Michael Viney tells Fintan O’Toole about his 60 years at The Irish Times

The old journalistic saw is that “dog bites man” is not news but “man bites dog” is. Or, in other words, what’s seldom is wonderful.

It was in this spirit that, on September 28th, 1961, the London Evening Standard reported the odd tale of a man going against the human tide of emigration from Ireland to England: “In a few days’ time Michael Viney throws up a £1,500 a year job to go and live in a Connemara cottage on £6 a week.”

It quoted the journalist, who was then 28, as saying, “I’m going to write and I’m going to see if I’m a painter… I’ll be a different person in a year’s time.” The report added: “He looks happy.”

Eight months later, in May 1962, this young man, who now described himself as a “refugee”, wrote his first article for The Irish Times about his experience of transplanting himself to the west of Ireland. This was the start of a relationship with the paper and its readers that has lasted, so far, for 60 years.

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It was also a foretaste of what must surely be one of the longest continuous columns in any newspaper in the world. Next month, Viney’s enthralling Another Life will have been in print for all of 45 years.

In any walk of life, these double anniversaries would be remarkable. In the world of journalism, whose only constant is endless flux, they border on the miraculous.

There is also, in this relationship, a paradox. Viney introduced himself to Irish readers as a romantic refusenik: “They will let you out of the rat race if you feign madness and say ‘no’ to everything.” He claimed to be “all for escapism, really”.

Generations of readers have indeed enjoyed a vicarious escapism of their own through the adventures of Michael and his wife Ethna. We have been witnesses to the marriage of dreams and realities in their lives as pioneers of self-sufficiency, chronicled so mesmerisingly in Michael’s classic book, A Year’s Turning, reissued this month in a very handsome new edition by New Island.

Yet Viney’s “other life” also has its obverse side. He chronicled many of Ireland’s darkest stories — those that were unfolding behind the walls of its elaborate institutions of repression. He may be a great escape artist, but he has never been evasive.

He was a pioneer in another sense — of the long series of investigative articles on a single topic: the state of the Irish language, for example, or the development of forestry, or the fate of rural Ireland, or the way the Civil Service was working. These series brought into a newspaper format ways of writing about Ireland that had been confined previously to small magazines, notably The Bell.

They have a potent afterlife as cross-sections of Irish life at a time of epochal change. The Ryan Report on the industrial school system appends Viney’s contemporary reports as essential historic documents.

His own persona in these investigations is closer than might be expected to the one that readers still relish in his weekly columns from Thallabawn in west Mayo: curious, open-minded, benign, gently probing but sharply rational.

Whether writing about the behaviour of birds or the structures of Irish society, there has been a constant pulse to Viney’s writing: the painter’s powers of observation and the writer’s ability to translate perceptions into prose of translucent clarity.

You grew up with parents who ran a fish and chip shop in Brighton. Was that a happy childhood for you? Did the second World War have a big effect on you?

It was a chips-with-everything cafe on the main road to the sea. It was closed by the war and we moved to the edge of the town where the white cliffs begin. I helped my father on his allotment, where he grew tobacco for his pipe. I slept in a Morrison shelter that filled most of the kitchen and once the windows were blown in.

Is it true that you wanted to paint before you wanted to write? Do you think that visual sense shaped (literally and metaphorically) the way you see the world?

Painting and writing came together at school. Diverted from an arts career by the careers teacher, I joined the local weekly, the Brighton and Hove Herald, at 16 as a trainee reporter, legally apprenticed to 21. Then I joined the local Evening Argus as reporter and feature writer.

My visual sense has shaped most things, from enjoying the natural world to that of painting and sculpture. In my teens I admired shop window displays. I have painted at intervals for most of my life, but never with the driving, original vision of a “proper” artist.

Were you influenced by the great social reforms of the Labour government after the war?

I joined the Labour League of Youth in my teens. But, to my shame, I later joined the Young Conservatives who had a big, blue badge with a lion on it and a livelier social life. I even canvassed for a fat-bellied Tory grocer on the steepest hills in town. Redemption came by way of a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march from Aldermaston and reading New Statesman and New Society.

What drew you to Ireland in the early 1960s? A more natural habitat might have been Fleet Street in London.

I came to Ireland as a refugee from several years in Fleet Street, where I was a reporter on The Star, a London evening paper, and a feature writer on Today magazine, the then-new successor to John Bull. It once sent me to the Middle East, on serious politics, but then the magazine decayed into tabloid pin-ups and the Royals which I found soul destroying.

I came to Connemara on my bike in 1961 for a winter’s painting sabbatical, and the following year headed to Dublin where I started writing features for The Irish Times.

You came to Ireland when it was at a turning point with the beginning of Whitaker/Lemass revolution. Did it strike you as a place that was in the doldrums or was there an immediate sense that big changes might happen quite quickly?

It was the sense of imminent change from Lemass/Whittaker economics that made me feel I could have a role in Irish journalism, writing about social change. The radical sociology of New Society was a big inspiration.

Did you get any sense of suspicion or hostility towards you as an Englishman? Especially when you started to poke around the institutions of Church and State and ask questions?

There was deep suspicion and obstruction from the Department of Education but great, if often guarded, courtesy from institutions in the field. My seriousness seemed to score well, plus my diffident respect, as a “protestant” newcomer, for Catholic culture.

I remember you saying many years later, when the extent of abuse in the industrial schools had become public, that you felt guilty for not having picked up more on the sexual abuse suffered by the children. But maybe it was hard even to imagine the depth of what was going on?

Everybody was keen to show the schools as happy places and it was my nature to think the best of everyone.

How much reaction was there when you wrote about the industrial schools and the mother and baby homes? Do you think those series of articles had any real effect on policy or the way things were being run?

There was very little negative reaction, but strong positive interest from UCD sociology students and from the radical social group Tuairim. About 1970 I was invited by the provost of TCD to write a social history of post-independence Ireland, but the first year of research so depressed me with its deadening picture of church dominance that I withdrew from the assignment.

What was The Irish Times like back then under its relative young editor Douglas Gageby? Did it feel like an exciting place to be?

It did feel exciting, with Gageby’s lively, interested presence a leading spirit of the workplace. He gave me remarkable freedom and work time for my own choice of social inquiries and sent me north on a tour that introduced John Hume to the paper.

We have mature oak trees grown from acorns he sent me that he’d collected and sprouted himself. And the Another Life column was his suggestion, born of a chance meeting on Grafton Street a few weeks before we left Dublin.

You went to work for RTÉ in the mid-1970s? Was working in TV and film some kind of fulfilment of your interest in visual media?

Yes, I loved film, and RTÉ trained me as producer/director. In the west I wrote and directed documentaries on Tim Robinson and Michael Longley, and Ethna and I made several landscape-based films for RTÉ and TG4.

The decision to move to rural Mayo and try to live a self-sufficient life was in some ways in keeping with the spirit of the 1960s and early 1970s. Did you and Ethna think of yourselves as part of a wider movement back to the garden, or was it more of a personal impulse?

The impulse was personal for both of us — an escape to live somewhere beautiful and do new and challenging things. Discovering the acre had good soil reconnected me with my dad and our wartime allotment. In early life, Ethna lived in a Cavan hill valley where her mother kept poultry and bees.

[ Michael Viney’s first article for The Irish Times: The man in the cottage ]

She also enjoyed solving problems, always asking, “Why not?” We knew about the UK’s self-sufficiency movement and its first settlers in Leitrim and read inspirational books by John Seymour et al, but the first impulse was our own and mutually endorsed.

Did you ever panic about the prospect of making it all work? Even in the simplest sense of being able to feed yourselves?

I once wrote: “If you have enough land to grow potatoes for a year, what can they do to you really?” We never doubted that and ate a lot of potatoes.

Do you think you might have felt more isolated if you didn’t have the column and that knowledge that you had so many readers who were, at least vicariously, sharing your adventure?

The column gave us minimum income and buoyed me up in the pleasure of writing in a shapely, personal language. It brought a warm response from readers and without them I might indeed have felt more isolated. Later, wireless broadband from Inishbofin offshore connected us with the world and opened a whole new source of natural history research and knowledge.

Did you ever despair about Irish people’s apparent indifference to or even hostility towards their landscapes and natural heritage? It often seemed to me that we were somehow afraid to love the land — perhaps because mass emigration gave us such a bittersweet relationship to it.

The postwar conservation ethic was dropped on a wholly unprepared Ireland from America and Europe. In its colonial past, pleasure and interest in nature were the reserve of the big house and the Protestant rector. At independence, nature study was dropped from the school curriculum to make more time for Irish. In the small-farm world, which yielded the mass of young emigrants, nature had no value beyond usefulness. However, landscape and nature do appear through the nostalgia of emigrant ballads.

Conservation was later presented by government as a matter of edicts from Brussels or respect for an abstract “scientific interest”. Before the Greens, one politician who showed informed concern for nature was Charles Haughey, which may or may not have been part of his image.

How much change have you seen over the years in the natural world you observe so closely — does climate change have obvious effects on what you’re seeing and experiencing?

The trees we planted on our acre have been showing extraordinary seasonal growth, which I put down to an increase in CO2. The recent lack of flying insects could be due simply to the change in habitat — the acre was once full of flowering plants and vegetables. The briars now busily rewilding it, due to my current neglect, don’t seem to bring in any butterflies. I watch for the jewelled flight of hoverflies, each one is now an event.

The hillside around us, with its fields of sheep, shows little or no change, with good growth of grass, so long as the showers keep coming from the sea, and a steady advance of bracken.

How do you feel about our prospects in the face of the climate emergency? Do you think the necessary sense of urgency is finally there?

The world has woken up far too late, so that sheer inertia seems certain to give humanity a bad time: the wildfires have been the first real shock, and there are many others to come. Wide social change will be forced by events and popular fear, with short-term politics always getting in the way.

I’ve never got the sense from your writing about nature that you are a mystic or a dreamer. How do you think about what comes after life?

I’m an atheist: nothing comes after. Accepting the role of chance, in both human and natural worlds, is something I’ve learned to live with. A bit of Zen might have soothed one’s cosmic insignificance, but I preferred the science of Gaia, the late James Lovelock’s inspirational concept of the Earth as a living organism.

Michael Viney’s A Year’s Turning will be reissued this month by New Island