An Irishman’s Diary on politicians and the press

The symbiotic – and also ambiguous – relationship between politicians and the press is never more noticeable than when elections approach, and allegations of bias or favouritism fill the air. Politicians stoutly deny that they have any intention of managing their own press coverage, but the historical record shows that this is rarely the case, and that on occasion even a political grandee such as Charles Stewart Parnell was not above a certain economy with la vérité when his own reputation was at stake.

One such occasion was the general election of 1880, when Parnell’s candidate in Wexford, John Barry, was fighting the sitting member, the Chevalier O’Clery, who was a member of the Buttite faction in the Irish Party, which was then in the throes of what was to be an unsuccessful attempt to prevent Parnell assuming undisputed leadership of the party.

One of the election meetings, in Enniscorthy, was memorably described by the journalist Andrew Dunlop who, though a Scot, had been deeply immersed in the world of Irish journalism since 1857, and who memorialised his own exploits and those of the celebrities of the era in his Fifty Years of Irish Journalism, published only a year before his death, at the age of 77, in 1912.

‘Rowdy meeting’

It was a rowdy meeting, and members of the Buttite faction who were in attendance did a fair job of disrupting things. One of them got hold of Parnell by the leg and was in the process of trying to pull him down from the platform when Dunlop, abandoning temporarily the journalistic independence for which his obituarist in

The Irish Times

praised him some years later, “managed to frustrate the attempt by taking my umbrella and bringing the knobby end of the handle heavily down on the knuckles of Mr Parnell’s assailant”.

Parnell’s carefulness with the press was in evidence just a couple of hours later, when Dunlop was handing in his report at the local post office to be telegraphed to Dublin. Parnell came into the post office and asked whether he could read Dunlop’s report – which included a description of how Parnell had, at the meeting, been struck by a missile (an orange or an egg), at which the great statesman “turned absolutely livid”.

The only observation Parnell made on the report was to say that the missile had been an orange rather than an egg. Dunlop was therefore more than a little mystified to hear, at another election meeting in Navan the following evening, Parnell denying roundly that he had been struck at the Enniscorthy meeting, and claiming that “there was no place in Ireland where such an insult would be offered to him”.

“I was inclined to mistrust my ears”, Dunlop commented in his memoir, “but as I was standing by his side in the recess of the window from which he was speaking, that was impossible. What other conclusion I could come to I must leave my readers to put into appropriate language.”

At this time Dunlop was working for either the London Daily News or the Freeman's Journal – the exact date of his transfer between these two titles is unclear – but by 1887 he had joined the reporting staff of The Irish Times, and had occasion to remonstrate with his former employer, the Freeman, about the way they had reported an incident during the "Plan of Campaign" in which he had been threatened by William O'Brien, the politician (and journalist) who edited United Ireland, a publication memorably described in Myles Dungan's recent book as "Mr Parnell's Rottweiler".

The occasion was an eviction at Lugacurran in Co Laois, which Dunlop attended as The Irish Times reporter, and at which O'Brien turned up to support the tenants. The Freeman's account of what happened at the end of O'Brien's speech was so inadequate, according to Dunlop, that he had to write a letter of correction to the Freeman itself which, in fairness, printed it.

Dunlop’s letter filled out the picture with some spirit. “When Mr O’Brien had finished his speech”, he wrote, “he stepped down off the trunk of the tree which had served as a platform, and turning round moved forward one or two paces and addressing me in the presence of the crowd, asked me to retire quietly from the meeting . . . I then asked why I should leave and Mr O’Brien replied, because you are not here as an ordinary newspaper reporter, but as a spy’.”

Spurred on by this, the crowd took the horse out of the shafts of Dunlop's carriage, and The Irish Times reporter had to walk the seven miles to Athy, where a mob which had followed him chased him from one public house to another until he found safety in the post office before catching the train back to Dublin.

That tumultuous era wasn’t all bad news for newspapers, however. During elections the addresses of the various candidates were all published by the newspapers as paid advertisements at a shilling a line – which apparently did little to discourage verbosity – and indeed articles and letters to the editor supporting individual candidates were charged to their authors at the same rate. Those were the days, indeed.