It will be 41 years ago in May since THE TIMES on its front page coverage of the funeral of Bobby Sands deliberately published a blatant lie.
It will be 40 years ago next month since the publication of the Press Council’s reluctant condemnation of it. I had spent months writing to the Council as it tried to wear me out with its dishonest defence of the rag.
That night I turned on the TV to see TIMES EDITOR hailed as “Editor of the Year” by his fellow editors.
The lie or its variants have been repeatedly published by other newspapers, and I suspect it will be recycled into the next century.
But so long as I live and breathe I intend to challenge it.
The piece below was published as a BLOG here in December 2015 and earlier that year as an article in THE IRISH POLITICAL REVIEW. I think it had been published earlier online in The Irish Democrat as part of a series exposing celebrated mercenary pseuds.
– PSEUDS, CORNER-BOYS: No.4 SIR SIMON JENKINS & SIR HAROLD EVANS.
In 1994 when Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, in pursuit of peace in Ireland and Britain, sought an American visa for Gerry Adams, who held an Irish passport, the British Government and its cronies did their damnedest to scupper his initiative.
One of the cronies was Simon Jenkins, a veteran journalist who had been Editor of London’s Evening Standard, and of the more prestigious TIMES of London.
Jenkins had no scruples, and years after his effort to scupper the peace process had failed, boasted, without shame, of how he had briefed officials in President Clinton’s White House. He had told them that since 1969 the IRA had killed “3,000 Britons.”
Approximately 3,000 persons had been killed in the conflict, 1,700 or so by Republicans and the balance by the British Crown Forces, their collaborators and admirers.
A great many of those killed were not British but Irish, and if they held passports, held Irish ones.
An experienced journalist such as Jenkins would have known this, even if he had not been a successor to Harold Evans in the Editor’s chair of THE TIMES.
Perhaps here I should explain the Hiberno-Irish term “corner-boy.” I have never seen it defined in a dictionary, but I have always thought it meant a creature lower in the esteem of decent people than a louse, or a lout.
My late mother might have equated it with “kinatt” a term current in Dublin when James Joyce lived there.
In 1981, when Harold Evans was editor of THE TIMES, the paper sought to defend its assertion that in the years between 1969 and 1981 that the IRA had killed “over 2,000 Protestants.” As the total fatalities in the conflict approximated that number, the intended implication was that all fatalities were inflicted by republicans and all those killed were Protestants. After 9 months Britain’s Press Council reluctantly upheld complaints lodged independently by myself, and by another reader, who lived in Paris.
The night the Press Council’s adjudication was published I turned on the TV to see Harold Evans awarded the accolade of “Editor of the Year” by his fellow British Editors.
A few months later, all on the same morning, at least three London papers, The Daily Express, The Daily Star and the Daily Mail, in a concerted attack on Ken Livingstone, then the leader of the Greater London Council, repeated verbatim the untruths for which THE TIMES had just been censured by the Press Council.
A gentleman in Birmingham reported the Daily Express and the Daily Star to the Press Council, which took another 9 months to uphold its complaint.
I complained the Daily Mail to the Press Council, but all in vain. Its lies had gone out over the name of Sir Humphrey Atkins, recently HM Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and the Press Council decided to let lying dogs sleep.
Shortly thereafter the Press Council. which had a reputation for toothlessness, was renamed the Press Complaints Commission, and Sir Humphrey Atkins, raised to the Peerage, also changed his name, and was appointed to the Press Complaints Commission.
The Wages of Sin may be Death, but not this side of the grave, and I reckon Atkins was on to a nice little earner.
Some time later Simon Jenkins and Harold Evans were simultaneously knighted.
Evans, I understand, lives a celebrity life in Manhattan. I wonder can he be the source of the nonsense spouted by Cardinal Dolan of New York equating the IRA with ISIS?
TO BE CONTINUED
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