Irish Times

Harry Browne asks whether the Irish Times is swinging dangerously to the right – and if so, does it matter?

The Irish Times is often accused of moving to the right. Has the paper of record simply changed to reflect a new Ireland? To regard the question as important implies a belief in the newspaper’s importance that is partly mythology, and partly outdated. Like other newspapers, the Times is increasingly irrelevant to younger people, and conservative choices ensure that it will stay that way, risking its future as an institution. Harry Browne chronicles the strange death of a liberal newspaper.

There is a typically fustian Irish Times yarn that goes like this: it’s the late 1920s, and the already venerable unionist paper has struggled to reconcile itself to the Free State, much to the discomfort of die-hard readers. The editor, John Edward Healy, is confronted outside the office by one such woman. “Sir,” she says, “the Irish Times is not what it used to be.”

“Madam,” Healy replies, “the Irish Times was never what it used to be.”

Nowadays, the paper is preparing to move from the offices in the triangle defined by D’Olier Street, Fleet Street and Westmoreland Street, where it has lived for 111 years, and into swish premises a few streets east. And nowadays the general tenor of complaint from older readers – including some Irish Times journalists, past and present – is that it has moved to the right politically.

There is a substantial case to be made that this is true. But we should heed the double-warning in Healy’s paradox: (1) nostalgia is usually shortsighted; and (2) a daily newspaper is a ridiculously complex organism that is difficult to pin down to an “is”, let alone a “was.” Just as the paper’s identity as a Protestant, unionist organ was destabilised as society changed, its succeeding reputation as a liberal, occasionally campaigning newspaper – the only reputation it holds for most people today – is highly contingent.

The paper’s Editor since late 2002 has been Geraldine Kennedy, a veteran political reporter and from 1987 to 1989 a Progressive Democrat TD. She refused to be interviewed for this article, but in public statements has avoided characterising the newspaper as “liberal.” In her essay on the paper’s website, she writes: “We are prepared to champion specific causes, as we have always done, while recognising that these causes have changed over the last decade.”

So old-style liberalism has gone out with the Church it opposed, and if the Irish Times is not what it was, it is because Irish society isn’t either. Case closed. Right? Or are there more direct and distinct indications of a real shift, or even a drift, in the paper’s politics, beyond the fading of the ‘liberal agenda’?

Conor O’Clery, former correspondent in Moscow, Beijing, Washington and New York, probably the most distinguished Irish Times reporter of the last 20 years, says he believes there has been a real change. “I do think the Irish Times has moved to the right,” he says. “The most obvious symptom is the decision to devote part of the foreign-news pages to a neo-conservative opinion columnist from abroad, first Mark Steyn, now Charles Krauthammer, both apologists for George Bush.”

O’Clery’s successor in Moscow, Seamus Martin, who has also left the newspaper’s staff in recent years, agrees. “There’s definitely a drift to the right. Is it coterminous with Geraldine Kennedy’s editorship? Is it coincidental? I’m not sure. Papers take on characters without being pushed in that direction. It’s almost by osmosis.”

Only a handful of other present and former Times staff journalists I spoke to were willing to be named in this story, and none of the many who shared O’Clery and Martin’s view. One reporter said the shift to the right has to be seen in terms of a too-intimate relationship to power: “the Irish Times has become much more boring and less inclined to break stories, which I suppose means being less inclined to challenge society’s power centres.”

“There’s now more challenge to power coming from the Catholic Church than from the newspaper,” says another former staffer. “Vincent Browne wrote lately that the Archbishop of Dublin is to the left of the Irish Labour Party. Well, the Archbishop is also to the left of the Irish Times.”

Former Irish Times journalist and Labour senator John Horgan, now professor of journalism at Dublin City University, took a similar view on RTE Radio 1’s Off the Shelf programme recently: “I think the Irish Times is much more an establishment newspaper than it used to be, a much more consensus newspaper than it used to be.”

Another veteran cites the health service and police scandals as areas where the paper has fallen down, and like many critics, points to the appointment of Stephen Collins as political correspondent. “That is a sign of where Kennedy lies: Collins is so conservative, so unlikely to make waves against the powers that be.” Collins, previously of the Sunday Press and Sunday Tribune, is one of Ireland’s most experienced political correspondents. He has written a sympathetic history of the PDs and is thought to be close to Fine Gael. His appointment, along with that of the conservative Marc Coleman (an Irish Ferries admirer) as economics editor, is cited as evidence for a rightward move.

Some of the present staff, including those with a history of left-leaning sympathies, say it’s more complex. “Is it a liberal paper? I can’t look into my heart and say that,” one says. “But Collins and Coleman don’t indicate any deliberate policy.”

“Categories of left and right aren’t very helpful,” says another. “There are people in Fianna Fail with agendas more radical than people from the Labour party. And political correspondents tend to hold consensual, centrist views. The only wonder about Stephen Collins is that he didn’t come to the Irish Times long ago.”

“It’s simplistic to say it’s moved to the right,” says foreign editor Paddy Smyth, another with a history on the left. “It has never been a paper of the left or the right. It always had a mix of views, and the balance has been broadly similar to what it is now.” All three of these journalists say that in as much as they contribute to opinion- and editorial-writing, their views have not been inhibited.

A colleague agrees, at least on Collins: “He was not hired for his right-wing views. And before Marc Coleman was hired, the economics-editor job was discussed with someone whose views are on the left.

“On the other hand, I think the leaders [the anonymous articles on the editorial page, taken to be the views of the Editor] are more to the right than before. One is conscious of a less-warm environment for views of the left. And as in any workplace, the boss has knee-jerk instincts and prejudices of which we’re all aware.”

“There has been a notable ideological shift,” says a former senior journalist with certainty. “I can’t think of a single policy point on which it differs from the Irish Independent.” Another former leading-light agrees. “For example, under Douglas Gageby or Conor Brady [Kennedy’s predecessors] I’m convinced the leader would have called for McDowell’s resignation after his recent outbursts. Instead he got a very light slap on the wrist. So I think the change is real. These things can happen without people realising.

“And it’s not so much what the paper is saying as what it’s not doing – like the massive ongoing story of the property scandal, with excessive uncontrolled lending and a market held up by belief. The ideology is the Emperor’s New Clothes, and the paper is ignoring it.”

However, even many of those concerned by the shift admit that it was “never a beacon of the left” (a phrase I heard repeatedly). Novelist and former Irish Times literary editor John Banville says: “It was always a conservative paper, as conservative as the barristers, businessmen and doctors who bought it. However, it had a knack of seeming radical, and there was a time, 30 or so years ago, when radicalism was fashionable among such people.”

Medb Ruane, formerly of the Irish Times, now with the Irish Independent, concurs. “I’ve always found it to be in the middle, with a very cautious editorial line. It’s burdened by its own image of being ‘liberal’. I didn’t find it particularly supportive during, say, the last abortion referendum campaign.”

Paddy Woodworth, who worked as arts editor and on the foreign desk before leaving in 2002, says: “I don’t see any shift to the right under Kennedy’s editorship. You could argue about handling of particular incidents, like the Kevin Myers ‘bastard’ controversy, but the general tone of the editorials doesn’t differ a great deal from the Brady era.” Brady was editor from late 1986 to 2002, with Gageby preceding him in two long spells for more than two decades.

Freelance journalist Michael McCaughan, who has contributed to the Irish Times for almost two decades, mostly with articles from Latin America, says the paper “acts as a mirror for its ABC readers,” a demographic that he reckons has moved rightward. “We all know the Irish Times has shifted. But how do you quantify that, count the steps as if it’s a tango? I’ve seen innate conservatism and over-due respect for the business class all through my relationship with the paper. You can blast Coca-Cola’s behaviour in Guatemala. But you couldn’t do that for Irish companies, especially overseas.”

If the consensus is fuzzy among the paper’s journalists, its left-leaning readers seem more sure they have been abandoned. I’ve never heard the word “incontrovertibly” so often in answer to any question. “It’s obvious there’s a rightward swing,” an activist in her 30s says, “from the choice of contents for the letters page to the choice of new columnists and the boundaries of what the editor will accept from long-established ones. Anyone with half a brain could see it.”

But even where the theory has taken hold, there are cautions. “A year or two ago I thought there had been a shift, that the Examiner was overtaking it as a liberal paper,” says a worker in the area of minority rights. “But now I’m not sure. Certainly it’s continued to be good on issues that concern us, and been prepared to give good access.” Green TD John Gormley also says things may not be quite so right-wing, citing “decent coverage” for anti-war activities as an example. But Greens, he says, have noted what they believe to be systematic avoidance in the Irish Times of criticism of genetically modified food. “People will say to me, ‘You’re not doing much to publicise that,’ and I have to say, ‘It’s not for want of trying.’”

Historian and anti-war activist Fintan Lane says: “It calls itself a ‘paper of record,’ but over the years it has typically ignored radical groups and campaigns, and most of the protests they organise. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see what presses their buttons – get a gaggle of TDs or some celebrities on board and you’re in! I’m fairly certain that historians of the future will categorise it as a ‘paper of record’ for bourgeois Ireland and the political establishment.”

Conor McCarthy, a founder-member of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, connects the question to wider trends: “As with the entire Irish political system, the Irish Times now cannot really question the Celtic Tiger/multinational FDI model of economic development. This eviscerates real political discussion. It is not the paper’s fault, but it shows no interest in thinking outside that box.”

Seamus Martin recalls: “In the mid-1980s, we ran a series by Maev-Ann Wren and John Stanley investigating the truth behind buying and selling property. Can you imagine that now?”

Eamonn Sweeney, a journalist with the Sunday Independent, sees the Irish Times’ changed character in its columnists, and beyond: “It’s strange to see Breda O’Brien, who came to prominence attacking the great States of Fear programme, in such a prominent position, especially when her output contains conservative nostrums about family and the direction of society backed up by research from American think-tanks. And John Waters has swung very hard to the right.”

“There are two other insidious elements,” Sweeney says. “One is the post-Jivin’ at the Crossroads thing, of always presuming that any episode of bigotry down the country must be understood as some kind of culturally relativistic thing. I wonder sometimes if this is because the Times isn’t sure of its footing in rural Ireland. The coverage of the Nally case, surely a fairly open and shut example of KKK-style mores, was a particular nadir.” “Then there’s the weekend Times, especially the magazine, which grows more and more like a glossy at the height of the boom in Eighties Britain. That obsession with property and gadgetry – you wouldn’t need to be a hair-shirted ascetic to find it simultaneously vacuous and disturbing.”

Elsewhere at the Independent group the view is different. A senior journalist at the Irish Independent laughed off the notion that the Irish Times might have vacated valuable space on the left: “It’s still soft left of centre. I wonder are they being ironic they’re so po-faced about things. There’s no sense of the new Ireland, of the free market. When it comes to the crunch on Aer Lingus they’ll do all the traditional stuff, with Fintan O’Toole going on and on. Independent-group editors will make their decisions based on what sells – and what sells now in Ireland is McCreevyism and consumerism. If the Irish Times has moved, it’s been in the slipstream.” [In fact, shortly after this interview was conducted, the Irish Times editorially endorsed the Aer Lingus sale as the “correct course of action,” citing “commercial freedom” as a great “intangible but positive factor” in the move.]

Conservative American-born Richard Delevan, business editor at the Sunday Tribune, says: “I’d say it’s always been a funny fish to categorise. I think it’s defined by its smugness, which is ideologically ecumenical. And, I daresay, its Protestant roots, which seemed liberal at a time when nationalist Catholic shibboleths were being overthrown.” The P-word came up in interviews nearly as often as the L-word. “We had the ‘liberal agenda’ before anyone else because we were a Protestant paper,” says one former journalist. A famous extended correspondence on ‘the Liberal Ethos’ animated the paper some 55 years ago. But the notion that this commitment placed the paper in or around the socialist or social-democratic left is a misunderstanding.

So says Fintan O’Toole. “When was it a left-wing newspaper? The fact that the question arises tells us more about fuzzy notions of the left in Ireland than about the Irish Times. What was seen as a left-wing agenda was really a liberal social agenda. In the nature of the Irish left they came to be seen as the same thing.

“The Irish Times used the ‘liberal agenda’ as a crucial part of its identity,” O’Toole continues. “The circulation rose as the paper was seen to represent these issues. And it was powerful because it was embodied: all these young women writing it, living out a notion of how Irish society might change. It was helped enormously by the fact that it was regularly attacked by the Catholic bishops. This hid other things, notably the scant difference on economic issues and the national question between the Irish Times and mainstream Fianna Fail under Charles Haughey. Now much of what was perceived as the soft left-wing territory of the Irish Times has become mainstream.”

Michael Foley, lecturer in journalism at Dublin Institute of Technology, says: “The end of the ‘liberal agenda’ – a term I hate – has sort of left the Irish Times without a function.”

Into the breach, critics say, Kevin Myers and Mark Steyn have marched. “Off-the-wall columnists have become fashionable, but they’re all on the right,” Seamus Martin says. There is a widespread belief that Kevin Myers is more provocative, more often, than he was under previous editors, and not just about ‘bastards.’ “He’s taken to writing hagiographies of Senator McCarthy and has an unhealthy obsession with the British army,” one reader says. “He wrote an offensive diatribe on Arthur Miller when he died. He has a weird fixation about lesbianism.”

“An Editor of the left would be more sensitive to what the right calls ‘political correctness’. Kennedy is certainly not PC herself,” says one insider. “Brady would have found a way to tone down Myers,” says another.

However, it was reported late in April that Myers had resigned. Word inside the paper says he was offended when he was left out of – indeed, not even told about – the paper’s 1916 supplement, and after a ‘Diary’ of his was withdrawn due to legal concerns. However, as this article went to press, efforts were apparently still being made to bring him back into the fold. Kennedy has made it clear that ‘stars’ such as Myers will not be eligible for the latest, generous redundancy package. Myers, for his part, is believed to be of value in his unique ‘maverick’ role, as the unPC fly-in-the-ointment at an ostensibly PC paper, and indeed as a daily writer for the Irish elite’s daily paper. He would risk becoming just another voice in the crowd at, say, the Sunday Independent or Irish Daily Mail.

Canadian neo-conservative Mark Steyn was seen as an even greater provocation – “risible Fox News stuff, insult served up rather than analysis,” says Sweeney. After more than two years on the foreign pages, his column vanished earlier this year. Foreign editor Paddy Smyth declined to explain the change. Insiders told me, however, that Steyn submitted a column that was over-the-top even by his standards. When the paper decided not to run it, they say, Steyn insisted he did not write articles to pass inspection but for publication, and severed his weekly relationship.

Steyn was replaced by a syndicated column from Washington by Charles Krauthammer. “He has his point of view, but he expresses it in a way more congruent with the Irish Times mode of civilised discourse,” I was told.

“Krauthammer is much more dangerous than Steyn, because he is a policy intellectual, and has a more moderate tone,” Conor McCarthy says. “I believe Krauthammer has consulted on speeches for Bush – why does the Irish Times feel it is important to give him a platform? I mean, the President of America can get heard whenever he likes! “It seems a shame: why not give a column to a Russian writer? An Indian journalist? A Black American? God help us all, why not an Arab journalist? In the Irish Times, when it comes to pundits on the Middle East, we have the unfortunate situation where the rightwing fanatics or fools write freely, happily and frequently on the region, while the left-liberals do so rarely.”

If the Iraq War were a litmus test for the left, the Irish Times would register the slightest trace of pale pink. The editorial line of the paper was against the invasion of Iraq without UN mandate. But it was dully presented (e.g. “It is a great failure of politics and diplomacy”) and didn’t colour the news coverage of the war in the way it did for some British dailies. It rarely editorialised about the use of Shannon, but noted: “if our political alignments are greater than the avowed principle of neutrality, perhaps this is the time to confront and implement a new foreign policy.” By the time the war was ‘over’ an editorial was praising Mary Harney for sticking to her guns over Shannon, showing “her willingness to take tough and unpopular decisions when felt to be necessary.” It has never supported US withdrawal from Iraq.

In late 2002 and 2003 the paper was obsessively concerned with deliberations at the UN – in keeping with the paper’s natural affinity with officialdom. It repeatedly praised Tony Blair – “a force for good”, said the London editor. John Waters memorably lauded “Mr Bush and Mr Blair” for “being principled, manly, Christian, resolved, and above all grown-up.”

Critics have pointed to the paper’s frosty leader treatment of the Rossport 5. But among domestic issues, immigration is perhaps the great litmus test. According to a colleague, the Editor is “conscious of the need for a multicultural side to the paper.” Michael Foley sees this as an opportunity for the paper to define itself: “It unashamedly pushed the liberal agenda in an earlier era. If it pushed multiculturalism, the debates could take place there in the knowledge that the paper doesn’t have a hidden agenda.”

However, at least one staffer believes there is a hidden agenda to the paper’s frequent coverage of immigrants. “There’s an undercurrent to that stuff. It’s not so much ‘let’s include everyone’ as ‘let’s keep an eye on these people.’ ‘It’s nice to have Polish nannies rather than Africans, but do we really want them opening their own restaurants?’” “It’s remarkable that though you have 700,000 ‘outsiders’ in Ireland, there is not a single ethnic-minority journalist on staff,” says a retired colleague. “You wouldn’t say a newspaper that wrote about women’s issues without women doing the writing was particularly enlightened.”

However, many knowledgeable critics say the paper’s politics are most profoundly, if subtly, coloured by Kennedy’s own journalistic priorities. Says one: “She is obsessed with an old-fashioned idea of news, the predictive scoop: ‘The Government will announce tomorrow…’ To get those scoops, reporters are in thrall to ministers who give them leaks in return for soft coverage.”

A former colleague is more sharply critical: “Geraldine has a limited understanding of the role of a newspaper. She’s a newshound, and that influences her view. Conor [Brady] gave good scope to analytical writing, made the paper a more reflective place. Nowadays you’d read it in three minutes. Analysis is seen as a luxury.” On balance, says one veteran investigative journalist, “if you’re doing critical analysis of the powerful, you tend to find yourself on the left.”

An Indo journalist takes a more positive view: “Kennedy’s less tolerant of waffle than her predecessors.” Ex-colleagues recall her saying “we don’t need any more writey-roundy, thinky-thinky bits.” She has also tended to promote like-minded ‘newshounds.’

Kennedy’s team of journalists is much leaner than the one that proceeded the 2002 redundancies, and a further round of redundancies will shrink it again. “Specialists who might do deeper stories find themselves chasing news all day,” says a close observer. “Agenda-setting journalism is time-consuming. Health, for example, is always the politics of the latest atrocity. To get under that, you need to be taken out of daily news coverage.” A senior reporter chimes in: “With the specialists squeezed out, analytical writing tends to be reserved for a small group around the politics staff. This has the effect of narrowing perspectives.”

Kennedy is said to work under “constant siege” from the commercial side of the house, led by managing director Maeve Donovan. (Donovan was not available for interview.) “Their first object was to reduce the power of the Editor and status of the editorship,” says a colleague. Tension between commercial and editorial priorities often lurks in newspapers, even one owned by a trust. A notable feature of the Irish Times struggles is that they seem to have little to do with the integrity of the newspaper itself. Instead, there has been a series of corporate-style rows over status, over salaries, over who reports to whom. This spring, for example, journalists were being encouraged to vote to place the canteen in the new offices on the top floor. Why? Because that would mean Maeve Donovan couldn’t put her office there and lord it over Kennedy on a lower level. For many insiders, the paper’s straitened budgets have combined with the passage of time to change its character. Voluntary redundancies and early retirements since 2002 claimed Seamus Martin, Conor O’Clery, Paddy Woodworth, Nuala O Faolain, Padraig Yeats, Padraig O Morain, Mary Maher, Angela Long, Pat Comerford, even Harry Browne, among many other lefties and liberals. Michael Foley left before that. Dick Walsh, a powerful figure in terms of what appeared in the paper, died, and so did Mary Holland. Other important feminist voices in Christina Murphy and Mary Cummins passed away prematurely in the Nineties. Not all are household names, but many influenced the paper’s tone from editorial positions. Few or none of them can be said to represent the left-of-Labour politics (Sinn Fein, Greens, left-independents etc) that is increasingly popular in Dublin and elsewhere and absent in the Irish Times; but they do amount to a substantial social-democratic exodus, even allowing for some younger lefties around the place.

Fintan O’Toole says: “Most journalists of the Sixties and Seventies had left-informed views of social justice, and many of them gravitated to the Irish Times.” “The Sixties generation is gone, apart from a few stragglers,” adds a colleague. “Now society is quiescent, technocratic rather than apocalyptic. The new generation is pretty university-educated, middle-of-the-road, apolitical, while being able and talented. There are no Nell McCaffertys there.” O’Toole points out they are likelier now to come through journalism schools and from the comfortable classes: “Journalism is arguably one of the professions that has narrowed its social base.”

“Getting rid of so many people in one go has been damaging,” Foley says. “The institution’s collective or corporate sense of memory was disrupted.”

If this is true, it seems many readers haven’t noticed. Recent market research has been more positive than executives expected. It seems the paper’s key readers, middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road, are happy with its performance. Journalists of various stripes, however, talk about the paper’s “smugness”; its “incoherence”; its “lack of energy”; its astonishing capacity for impenetrably dull page-one headlines about the economy or the North; its increasing reliance – thanks to tight budgets and fatigue among largely unshuffled journalists – on PR to drive its arts and business coverage; its crass commercialism in much of the editorial content; its failure to evolve with the variety and directness of its British counterparts. Some see these characteristics politically, as ‘conservative’; others simply worry that such an uninspired paper won’t have anything to fall back on if and when the goose stops laying the golden eggs of property and recruitment advertising.

I contacted dozens of people for this story. Very few refused to talk. And fewer gave me a blank stare: the idea that the political posture of the Irish Times is a topic worth discussing, and writing about, made perfect sense to the middle-aged media types who dominated my list. It was clearly a topic to which many had given some thought. Most of the names in my notebook cannot be repeated here: they’re off the record. If their eagerness to talk says they think the Irish Times is important, their reluctance to criticise the paper attributably suggests they also think it’s influential. People inside and outside the paper seem to believe their careers and reputations are vulnerable to its power. However, that power is worth interrogating. For every politician, publisher, theatre producer, marketing executive or magazine editor who trembles at the name of the Irish Times, there are thousands of others to whom it is meaningless. They’re not just the poor people and culchies who don’t figure in its demographic strategy. They include middle-class young people whose new-media lives are unlikely to include newspapers, especially dense, dull ones.

In Ireland 2006, a small cohort pays the bills for a ‘quality’ newspaper, with money to spare. But the Irish Times could eventually pay for its editorial choice of small-c conservatism. This might seem unduly bleak given that the paper’s circulation has risen in the last two decades from just over 80,000 to a bit short of 120,000. Similar newspapers in other parts of the world are seeing their circulations fall. However, as Conor Brady admits in his memoirs, the rise in circulation falls well short of the incredible demographic shift in Ireland during that time, with the number of people in the relatively affluent ABC1 categories doubling.

Certain factors should have triggered an explosion in newspaper reading, on pre-Nineties precedents. We got more urban, more educated, more likely to take a train or bus to work. We got a lot more disposable income. When you consider all the Irish Press readers turned loose a decade ago, the neglect of the top end of the Irish market by English papers, and the way the Irish Independent has stayed mid-market and even turned downward, the circulation performance of the Irish Times is positively disappointing. I teach in the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Aungier Street building, the largest centre of the largest third-level institution in the State. There are nearly 3,000 full-time students in this ‘campus’ alone, most studying for business degrees, most of the rest studying media. This is Irish Times territory, mostly middle-class and hoping to be upwardly mobile. It is the most popular paper in the student-union shop, where it sells about 70 copies a day at the cut-price student rate of 70 cents. (It costs €1.60 in the real world). Most of these, the manager tells me, are sold to staff, who save a nice 90 cents compared to their local newsagents. Perhaps 30 copies a day go to students – about 1% of the potential market.

Sales rise when essay deadlines and exams approach: students know the Irish Times is the paper to quote to lecturers. The college’s computers also have free access to the paper’s website, much of which is only available by subscription elsewhere. But the site, once pioneering, is so dry and unfriendly, with tiny images and no cross-referencing of articles, that students tend to ‘use’ it, especially for its archival material, rather than ‘read’ it.

“When I went to university,” says Michael Foley, “I bought the Irish Times partly for its symbolic value. I bought it to show people, ‘I’m in favour of what they’re in favour of.’” In an era that mostly eschews conspicuous political commitment, and in which the Irish Times isn’t coherently in favour of anything anyway, today’s students can see little reason to buy it at all.

Published in the May 2006 edition of The Dubliner magazine