Elections are good news for newspapers. Journalists love chasing candidates round the country, writing colour pieces, while editors and proprietors rub their hands at the prospect of extra sales.
There was a time when elections were even more welcome. In the 1860s a Scotsman named Andrew Dunlop came to Ireland to work as a journalist. He first found work on the Wexford Constitution, then for a short while on the Limerick Chronicle before an eventful life in Dublin working for the Daily Express, the Freeman's Journal and The Irish Times. It was while working in Limerick that he observed how newspapers of the time profited from elections. money. In his memoir Fifty Years of Irish Journalism, published in 1911, he remarks that local newspapers "had a good harvest at election times." The practice was for papers to publish the addresses of the candidates as advertisements at a shilling a line. That was only the beginning, for everything written favourable about candidates, "be it a leading article or letter, was charged and paid for at the same rate as the advertisements".
Little has changed
Dunlop's book is less concerned with the events he covered than with the life of a journalist. It is remarkable how little has changed. This may be the era of the laptop computer rather than the telegraph, but journalists of today and Dunlop's time share is the same obsession with getting the story back to head office. Dunlop travelled to assignments by train, coach and horse, but a 21st-century journalist reads his book with a sense of familiarity. For instance, Dunlop and his colleagues worked a shift called "night town", which reporters in Dublin still do. One of the most important duties of the sub-editor, Dunlop writes, after securing such a post in the Dublin Daily Express, "is to guard against the insertion of libellous matter".
Dunlop returned to reporting and soon realised that sub-editors do more than check for libel. He was covering the murder of a land agent when he had cause to complain about the subs adding new material to his copy. He was working for The Irish Times when a contribution from a local priest was added to his story: "This is a very unusual course for a sub-editor to adopt; for although as long as journalism is conducted on the anonymous system, the editor, or it may be the proprietor of the newspaper, is the person responsible to the public for what appears in its columns, the writer being responsible only to his employer; yet when a representative of a newspaper is sent on a mission such as I was entrusted with on this occasion, his identity necessarily becomes known, all the more so in my case because I was well known in Loughrea, and, to a limited circle - to those from whom he has been acquiring information, for example - he is looked upon as the responsible individual."
Rescuing Parnell
Being a journalist during the 19th century was not an easy career option. Irish journalism came of age against a background of political agitation. Indeed, Irish journalists reported historic events, often at some danger to themselves. Dunlop recounts how he came to the aid of Charles Stewart Parnell when the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party came under direct physical attack. "A man got hold of him \ by the legs and the Irish leader was in great danger of being pulled through one of the open spaces of the wooden railing of the platform, which alone separated him from the angry crowd. I was standing close by him throughout the entire scene and was thereby enabled to frustrate the attempts by taking my umbrella and bringing the knobbly end of the handle heavily down on the knuckles of Mr Parnell's assailant."
His life was one of travelling across Ireland in mail trains, of cold beds in commercial hotels and the never-ending battle with telegraph systems to get his reports back to Dublin. He even had a special wooden portable writing table so he could write his stories while horse and cart swayed over the pot-holed roads of the West of Ireland.
Crossing the water
But the fearless reporter was not always appreciated. He recounts an incident while covering an eviction in Glenbeigh, Co Kerry: "As luck would have it, on my way out a woman offered to carry me [across a stream\]; I accepted the offer, and was borne across safely. On returning in the evening, however, in company of nearly the whole of the party, a stout young fellow, who had been evidently put up to the job, offered to carry me across.
"I had my suspicions, but I instantly realised that I could not be in a worse position by accepting the offer than by rejecting it, so I accepted; when we reached the middle of the stream my bearer said 'down wid ye'. I instantly did so, quickly realising this was better than to wait till I should be thrown down."