‘Newspaper Memories’ by Donal Kennedy

A few weeks ago I was in The British Newspaper Library . I located a long interview given by my grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, to the  Cork Examiner in 1910 on the aims and policy of the Association of Secondary Teachers (Ireland) of which he was a founding member in 1909 and first President. I then consulted some issues of The Freeman’s Journal, a Nationalist (but not Republican) Dublin daily paper for 1920 and 1921 which so threatened British rule in Ireland that  it was for a time suppressed and its editor  gaoled. I found it extremely informative and well written, with telling photographs and hard-hitting cartoons. I can’t think of a current daily paper in these islands which is up to its standards.

As an afterthought I consulted WILLINGS’ PRESS GUIDE, described as “the world’s best-read media guide for the past 125 years.”  I checked the volume covering 1982 for the London-published IRISH OBSERVER but found no reference to it.

My interest in it started in London’s Fleet Street when I visited the office of THE IRISH PRESS in the Spring of 1982. I think I also visited the IRISH TIMES and IRISH INDEPENDENT offices there that day. Those were the days when one might be lucky to buy one of the Dublin papers in Central London on the afternoon following the morning of its publication or on the following day in the suburbs.  Anyhow I overheard a woman customer telling an IRISH PRESS  employee that a new weekly for the Irish in Britain would soon be launched to knock the “dreadful”  IRISH POST off the news stands.

The Irish Post had been launched in 1970 and had built up a strong circulation. It celebrated the Irish in Britain fostered their  community organisations and was instrumental in their forming a federation, reported on events in Ireland and Britain, commented on them, and encouraged readers to put their opinions on record. Its indefatigable Editor and Managing Director, Brendan MacLua, ensured that there wasn’t a misspelling or a grammatical error in it and it was a professional product in every respect. Sloppiness was anathema to Brendan.

Under the pen-name “Frank Dolan,” one of his many pseudonyms, Brendan criticised the behaviour of the British Government in Ireland and excoriated Irish politicians whom he considered more supportive of that Government than the rights of those suffering under it. The hunger strikes of 1981 had galvanised many young people born in Britain of Irish parents to assert themselves. Their parents, no matter how they resented British policy, for the most part kept their voices low as their accents might get them in trouble. Most of the British media, cartoonists and alleged comedians were part of an officially orchestrated anti-Irish propaganda war.

The IRISH OBSERVER hit the news stands. It led with an interview with Eamonn Kennedy, the Irish Ambasador, half of which was devoted to the Stag’s Head or Antlers motif of His Excellency’s neck-tie and half to how gracious Mrs Thatcher had been to him when she invited him to stand next to him while a regiment of Her Majesty’s Life Guards “Trooped the Colour” in Horse Guards’ Parade.

At the time most people in London buying a paper with “Irish ” in its title would have preferred to see the whole Brigade of Guards, leading the rest of Her Majesty’s Forces in Beating Retreat. I’m not sure if a second edition  of the IRISH OBSERVER was ever printed.

Its editor (since deceased) had been editor of “The Catholic Herald”. The rest of the staff had been seconded from Bord Failte and I believe retuned officially to the Irish State payroll when The Irish Observer folded.

Thirty-four years later The Irish Post survives. Brendan MacLua passed to his eternal reward in 2009. Ar dheis De go raibh a anam uasal. He once compared Bord Failte to Fawlty Towers, with apologies to that TV farce.