I’m a Souvenir myself, I realise, for I have just rediscovered a piece I wrote in 1990 in the Irish Democrat,published monthly in London by the Connolly Association from 1938 until into this century.
The piece was called “SUNDAY, SUNDAY” and above the title the Editor had the heading “Media Watch”followed by “Donal Kennedy casts a jaundiced eye over the papers.
“In England’s South-east you can recapture part of the Sundays you knew.” So it said in the Irish Postadvertisement for The Sunday Press currently under threat by its proprietors.
I remember the first edition of The Sunday Press, for my brother brought it back from the All-Ireland Hurling Final in 1949. It first supplemented and then supplanted The Sunday Independent at home. My father used to argue with its uncritically pro-De Valera line, but preferred it to the Independent, just as he always voted Fianna Fail “as the best of a bad lot.” I think he always had 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 People, Empire News and Sunday Express for their sensationalism, or their coverage of England’s Royal Family, according to taste, but The Sunday Times and The Observer never swam into my ken.
The Sunday Press that the advertisement evokes had a full page of comic strips, two of which, and this was unique, were Irish produced, and one in the Irish language, A Jesuit, Father Nash, had a column of great cindividuality. I thought when I last saw it that he had died and left a legacy of pieces to be published ad nauseam, like the ghost stories of Victor O’D Power and the recycled 1920s with their 2 shillings and 6 Pence prizes for publication that appeared in the Our Boys.
Incidentally, the Irish Christian Brothers, publishing a monthly for boys since 1914 (when every other children’s paper originated body and soul in Britain and the USA) did sterling work, or, should I say, were worth their weight ingold.
I was convinced of Father Nash’s distance from terrestrial affairs when he fulminated against revolutionaries andntheir universal cowardice, at a time, such as a hunger strike, which belied his case. I found later that it was a contemporary effort. Father Nash has since gone to an Ancient Regime in the Sky, and is happy there, unless the Liberation Theologians have turned it into the Republic of Heaven,
Best of all, in The Sunday Press, to my mind, were the memoirs or biographies of old heroes. Florrie O’Donoghue’s book on Liam Lynch and Ernie O’Malley’s “IRA Raids” knocked The Sunday Express’s “Cockleshell Heroes” into a cocked hat.
When in 1954, 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 of 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 lucky dip, with the serious cheek by jowl with the trivial. It later acquired an Agony Aunt,bwho might be said to have thought an Aspirin and a Decade of the Rosary was the best way out of a conundrum. But I remember her writing in the mid 1970s, that Ireland was acquiring a grasping, amoral middle class, for the old values and civilities were dead letters.
Today’s Sunday Press bears all the signs of being taken over by that new class, and except for one veteran columnist “Gulliver” none of its regular writers seems to have any historical, philosophical, or grammatical terms of reference.
When the paper’s resident London correspondent did a piece on an Irishman working in Windsor’s Great Park, he said the fellow could see Buckingham Palace from it. I suppose, like Marie Lloyd he’d have “seed the Ackney Marshes, if itwasn’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 a caption saying that he had the “toughest police job in Britain.”
To avoid blaspheming on the Sabbath, I gave up The Sunday Press and 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 in London until, a few months ago. the Sunday Independent made its appearance. If the Sunday Press was chiefly Nationalist paper with Catholic incidentals the Sunday Independent, like its daily stablemate, always seemed to me a cloyingly pietistic Catholic paper with Nationalist incidentals. Its Nationalism was chiefly of the anti -Fianna Fail , and you’d sometimes think it had been founded by MichaelCollins, rather than the old Irish Party’s 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 skilfully written than I can remember it. Gone is the old pietism, together with “old dacency” and there is neither religion nor what i would recognise as national self-respect in it. In some ways it is more brash and vulgar than anything published in London, and even in Dublin’s own gutter Sunday World. Its star columnist, Colm Toibin, though a Modernist in ethics, has a contempt for the Irish majority that would stagger Trinity’s elitist Professor Mahaffy or his contemporary, the 19th Century British Prime Minister, Salisbury.
In a profile of Senator Mary Robinson Mr Toibin is at his revealing best. –
“When Mary Robinson began to campaign in the Senate, for legislation to make contraceptives available, the abuse began. Unreconstructed Ireland showed its face, the people who didn’t read The Irish Times, didn’t have a vote in the 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 to her office in the Senate, as many as fifteen or
twenty per week, cut up garden gloves, or the parts of them which resembled condoms, were often enclosed. Mother Ireland.
was rearing them still.”
Significant here, and confirmation of what I was saying earlier, neither the Press or Independent groups, with a wider readership
than that of the Irish Times are evoked as enlightening agents, while The Irish Times is accorded the reverence which The Independent used to give to the Pope.
Neither of my parents,nor most of their generation, would have recognised a condom had it hit them in the face, and my father a
Varsity man too-,one of the privileged minority with a Senate vote!. But he went to National, not Trinity, and I suppose like all those who read The Irish Press or Irish Independent, he couldn’t know anything better.
I’m not here knocking The Irish Times, a very good paper in its own way, nor even the issue pursued by Senator Robinson.
But the urchins and young wans of Dublin’s non-academic streets used to have the perfect put-down for the pretensions of
a Colm Toibin – “Would yeh go an’ have a Mass said for Yerself,”.”.
Comments are closed.