Sir, – Ian Kenneally's excellent article "Press was intimidated in War of Independence" (Weekend, November 15th) has outlined the intimidation suffered by the Irish Independent during the War of Independence. May I point out that its great rival in the daily newspaper market at that time, the Freeman's Journal, was also the victim of republican violence? This was arguably an even greater outrage since it occurred after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and was clearly designed to subvert the democratic will of Dáil Éireann in regard to the Treaty.
On March 29th, 1922 (in the hiatus between the signing of the Treaty and the outbreak of the Civil War), the Freeman's Journal's printing plant was destroyed by a raiding party of anti-Treatyite IRA because they objected to an article about a convention of their military council held two days earlier. The Freeman responded in a spirited fashion. A much reduced version of the newspaper was produced on Gestetner machines as a stop-gap in the following weeks, until it resumed normal production on April 22th.
With hindsight, many anti-Treatyites came to recognise that it had been a bad mistake to attempt to suppress the Freeman. The effect of that and other similar occurrences was to associate the anti-Treaty side with military dictatorship and censorship – to give the impression that, as the prominent republican Todd Andrews later wrote, people "were liable to be pushed around at the whim of young IRA commanders'". This tended to strengthen popular support for the Free State government.
The destruction of the Freeman's plant cast a long shadow. As late as 1976, in a speech about the Criminal Law Bill introduced by the then Fine Gael-Labour coalition government, the parliamentary secretary to the taoiseach, John Kelly, referred to it when dismissing a claim by Charles Haughey that a section of the Bill could give rise to press censorship. That claim, Kelly opined, was "brazen unscrupulousness" – and then he said this: "I may recall that on only one occasion since the Treaty was a newspaper literally put out of action because its politics were unacceptable – in 1922, when the printing works of the Freeman's Journal were smashed up . . . This thoroughly fascist act was not committed by anyone in the Cosgrave tradition, but by the 'Republicans' from whom Mr Haughey's party proudly trace their descent." – Yours, etc,
FELIX M LARKIN,
Dublin 18.