HISTORY : The News From Ireland: Foreign Correspondents and the Irish Revolution By Maurice WalshIB Tauris, 258pp. £20
IN THIS ORIGINAL and wide-ranging study of British and American press coverage of conflict in Ireland between 1916 and 1922, Maurice Walsh takes a step back from the details of international press engagement and reportage, and asks what factors framed the interest of the British and American press in the Irish struggle. He concludes that "the work of foreign correspondents covering the Irish revolution was mainly about other things than Ireland"; his text suggests, rather, that foreign correspondents applied to the British campaign in Ireland the moral framework which the victorious Allied powers had constructed to justify their victory in the Great War and to legitimate the postwar settlement imposed on the defeated powers at Versailles.
Ulster is strikingly absent from the study, just as it was from international coverage of the Irish conflict. Events such as the police murder of two civilians and the burning of much of the small town of Balbriggan became causes celebres in the international press; the death of over 200 people in Belfast between 1920 and 1922, the majority of them Catholic civilians, at the indiscriminate hands of an uncontrolled mixture of local security forces and armed loyalists, generated almost no international comment or analysis. Even then, the North was a place apart.
Walsh stresses the impact of the Great War on journalism. Overt wartime censorship was hard enough for press men to endure, but what was worse was that correspondents were asked to subordinate their professional ethics to the interests of their country. The consequence, as many acknowledged, was that they became effectively propagandists "embedded" - to use contemporary parlance - in the military. They could usually send back from the front lines only those stories which the army approved, a constraint which made informed criticism of the conduct of the war difficult (although Walsh might have considered the contrasting example of the 1915 shell crisis, provoked by the reports of the Times's military correspondent Charles Repington, which convulsed parliament and undermined the authority of the Asquith government).
When experienced journalists began to visit Ireland as a pattern of unofficial Crown reprisals against individuals and property was emerging in 1920, they were disinclined simply to accept the official version. As atrocity and counter-atrocity grew in scale, such visitors sought independent sources of information. Men such as Hugh Martin took their lives in their hands by finding eyewitnesses to Crown atrocities. Their reportage had an immediate impact in Britain, frequently being used in parliament to question the government's Irish tactics, conduct, and strategy.
The separatist viewpoint was ably put by Desmond FitzGerald and Erskine Childers, disconcertingly suave Englishmen who took care to treat journalists with respect. While the Crown was repeatedly called to account for illegalities of its forces, Childers and FitzGerald by and large were expected only to explain the higher political logic of the revolution and were seldom asked to explain or justify individual acts of republican violence.
Walsh writes evocatively of the golden pre-first World War age of special correspondents, big names sent to trouble spots across the globe with broad remits and indeterminate deadlines, accompanied by retinues of native guides, bearers, cooks and disgruntled camels. In Ireland such journalists travelled alone just as they would in the home counties. They were appalled by what, in remoter colonial settings, would have seemed the mildest of official conduct. Few in Britain or America much cared about the details of colonial counter-subversion - the Amritsar massacre of 1919 in which about 400 Indians were killed had, in many British eyes, only one real victim, the Irish-educated General Reginald Dyer who lost his job as a result. But the burnings of Balbriggan and Cork, the deaths of civilians in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday, all happened very close to home, and the people affected were the same colour, spoke the same language and looked much the same as the Crown forces responsible.
Taking up an argument originally framed by Robert Kee, Walsh also observes that the contradiction between the high-minded Wilsonian language of the victorious powers at Versailles and the conduct of British forces in Ireland led journalists to probe, and to judge more harshly, the Crown's conduct than that of the IRA. (Much the same point has often been made to me by officials and policemen involved in the Northern Ireland conflict, aggrieved that a small number of alleged security force wrongdoings continue to attract disproportionate media interest).
It was not only republicans who courted the international press. Walsh writes revealingly of the curious relationship between the American journalist Charles Ackerman and Sir Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard. Thomson, a maverick who had manipulated the press to discredit Roger Casement in 1916, and who was eventually to be dismissed in November 1921 in an Irish-related power struggle in Whitehall, used Ackerman as a conduit to Sinn Féin.
Journalists face a perennial hazard in such situations. They occupy much the same vague space between the lines in a conflict as do intelligence officers, and sometimes they serve as both reporters and as spies (the right-wing Morning Post provided journalistic cover for an agent of Thomson's agents in Finland). If Maurice Walsh can find the time, he might write more on the awkward inter-relationship between the media and intelligence services. This book demonstrates that he has both the skills and the insight to do so.
Eunan O'Halpin's most recent book is Spying on Ireland: British Intelligence and Irish Neutrality During the Second World War(Oxford, 2008).
The News From Irelandwill be launched in Dublin at 6pm on Oct 16 by Dr Garret FitzGerald in Waterstone's bookshop on Dawson Street. RTÉ's Vincent Woods will chair a discussion about the book between its author and Dr FitzGerald at the same event.
Dr Maurice Walsh will speak on The Wilsonian Journalist: Carl Ackerman and Ireland's Revolutionat the Centre for Contemporary Irish History research seminar in Trinity College, Dublin on Wed Nov 26 at 4pm