In the eye of the Tiger

MEMOIR: The Dubliner DiariesBy Trevor White, The Lilliput Press, 204pp. €9.99

IN ONE sense, at least, Trevor White's Dublinerwas a publication ahead of its time. Back in 2006, with the Ryder Cup about to descend on Ireland, the magazine featured a joke in poor taste about the wife of Tiger Woods. It was a gross libel – and, besides, it wasn't funny. Also, as we now know, it targeted the wrong half of the couple. Even so, published when the golfer's image was still a bland, squeaky-clean triumph of personal branding over reality, it now looks curiously prescient, as if the Dublinerhad found Woods's attic and sensed something was wrong there but somehow missed the portrait.

Then again, it was not for such exposes that the self-described "journal of ideas" had been founded. In fact, for the sport-sceptic Dublinereven to devote an issue to the already overhyped Ryder Cup was, as White admits, a bit shameless.

Subsequent events were also a good lesson in being careful what you wish for, as one of the publisher’s early realisations was that, to survive, a small magazine had to create publicity. “We need to kick up a fuss,” the author notes. And the Woods controversy was certainly that, albeit the kind of fuss a fisherman’s skiff makes when being hit by an ocean liner.

But that debacle was just another twist in White's doomed, almost decade-long attempt to make his magazine (a) stand for something and (b) sell. By the end of White's time with the magazine – it has now become a handout with the Dublin Evening Herald – the Dublinerhad never again matched its first-issue sale. The best attempt was with a cover story featuring Paris Hilton.

In 2001, responding to an already-common criticism that his magazine was in-house reading for the Dublin 4 set, White summoned a surprise defence witness: Patrick Kavanagh. The Monaghan man was an unlikely ally, notwithstanding his long exile in the borderlands of Dublin 2 and 4, and the fact that he also published a journal of ideas (which sank after a 13-week reign of terror in 1952).

But it was Kavanagh’s famous argument in favour of being parochial rather than provincial that the publisher had in mind. Dublin 4 types are human too, he protests, and just as worthy of study as any other branch of Irish anthropology: “As if there are people more like people elsewhere.”

He’s not entirely convincing about this. Frequently in these diaries we find him apologising for being posh and well connected. Indeed, paradoxically – and for the opposite reasons to Kavanagh, who attributed his humiliation in Dublin to having no establishment friends – White also admits to feeling like a total outsider in his own city: “The son of a Jew in Catholic Ireland, I have Quaker and Jesuit blood on my mother’s side, went to a tiny Protestant boarding school, spent two years at college and split. My favourite sport is cricket, I don’t eat bacon, and even my friends think I’m socially retarded.”

It’s not until the book’s end, by which stage he has quit the magazine, that White has an epiphany, revealing himself, after all, to be a “local mongrel”, like most Dubliners. “It only took me 37 years to realise that.”

Elsewhere, misattributing it to Wilde, the author echoes Orwell's quotation that by the age of 50 every man has the face he deserves. White is talking about Brian Cowen, whose ascension to Taoiseach earned him a Dublinercover. But you could also adapt the quip to magazines, if with a shorter timescale.

By 2008 the face of White’s journal of ideas had settled for being something less than that: fun, bitchy, mischievous, occasionally thought-provoking but not exactly relevant, especially if you didn’t live in Dublin – or even if you did and (like some of us) had never been to Renards. Later that year, as he moves towards the exit, White pays tribute to his “loyal and deeply talented” team for surviving disaster to create the “best little magazine in Ireland”. And there is something heroic in keeping any new magazine afloat that long. But his pride in the achievement sounds a bit like the relieved, uncritical pride of a father realising his troubled offspring has finally made something – anything – of itself.

The Dublinerwas very much a child of the Celtic Tiger. It was funded by the property boom: a €200,000 loan based on released equity from White's small house in Dublin 2. And although Ireland's real economic miracle was over by 2002 its effects continued to rage throughout the Dubliner's early years.

When not deprecating himself for riding the Tiger's back the author takes well-aimed swipes at those around him, including The Irish Times(for which he once reviewed restaurants). His book also charts the rise and fall of other Tiger children, among them Katie French and Conrad Gallagher. Food, especially its pretentiousness and mediocrity during Dublin's boom years, is a recurring theme.

And although it had seemed a bit rich when, back at the start, he used Kavanagh's parochialism theory as a shield, he was spectacularly vindicated in the end. At the time he had even quoted the sonnet Epic– written about a dispute between Inniskeen neighbours over "who owned that half a rood of rock" – and Kavanagh's conclusion that the Trojan War had been a similar "local row". Which poem was uncannily echoed by a certain 2008 law case in Dalkey. A dispute about who owned three-quarters of a rood of rock, this pitted Ireland's best-known broadcaster against his neighbour. And not only did it seem to mark the end of an era, but, as urban and rural Ireland experienced a rare unity in their fascination with the details, it again made Trevor White look oddly prescient with his argument, slightly controversial in 2001, that south Dubliners were people too.

Frank McNally is an Irish Timesjournalist; he writes "An Irishman's Diary" for the paper