MEMOIR: FINTAN O'TOOLEreviews In My Own TimeBy James Downey, Gill and Macmillan, 277pp, €24.95
IT IS common enough for memoirs to be ruined by bitterness and the settling of old scores. James Downey’s record of his long and highly distinguished career in Irish journalism is a rare example of a memoir that is greatly enhanced by bitterness and the settling of old scores. What might otherwise have been a quietly elegant book, of interest mostly to those in and around the newspaper trade, is transformed by rage and resentment into a gripping psychodrama.
On the surface, Jim Downey ought not to be an especially controversial figure even within the claustrophobic hothouse of Irish journalism. He is, almost universally, both liked for his warm and engaging personality and admired for his piercing clarity of thought and style. He has enjoyed considerable success on both sides of the great divide between The Irish Timesand the Irish Independent, making him one of the very few figures ever to have wielded real editorial influence in each of those papers. Yet he emerges in In My Own Timeas a man haunted by a strange and entirely unjustified sense of failure. Without it, his life might have been happier but his book would have been much duller.
Downey is a link back to an almost lost world of Irish journalism. His career began in 1951 at the Carlow Nationalist, breeding ground of such remarkable talents as Desmond Fisher, Michael Finlan and Olivia O'Leary.
He quickly made his way to the fledgling Evening Press, edited by Douglas Gageby, who would be a huge figure in his working life. From there, after a falling-out with Gageby, he went to the Times Pictorial, a weekly version of The Irish Times. After its demise, and a short period teaching English in Spain, he went to London and worked on a local paper in the East End.
In 1959, he returned to Dublin and to The Irish Timesstable to work on the short-lived Sunday Review, the Evening Mailand then The Irish Timesitself. He stayed there until 1988, when he left (ultimately for the Irish Independent) in circumstances that seem to hover over all his professional memories like a dark cloud of unresolved anger.
It is a wild understatement to say that Downey’s memories are never bathed in the glow of nostalgia. He is unflinching in the face of the “terribly restricted lives” of the rural Leitrim of his youth and of the “poverty and decay” of 1950s Dublin. There is no “rare oul’ times” romanticisation of the city’s literary Bohemia: Brendan Behan is recorded as “a gurrier, unwashed, violent, delighting in every kind of misbehaviour, lazy, an abuser of his marvellous talents, and, worst, mean-spirited.”
The news editor of the Irish Press, Bill Redmond, is "tyrannical and almost sadistic". Fergus Pyle, who edited The Irish Timesin the mid-1970s is "one of the worst editors ever to preside over any considerable newspaper".
In some respects, indeed, In My Own Time, reads like a successful and highly entertaining audition for a part in Grumpy Old Men. From Michael Scott's "appalling" design of the Abbey Theatre to the "petulant, self-regarding" Noel Browne and from the "present age of illiteracy" to "grotesquely ill-named" neo-conservatism, Downey's verbal barbs hum like a nest of angry wasps.
But the grumpiness gives the book its edge. It is clearly the work of a man with a passion for journalism, but also of a clear-eyed realist who quickly learned that it is not a world occupied exclusively by saints.
When the 20 year-old Downey was Portarlington correspondent of the Nationalist, the original "dial-a-quote" of Irish politics, Oliver J Flanagan, allowed him to write "the predictable terms of his reaction myself".
He was offered bribes to keep the names of defendants out of court reports and, as London correspondent of The Irish Times, to pass on information gleaned in Westminster lobby briefings.
He was approached by the then government press secretary Frank Dunlop with the extraordinary suggestion that The Irish Timesshould run an editorial calling for the dismissal of the then garda commissioner Ned Garvey. Downey is also brutally honest about the drinking culture of a journalistic world "fuelled by whiskey" in Dublin and imbibing "on a heroic scale" in London.
Politically, Downey describes himself as a socialist in principle but a “middle-class individualist at heart”. He helped to write Labour leader Brendan Corish’s famous “the seventies will be socialist” speech. He stood for Labour in the general election of 1969 (he got 895 votes) and gives a wonderfully salty account of his experiences on the canvass.
Yet his most important political intervention was probably his authorship of the infamous pro-Fianna Fáil front-page "payback time" editorial in the Irish Independenton the day before the 1997 general election. To that extent, the book is also a journey from idealism to disillusionment. Rather sadly, but with typical honesty, Downey writes that when he took the job of chief leader writer with the Independent, he told the editor Vinny Doyle that he would "take whatever line he [Doyle] pleased on any issue".
As he sees it, however, the key moment in Downey's career is not his many positive achievements, but his "devastating" failure to become editor of The Irish Timesin 1986. There's a telling moment when Downey is discussing his desire to leave the paper during Pyle's editorship. He writes that, of those he approached for a job, only RTÉ and the Sunday Independenttook him seriously: "Others refused to believe that an assistant editor of The Irish Timescould possibly wish to come down in the world by taking a job with another organisation." Oddly, there's a sense in the book that Downey at least partly believes this himself.
On Downey’s account, the idea of him becoming editor emerged in 1977, when Pyle’s regime was obviously in trouble. That ambition was sidelined by Gageby’s second coming as editor, but seems to have solidified throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s.
His accession to the job of deputy editor and his oversight of the paper’s shift to new printing technologies probably put him a little ahead of Conor O’Clery and Conor Brady in the succession stakes. By his own account, however, he expected a laying on of hands and was unhappy with the idea of a competition for the job.
When, he records, Gageby reassured him that he was still the “front-runner”, he reflected that: “To call me the front-runner was if anything a diminution of my supposed status, that of the anointed successor.”
There is, in the account that follows, a dark streak of paranoia. One day, Downey looks up and sees Gageby “watching me with a stare of deep-seated malice”.
In spite of having, as he claims, the support of 70 per cent of the editorial staff (a figure that is probably no exaggeration), he feared “intrigue and treachery”. He mentions “rumours of outside influence, possibly exerted through trust members” – as a consummate professional Downey would never have allowed a statement that included the words “rumours” and “possibly” to appear in a newspaper.
When it came, the news that Brady was to be appointed struck Downey “like a physical blow”. He records the paper’s chairman, Thomas McDowell, telling him, after he broke the bad news, that “you’re still Jim Downey” – a rather sensible reminder that a public life of great distinction lay both behind and ahead of him. But his response is extraordinarily bleak: “Oh yes! I thought, the great Jim Downey with his career all behind him at the age of 53.”
At times, this bitterness acquires a distinctly unpleasant edge. It is rather ungracious to dismiss Conor O’Clery’s appointment as Moscow correspondent, where his reporting on the fall of the Soviet Union would be one of the finest achievements in Irish journalism, as a cynical manoeuvre to get him out of the way.
For the most part, however, the person Downey seems to treat most unfairly is himself. He is too fine a writer and has contributed too much to Irish journalism for his career to be defined by a single disappointment. Yet, readers of his memoir have reason to be grateful for his refusal to move on from that moment. It makes for an absorbing anatomy of one of the emotions that touches all human lives: disappointment.
Fintan O'Toole is Assistant Editor of The Irish Times. His new book Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tigerwill be published next month by Faber