HISTORY: The Irish Times: A Historyby Mark O'Brien, Four Courts Press, 320pp. €35 NEWSPAPERS ARE paradoxical institutions. On the one hand, they function within a context of constant flux, surf-riding, as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid put it, on the day's sensations. On the other, they are, for the most part, remarkably conservative.
Perhaps because they serve as markers of identity for their readers, they tend to retain their broad political stamp through the decades. Time and technology, social and political change, revolutions in design and distribution, all tend to leave their basic orientation intact.
Part of what makes The Irish Timesso interesting is that it is an exception to this general rule. Of all the institutions that emerged from the Irish 19th century and survived into the 21st, it is the one that bears most comparison to a chameleon.
Some of this change is a matter of outside perception. In Mark O'Brien's lucid and impressively detailed history of the paper, published in good time for its 150th anniversary next year, there is a vignette that would be very funny if it were not so alarming.
On Bloody Sunday in 1920, when Michael Collins's IRA squad killed 14 British agents, the ultra-respectable and solidly Unionist Irish Timeseditor John Healy and the man who would succeed him, Robert Smyllie, were arrested by a party of drunken Auxiliaries who insisted they were Sinn Féiners and, consequently, must be shot. They were saved by the good graces of a concerned citizen who phoned Dublin Castle, which sent out a party of officers to rescue them. Fast forward three years to the Civil War and poor Healy was a target for the IRA, who fired shots through the windows of his house as a warning. Skip ahead another 15 years or so and the paper, now under Smyllie, was reported by Todd Andrews, who served in the anti-Treaty IRA, to be the benchmark for Fianna Fáil politicians: favourable comment from The Irish Times made a minister's day. Favourable comment from the other two Dublin dailies was of no importance to them.
These were perhaps no more than the vagaries of troubled times, but the paper itself had this slippery quality from the very beginning. Though O'Brien tends to see the paper in the 19th century as a simple expression of the Protestant and Unionist cause, its self-image was never quite that stable. Its own early descriptions of its political identity range from that of its founder Lawrence E Knox in 1860 (the Protestant and Conservative daily newspaper) to Moderate-Conservative (1882), Independent (1887) and Unionist (1895).
This may represent a fairly narrow range of political positions, but the instability of the labels hints at the underlying complexity of the paper's position, even in its days as a solid friend of Dublin Castle, the monarchy and the empire. O'Brien, whose gallop through 150 years in 276 pages (excluding footnotes and the index) is perhaps inevitably stronger on chronological thoroughness than on analysis, could have done more to explore that position.
Unionism was not a monolith. It was divided between north and south and between the landed Ascendancy on the one side and the mercantilist and professional classes on the other. The Irish Timeswas the voice of just one part of this sometimes uneasy coalition - the southern business, professional and administrative elite. Hence, its support for the Land League (whose principles, it declared, contained nothing at which the public need be shocked or frightened.) Hence its relatively sympathetic early coverage of Parnell's campaign for Home Rule. And hence its growing alarm at the rise of Ulster Protestant separatism, which it rightly feared might lead to the abandonment of its own southern Unionist constituency.
This was a much more unstable position than we might assume an Establishment paper to occupy, and O'Brien might have explored the way it prepared the ground for the survival of The Irish Timesafter Independence.
It survived, arguably, because the break was not really as sharp as it is often made out to be. For one thing, reading any newspaper's position through its editorials does not quite reflect its reality.
It is a safe bet that most readers, in the 19th as in the 21st century, bought the paper for its news coverage rather than for its editorial thunderings. And that coverage, as O'Brien does acknowledge, was often much more open than the editorial line would imply. In 1873, The Irish Timespublished a special 12-page edition (which it boasted was the largest daily paper ever published in Ireland) to cover the proceedings of the conference of Isaac Butt's Home Rule Association. During the 1913 Lockout, while its editorial line was resolutely anti-Larkin, it also published WB Yeats's great attack on the employers' leader William Martin Murphy, September 1913, and George Russell's long and excoriating open letter To the Masters of Dublin. After the 1916 Rising, while the editorials were calling for the whole malignant growth of militancy to be removed - rhetoric taken by most to be a call for more executions - the paper's reporters were going about the business of providing what was undoubtedly the best straight reportage of the events.
It was this tradition of relatively unbiased reportage, and of being willing to publish material of quality and interest even when it did not accord with the editorial line, that allowed The Irish Timesto carve out a space for itself in the new State. In one sense, it was fortunate that the dominant culture of independent Ireland was so narrow and repressive. A mainstream nationalist paper with a commitment to openness and pluralism would probably have destroyed The Irish Timesby offering open-minded readers its best qualities without the attendant nostalgia for the British connection. But there was really nowhere else for those readers, or writers as brilliantly eccentric as a Patrick Campbell or a Myles na gCopaleen, to go.
O'Brien, who has previously written an excellent study of the Irish Press, is at his best on this whole period when the paper combined what Bruce Williamson called "magnificent bohemianism" with a continuation of its old protean traditions. His careful tracing of the paper's evolving relationship with the new Establishment underlines how complex that relationship really was.
Initially, and inevitably, the paper was strongly committed to Cumann na nGaedheal and Fine Gael. By 1936, its strong support for the Minister for Finance, Sean MacEntee, had Fine Gael's James Dillon denouncing it in the Dáil as essentially a Fianna Fáil rag. By 1965, Sean Lemass was complaining in public that The Irish Times. . . seems to have passed under the control of a group of crypto-reds, supporting left wing elements in the Labour party. One might add, for good measure, Smyllie's own description of the paper in 1941 was as the only real Sinn Féin paper in existence.
IT MIGHT BE SAID THAT, under Douglas Gageby and Conor Brady in the last three decades, The Irish Timesacquired a more simple and stable identity as a liberal middle-class paper, hospitable to critical social thinking and strongly identified with the movement to sever State from Church.
Even then, however, it is easy to miss the fact that for most of that period the paper was, in broad terms, editorially supportive of Fianna Fáil, a party which was hardly sympathetic to either of those concerns. This reminds us of the primary virtue that emerges from O'Brien's book, the paper's ability to be contrary, even in relation to itself.
Fintan O'Toole is an assistant editor of The Irish Times
