Journalism: It is, I fear, all too characteristic of the mandarin cast of mind produced by The Irish Times that a collection of features by women writers from The Irish Times is subtitled: "Irish Women Journalists 1969-1981". As though there were no other Irish Women Journalists, except those associated with The Irish Times! A whiff of that old Ascendency hauteur never left them, writes Mary Kenny.Mary Kenny
Only codding. Well, only half-codding: the subtitle of this book really ought to have been "Women Journalists from The Irish Times 1969-1981". Perhaps the next instalment - 1982-2000? - might remedy this conceit.
On the other hand, it is to the paper's credit that it takes pride, and always has taken pride, in its writers and promoted them to a degree that the writers themselves often seem married to the paper. For the late Mary Cummins - some of whose most luminous and well-observed pieces are reprinted here - The Irish Times was better than a husband, and more congenial than many aspects of family life. It was only when Maeve Binchy became the most famous popular author in the world that she finally stopped being introduced as "Maeve Binchy of The Irish Times", inseparable from the protective aura of the newspaper's reputation. A mandarin caste, like a crack regiment, is created through this intense sense of loyalty and identification with the institution itself: perhaps an increasingly rare phenomenon in the dizzily free-market world of no fixed loyalties. So the attitude that there could only be one newspaper in Ireland which represented women's journalism is perhaps less an error than a natural assumption.
The collection is a sort of snapshot in time, capturing that period encapsulating the rise of "women's liberation" and the onset of all the social changes in Irish society with which we have become familiar, including the eruption of the North of Ireland. Quite rightly, the editor, Elgy Gillespie, has first paid tribute to the late Donal Foley, the Irish Times executive who really brought the newspaper forward, not just into the realm of opportunities for women, but, with artfulness, grace and humour, and in partnership with the immortal Douglas Gageby, moved it away from its old Ascendency base, and towards the demographics of a new Ireland. Foley and Gageby did this by instinct, but it was one of the smartest marketing moves of the 20th century: the old Southern Unionist constituency of The Irish Times was ageing and dying: a new Catholic bourgeoisie was rising, in numbers as well as in power. The lead topic of the Letters Page, which had so often been the beastly habit of exporting Irish horses to the Continent, really had to give way to more mainstream concerns. Almost imperceptibly, Gageby and Foley carried through this change with a style which ought to be a textbook lesson in Media Studies. Newspapers have to change: but the change must look like an organic development.
Changing the Times recaptures some wonderfully hilarious pieces: Maeve's adorable story of her first evening dress, and Nell McCafferty's comical evocation of her childish attachment to a dreadful little coat that was sent to her from America, replete with the religious trinkets that recall an archaic Ireland - lined with medals of the "Sacred Heart, Virgin Mary, Saint Philomena (now demoted), Roy Rogers medallion and hairy scapulas \ scratching my not yet nubile chest". So archaic an Ireland, indeed, that copy-editors do not now know how to spell scapulars. Still, I laughed out loud.
It is a harsh truth that very little journalism stands the test of time, and is not designed to do so: journalism should be like a fresh cake from the Tea-Time Express - rewarding to bite into, gratifying to the palate, but stale within a week. Even some of the fine pieces of reportage here really only serve to demonstrate how much has changed: and yet others, simply because they come from a past now long gone, stand as witness to a dead time. Mary Leland's portrait of Bishop Lucey of Cork is a small masterpiece, evoking a stubborn, but not unlikeable, prince of the Church who refused to change with the times (Lucey was a stickler for banning dance-halls in Lent, but in the 1930s, be it remembered, he wrote some of the most trenchant and courageous denunciations of the race basis of Nazi ideology).
Mary Cummins's interview with Bernadette Devlin on the occasion that she announced her first, unmarried pregnancy is really a most significant slice of history, social, political and personal. And Caroline Walsh's 1975 interview with Seamus Heaney is a salient exposition of why the poet's voice is more piercing to the marrow than any other, because "every poem begins with a lifeline to the subconscious". It is a tutorial on poetry with Heaney when he was young and fresh, and although he has never grown stale, a celebrity can never again be so unselfconscious.
The elements that signal the expanding awareness of feminism are present, and meaningful - the contraceptive and abortion debates - but not overweening: when newspapers listen to their readers they come to understand that not all women are feminists, and the mothers of sons are particularly keen to see the world remain fair to men. There is an entertaining essay by Theodora Fitzgibbon defending the joys of the kitchen, and, perhaps prophetically, the pleasure of being a domestic goddess. Indeed, the snapshots in time which set out to track the development of feminism make one ruminate upon the reversals, as well as the progress that has been achieved. Elgy's 1971 report of a Mansion House meeting setting out the aims of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement is a startling reminder of the most prominent, and now the most forgotten, aim of Irish feminism of this period - to ensure that every family had the right to a decent home. If you read The Irish Times's property supplement on a Thursday, you might wonder what kind of a world our revolutions have wrought.
Mary Kenny was a founder member of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement in 1970. She is a columnist for the Irish Independent. Her new biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, Germany Calling, will be published in October by New Island Books
Changing the Times: Irish Women Journalists 1969-1981. Edited by Elgy Gillespie, The Lilliput Press, 250 pages. €16.99