I was saddened but not surprised to hear of the recent cull at the Times and Sunday Times Ireland. Say what you like about Rupert Murdoch (and there’s much to say), the Sunday Times was the only serious English newspaper with an Irish edition that gave extensive coverage to Irish news, sport and culture. Pick up the Observer, for example, and there’s nary a word about us unless the DUP are acting up again.
I was very happy to have been offered an opportunity by associate editor John Burns to air my views on art, literature, and even my personal dramas (that root-canal treatment, those TB days) for nearly 12 years. This purge seems to be getting rid of some of its most-talented writers, leaving it much diminished. In addition to John Burns (an award-winning writer on culture), I rated Denis Walsh as one of the best sports journalists in the country and Justine McCarthy supplied an acerbic and articulate left-of-centre perspective on politics. Maybe a tad too left for Rupert’s taste. Mark Tighe, author of that brilliant and painstaking exposure of John Delaney’s machinations at the FAI, had already left. All it needs now is to let Liam Fay go and there will be no incentive to buy it ever again.
Irish art gets scant coverage in print and the Sunday Times Culture magazine was one of the few places where artists’ work was regularly reviewed. Let’s hope it continues to employ the services of the estimable Cristín Leach in this area – a stern judge who has ruffled a few feathers in her day. While journalism doesn’t pay handsomely, especially arts journalism, it is hugely rewarding in other ways. I cherish many delightful memories of my stint there. I travelled around the country interviewing such luminaries as Basil Blackshaw, Sean MacSweeny, and that great Cork maverick Maurice Desmond. My favourite encounter was with Gilbert & George in the Mac Belfast. Sporting their new Donegal Tweed suits (they had eschewed Harris Tweed because of Brexit), they were by turns hilarious and outrageous. Despite being gay, they strongly disapproved of gay marriage – maintaining that it was bourgeois and that gay men should be sexual adventurers (quoting John Rechy). While all my art writing was received with nothing but gratitude, my book reviewing frequently exposed me to tirades of Twitter abuse. One female writer of light-weight fiction unleashed an army of her trolls (male and female) on me for deviating, minutely, from rigorous wokeness. At least the late, and much lamented, Eileen Battersby had the grace, albeit via her agent, to write a letter to the paper challenging my views on the clearly autobiographical character in her novel. The Speakeasy section of the Sunday Times (long discontinued) allowed writers to indulge in personal stories so I was able to horrify my Cork-based siblings with revelations about child-hood episodes such as my incarceration for a year in a sanatorium in Foynes and an episode in the Dental Hospital in Cork that far outdid Laurence Olivier’s dental antics in the film Marathon Man.
What fun it all was.
