From Irish Political Review, June 2004 Martin Mansergh And The Irish Times A Polemic Editorial Note: The story starts with Martin Mansergh's article, Why I'm Not A Spy In Spite Of All You Hear (Irish Times, 3.4.04) which was reproduced in the April Irish Political Review, with two replies sent to the paper: one from David Alvey and the other from Jack Lane. The former did eventually appear in the paper on 19th April, but Jack Lane's letter was ignored. Below are other salient letters and articles which have appeared on this issue at time of going to press, 17th May. 9th April 2004 Mansergh Not A 'Mick'
Martin Mansergh penned the strangest column in The Irish Times last week in which he suggested that an article in The Phoenix (26/9/03) had supported, or even initiated, a conspiracy theory about the senator being a British spy. This is nonsense, as any reading of the original Phoenix article would immediately indicate.Mansergh says, among other things, that The Phoenix had accused him of writing in "hardly the most republican forum in the media". In fact, Goldhawk had merely quoted Mansergh's farewell to Sunday Business Post readers before he defected to the IT. There he described the Post as "a forum in which the best ways forward for an Irish republicanismism with legitimate, constitutional aims can be freely discussed". It was left to Goldhawk to note that the IT hardly fell into this category—a category referred to by Mansergh himself.
The rest of our article pointed to the historic incongruity of Manswergh's ingratiating remarks in his new IT column about Sir Garret Fitzgerald and Major Tom McDowell and Bertie Ahern's enthusiasm for "the IT's unrelenting anti-FF line [to] be countered" by Manswergh. This commentary hardly implies that Mansergh is some ace of spies for MI5… [From Phoenix]
22nd April 2004 Irishness Of Elizabeth Bowen
I reject David Alvey's assertion (April 20th) that Elizabeth Bowen was not an Irish writer. Her work is infused with that peculiar Anglo-Irish sensibility which left her feeling a foreigner in both Ireland and England, at home only in "the middle of the Irish sea".
The Last September and A World of Love are shot through with Irishness and nowhere is the landscape of north Cork more lyrically described than in Bowen's Court.
I do hope that attempts to exclude Bowen from the list of Irish writers is not due to her having been (whisper it!) a Protestant.
[Aidan Harman, Cork. Irish Times]
23rd April 2004 British Ambassador's 1969 Letter And The Irish Times
May I apologise for certain remarks I made about your newspaper on Newstalk 106 on Monday evening?
I was wrong to say that The Irish Times had not published any of the allegations made in 1969 by the then British ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, about a conversation he had with your paper's former chairman and current president for life, Major Thomas McDowell.
I now know that the substance of these allegations was carried by your paper on January 27th, 2003 in a story headlined "Major McDowell rejects UK envoy's claim".
As a teacher of journalism students I stress the importance of factual accuracy, so I am embarrassed by having made such a mistake.
That said, however, I stand by my belief that The Irish Times's record in this matter is hardly beyond criticism. When Gilchrist's letter was released by the British Public Record Office in January 2000, the paper was guilty of self-censorship by failing to publish its contents, especially the claim that Major McDowell referred to his editor at the time, Douglas Gageby, as a "white nigger", and that he was happy for Downing Street to direct or, at least, influence your paper's coverage of the North. Surely this was of importance to your staff and readers.
These sensitive claims remained secret until discovered by Jack Lane of the Aubane Historical Society three years later. He reported his discovery to you, but nothing appeared until the allegations in the Gilchrist letter finally appeared in the Sunday Independent. Next day, you then published the McDowell denial story mentioned above which, in the light of the previous cover-up, was surely an inappropriate way to report the matter.
The implication of the blanket denials is that the ambassador was lying to his chiefs at the British Foreign Office and the matter can therefore hardly be said to have been resolved to anyone's satisfaction.
I have long been an admirer of The Irish Times and, in my capacity as a media commentator, I have often made public statements which hailed your paper as one of Europe's best. But I have to say that this episode has stunned me.
By any objective journalistic criteria, the involvement of a newspaper controller in affairs of state, especially in talks with the representatives of a foreign country, required much greater candour from a paper of record.
[Roy Greenslade, Co. Donegal. Irish Times]
23rd April 2004 British Ambassador's 1969 Letter And The Irish Times
I would like to correct a possibly unintentional error in a letter from David Alvey, publisher of the Irish Political Review (April 19th).
Mr Alvey wrote that a letter in 1969 from the British Ambassador to a Whitehall official concerning the then owner of The Irish Times, Major Thomas McDowell, was "released into the public domain in 2003". In fact the letter was released into the public domain in the British Public Records Office in January 2000. It would be correct to say that that it was first published in 2003 in the Irish Political Review.
The Irish Times apparently deliberately ignored this letter. The Irish Times published a story on other letters in the PRO file concerning the ambassador and Major McDowell in January 2000. The letter that was suppressed contained racist references, attributed to Major McDowell, directed at a former editor of The Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, and contained a request from Major McDowell for guidance from 10 Downing Street on editorial control of The Irish Times. Gageby was referred to as a "renegade or white nigger".
After attention was drawn to the letter in the Sunday Independent in late January 2003, The Irish Times responded once and once only with an anonymous article that attempted to kill off interest in the story. Further discussion was, it would appear, closed off.
The censored letter is reproduced on Indymedia.ie. The Irish Times has yet to adequately discuss the import of the letter and, more seriously, explain why disclosure of the letter was suppressed in January 2000.
Readers of Ireland's newspaper of record demand answers.
[Niall Meehan, Dublin 7. Irish Times]
The contents of the letter in question were published in The Irish Times on January 27th, 2003, as soon as its existence was drawn to my attention.—Ed., IT. 23rd April 2004 UNPUBLISHED LETTER
It was refreshing to read Roy Greenslade's letter this morning (23 April) explaining the situation on how the Irish Times have dealt with the infamous letter of the British Ambassador of 2nd 0ct 1969 and correcting an impression he had given about your reporting of the allegations in that letter on 27th Jan 2003.
Mr Greenslade had little to apologise for, as you well know, because that item on 27th Jan. '03 was not a report on the Ambassador's letter but a report on McDowell's (incredible) denial of all its contents. But Mr Greenslade's letter was an example of scrupulous honesty as befits a responsible professional journalist and ex-editor. Do you recognise this behaviour?
This was an example of a professional setting the record straight as soon and as clearly as he could. Could you please copy his example and set the record as straight about what Senator Martin Mansergh alleged about me in your paper on 3rd April? You have a letter from me for nearly 3 weeks rejecting his allegations. I cannot understand how you refuse to help me clear his name, mine and your reputation by simply publishing my short letter. You also have a full report of the whole issue by me, another copy attached, and there seems no prospect of that being published either. Perhaps you might have the courtesy of at least telling me why.
In today's paper you plumb even deeper into the depths of misrepresentation. You say in a note "The contents of the letter in question were published on January 27th. 2003, as soon as its existence was drawn to my attention. "
You know very well that the letter was drawn to your attention on 10 Jan. 2003 by me and you replied on the 15th January saying you were "unable to confirm the veracity" of it and you did NOT publish anything about it. How could you have published it if you doubted the veracity of it? This correspondence with you has been in the public domain for nearly a year now and the facts are irrefutable. Many people will therefore know the facts of the case. You cannot suppress them by more pathetic censoring and misrepresentations on your part. However, you can salvage your reputation by coming clean.
After the Sunday Independent later made a national issue of the letter you had no choice but to respond and you did so by publishing Major McDowell's total denials. You did not publish the full letter and therefore 'the contents' as you claim. Please present these facts of the case in your paper, 'a journal of record' remember, as a matter of urgency. What remains of your integrity demands it.
By way of contrasting you with your peers I should remind you that I was criticised by the Irish Times under your predecessor and he had the decency to publish ALL letters I sent for publication. See the Irish Times of 23/5/97 and 11/9/97. In addition the then editor, Conor Brady, also OFFERED me a feature article to explain myself, which he published on 29/7/97. Earlier this week I wrote a letter the Guardian to clarify a point and they published it 2 days later. And the Guardian had not even mentioned, never mind tried to defame, me. And now we have Mr. Greenslade setting another example for you on how to behave.
Why can you not copy your peers? Why are you lowering the standards of your paper and yourself? Do you have some sort of death wish for your own personal reputation? Please pluck up the courage to act as befits a responsible editor like your peers and redeem yourself.
[Jack Lane, Aubane, Co. Cork. Submitted to Irish Times]
26th April 2004 Irishness Of Elizabeth Bowen
David Alvey (April 19th) suggests that Elizabeth Bowen should not be regarded as an Irish writer on the grounds that she spied for a foreign power against this State.
The notion of national literatures will probably be with us for as long as the nation-state is with us. Whether this helps the understanding of literature itself is another question. To the extent that one does make use of the notion, the test for including a novel in a country's literature is not the politics of its author, but the extent to which it engages with the lives of people within it.
In her fine novel The Last September, set in an Anglo-Irish big house, Elizabeth Bowen does engage deeply with Irish society at a crucial moment in its history. That alone is a reason to regard the novel as part of Irish literature.
As it happens, most of the Anglo-Irish people in that novel seem to be crypto-nationalists, at least in their personal sympathies, and there are even indications of startlingly high levels of anglophobia among them. And as for Bowen's spying activities, these do not seem to have amounted to anything very much more sinister than sitting in the public gallery of the Dáil during a debate, and taking tea with Archbishop McQuaid.
But even if she had been less ambivalent in her political sympathies, the view that a section of her work forms part of Irish literature would not make the definition of national tradition any less coherent than it usually is.
[From Anne Nolan, Gresham House, Dublin 1. Irish Times]
27th April 2004 Irishness Of Elizabeth Bowen
Aidan Harman's letter on Elizabeth Bowen's Irishness (April 22nd) prompted me to look up David Alvey's earlier diatribe, which I hadn't seen.
It is pointless to argue that Bowen wasn't Irish. She was born in Dublin and, unless Mr McDowell's regrettable referendum has retroactive effect, will remain Irish forever.That she might have given political allegiance to another power in a time of peril is neither here nor there:—Irish people have given political allegiance to many different powers over the centuries. William Joyce was undoubtedly Irish and gave his political allegiance to Hitler (though I believe it was his British passport that eventually hanged him).
I am fed up with the notion that there is such a thing as an "Irish writer". There are Irish people who write. They do so and have done so in many different traditions. In some cases, such as Joyce, they found the need to start their own traditions.
Mr Alvey needs to rethink the notion that there is such a thing as a "national tradition". If, by that, he really means "nationalist", let him say so. There is a nationalist tradition. It is but one of many, all of them Irish in their different ways.
[Paul Kenny, Dublin 12. Irish Times]
28th April 2004 Irishness Of Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen may have felt like "a foreigner in both Ireland and England", as Aidan Harmon argues (April 22nd), but she nonetheless gave her allegiance to England. During the second World War she showed where her sympathies lay by spying against Ireland for the British intelligence services. In political terms, therefore, it makes no sense to celebrate her as an Irish writer. That she was an Irish Protestant is irrelevant to the point at issue.
From a literary point of view the case against her is even stronger. A clear-headed critic, Ernest Augustus Boyd, author of Ireland's Literary Renaissance, maintained that to designate Anglicised writers such as Swift, Berkeley, Sheridan, Goldsmith and even Shaw and Wilde as Irish was to debase the idea of a national Irish literature. Their works should be appreciated for what they are: works of English literature, a literature that has, incidentally, generally been popular in Ireland.
Elizabeth Bowen wrote at a time when national independence had been achieved. She could have joined the endeavour to forge a new national literature here. She chose not to. For her services to English literature she was awarded the CBE and made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
Designating her as an Irish writer is like describing the English novelist, Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland, as a Polish writer. Assuredly the Poles do not claim Conrad. They have a measure of cultural self-respect.
[David Alvey, Publisher, Irish Political Review, Dalkey, Co Dublin. Irish Times]
29th April 2004 British Ambassador's 1969 Letter And The Irish Times
Roy Greenslade has rushed to judgment in his letter of April 23rd, compounding his earlier, acknowledged inaccuracy.There was no "cover up" (his term) in The Irish Times's reportage of the 1969 British government papers, released to the public in January 2000 under the 30-year rule.
The facts are that in late December 1999, Ms Rachel Donnelly, a reporter from the London office of The Irish Times, was assigned to examine the 1969 papers (embargoed to January 1st, 2000) at the Public Record Office in Kew.
She identified one letter, written on December 29th, 1969 by the head of the Irish section at the Foreign Office, Mr Kelvin White, to the British Ambassador in Dublin, Sir Andrew Gilchrist.
In this letter Mr White wrote of Major T.B. McDowell's willingness to act as a link between the British and Irish governments and to have The Irish Times play a role in organising a conference of "prominent people".
Major McDowell was then one of a number of directors of The Irish Times Ltd. Later he became chairman.
Over recent days I have confirmed with the London Editor of The Irish Times, Mr Frank Millar, that Ms Donnelly's examination yielded only this one letter. She did not come across another letter, dated October 2nd, 1969 from the ambassador to Mr White.
In this letter, the ambassador quoted Major McDowell as having described my predecessor as editor, Mr Douglas Gageby, as a "renegade or white nigger". Major McDowell has since denied ever using these terms.
At the weekend, Mr Millar furthermore confirmed with Ms Donnelly, a conscientious and experienced journalist, that she saw and reported on the contents of only one letter and that she had not encountered the terms "white nigger" or "renegade" in what she read on the file.
The letter which she saw formed the basis of the report published in The Irish Times in January 2000. This detailed Major McDowell's contact with the Foreign Office and his offers of assistance.
To allege a cover-up is gravely defamatory of me in my role as editor, as well as of the other journalists involved. I do not know why or how the letter of October 2nd, 1969 did not come to the attention of our reporter. The fact is that it did not.
Nor did it come to the notice of any of the other journalists who examined the files when they were made available on December 22nd and 23rd, 1999. Other journalists assigned to this task, as I understand it, included Mr Bernard Purcell of the Irish Independent and Mr Aidan Hennigan, representing the Irish Examiner.
Surely it is not without significance that not only did The Irish Times not report on this letter, neither did any other news medium.
Does Mr Greenslade or anyone else seriously believe, if such a letter had been uncovered by Irish journalists at this time and "covered up" by someone else, that this would not have become instantly known throughout the various newsrooms? There would have been uproar—most especially in The Irish Times. If he believes otherwise, Mr Greenslade does not understand the values that imbue the journalism of this newspaper.
The Irish Times—along with other newspapers—may have been guilty of an omission or oversight.
For that, as editor, I have to take responsibility. But neither I nor any of my colleagues was guilty of any suppression or distortion.
Mr Greenslade was himself a newspaper editor. He knows that errors, omissions and failures of judgment do occur. Ours is a very imperfect craft, executed under severe time constraints.
In conclusion, let me add that I had my differences with Major T.B. McDowell while I was editor (1986-2002), mainly about the organisations's pace of change and its capacity to face future challenges.But in those 16 years I had an absolutely free hand in relation to editorial content and policy and never encountered the slightest pressure of any kind.
I have no doubt it was the same in Mr Gageby's editorship.
[Conor Brady, Editor Emeritus, Monkstown, Co Dublin. Irish Times]
30th April 2004 Irishness Of Elizabeth Bowen
David Alvey (April 28th) says the Poles do not claim Conrad. Does anybody claim him? Yes, the world. That should be sufficient.
Who claims someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer—one of the most haunting voices of the 20th century—who wrote in Yiddish? The Poles? The Jews? The Americans? We can all claim him. When Beckett was asked was he an Englishman he replied, "Au contraire". That didn't imply he was French. Politically, he was more interested in the French Resistance than in the Irish Resistance, but politics isn't everything.
Surely it's a matter of where the heart is and it is not always easy to define the heart's place geographically. The artist's imagination does not recognise fixed national boundaries. Singer's heart belonged to more than one place and—indeed—more than one time.
David Alvey's letter appeared in the same edition in which Eileen Battersby reported on Cúirt, welcoming new and old voices from eastern Europe. Some contemporary Estonians writers have been looking East, as it happens, not West, and their writing is all the more interesting because of that. Will future Irish writers find the labels Irish, Anglo-Irish or English to be meaningful or will they be happy to be classified simply as European, whether they write in Irish or English? What elements in their writing will qualify them to use the label "European"? It is, perhaps, far too early to say.
[GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK,Co Átha Cliath. Irish Times]
30th April 2004 Irishman's Diary
Each spring, the Times of London has letters about the first cuckoo. Here in The Irish Times, at around the same time of year, we have letters questioning the Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen. The subjects tell us a great deal about the priorities of the respective readerships, writes Kevin Myers.
The English, who notionally have four seasons, are interested in the weather. The Irish, who—up until recently, anyway—had just one season entitled a grand soft day thank God, are more interested in identity.
Actually, I had come to believe that the issue of "Irishness" was as old hat as James Bond's pork pie, but clearly not. A recent letter from David Alvey, publisher of the Irish Political Review, declared that in political terms, it makes no sense to celebrate Elizabeth Bowen as an Irish writer, because she spied against Ireland for the British. So Irishness is not a matter of where you're from, but how you think. This presumably means that Irish unionists, north and south, who were in favour of Ireland entering the second World War, were less Irish than Irish nationalists.
Ah. So did the leaders of the IRA, who actively sought a Nazi victory, cease to be Irish because of it? Did Paddy Devlin, later of the SDLP, whose IRA unit shone lights to guide Luftwaffe bombers onto Belfast—a far more heinous deed than anything Elizabeth Bowen did—thus cease to be Irish? And what about France? What about the collaborationist milice, many of whom ended the war with a Gauloise and a wall? Did they cease to be French because they served Germany? Did the Scandinavians of Das Viking SS Division forfeit their national identities merely because of a single decision they had taken?
Conversely, was Willie Brandt, who served with the Norwegian resistance during the war, a lesser German because of it? And what about all those brave men who conspired against Hitler, and wanted an Allied victory? Were they accordingly less German than the Austrian whom they were trying to kill?
David Alvey declared that designating Bowen as an Irish writer is like describing "the English novelist Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland, as a Polish writer". An interesting observation. Has he ever tried telling a Pole that? Any Poles I have spoken to are, properly, very proud of Conrad. He wrote in English, to be sure, but it is a strange English; and the mind at work behind those curiously though magically assembled words is clearly not an English mind. He was as much English as James Joyce was Swiss, or better still, Samuel Beckett was French.
Moreover, Conrad personifies the ambiguities of identity. He described himself as Polish, though he was from the Ukraine, which is both a geographical entity, and a tribal one: ethnic Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, Moldovans all live there. Moreover, there are "Ukrainians" in Poland and the Czech Republic—the latter being the only example that comes to mind where the country is not defined by the land itself, as in Ireland, France, Germany, but by the tribal polity which resides there. And perhaps appropriately, for its capital was the birthplace of Kafka, the Jewish-Czech-German who wrote in the language of the country that gave the world the Third Reich, and which had a theory or two about what constituted nationality.
All of which doesn't tell us a great deal, save this: the association of land with political, national or tribal identity is of relatively recent origin over most of Europe, and the sort of simple loyalty which romantic nationalists embrace is quite beyond the capacity—or better still, the breadth of vision—of many. Which makes nonsense of Ernest Augustus Boyd's suggestion, quoted approvingly by David Alvey, that "to designate anglicised writers such as Swift, Berkeley, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and even Shaw and Wilde as Irish was to debase the idea of a national Irish literature". It debases nothing, but merely makes the definition of Irishness more catholic and complex. For empires invariably create anomalies.
Albert Camus played soccer for Algeria, but was not Algerian; yet neither was he French. Swift and Goldsmith were not English, but were products of institutions that were both peculiar, and peculiarly Irish, long before the notion of a fully separate Irish national polity had emerged. To make their Irishness contingent upon a modern definition of identity, one which would have made no sense to them, is simply anachronous.
They located their narratives in England because of its cultural eminence amongst writers in English, and because England was where money and respect lay. As a matter of course, Sheridan often used the word "English" when he meant British.
The Irish journalist Russell, writing from Crimea, regularly spoke of "English troops" when he clearly meant Scottish or Irish. Arthur Conan Doyle set his novels not in Edinburgh, where he first mastered the arts of deductive reasoning, but London, and with English heroes.
Was he less Scottish because of this? And was Elizabeth Bowen less Irish because she would have seen this country occupied by the Allies in preference to a Nazi victory, with the concomitant ruin of Christian civilisation across the world? And is that what Irishness means: that the defence of national sovereignty in the darkest hour in world history must take precedence over the protection of all civilisation, even if such a defence ends both that civilisation and Irishness itself?
In truth, the argument is circular. "Is Elizabeth Bowen Irish?" is a uniquely Irish question.
Even to ask it means the answer is Yes.[Kevin Myers. Irish Times]
2nd May 2004 UNPUBLISHED ARTICLE: The Gilchrist Letter And The History Of The Irish Times
The editors of The Irish Times from 1969 to the present, together with everyone involved in the management of the newspaper during that time, owe Irish society an explanation. They need to explain why their newspaper has been running scared from questions about a letter that shows the British Government being invited to take The Irish Times in hand. They also need to explain the letter itself.
The letter was written on October 2nd 1969 by Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the British Ambassador, and was addressed to W.K.K. White of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. It is marked Secret and Personal and its final sentence reads, "I am destroying the correspondence". In the letter Sir Andrew relates how one of the owners of The Irish Times, Major Thomas McDowell, had asked the British Government for "a certain degree of guidance". He concludes by asking Mr. White to assure No 10 "that we will do what we can to exploit this opening".
The manner in which The Irish Times has responded to this extraordinary letter raises questions. Why was it missed by all of the Irish journalists who went to the Public Record Office in Kew in late December 1999? And why did the present editor of the paper, Geraldine Kennedy, not make it known to Irish Times readers when sent a photocopy of it by Jack Lane prior to its publication in the Irish Political Review in early January 2003?
The various ploys used by The Irish Times to duck the issue have been described by Roy Greenslade, a respected English media specialist, in a letter to the newspaper on April 23rd. He said that as a long time admirer of the paper he was stunned by its stance. He considered that the involvement of a newspaper controller in talks with the representative of a foreign country required a more candid response.
Surprisingly, that statement elicited, not an editorial response from The Irish Times, but a letter from a former editor, Conor Brady, who chided Mr Greenslade for making a mistake on a detail of the story and otherwise said very little.
When a closed institution is determined to keep silent on a sensitive matter concerning itself, it can be difficult to get to the truth. Difficult but not impossible. In the circumstances it is usual to piece together a scenario of what has been happening based on the known facts. So, we need to piece together a history of The Irish Times in the light of the Gilchrist letter. What follows is my tuppence halfpenny worth.
The period around 1969-1970 was a critical time in Irish politics due to the outbreak of political violence in the North and later the Arms Trial in the South. It was also a critical time in the evolution of The Irish Times. The transition of the paper from being a relatively small newspaper orientated towards the Protestant minority to becoming the national newspaper of record was almost complete. The mould of The Irish Times as a major newspaper was set at this time, exactly the time when the Major had his little chat with Sir Andrew.
Throughout the seventies, eighties and early nineties, The Irish Times, as a nationalist newspaper, competed with another daily newspaper, the Irish Press, a paper historically connected with the Fianna Fail Party. Perhaps The Irish Times provided some services that justified Roy Greenslade's high opinion of it. But the end result was that the Irish Press went into liquidation in 1995.
Since the early nineties an anti-national bias has steadily gained ground in Irish society. Some commentators have seen this as positive movement towards internationalism, a shift away from the constricting narrowness of national culture. But it is not a departure from national culture. It is a displacement of Irish national culture with English national culture.
It can be observed in the way that an insipid version of Irish history has won out completely in the universities and is now being taught in the schools. And it can be observed in the way that Irish literature has been provincialised: transformed into a regional branch of English literature, hence the very English novels of Elizabeth Bowen must be regarded as Irish literature. These trends have been cultivated every step of the way by Irish Times writers.
Two of the paper's columnists who each command considerable influence deserve especial mention: Kevin Myers and Fintan O'Toole. Kevin Myers is an unashamed anglophile who sees nothing wrong in the futile sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in the trench warfare of the Great War of 1914-18, yet condemns the blood sacrifice mentality of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, an insurrection which caused a few hundred casualties and successfully sparked off the Irish national revolution. His column is published on several days of the week and on Sunday he writes for the Sunday Telegraph, a newspaper aligned with the British Conservative Party. Irish national values are excoriated in the weekday columns but English values are not criticized in the Sunday column.
Fintan O'Toole on the other hand devotes his column to giving society in the Republic a bad conscience about itself. We are an irredeemable people as instanced by the antics of our largest political party. What we need is foreign influence and plenty of it!
All things considered Major McDowell must be happy enough with the way things have turned out.
We are owed an explanation about the Gilchrist letter. At this stage nothing less than a detailed, objectively verified, history of The Irish Times since 1969 will suffice.
[Editorial Note: David Alvey was encouraged to submit the article above by the 'Opinion Page Editor' of the Irish Times in response to polemical items criticising this magazine and its contributors. Publication was then rejected.] 3rd May 2004 Conspiracy Theorists Display Narrow Notions Of Irishness
In reply to David Alvey, editor of the Irish Political Review (April 19th), I freely acknowledge that the Aubane Historical Society and authors Brendan Clifford and Jack Lane do good work in keeping alive the memory of many notable people from north Cork and in publishing valuable historical documents.
What I take issue with is their treatment of some people and institutions, coming from (suspect) cultural minority origins, with any exposed lapse or evidence of dual loyalties being extrapolated to justify blanket condemnation without appeal.
I am frankly incredulous that anyone in 2004 should seek to impugn the Irishness of The Irish Times and treat it as an agent of British influence in Ireland. Certainly, as a successful paper for modern Ireland, it does not reflect the values of de Valera's Ireland any more than it reflects the old values of Anglo-Ireland.Have the conspiracy theorists overlooked the fact that its editor during most of the Troubles, Douglas Gageby, as a former Irish intelligence officer, was surely a match for any counter-influences? How about asking those who have worked for the paper over the years, or just reading it?
One should not confuse opinion columns, editorials or letters pages with mainstream news coverage. No newspaper these days can afford to be politically aligned. Nor has lack of a party paper kept Fianna Fáil long out of government.
The days are gone when Daniel Corkery could dispute the Irishness of J.M. Synge, or Patrick Kavanagh, subsidised by Archbishop McQuaid, deny the Irishness of Yeats. No self-appointed cultural guardians have any right or authority to strip Elizabeth Bowen of her Irish nationality, background and birthright, or to deny her contribution to Irish as well as English literature. Lane and Clifford have done a service in publishing her actually quite sympathetic confidential wartime reports as a writer and journalist on public opinion in Ireland and its attachment to neutrality. They were sent not to an intelligence service but initially to the junior Minister of Information, Harold Nicolson.
That episode in her life is treated as grist to the mill of Brendan Clifford's view of landed families, resident or not for however many centuries, and regardless of their involvement with Ireland post-independence, as irredeemably and exclusively English. Lane and Clifford's gloating over the destruction of Bowenscourt, and the suggestion that Elizabeth Bowen chose to be buried in Farahy, North Cork, only because she regarded the graveyard as a little piece of England, represents an incorrigible form of cultural hatred that deserves to be repeatedly and vigorously challenged as long as it is maintained.
All of this is set in a context of a bizarre revisionism, as that term is applied to recent German history, that Britain caused the second World War and by extension was responsible for the extermination of the Jews. The view of Rev William Ferris in 1948, frankly not worth republishing -- that "the English are the great war-lords of modern times", who "have played for several centuries the grand Satanic role of mischief-maker to Europe and the world. Around England's name centres practically the whole terrible story of modern warfare" -- is enthusiastically endorsed as a widespread view then and not invalidated today.
While I am not accused of being a spy, my father, who was a British wartime civil servant in the Ministry of Information, which dealt with press and public relations, is so accused, which is the next best thing. To correct other errors by Clifford, Nicholas Mansergh went to school in Ireland, not in England. He was not an imperialist, but an anti-imperialist, as he told this newspaper in 1984, and he wrote with a deeply sympathetic understanding of Irish and Indian nationalism. In his most important lecture in 1947 he told an audience including British Ministers and officials that a mistake had been made in 1921 in ruling out external association. India became a republic in the Commonwealth shortly afterwards. As for his qualities as a historian, I would prefer that to be judged by people who understand his work.
The spirit of Fianna Fáil invoked by Clifford is not infused with political bigotry or virulent anglophobia or a nationalism that excludes a priori any part of a tradition that identifies with Ireland. Nor were such attitudes those of Eamon de Valera. In fact, he recalled Charles Bewley, Irish ambassador to Germany in 1939, for rampant anglophobia and anti-Semitism.
Few people share the desire to see reinstated the sometimes aggressive ideological dogmatism that was more prevalent in a less confident Ireland of 50 or 60 years ago and that has no contribution to make to peace and reconciliation or any greater future unity.
[Martin Mansergh, Seanad Eireann. Irish Times]
6th May 2004 Irishness Of Elizabeth Bowen
Senator Martin Mansergh (May 3rd) is keen to rebut attacks on Elizabeth Bowen's identity as an Irishwoman. In the light of current controversies, his emphasis on the place of her birth as conclusive of the question is interesting.
No doubt he will be campaigning for a No vote next month.
[Fergus O'Rourke, Co. Cork. Irish Times]
7th May 2004 Irishness Of Elizabeth Bowen
Perhaps the moment has come to restore literature in Ireland to the status of a regional British literature. That appears to be Kevin Myers's object. But surely it would be best done straightforwardly rather than by such devices as those he used to make Elizabeth Bowen an Irish writer. In his Diary of April 30th he rejected the view that "Irishness is not a matter of where you're from but how you think."
Rejection of the view that the character of writing is determined by birthplace rather than thought-content leads to strange conclusions. It may determine that Elizabeth Bowen was an Irish writer, but it also determines that George Orwell was a Burmese writer, even though he is universally taken to be one of the premier English writers of the mid-20th century. It also determines that Apollinaire is not a French poet. And of course it determines that Mr Myers himself is not an Irish polemicist.
At a moment when our progressive Minister for Justice is proposing to break the connection between birthplace and nationality, it would surely be more sensible if Mr Myers dropped these nationalistic musings and asserted openly that literature in Ireland is merely a provincial branch of English literature, and that any Irish writing which cannot be included in English literature is not worth preserving as literature. That is the meaning which is implicit in his piece.
[Pat Murphy, Dublin 3. Irish Times]
8th May 2004 Belittling A Big Irishman From The Big House
My saddest holiday reading was a denial by our neighbour Martin Mansergh of Friarsfield, Tipperary, that he is a British spy. The charge of espionage is self-evidently ridiculous and hasn't been made in so many words. But sinister insinuations have been circulating ever since he started writing for The Irish Times six months ago.
In his first article he had the temerity to praise The Irish Times Trust, "which keeps at bay wealthy proprietors with the power to hold governments to ransom." The case against him seems to be that 34 years earlier a member of the newspaper's board reportedly complained to the then British ambassador about the then editor's policy line on the North, "while seeking guidance from Downing Street on lines to follow." All of which, of course, couldn't have had anything to do with Dr. Mansergh.
So why has he been fingered? He answers the question himself: "If one comes from that diminishing Protestant sub-class, those of Anglo-Irish background, was born in England and educated at a public school, decades of Irish public service will not dispel every lingering suspicion."
He recalls a prominent Gaeilgeoir historian being asked by friends in relation to the Senator: "Can we trust him?" Then a former minister went on record as saying: "He was educated at Oxford University, right? Well then, you'd have to ask, who does he work for?" And two low-minded holders of high office told a former government press secretary they had reason to believe the Senator was a British agent and asked him to find out more.
In the face of all such defamation, however, Dr. Mansergh doesn't regard [sic] his decision to return home over 30 years ago to serve Ireland. And no, he isn't paranoid. He acknowledges that in Ireland he has enjoyed great trust.
Indeed he has. And justly so. There's no need to repeat yet again his comprehensive and historic contribution as adviser to successive administrations, especially in the sphere of Irish/British relations: suffice it to say that, largely thanks to him, the situation has been immeasurably improved and countless lives saved.
His perspective is extraordinary if not unique. He isn't only an heir to the better traditions of the Big House. He is the definitive contemporary interpreter of constitutional Irish republicanism.
It is surely sad that at this stage he finds it necessary to defend himself against McCarthyite attack. But isn't it sadder still that apparently no-one, not even here in North Munster where he is one of our own, should have sprung to his defence?
[Brendan Halligan, Limerick Leader.]
10th May 2004 Competing Notions Of Irishness
Martin Mansergh's accusation (May 3rd) that certain writings of Brendan Clifford and Jack Lane represent "an incorrigible form of cultural hatred" cannot be allowed to go unanswered.
Brendan Clifford, Jack Lane and others who contributed to the Athol Books publishing group propagated the "two nations theory" in the early 1970s. By publishing historical material they showed that Ulster Protestant society constituted a distinct national community.
They argued their case in opposition to all and sundry and sustained it through the entire period of political violence. Let others be the judge of what influence those ideas had on the conflict.
They were also responsible for founding and developing a magazine called Church and State. Historical and analytical work produced in Church and State laid the basis for the successful agitations of the Campaign to Separate Church and State in the 1990s. These matters are well known and documented.
That they should have engaged in these projects while harbouring a bigoted view of Protestants is impossible. As hundreds of people who passed through Athol Books know, it is a space where people from diverse backgrounds discuss ideas in a spirit of robust humour.
Martin Mansergh sees Brendan Clifford's description of the demolition of Bowenscourt by a farmer who owned it as "gloating". I do not. I see it as a writer describing a historical process in plain language.
The people charged with giving leadership to the society, the Anglo-Irish landlords, failed to make provision for the social development of the people, and when the people eventually attained a measure of social power they quickly forgot about their former landlords. Describing historical processes in plain language is conducive to coherent thought about those processes. The converse, I believe, is also true.
Martin Mansergh concludes his long letter with a reference to the "aggressive ideological dogmatism that was prevalent in a less confident Ireland of 50 or 60 years ago". The implication is that materials written by Jack Lane and Brendan Clifford for the Aubane Historical Society are a throwback to such dogmatism.
He really has got the wrong end of the stick here. There is an overlap of membership between Athol Books and the Aubane Historical Society. Much of the material published by the Aubane Historical Society is produced for a twofold political purpose: to prevent the Irish national tradition from being maligned, and to emphasise the part of that tradition that is rooted in cultural diversity and tolerance.
The challenge for political writers in contemporary Ireland is to address the vacuum created by the decline of Catholic nationalism. When Kevin Myers, Martin Mansergh and others designate the novels of Elizabeth Bowen as a part of Irish literature, consciously or not, they are treating Ireland as if it was West Britain. There is no surer way of undermining what is unique about Irish culture.
Clearly the issues raised in this exchange are too large to be properly aired in the letters page of The Irish Times. Information about Athol Books and the Aubane Historical Society can be had at www.atholbooks.org.
[David Alvey, Publisher, Irish Political Review, Dalkey, Co Dublin. Irish Times]
17th May 2004 Martin Mansergh, Nationalism And Elizabeth Bowen
Letter to be published in full or not at all.
Your publication of extravagant Denunciations of me by Martin Mansergh and Kevin Myers is probably unanswerable in your paper, nevertheless here is a response equal in length to Senator Mansergh's second Denunciation (May 3rd).
One might spend a lifetime asserting basic truths about the Ulster Protestants against the trend of enthusiastic nationalism (which included Dublin 4 in 1970), campaigning for the separation of Church and State while the Catholic Church was institutionally dominant, and indicting Britain for refusing to incorporate the Six Counties into the functional democracy of the British state, and yet be an anti-Protestant bigot and an Anglophobe, according to the strange reckonings of Mansergh/Myers, if one does not hail Elizabeth Bowen as a North Cork writer. Bowen is their test of unreason. I suppose every faith needs one.
In her last memoir Bowen describes how as a girl of 8 she soaked historical England into her system, and she rejected classification as a regional writer. As a mainstream national writer, she can only be English.
In Senator Mansergh's 1st Denunciation I am charged with describing him as a spy. It never occurred to me that he might be a spy, though he reveals that some of his colleagues thought him one. Although the response from Aubane was not published, he concedes in the 2nd Denunciation that no such allegation was made about himself, but claims I made it about his father. But his father was an open functionary of the British Empire. He did not go around under false appearances spying out the country as Bowen did. His book on Ireland was honestly published as a Commonwealth document. And its evasions are what one expects from a writer in the British interest: the 1918 Election and the Treaty ultimatum. And his book on the Great War, which began as lectures to a college for Protestant young ladies in Dublin in 1944, is little more than a recycling of the British war propaganda of 1914, completely at variance with the views of Connolly, Casement, and Fianna Fail.
Bowen, though a spy and an English writer, was actually included in the "North Cork Anthology" so that people might sample her, since she had occasionally lived in her Cromwellian mansion there, as isolated from the populace as any of her ancestors. But Mansergh's inclusiveness is such that he wants William Ferris excluded because he wrote that "the English are the great war-lords of modern time". Are we required to describe the state which has fought many more wars than any other in modern times as a peace-loving state? One might argue that it was good for the world to be made war upon by Britain, but it is perverse to deny that it has been making war almost continuously from a position of safety for over 300 years.
Mansergh's summary of my views on the 2nd World War would be worthy of "Pravda". I held that Britain prevented France from making a workable settlement with Germany in 1919, and facilitated the growth of Nazi power for six years, before encouraging Poland to reject a moderate German proposal for settlement of the Danzig issue by offering it a military guarantee,and then failing to deliver when the German/Polish war broke out. It then declared war on Germany but failed to prosecute it, wasting many months trying to get into the Soviet/Finnish war instead, and leaving Germany to take the initiative in France. Following the debacle in France it refused a settlement though unable to give battle, hoping to gain the Soviet Union as an ally, although Churchill (and Bowen) saw Communism as a far greater evil than Fascism. The extermination of the Jews was conducted in the obscure hinterland of the German/Soviet war, and it is improbable that it would have been attempted otherwise.
As to "the Irishness of the Irish Times", I am perhaps biassed in that the first issue of it I saw advised Irish emigrants of the dangers of race-mixing, which was then a very English attitude. Our discovery that Major McDowell sought advice from Downing St. reinforced that bias. And Mansergh's placing of "Anglo-Ireland" on a par with "De Valera's Ireland" rather gives the game away.
I had not previously thought of him as a chip-on-the-shoulder Protestant. But what else blinds him to the fact that the North Cork Anthology covers the entire social spectrum without regard to creed or economic status? It is genuinely inclusive. It does not include on one side while cutting off at the other, as Irish Times columnists do.[Brendan Clifford. Irish Times]
17th May 2004 [A Little Man From A Little House]
Brendan Halligan's item "Belittling a big Irishman from the Big House" (8/5/04) has been drawn to my attention as I and other members of this tiny local history group were the only people actually named by Martin Mansergh as accusing him of being a spy.
He provided no evidence for this charge, as there is none. I wrote immediately to The Irish Times to reject this accusation but they did not publish my letter and I asked Mr. Mansergh to help me 'clear' his name by having it published but he refused to do so.However, the Irish Times then published a long letter by him where he withdrew this particular accusation against us but made more allegations. See the Irish Times Letters page of Monday, 3rd May 2004.
I would be grateful therefore if you would give as much prominence in your paper to Mr. Mansergh's withdrawal of this particular accusation as that given to his original charge. I am sure your newspaper would not want 'to give legs' to this particular piece of nonsense when the author himself has withdrawn it.
As I was born and reared in a labourer's cottage in North Cork can I suggest the title "Belittling a little Irishman from a Little House" for such an item?
Of course, if Mr Mansergh wants to debate with us in your columns on any of the issues that he has raised in connection with this red herring we would be delighted to do so. It has not proved possible to have such a debate in the columns of the Irish Times and you would do a great public service if you provided such an opportunity.
You refer to his "historic contribution as adviser to successive administrations, especially in the sphere of Irish/British relations" but you should also have pointed out that he refused to serve the Bruton administration which, arguably, needed his services more than the others.
You express your sadness at no one springing to his defence. I did, as explained above, and I was rebuffed by him and The Irish Times.
I hope therefore that you and your readers will appreciate that there is another side to this story and that you will facilitate its telling. Its telling might help explain why Mr. Mansergh indulged in such bizarre allegations about members of this small local history group.
[Jack Lane, Letter To The Limerick Leader]
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