Courtney McGrailThe Irish Times: 150 Years of Influence
by Terence Brown
(Bloomsbury Continuum, £25.00)
Felix M. Larkin
This latest book about The Irish Times sets out to celebrate its “150 years of influence”, to quote the book’s subtitle. But what is the influence of The Irish Times or indeed any other newspaper? To what extent do newspapers shape public opinion, or do they merely mirror it?
My own view is that the real power of a newspaper lies in its ability to set an agenda. It cannot control what its readers think, but it does determine what they think about.
It seems to me appropriate, therefore, that Terence Brown’s approach in this book is primarily to analyse how The Irish Times invited its readers to engage with various issues during its first 150 years. His book is not a conventional institutional history; rather its focus is, in Brown’s own words, on “how the newspaper reported and reflected on Ireland and the world” since its foundation in 1859.
Minority
For the first one hundred years, until the late-1950s, its readers were largely the Protestant minority in southern Ireland – and the newspaper was required to address a range of issues that fundamentally challenged the interests of these readers: disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, land reform and Irish independence.
All these things, of course, came to pass despite the opposition of The Irish Times – but it is Brown’s contention that the historic achievement of the newspaper was, through its reportage and commentary, to nudge its readers into accepting the changes and working out an accommodation with the new Ireland that was emerging.
Conversely, after independence in 1922, the newspaper sought to encourage the Irish polity to be more accommodating to the Protestant minority. That was a lost cause up to the 1960s, when greater economic prosperity and the radical spirit of the Second Vatican Council began to undermine the old orthodoxies in Ireland and a more open, liberal society suddenly seemed possible.
Brown argues that the public discourse on modernising Irish society at that time and later was in large measure defined by The Irish Times. This won for the newspaper a new cohort of readers – the new well-educated and predominantly Catholic elite which was then replacing the aging revolutionary generation that had dominated Irish society since 1922. The Irish Times thus became Ireland’s unrivalled “quality” daily newspaper and this guaranteed its survival after decades of very precarious existence.
Judgment
While accepting that The Irish Times has generally served its readers well, there have been some lapses in judgment. Probably the most egregious was its fawning treatment of Charles J. Haughey for much of his career. It failed in its duty to raise questions about his wealth and shameless political shenanigans notwithstanding the speculation about him that was rife in informed circles throughout the country.
Brown attributes this lapse to the influence of the journalist John Healy, Haughey having been one of the main sources of political gossip for Healy’s innovative ‘Backbencher’ columns in The Irish Times. Healy for years referred to Haughey without irony as “the golden boy” of Irish politics, and even on election day in November 1982 – after the fall of Haughey’s most infamous government – an Irish Times editorial described him admiringly as “born to be chief”.
Brown’s book is the fourth history of The Irish Times to have been published in recent years – the others being by Mark O’Brien, Dermot James and John Martin. In addition, the two most notable editors of the newspaper, Robert Smyllie and Douglas Gageby, have each been the subject of individual volumes – the former, a full-length biography by Tony Gray; the latter, a collection of essays edited by Andrew Whittaker. Another former editor, Conor Brady, has written an autobiography.
In focusing on the contents of the newspaper, Terence Brown has produced a work which is broader in scope than any of the earlier studies. He has been painstaking in his research, and I marvel at his great achievement in trawling through 150 years of daily newspapers and converting the results of his research into a coherent and elegantly written book.
One criticism I would make is that the book is heavily weighted towards the contemporary. The 19th Century merits less than 50 pages (out of a total of 423 pages of narrative), while over 200 pages – almost 50% – refer to the period since 1966.
This imbalance may indicate what today’s Irish Times wishes to celebrate about its 150 years of publication, but it surely distorts the historical record.