Irish Journalism Before Independence: More a disease than a profession

Introduction

Kevin Rafter

On a Friday afternoon in early December 1908 Mr Alfred F. Robbins, a journalist from London, delivered a lecture in Trinity College, Dublin entitled, ‘The London Correspondent’.¹ It was the first in a series of half a dozen talks organised by Trinity College and the Institute of Journalists, and which would continue during the first six months of 1909. The speakers were well-known newspaper men from London, and their topics included the place of the political cartoon in journalism and the role of the special correspondent. The lectures – described as a ‘course’ in journalism by the Provost of Trinity College but labelled a ‘diploma in journalism’ in newspaper reports – would seem to have been unaccredited but motivated by a desire to better understand the profession and its practices. The meetings were very well attended, open to the public but with places reserved for students of the University and members of the Institute of Journalists.

The fifth lecture in the series – and the most extensively reported – was delivered on 6 March 1909 by J. A. Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette. Spender’s newspaper was probably the most influential evening publication in the United Kingdom at the time, and in an impressive achievement he would hold the position of editor for twenty-six years until his retirement in 1922. Like the other invited speakers, Spender had travelled specially to Dublin to address the Trinity College gathering. His audience included the Lord Lieutenant, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral and the Countess of Aberdeen. The title of his address was ‘the education of the journalist’. Obviously speaking from first-hand experience as a newspaper editor and a graduate of Oxford University, Spender described how most older journalists were united in seeking as a ‘positive disqualification for any but the leader-writers of a few London papers to have devoted the best years of their youth to getting a degree by academic studies’. In the world of journalism – which had developed from the late eighteenth century into the early years of this new century – graduation was by way of steady ascent from office boy to editor via the newsroom and reporter’s room. This traditional approach was no longer acceptable, Spender argued, as ‘in every University and in every great school there were a certain number of young men who would deliberately adopt or who would drift into journalism as their work in life’.

The editor of the Westminster Gazette was interested in exploring what kind of education would be most helpful to the professional man – the gender was always male – working in a newspaper office. ‘The difficulty in relation to the education of the journalist was to know where to begin,’ he observed, ‘the dangers and temptations of the calling were as obvious as they were unavoidable – the dangers of sciolism and shallowness; temptations to conceal ignorance, to pretend knowledge, to talk hastily, loosely, inaccurately.’ To counter these dangers and temptations, Spender proposed ‘some kind of literary and scholarly conscience which would keep the journalist from straying beyond forgiveness’. His ideal study for the journalist included a combination of history, law, natural science and political philosophy. In this way a ‘modern journalist’ would emerge who would not pose as an oracle but as a professional presenting himself as ‘a genial, fallible, sympathetic fellow-creature, to whom nothing human is alien and who has had enough experience at first hand to realise the things about which he is writing’.

The sentiments expressed by Spender would most certainly have raised the ire of W. J. Lawrence, a theatrical historian who earned a living as a freelance journalist in Dublin. When the lecture series first commenced in December 1908, Lawrence took great exception to the very idea of a formalised education for members of his profession. He recorded his objections in a letter to the editor of the Daily Mail:

As a brother-at-arms with the interests of his calling at heart, I hope you will accord me with a little space to point out to the Council of the new ‘School’ of Journalism the utter futility of the course which they have adopted. It seems to me that they are setting about to prove the truth of a quaint contention I heard uttered by a certain Dublin editor not long after their scheme was formulated. ‘The whole mistake,’ he said ‘arises from the gratuitous assumption that journalism is a profession. As a matter of fact, it is not so much a profession as a disease. It can be caught – not taught. Knack presses the button and experience does the rest. The great desideratum is aptitude, and that is precisely the one thing that cannot be evolved.’²

Whatever early ambitions existed in Trinity College in relation to journalism education they were never realised within the curriculum of the University – journalism continued as a disease: something to be caught and not taught. Indeed, it was another half century before journalism was given a formal place in the Irish higher education system. Since the early 1970s a strong tradition of journalism education has been established in Ireland – and, in particular, with programmes at Dublin Institute of Technology and at Dublin City University enhancing the craft of the profession has been well served. Until recently less focus has, however, been placed on journalism scholarship and the historical inquiry into journalism. It is not a situation unique to Ireland. American academic Barbie Zelizer asked the potent question: ‘why is journalism not easily appreciated at the moment of its creation, with all its problems, contradictions, limitations and anomalies?’³ The answer to Zelizer’s conundrum, however, may well be in the very question she posed. Journalism is many things. At its core is giving witness and story telling, and a belief that the work produced actually matters, and should be taken seriously. But it is a profession, or to credit Lawrence’s Dublin editor ‘a disease’, of varying personalities and practices. It is a broad church, and it has always been so – as Andrew Marr so delicately put it: ‘a ragged and confusing trade all the way through’.⁴ James Joyce – himself a one-time journalist as discussed in Terence Killen’s chapter (15) in this volume – immortalised the profession in the pages of Ulysses: ‘Funny the way these newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn’t know which to believe.’

This assessment may in part explain why more often than not journalism has been the source material for academic research rather than a significant discipline of research in itself. The motivation underpinning this volume is to take Irish journalism seriously and to further enhance the idea of journalism as a scholarly exercise rooted in the historical evolution of the profession. It is a moot point whether this stance on journalism scholarship would meet with the same type of hostility provoked over a century ago by the idea of educating journalists in a formal setting.

The material in this publication looks at Irish journalism before Independence through an interdisciplinary lens, and this is clearly evident in the backgrounds of the various contributors. The collection does not seek to be a definitive history of journalism in the ‘long’ Irish nineteenth century that extended until 1922. There is no chronological or thematic approach driving the text. Like good journalism this is a volume of stories. And these stories pay tribute to the early years of the profession in all its hues – so on the pages that follow foreign correspondents are joined by local newspaper owners, leader writers, propagandists and artists.

There is no easy way to draw a boundary to the historical study of journalism. In an interdisciplinary publication such as this choices must be made. Resultantly, the contributions in this volume are book-ended by two seminal dates in Irish history – the Act of Union in 1800 and the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1922. It is a fair conclusion that journalism as it would be recognised today emerged in this period between the abolition of a Dublin parliament and the partition of the island with two jurisdictions each having a different relationship with the United Kingdom. There was, of course, journalism in Ireland prior to 1800. In his chapter (1) Mark O’Brien recalls that the first newspaper printed in Ireland, The Irish Monthly Mercury (which carried accounts of Oliver Cromwell’s campaign) appeared in December 1649 although it was not until February 1659 that the first Irish newspaper became available. But these early publications were – as Robert Munter concluded – ‘primitive and erratic efforts at journalism’.⁵ In truth, it is debatable if the output of this early print culture should actually qualify for description as journalism produced by journalists. There is an undoubted connection, a historical trace line, but perhaps this early print work is best seen as a distant relation of the journalism of the nineteenth century. Even the initial publications that would be recognised today as newspapers were poorly designed and operated under strict government control. As recent as 1776 the authorities were issuing orders prohibiting the publication of any news not guaranteed by the government. Indeed, in this period setting up a newspaper in Dublin was not an easy undertaking even with the imprimatur of government. A pro-British newspaper the Volunteer Evening Post was established in Dublin in 1780 with a staff of editors, printers and compositors from England. But the venture met with local opposition – the editor is said to have fled for this life ‘but the printer, less fortunate, fell into the hands of the populace and was carried to the Tenter-fields and tarred and feathered’.⁶

As the nineteenth century progressed newspapers broke free of governmental control exercised by means of strict libel laws and a repressive taxation regime. The development of modern journalism was assisted by the mid-nineteenth century abolition of press taxes – identified by James Curran as the ‘key breakthrough’ – which made newspapers a less expensive purchase for the wider population.⁷ Rising literacy standards also expanded the market for newspapers. While newspaper publication had been slow in Ireland – and few of these early newspapers managed to establish a lasting presence – change came with the development of the railways and the expansion of the postal network.⁸ During the nineteenth century news and time took on a meaning that is easily understood today. The developments in transport, the expansion of the postal service and the advent of the telegraph meant news arrived faster – distances were reduced from weeks to days to hours. For example, in 1707 it took twenty days for news to flow from Portugal to Dublin but with telegraph cables over a century and a half later simultaneous communication was possible, and for the first time information could be sent faster than a person could carry it.

These nineteenth-century technological developments and administrative changes gave birth to an industry which remained familiar well into the following century. Indeed, the central tenets of twentieth-century journalism were shaped in this period, and remained in place until the early years of the twenty-first century when a technological tsunami has left in its wake fundamental questions about the very nature of journalism. At this contemporary time of tremendous change for the profession it does seem appropriate to go back to examine when it first appeared in its modern guise.

The stories, narratives and histories in the volume provide a representation of the emergence of Irish journalism – and a journalism that existed not just on the island itself but, like many other areas of Irish life in this era, one that was shaped and existed in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere. In their respective chapters Mark O’Brien (1) and Michael Foley (2) chronicle the evolution and development of the profession, and the various challenges confronted by this first generation of modern journalists. One of the underwritten but significant developments in the nineteenth century was the emergence of the newspaper reporter. In his history of the media in Ireland Christopher Morash observes that ‘only rarely would an Irish newspaper editor of the eighteenth century venture outside his premises in search of a story’.⁹ Significantly, newsgathering came to the fore in the nineteenth century as journalists went out and saw with their own eyes.

In light of this fundamental shift in how reportage was undertaken it is interesting that Marie Louise Legg in her history of nineteenth-century provincial newspapers should lament the absence of the person in many histories of the Irish media: ‘Yet so much work on the press has tended to be dull and pedestrian. Human life, is missing and the mentality of those who ran the press is absent.’¹⁰ Set against Legg’s conclusion, this volume seeks to frame Irish journalism’s past by reference to its practitioners and their practice. In the work of the various contributors there are examples of some great journalism – and some not so great – and readers are treated to studies of foreign correspondents, editors and proprietors, editorial writers, provincial journalism, the evolution of sports journalism and the challenges of Irish language journalism. Several examples of Legg’s ‘human life’ are evident in the pages that follow. William Howard Russell is probably the best known of the Irish-born correspondents who captured dramatic events from far-flung locations for newspaper readers. But there were other remarkable Irish men who proceeded to the top of their profession as foreign correspondents including Francis McCullagh as told here by John Horgan. And like so many later journalists – including the current author – these men, and in the nineteenth century they were primarily men, came to their career through a variety of routes. Many stumbled into journalism as was the case of E. J. Dillon at the Daily Telegraph. Others, including Arthur Griffith and Michael Cusack, saw newspapers as a means of promoting their chosen cause. For Cusack – as Paul Rouse explains – sport was a means to promote a Gaelic revival.

Like so many other facets of Irish life in the nineteenth century, journalism stretched beyond the shores of the island. The hours were long and the financial rewards mixed. In his chapter (10) Anthony McNicholas traces the successes and failures of one journalist as he sought to build a career in Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Gillian O’Brien (Chapter 9) provides a flavour of the individuals who having left Ireland made careers as journalists in the United States including Margaret O’Sullivan, a woman succeeding in a man’s profession – and what this study also clearly shows is how even across the Atlantic the growth of nationalism in Ireland was central to the story of Irish journalism in the nineteenth century. The great political debates about Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and a possible future as an independent entity serve as a backdrop – or indeed are centre stage – in several chapters, including M. L. Brillman’s focus on the role of The Nation in Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Movement (3), the research on Arthur Griffith respectively from Felix M. Larkin and Ciara Meehan (14) and Ian Kenneally’s work on the War of Independence period (16).

Those who prospered and those who failed in Irish journalism in the years from the passing of the Act of Union to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty were idealists and ideologs; they were businesspeople and entrepreneurs; they were adventurers and rogues. But whatever their motivations and their differences, they worked only in print – they were newspaper men and women – in an era before the arrival of broadcast. They benefited from technological change from printing presses to telegraphy. Ironically, today a digital revolution is again transforming the profession and its practices in a manner last experienced in the nineteenth century. In these initial decades of the twenty-first century it is no longer so easy to answer questions such as ‘what is journalism?’ and ‘who is a journalist?’. So perhaps to better understand the present – and to speculate about the future – it is appropriate to revisit and to review the past.

Notes

1The quotations in this passage relating to journalism lecture series are taken from newspaper reports between December 1908 and March 1909. A notice on the Robbins was included in The Irish Times on 5 December 1908; a report of the Spender meeting was published in the same newspaper on 8 March 1909.

2W. J. Lawrence, Evening Mail, 17 December 1908. My thanks to Martin Molony who included this quotation in a paper ‘W. J. Lawrence: An Irish Freelance Journalist of the Early Twentieth Century’ delivered at the inaugural conference of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland, 1 November 2008.

3B. Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy (London: Sage, 2004), p. 1.

4A. Marr, My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (London: Macmillan, 2004), p. 6.

5R. Munter, The History of the Irish Newspaper 1685–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 8.

6A. Andrews, The History of British Journalism, Volume 1 (London: Adamant Media, 2005, reprint of edition of 1859), pp. 294–5.

7J. Curran, Media and Power (Oxford: Routledge, 2002), p. 4.

8Munter, p. 8.

9C. Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 68.

10M. L. Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850–1892 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), p. 13.

1

Journalism in Ireland: the evolution of a discipline

Mark O’Brien

While journalism in Ireland had a long gestation, the issues that today’s journalists grapple with are very much the same that their predecessors had to deal with. The pressures of deadlines and news gathering, the reliability and protection of sources, dealing with patronage and pressure from the state, advertisers and prominent personalities, and the fear of libel and state regulation were just as much a part of early journalism as they are today. What distinguished early journalism was the intermittent nature of publication and the rapidity with which newspaper titles appeared and disappeared. The Irish press had a faltering start but by the early 1800s some of the defining characteristics of contemporary journalism – specific skill sets, shared professional norms and professional solidarity – had emerged.

In his pioneering work on the history of Irish newspapers, Robert Munter noted that, although the first newspaper printed in Ireland, The Irish Monthly Mercury (which carried accounts of Oliver Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland) appeared in December 1649 it was not until February 1659 that the first Irish newspaper appeared. An Account of the Chief Occurrences of Ireland, Together with some Particulars from England had a regular publication schedule (it was a weekly that published at least five editions), appeared under a constant name and was aimed at an Irish, rather than a British, readership. It, in turn, was followed in January 1663 by Mercurius Hibernicus, which carried such innovations as issue numbers and advertising. As Munter noted, its readership was limited to the Protestant land-owning class and one of its main sources of news was the Court of Claims that redistributed the estates forfeited to the Crown after the 1641 rebellion. Following the Licensing Act of 1662, which stipulated that newspapers could only be printed under licence, entrepreneurs began to supply subscribers with hand-written letters from correspondents (scriveners) who lived close to sites of news such as parliament or the courts. In time these letters were set in type and in 1685 Dublin witnessed the establishment of The News-Letter, which was published three times a week and posted to subscribers.¹

Up until the mid-1700s newspapers, and by extension journalism, were part of the diverse activities of stationary shops and printers. They were not so much a new entity, more an extension to an existing business. The eventual growth of advertising was what determined the course of newspaper development. Publishers initially used surplus space in their newspapers to promote their own publications and services and other adverts slowly began to trickle in, first for the return of lost property or strayed animals and then, more significantly, for the sale or lease of land. Eventually, newspapers began to solicit adverts and they increased in size and in importance to the stationer’s business. While they gradually took a more regular shape they remained an elite form of communication, aimed primarily at the English-speaking, Protestant population. And, since readers bought directly from the publisher, print-runs were small and only large urban areas – Dublin, Belfast and Cork – could sustain newspapers.

In terms of journalism, as Munter put it, ‘a journalistic ethic grew up which was the product of two things: the general attitude of the public and the policy of the Irish government, the former by and large a positive and constructive element, the latter a negative and restrictive one’.² Newspapers were judged by the veracity and freshness of their news and many titles proclaimed their wares in such terms. Pue’s Occurrences declared that it carried, ‘the most Authentic and Freshest Transactions from all Parts’ while the Dublin Mercury offered ‘a Greater Variety of Authentic News, impartially collected, than in any other Advices now extant’.³ Then, as now, rumours abounded and publishers had to thread a wary line between publishing false stories and giving competitors an advantage by being too cautious. As an example, George Faulkner of Faulkner’s Dublin Journal was once forced to publish the following: ‘We have a hot report about the Town that a certain Gentleman lately Barberously murder’d his own Wife and two children, but I forebear to name him till I know its full certainty.’⁴

Newspapers were generally one-person operations and there was little or no demarcation between proprietor, printer, editor or journalist. News came from a variety of sources; coffeehouses, political clubs, courts, markets, and the crews of incoming ships all provided publishers with news. The most important source, however, were the newspapers that arrived from London. All local publishers scanned these publications and, depending on their need for content, reproduced entire articles or summaries of events. As Munter observed, a rather strange journalistic ethos existed among the Dublin papers: ‘To copy a part or the whole of an English paper was an everyday occurrence and was considered a fair business practice; to copy from another Dublin paper was condemned – not as piracy, but as passing stale news on to the public.’⁵ In terms of pre-nineteenth-century politics, the Irish Parliament retained absolute privilege over its proceedings and both houses (Lords and Commons) had powers of compellability, examination, interrogationand detention.⁶ While the most frequent charges against publishers were breaches of privilege and contempt, charges of libel and seditious libel were also common.

Charles Lucas and political journalism

By the mid-1700s the increased circulation of newspapers, coupled with political strife among Dublin politicians, resulted in journalism becoming sensitised to the demand for political commentary. The rise of political reformer Charles Lucas, his battles with Dublin Corporation and the House of Commons and the role of the press in the controversies that followed, indicate the growing power of journalism in influencing public opinion. In 1742 Lucas began a campaign for municipal reform and published a series of pamphlets that exposed the internal machinations of Dublin Corporation. By 1747 this campaign had extended to include charges against parliament and the judicial system. Wary of making a martyr of Lucas, Dublin Castle published The Tickler, the aim of which was to ridicule Lucas. A by-election for the House of Commons in 1748–49 increased further the political temperature. Lucas launched a newspaper, The Censor, to promote his manifesto, much of which was based on political reform and legislative independence for Ireland. As Munter points out, the appearance of these two political journals forced the regular press to sit up and take note of their campaigns, and the way in which political comment and controversy were now features of public discourse:

With the Tickler and the Censor the age of the political journal was introduced into Ireland, and Lucas as much as any individual can be said to have been responsible for the actual emergence of the political newspaper, for it was the controversy that he touched off which forced a public and eventually a newspaper press to respond.⁷

Lucas touched a nerve with the public; he also made the House of Commons nervous. Summoned before the House in October 1749, Lucas was sentenced to imprisonment as an enemy of the state. Although he fled the country the episode left an indelible mark on Irish journalism. It was during this controversy that the phrase ‘the freedom of the press’ was added to the Irish journalistic vocabulary: Irish newspapers, and by extension, Irish journalism had moved from its cautious beginnings to keeping a wary eye on political institutions.

As political and economic pressures – the American war of independence, the success of the Irish parliament in winning a measure of legislative independence, and the growing aspirations of Irish Catholics – came to the fore in the 1770s and 1780s, the role of the newspaper as a medium for public debate, and of journalism as a means of keeping an eye on the doings of government, continued to evolve. So too did governmental methods for controlling journalism. In 1771 the government conceded the right of printers to publish verbatim accounts of parliamentary debates but in 1774 it imposed a stamp duty on newspapers. This added to the tax on advertising introduced in 1712 and the tax on newsprint imposed in 1757. These taxes were directed against opposition newspapers that did not benefit from government patronage in the form of official announcements that were exempt from the advertising tax or bribery in the form of direct subsidisation or payments to editors. The favouritism exercised by the authorities in Dublin Castle also extended to the distribution of news. The express copies of the London newspapers – which were critical in terms of content for Irish papers – were only distributed to newspapers in favour with Dublin Castle. Thus not only did the authorities bestow an economic advantage on newspapers that were ‘on its side’, it also bestowed a journalistic advantage. In 1807 the Evening Post asked why, since the express delivery from London was paid for out of the public purse, the Correspondent, a Castle newspaper, was the sole beneficiary. Laughingly, the Correspondent denied the receipt of official favours: it was first with the news, it claimed, by virtue of its efficiency as a news gathering operation.⁸

Journalistic autonomy

As momentum built up behind Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association, Michael Staunton established the Morning Register in 1824. Staunton was a former editor of the Freeman’s Journal and had established an unsuccessful Catholic newspaper – the Dublin Evening Herald – in 1821. In Brian Inglis’ account of the development of the press in Ireland, Staunton is credited with radically altering the practises of Irish journalism. Staunton insisted that the newspaper’s emphasis be on reports of events in Ireland rather that the traditional practices of ‘lifting’ content from the London papers or reproducing, verbatim, unedited dispatches from abroad. This change required hiring a newsroom of reporters so that comprehensive coverage could be given to newsworthy events around the country. Staunton achieved his objective, and he essentially forced other Dublin newspapers to do likewise. Staunton also sought to put journalism on a dignified footing. During King George IV’s visit to Dublin in 1821, he was to be given a tour of the Dublin Society and passes were sent to the city’s newspapers that allowed reporters access to the street outside. Staunton complained that no journalist could be expected to subject himself ‘to this inconvenience and, indeed, indignity’.⁹ The situation was rectified and reporters were allowed inside the venue. Staunton is also credited with improvements in the appearance and readability of newspapers in the 1820s. New layout and better print quality combined with reportage of O’Connell’s countrywide monster meetings and his election victory in 1828 set new standards for Irish newspapers that others were forced to follow.¹⁰ Such was Staunton’s influence on Irish journalism that after his election as Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1847 his peers presented him with an ‘illuminated address’ that praised him as ‘the man who, if he be not the father by right of years, does yet, so far as its efficiency is concerned, deserve the title of CREATOR OF THE IRISH PRESS’.¹¹

In contrast to Staunton, O’Connell had a different view of journalism. He demanded uncritical coverage of his political manoeuvrings and expected that his speeches would appear verbatim in newspapers. Very often, proprietors and journalists found themselves caught in a ‘cat and mouse’ game between O’Connell and the authorities who viewed his speeches as seditious. In 1825, the reporters who had been present at one of his speeches were summoned to give evidence against him. They refused. The editor of the Star declared ‘he would not permit his reporter to be the accuser of anyone’; the Morning Post reporter said he did not think ‘the press the proper medium though which the business of a common informer should be transacted; the Freeman’s Journal reporter said he could not remember what O’Connell had said and he did not have his notes with him in court; the Saunders’ News-Letter reporter stated he had been asleep when O’Connell had spoken the supposedly seditious words and so had based his report on the notes of another reporter. The case against O’Connell duly collapsed.¹²

The unity of these reporters in refusing to act as witnesses indicated a growing sense of professional solidarity and journalistic objectivity. This is all the more pronounced given that some of the journalists worked for newspapers that were not supportive of O’Connell or his campaign. Despite such actions, O’Connell retained a rather poor opinion of journalists and in terms of winning the favour of reporters sent to cover his speeches he was not the most tactful. In 1826 he engaged in a public row with reporters present at a Catholic Association meeting:

In the middle of a speech he broke off to accuse them of interrupting him, threatening them with expulsion from the hall. Not, he continued, that he had any desire to be reported by them; indeed, he would much prefer that they should not report him, for he ‘never in his life saw anything so shameful, so disgraceful, as the brevity, the inaccuracy and the imperfection of the reports’. The editor of the Evening Post, who was present, intervened to protest that there surely could be no designed misrepresentation. O’Connell agreed. The fault, he said, rose not from intention, ‘but from total incapacity’.¹³

In response, the reporters held a meeting, refuted the allegation that O’Connell had been misrepresented and claimed he was abusing the press to disguise his own political inconsistency. Whatever the truth of the matter, Charles Gavan Duffy, who arrived in Dublin to take up a position at the Morning Register, found that journalism was not quite what he had expected:

The Dublin journalists, when I came to know them, were a marvel to me. They resembled nothing I had associated in day dreams with the profession I was about to embrace … I thought of a publicist as a man somewhat combative and self-willed perhaps, but abundantly informed, and with settled convictions, for which he was willing to face all odds … But the society into which I was now introduced swarmed with the gipsies of literature, men who lived careless, driftless lives, without thought of to-morrow. The staff of the journals which supported O’Connell had slight sympathy with his policy, and few settled opinions or purpose of any sort … To the reporters, for the most part, public life was a stage play, where a man gesticulated and perorated according as his role was cast by his stage manager … The dream I had had of journalism as a mission had a rude awakening.¹⁴

As if to prove O’Connell’s poor view of reporters and their abilites, in his memoir Duffy recounted the activities of Christy Hughes, then the doyen of Dublin reporters. Having been dispatched to cover one of O’Connell’s annual after-dinner speeches to a