An extraordinary event is due to occur in the early days of the new century. This newspaper will move its headquarters into the old offices of the Irish Press; and in some earthly remove, ancient de Valeran bones will turn ever so gently. For few things so characterise the transformation of Irish political life this century - a transformation that has now turned full circle. In the year 1900, this newspaper enthusiastically championed our membership of the mightiest empire in the world; we still do so.
In the intervening century the Irish people dabbled in self-government, though in an oddly etiolated sense. It was never full self-government in any meaningful sense, for we have never attempted to defend ourselves, being content to let others do it for us - a dependency we so often invested with high moral tone and a tiresome tendency to preach to our defenders. Similarly, we have also been fiscally dependent, as much today as we were when the old century dawned on the final score months of Victoria's reign.
Fiscal independence
For over three-quarters of that century, mostly while nominally independent, we used another country's currency, but placed our own imprint on a naturalised sub-species, which, to be sure, was handsomer than the parent species, and moreover gave us the wondrous assurance of a wholly spurious fiscal independence. Meanwhile, we used another country as a role model for the conduct of our affairs. That country was Tibet. Politics and religious piety became synonymous with a self-imposed distancing from a contaminated continent. The Dalai Lama of that process was Eamon de Valera, and the mouthpiece for his thoughts was the Irish Press.
Go back 50 years, and you would have been in no doubt which newspaper was going to flourish in the coming Ireland. The Irish Times, quite unattached to the factions of Irish politics, still looking wistfully abroad for its spiritual home, its readership emigrating, dying or being outbred, seemed doomed. The Irish Press spoke for the nationalist people of Ireland, and in terms of dazzling self-centredness and awesome self-pity. While this newspaper had not long before silently, stealthily supported the Allies, as Joe Lee reports in Ireland, 1912- 1985, the Irish Press had in 1945 freely censored stories of Japanese atrocities against Americans because they might "inflame passions," yet had observed in 1943 (the year of the Warsaw Ghetto Rising, the year that a million Jews died in Auschwiz): "There is no kind of oppression visited on any minority in Europe which the Six County nationalists have not also endured."
Hibernian Tibetanism, with its skewed version of the world, its belief that all would be righted with a little bit more of the same old monastic medicine, a few more gongs gonging here, a few more prayer-wheels there (though, needless to say, robed in green rather than orange), nearly saw the Irish nationalist people consumed by the spiritual grave which had by then largely swallowed southern Irish unionism. Tibetanism was abandoned as a national aspiration (though attachments to Shangri-la policies on unification and the Irish language survived and survive in strange, mutant forms which emerge largely during ard fheiseanna, and then usually vanish again).
Cultural migration
Similarly, in order to survive, this newspaper had to change, and to create a new, cross-bred constituency which possessed some of the internationalism of that vanishing caste which had once cherished the imperial connection, yet was rooted firmly in the soil, the people and the politics of Ireland. Yet simultaneously, there was a large-scale cultural migration from the mind-set of Burgh Quay, which remained attached to the distant and increasingly irrelevant gongs of Dalai Valera. Well into the 1970s, the Irish Press contained obituaries which reported with tendentious primness that during the Civil War Commandant O'Suchandsuch "remained true to the Republic".
Was it possible for that constituency to have revitalised itself as did the caste for which the Irish Times had come into existence? Possibly - but its predicament was different. It remained attached to the largest party in the State; why should it change? Like an arrogant alcoholic with a private income and who has not hit rock bottom, it thought it could muddle by. It couldn't. A de Valera founded it and a de Valera buried it, and now its headquarters, bought with money raised in the US to destroy the union, will be owned and occupied by a newspaper which once defended that union.
Economic smugness
Now we belong to another union, in which we will be as fiscally dependent as we are militarily, though this is unlikely to diminish the vulgar, loudly-trumpeted economic smugness which has replaced the spiritual smugness so characteristic of our Tibetan period. The truth is, were the US Finnish-speaking and we were dependent upon the unaided skills of our own politicians, the world would be talking of the Ugric Tiger, and we as always would be nuzzling wanly on the posterior mammary.
But that is by-the-by. The Irish Press was the journalistic flagship of total independence, and it was an illusion. The day of illusory independence is over once and for all. We are back to being where we were when the century began: a member of the largest empire in the world. We are a province once again.