'Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof," observes the editor in James Joyce's Ulysses, amidst 40 pages devoted to "How a great daily organ is turned out", reflecting Joyce's deep interest in journalism, writes Martin Mansergh
Myles na Gopaleen exercised his genius as an Irish Times columnist, thanks to an almost equally idiosyncratic editor Robert Smyllie, who took satire better than the humourless government minister, Paddy Smith, who had him removed as a civil servant in the Custom House. I thought of Myles's character, the brother, when one of my own, on hearing I would be writing a column for this paper, wondered quizzically if "we" would be writing about faraway subjects of which "we" know nothing.
The wife would heartily endorse the sufficiency for the day of the newspaper thereof, if understood to be singular. Smokers acknowledge the harmfulness of tobacco, but wish to retain the freedom to light up in the convivial atmosphere of a pub. My addiction is to newspapers. I can rarely make do with less than half a dozen, inviting gratuitous comments from newsagents about "a lot of reading there", and visions of more tropical forests being felled, by and for climate criminals, from the brother.
Actually reading them has often to be done in the early hours. I regularly buy French and German journals so as to go beyond the Anglocentric perspective on Europe that is the ready alternative to our domestic media.
My preferred reality test is neither radio nor television, but what is printed in newspapers, a record that is easier to tap into. When I worked in the Irish embassy in Bonn in the mid-1970s, I had access to the library of the Bundestag, which kept files of news-cuttings on every subject a parliamentarian might wish to debate.
In politics, following a range of publications and digesting their analysis is one way of keeping an eye on the myriad moves being made across the board as well as of finding fresh inspiration. Newspapers are not, of course, any substitute for personal contacts, which generally provide the most striking insights, nor are they a substitute for more in-depth studies. Though a well-written article can be just as profound, I am dissatisfied if I cannot find time each day to pick up a book.
For 50 years, The Irish Times has been both monitor and catalyst of a changing Ireland, moving in the process from the margins to a mainstream once divided among others. On holiday in the west, The Irish Times used to be virtually unobtainable, where today it is everywhere. Originally the organ of the pre-independence establishment and the considerably reduced cohort that survived into the Free State, its commitment to Ireland displayed an often condescending scepticism towards the values and ethos of the new order.
Crusty correspondents wondered whether compulsory Irish would help people get into the colonial service, or whether land redistribution would create non-sustainable subsistence farming. Still, The Irish Times backed neutrality, while fervently wishing for an allied victory in the second World War, posing some challenge to a pedantic censorship. Where did the old order end and the new liberalism begin?
Looking back on the summer of 1958, when I as a boy of 11 on family holidays would have started to look at the paper, the Dublin Horse Show captured front-page headlines every day for a week ("Horse Show likely to be best ever"; "Portugal wins opening heat in international jumping"; "Crowds queue from early for show", "Sun favours Ladies Day at Show").
An Irishman's Diary reported on the Louth Hunt Ball, where young men who had been slowly pouring their glasses from a balcony over inoffensive dancers were drenched by a jug of Guinness wielded by a young American lady rushing upstairs in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, after which their behaviour much improved! A month later, the paper had a single, concise and sober account by today's standards of the All-Ireland Final - "Tipperary Experience beats Galway Pluck" - but it was hard to compete with the pervasive equestrian news. Little wonder Brendan Behan put down the Anglo-Irish as "Horse Protestants".
A duller paper compared to today, the pages were dominated by international affairs, almost as if Irish developments were not sufficiently inspiring. The special correspondent from Belfast was clearly unionist and reported the appeal of Mr George Newe to co-religionists to co-operate with the Northern Ireland government, expressing the hope that it would not be necessary to repeat in future that "Catholic criticism of the Government has very often been ill-informed and childish".
On August 12th, Brian Faulkner, using quasi-Sinn Féin language, said there was not the slightest interest in proposals to change the constitution. "Let it be clearly understood that we are masters of our destiny, and, in our hands alone, lies the future of Ulster." Not quite.
Change came rapidly in the 1960s. Dynamic economic progress and social reform, the beginnings of ecumenism and the piercing of the "green curtain" as Lemass called it created closer identification with the new Ireland. I recall regularly going down to the Oxford Union to read the previous day's Irish Times, and to feel, as Charles Kickham expressed it, that
The nations have fallen, but thou still art young.
Thy sun is but rising, while others have set.
I contributed my first letter to The Irish Times in 1969, taking up Monk Gibbon on literary censorship, which had just been lifted. Some years and many letters later, before being accepted by the Department of Foreign Affairs, I tentatively explored with Ken Gray the possibilities of working for The Irish Times. Life comes full circle, and I appreciate the privilege now offered me by the editor.
Ironically, I may find myself working or at least appearing under Garret FitzGerald again, whose pioneering and enthusiastic economics columns I well remember. Mary Robinson was the other leader in the paper's image. In 1927, Bertie Smyllie diverted Alderman Jinks TD from a crucial vote, thus blocking what would have been the historic formation of a Labour minority government with Fianna Fáil support. He was not the only future editor of The Irish Times to contribute powerfully to the making and unmaking of governments.
Like Le Monde, The Irish Times has been governed by a trust, rather than a wealthy owner (though perhaps the Major was both), to protect its independence. On the North, from the outbreak of the Troubles to the peace process, on the economy, Europe, social justice, to mention only a few examples, it is extraordinarily committed.
Its relationship, on the other hand, with the principal party in the State, Fianna Fáil, has sometimes been fraught. I welcomed Conor Brady's acknowledgement that perhaps they were too hard on Albert Reynolds. Articulation of a clear (and correct) political position seems at times almost to be preferred to good results. The letters page provides a high-profile and accessible public debating forum. In recent decades, women journalists have helped to transform the paper, culminating in its first woman editor.
Before the summer my colleague from Tipperary, Labhras Ó Murchú, complained in the Seanad of the campaign in the paper against special recognition of the traditional arts. On that subject, Myles na Gopaleen conjured up a claim by a Gaelic League speaker at the Oireachtas of 1897: that Handel, visiting Dublin in 1742, had said he would willingly have sacrificed the authorship of all his works to have been the author of Eileen Aroon. Myles, for added measure, imputed to Mozart that he, too, would have died happy if he could have been its composer.
If certain very popular activities and sensitivities outside the metropolis are not well covered, and if middle Ireland is mistaken for old Ireland, a paper may open itself to the charge of elitism, to which I can almost hear the retort of my old boss Charlie Haughey in another context: "And what is wrong with that?" Elitism and equality, progress and consensus, standards and pragmatism are the creative tensions (dialectic?) which help to forge this society.
The combined tendency of political and media pressures to over-simplify issues, often in a Manichean way, needs to be countered by an appreciation of the more complex and shifting background, against which political decisions and moral judgments have to be made. The ambition to lead opinion carries with it much attendant responsibility.
Martin Mansergh today begins a weekly Saturday column for The Irish Times. Dr Mansergh, who is a Fianna Fáil senator, resigned in 1981 from the civil service to become a special adviser to successive Fianna Fáil Taoisigh on Northern Ireland and, later, head of the party's research division. He is credited with playing a substantial part in the negotiations which led to the Belfast Agreement. He contested Tipperary South in the last Dáil election.