A MODEL CITIZEN? by Donal Kennedy

That’s how THE TIMES of London, on 31 May 1934, saluted the man who had been Editor of THE IRISH TIMES from 1907 until his death.  “Ireland had many more declamatory, but few deeper and more anxious, lovers.”…….”The passing from his country of so many and so much that he had esteemed, and the gathering darkness of outlook beyond which he could decry no light, brought a great sadness to his later years”.

On 17th December 1920 District Inspector O’Sullivan of the RIC was shot dead by the IRA in Henry Street, Dubiln. He was accompanied by a Miss Moore, who was not attacked. The IRISH TIMES reported that passers-by did nothing to help the shot man.  The Dublin Evening Mail  carried Miss Moore’s emphatic denial of the story published in THE IRISH TIMES. The Evening Mail, like the IRISH TIMES, was a Unionist paper.But, unlike THE IRISH TIMES it gathered news, rather than producing, as the fruit of its own enquiries, the official press releases from the British regime in Dublin Castle.( In my youth we often had the Evening  Mail  at home, never THE IRISH TIMES. Some of my friends’ parents bought English Sunday papers, but not

THE IRISH TIMES.)

On  23 February 1920 THE IRISH TIMES said in an Editorial –

“The present government is unpopular with a majority of Irishmen. Let us go no further and assume for the sake of argument that it is an arbitrary government which consistently abuses its power. At the worst,however, it is not nearly as arbitrary as was the Roman Government to which Christ and St Paul rendered strict obedience.”

The “present government” in the paper’s view was the British Government. Following Sinn Fein’s  General Election popular mandate of 1918 Dail Eireann assumed the responsibilities of government and its popularity had been further attested to by Sinn Fein’s successes in the Municipal  Elections of January 1920.

Healy’s Obituary in THE TIMES continued – “In the evil days that followed the War, Healy had every reason to believe himself a marked man. Night after night he used to leave the IRISH TIMES office in the small hours of the morning and walk alone for some two miles to his home on the outskirts of Dublin, never knowing whether he would reach home alive or be assassinated on the way.”

Well might he have been in fear because, under curfew, Crown Forces patrolled the streets.  Journalists had been arrested in broad daylight by those forces and imprisoned by British courts. At Easter 1916 two Unionist journalists, together with a Pacifist one, had been murdered at the orders of a (perhaps) deranged British Officer by (perhaps) sane British soldiers.

In February 1933 when Eamon de Valera who had led a Fianna Fail Government, with Labour support. for a year, called a General Election, THE IRISH TIMES entered the fray against him. Fianna Fail won an overall majority, and the following four General Elections returned that party to power.

In March 1933 THE IRISH TIMES celebrated with glee the accession to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler.

It’s nice to think Ireland has at last been liberated from the darkness of outlook of Eamon de Valera, and that today the country has a commentariatwhich shares the enlightened outlook of a John Edward Healy and that it can recycle, without criticism, the stories put out by the British Government during the Glory Days of the Great War, and the evil days of the ascendancy of Sinn Fein