THE IRISH TIMES claims a record of “Trusted Journalism since 1859” the year of
its foundation.
I’ve checked the word “TRUST” in various dictionaries which I have learned to trust.
Used as a NOUN it can mean -“firm belief in the reliability, or strength of a person or thing, a confident expectation, a responsibility arising from trust in the person given authority”
It can also mean “an organisation founded to promote or preserve something”.
Used as a VERB it means “to have or place trust in, treat as reliable.”
The paper’s judgement seldom swayed most Irish newspaper readers.
In 1916 it called for the extermination of the 1916 Insurgents. Following the
landslide victory of candidates standing on a manifesto establishing a Republic
in accordance with the Insurgents’ programme, it did not come to terms with it,
except during a short period when Douglas Gageby was its Editor.
In February 1933 the Fianna Fail party, which had come to power with Labour
party support a year earlier. called an Election. The paper predicted rack and ruin
for Ireland if it was returned to power. Fianna Fail won an overall majority, and,
held power following numerous elections until 1948. Guided by Eamon de Valera
the electorate established a sovereign independent democratic Irish State introduced
mandatory one week annual holidays (ahead of the UK) oversaw a massive building
programme, established new industries, played an outstandingly honourable part
in the League of Nations and kept out of the Second World War.
In March 1933 the IRISH TIMES, in the Editorial “Herr Hitler’s Way” hailed Hitler’s
accession to power. It was particularly happy with the brutal suppression of the Left,
endorsing the thuggish slogan “one can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.”
So much for the trust most Irish people had for Irish Times Opinion.
What trust can we have for Irish Time Facts?
It seems to me that Opinions should follow from analysis. But the Irish Times puts the horse behind the cart. But by some trick the horse can deposit its noisesome load as in the feature “Rite and Reason”.in the cart.
At Easter 2016 a contributor to that column calumniated the insurrectionary leaders of 1916 whom it compared unfavourably with Daniel O’Connell (the Kerryman after whom streets in Dublin, Limerick and Christian Brother’s Schools are named) it claimed “never shot a man.”
Every Christian Brothers’ boy in my day, like Macaulay’s eponymous schoolboy, knew better than the columnist, an Ordained Member of the Society of Jesus, a Professor in an American University named Seumas Murphy.
In more enlightened times schoolboys were flogged for such HowlersAnd, I would hope, adults burned at the Stake.In fact in 1815, one hundred and one years before the 1916 Rising Daniel O’Connell, in a personal quarrel where he and his opponent believed their honour was at stake shot John d’ Sterre in a public duel in Kildare. That same year O’Connell was arrested on his way to Ostend to meet a challenge from Robert Peel, the future creator of police forces in Britain and Ireland and a future opponent in the House of Commons.
O’Connell was a Barrister and Irish Barristers were probably the most trigger-happy in the world. When O’Connell was studying in France, that country recognised his family as Gentlemen. That was when Catholics in Ireland and Britain were still despised by their rulers and unable tosit in Parliament. If O’Connell had funked a challenge he would have debased both himself and his co-religionists in polite so In 1806, nine years before O’Connell’s duel, US Vice President Aaron Burr shot Treasury Secretary Andrew Hamilton dead in a duel. The idea of honour had long crossed the Atlantic.
Incidentally, the French Establishment recognised the O’Connell claim to gentility in 1789 shortly before the Fall of the Bastille when such a distinction was no longer one to safely boast about.
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