I remember reading the very first edition of THE SUNDAY PRESS in September 1949
when I was nearly 8 years old.
The paper collapsed 46 years later and my piece reproduced here was published in THE IRISH DEMOCRAT just before that collapse.
It was called “SUNDAY , SUNDAY.
” ‘ In England’s South-east you can recapture parts of the Sundays you knew’. So it said in The Irish Post’s advertisement for The Sunday Press currently under threat of closure by its proprietors.
I remember its first edition, for my brother brought it back from the All Ireland Hurling
Final in1949. It first supplemented, and then supplanted. The Sunday Independent at
home.
My father used argue with its uncritically pro-De Valera line, but he preferred it to the
Independent, just as he always voted Fianna Fail as ‘the best of a bad lot.’
I think he always had it in mind that The Irish Independent had virtually called for the
execution of Connolly and Sean MacDermot in 1916 and was glad to have an alternative
Sunday read.
English Sunday papers didn’t appear in our house for decades, and those that the neighbours bought were not the qualities. Some bought the The People, Empire News
and The Sunday Express for their sensationalism, coverage of England’s Roya lFamily,
according to taste, but neither The Observer nor The Sunday Times ever swam into my
ken.
The Sunday Press that the advertisment evokes for me had a full page of comic strips,
two of which, and these were unique, were Irish produced, one in the Irish language.
A Jesuit, Father Nash, had a column of great individuality. I thought,when I last saw it, that the man was long dead, and left a legacy of pieces to be published ad nauseam, like the ghost stories of Victor O’D Power and recycled jokes with their 2/6 prizes that appeared in the Our Boys.
(Incidentally , the Irish Christian Brothers, by publishing a monthly for boys since 1914
when every other children’ s paper sold in Ireland originated, body and soul in England
did “Sterling” work – or , should I say? were worth their weight in Gold?)
I was convinced of Father Nash’s distance from current affairs when he fulminated
against revolutionaries and their universal cowardice at a time, such as a Hunger
Strike which belied his case. I found out later it that he had written it at such I time.
He has since gone to the Ancien Regime in the Sky, and is happy there, unless the
Liberation Theologians turned it into the Republic of Heaven.
Best of all, to my mind, in The Sunday Press, were the memoirs or biographies of
old heroes . Florrie O’Donoghue’s book on Liam Lynch, No Other Law, and Ernie
O’Malley’s IRA Raids knocked the Sunday Express’s COCKLESHELL HEROES
into a Cocked Hat.
When, in 1954, when the IRA , which most people had thought had dissolved like
Finn McCool’s Fianna into the mists of legend, staged a raid on Armagh’s Gough
Barracks, taking enough rifles to arm a regular Battalion from the British Army, The
Sunday Press was jubilant. When EOKA guerillas were hanged by the British it was
angry.
But the paper was always a bit of a ragbag or lucky dip, with the serious cheek by jowl
with the trivial. It later acquired an Agony Aunt, who might be said to have thought an
Asprin and a Decade of the Rosary was the best way out of a conundrum. But I do
remember her writing, in the mid 1970s, that Ireland was acquiring a grasping, amoral
middle class, for whom the old values and civilities were dead letters.
Today’s Sunday Press bears all the signs of being taken over by the new class, and,
except for one veteran columnist ‘Gulliver’ none of the regular writers for the paper
seem to have any historical, philosophical or grammatical or geographical terms of
reference.
When the paper’s resident London columnist did a piece on an Irishman working in
Windsor Great Park, he said the fellow could see Buckingham Palace from it.
(I suppose, like the late Marie Lloyd, he’d have also seen the ‘Ackney Marshes If It
Wasn’t For The ‘Ouses In Between?)
The final straw for me was the front page photograph of the wedding of the RUC’s Sir
John Herman with the caption saying he had ‘the toughest police job in Britain’
(SIC).
To avoid blaspheming on the Sabbath, I gave up The Sunday Press.
All the advertising in the world will not get me to buy it again.
The Sunday Press had a virtual monopoly of Irish Sunday papers in my local patch of
North London, until, a few months ago, The Sunday Independent made its appearance .
If the Sunday Press was chiefly a Nationalist paper with pious Catholic incidentals, the
Sunday Independent, like its daily stablemate, had seemed to me a cloyingly
pietistic Catholic paper with Nationalist incidentals. Its Nationalism was chiefly of the
anti-Fianna Fail tendency, and you’d might think it had been founded by Michael Collins
rather than been the mouthpiece of William Martin Murphy.
If Rip Van Winkle found his old haunts unrecognisable when he woke up after 20 years
asleep his shock cannot have been greater than mine on making a recent re-acquaintance with the Sunday Independent. It is far more skillfully written than I remember it.
But, gone is the old pietism. together with ‘Auld Dacency’, and their is neither religion nor
what I would recognise as national self-respect.
In some ways it is more brash and vulgar than anything published in London, and even
Dublin’s gutter Sunday World.
Today the Sunday Independent’s Star Columnist is the novelist COLM TOIBIN.
Though a Modernist in Ethics he has a contempt for the Irish majority that would
have staggered Trinity College’s elitist Professor Mahaffy or the 19th Century British
Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury.
I will put my quotation from Toibin’s Sunday Independent’s article in capital letters to
avoid confusion.
‘WHEN MARY ROBINSON BEGAN TO CAMPAIGN IN THE SENATE FOR LEGISLATION MAKING CONTRACEPTIVES AVAILABLE, THE ABUSE BEGAN.
UNRECONSTRUCTED IRELAND SHOWED ITS FACE, THE PEOPLE WHO HADN’T READ THE IRISH TIMES, HADN’T VOTED IN SENATE ELECTIONS, HAD NOT BEEN
ENLIGHTENED BY VATICAN TWO, NOR LIBERATED BY FREE EDUCATION, WROTE LETTERS TO MARY ROBINSON. LETTERS FULL OF FOUR-LETTER WORDS WITH HOLY PICTURES ATTACHED CAME TO HER HOME AND HER OFFICE IN THE SENATE, AS MANY AS 15 OR 20 A WEEK. CUT UP GARDEN
GLOVES, OR PARTS OF THEM WHICH RESEMBLED CONDOMS WERE OFTEN
ENCLOSED. MOTHER IRELAND WAS REARING THEM YET.’
It’s funny peculiar that Toibin should write such a piece in a paper, which like those
of the Press group were written for a paper read by the masses whom Toibin despises.
Neither of my parents nor most of their Irish contemporaries, would have recognised
a condom if it had hit them in the face, and my father a Varsity man too! One of the
privileged minority with a vote in Senate elections! But he went to the National University,
not Trinity College, and presumably like the masses who read the “Indo” and “Press”
papers he could not be expected to know any better.
Barefoot street urchins and ragamuffins used to have the perfect put down for their presumptuous betters, long before the days of Vatican II:-
WOULD YOU GO AND HAVE A MASS SAID FOR YOURSELF!
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