memory, we readers should fold our paper carefully and prop it against the teapot.
I mbaclainn Dé go raibh a luí. – Yours, etc.
BARBARA CLANCY,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.
