Ireland is a sick country. The cheerful fortitude of ordinary people who suffer at the hands of Ireland’s governing elite is one of the wonders of the modern world. In this examination of journalism in the 20th century, Mark O’Brien details some shocking anecdotal evidence of bullying buffoonery inflicted on innocent people. When, seeking to fight these injustices, journalists intervened as the people’s tribunes, they could experience some pretty dire consequences. As a result Irish journalism was timid.
As O’Brien points out, the perspective of outsiders was critical. The “cold eye cast on Irish society by non-Irish journalists, such as Michael Viney (British) and Mary Maher (American), who had made their home in Ireland, played a key role in challenging the insular conservatism that had characterised Ireland since independence”.
Honor Tracy was another outsider. Born in Ipswich, Tracy moved to Dublin to work for the Bell, a radical periodical edited by Seán Ó Faoláin and Peadar O'Donnell. Before outlining Tracy's service to truth and justice it is useful, not to say inspiring, to pause to pay tribute to this small-circulation monthly publication.
Its mission, according to Ó Faoláin, was to challenge the conventional wisdom of post-independence Ireland populated, he argued, by "the bourgeoisie, Little Irelanders, chauvinists, puritans, stuffed-shirt pietists, Tartuffles" – I don't know either – "Anglophobes [and] Celtophiles" and steer the Bell "between a faint star that calls itself the spirit of human liberty and a vast fog compounded by the humbug, hypocrisy, selfishness and cowardice of our ruling snob-classes".
Paedophilia hints
In a chapter entitled "Official Ireland" O'Brien reminds us that the Bell published articles on prisons, illegitimacy, crime, workhouses, hospitalisation, dance halls, clericalism, public libraries, mental illness, poverty, pawn shops, TB, urban slums, the Irish language and literary censorship. And as long ago as 1944 the Bell was the only publication to mention child abuse. A series of three articles by Olivia Manning Robertson recounted her experience working as a play leader in Dublin Corporation playgrounds that hinted at paedophilia.
After her stint at the Bell, Tracy took the post of Ireland correspondent for the Sunday Times. In May 1950 she filed a report from the parish of Doneraile, Co Cork. A large, modern villa had been built for the parish priest, the cost borne by his parishioners. The article contrasted the impoverished parishioners' dwellings, "without water or light", with the big house they were coerced into giving their pastor. Tracy noted that the "spaciousness" of the priest's house had "taken away the breath" of the people who funded it through church dues that had been increased for that purpose.
They reported how the canon’s voice, “so tired and confused” during the service, “rose clear as Shandon bells from the steps of the altar as he pricks the faithful on to fresh endeavours” in fundraising. He read aloud how much each parishioner contributed to the weekly collection of dues. This in 1950.
The priest in question, Canon Maurice O’Connell, was not named in Tracy’s report but sued for defamation, alleging that the piece meant he “was seeking luxury and comfort incompatible with his office”. The newspaper settled the case by donating £750 to the Society of St Vincent de Paul, accompanied by an apology stating that the article was “untrue in its material facts, inaccurate and misleading”.
Tracy promptly sued the Sunday Times for "casting aspersions on her journalistic integrity". The jury found in her favour and awarded her £3,000 in damages against her paper. As O'Brien points out, Tracy, an outsider, had done nothing other than bear witness to an incident that illustrated how Irish society was structured at the time. She breached the unwritten rule that the church enjoyed immunity from scrutiny that would expose inconvenient facts.
Protestant paper
The Irish Times, then if not now, stood apart from Official Ireland. The Protestant paper could not be trusted. Under the editorship of Robert Smyllie, this outsider opposed neutrality during the second World War, or what the cute-hoor natives neatly defined as the Emergency.
The appointment of Douglas Gageby as editor in 1963 was a turning point in Irish journalism. Most importantly, he empowered women journalists to escape the ghetto of “women’s pages” consisting of banal musings about fashion and cookery. Gageby appointed Maher and Eileen O’Brien with a brief to take on serious matters of social concern to women.
John Healy was another Gageby appointment. Healy wrote daring, irreverent, robust political commentary. As one observer noted, "until the arrival of 'Backbencher' " – as Healy signed himself – "in the Sunday Review, and later The Irish Times, regular and provocative political journalism was almost unknown in Ireland".
Ironically, Gageby and, in particular, Healy had a grá for one CJ Haughey. But, given the times that were in it, the boys were not alone in that.
Katharine Graham, the proprietor of the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal, insisted that "news is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising. The power is to set the agenda."
Much of O’Brien’s analysis of 20th-century Irish journalism reflects on the power of the Catholic Church and how it, together with its political puppets, set an agenda designed to persecute the mass of Irish people. Some were blackguards and some were thieves, but most were timid placemen doing what they were told.
Dangers of TV
The arrival of television posed a new threat to the State’s brutal rulers. The monstrous Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and the powerful politicians Seán Lemass and his mentor, Éamon de Valera, were alive to the dangers of the medium. Once more it was arguably the resistance of outsiders that preserved the independence of a new power in the land, Raidió Teilifís Éireann.
Eamonn Andrews, the first chairman of the RTÉ Authority, was one of our own. But, crucially, Andrews had escaped the parish to become a popular and respected broadcaster in the UK, with the BBC. Thus liberated, this outwardly amiable, devout Catholic had the guile and steel to stand up to politicians and clerics seeking to set RTÉ’s agenda.
In the context of O’Brien’s assessment of Irish journalism in the 20th century, Andrews represents something new and enduringly heroic: a patriot who understood the importance of free speech.
Gay Byrne, the quiet yet inspiringly determined showman with a rare gift for taking the national pulse, emerges also. Byrne's Late Late Show was the most popular television programme in the country. Freedom of speech was assured. His equally popular daily radio show, The Gay Byrne Hour, was at times a powerful, agenda-setting forum – never more so than in 1984, when the Sunday Tribune reported the death of the teenager Ann Lovett and her baby in the grounds of a church in Co Longford.
The Tribune was subject to a critical assault for reporting this tragedy and naming the victims. While the reporters who travelled to Granard were accused of bringing shame on the town, the tragedy was a catalyst for those who, similar to Lovett, had been forced to hide a pregnancy, give birth in secret and, in some cases, commit infanticide.
Hundreds of letters from such women were dispatched to Byrne’s show, and read out by actors. This was public-service broadcasting, free of the chains of church and State.
As O’Brien documents, the result was, in the words of the writer Colm Tóibín, “the most relentless assault which has ever been presented to a mass audience on the accepted version of reality in this country”.
Shameful story
Looking back on these events 20 years later, Emily O'Reilly, who wrote the Tribune story, argued that "Ann Lovett's death in a sense marked an end to all that. It told us not just its own story but also the story of one part of a generation before it, a shameful story of terror, hypocrisy and misogyny".
Byrne was now setting the agenda to the extent that any one journalist can.
Mark O’Brien is an academic at Dublin City University. This book is well researched and welcome for reminding us of the evils of the State’s past. We are 17 years into the 21st century. Sadly we are as a nation no better off. Print journalism is dying. New masters of our universe have slipped slyly into the powerful space once occupied by the clerics. Cleverer, wealthier and in essence far more menacing to the common good, the new bullies do not threaten politicians. They recruit them.
As the fourth estate dies slowly and a fifth estate is born, who is going to call the new masters of our universe to account?
Eamon Dunphy is a journalist, broadcaster and podcaster on thestandwitheamondunphy.com
