Crisis in the Times

The refusal of The Irish Times to apologise for the publication of the stigmatisation of children and parents and the disingenuous retraction by Kevin Myers prolongs trauma for the newspaper. By Vincent Browne

Geraldine Kennedy will have been relieved by the publication of a front page story in The Irish Times on Friday (11 February) morning, the exclusive report that the cash and properties contributed by the religious orders towards the indemnity deal on institutional abuse will be €50m short of what was promised.

Her own career as a journalist was distinguished by her ability to get stories, exclusives, first for the Sunday Press, then for the Sunday Tribune and later for The Irish Times. It was that capacity for identifying and obtaining major stories that recommended her for the editorship of The Irish Times. She has been impatient at the failure of the newsroom to generate such stories since she became editor over two years ago and she will judge her own record as editor very much by the number and importance of the stories the newspaper breaks while she is in charge.

She would not have claimed for herself any special aptitude for managing the kind of crisis that broke on The Irish Times by the Irishman's Diary column of Kevin Myers on Tuesday (8 February). The column followed on a lecture by the former head of Limerick University, Edward Walsh, claiming that the welfare allowances afforded unmarried mothers encouraged impoverished young teenage girls to become pregnant and the consequences of such pregnancies were criminality and social dysfunctionality.

While the factual bases of that argument are vigorously contested, Kevin Myers accepted them on face value and went beyond what Edward Walsh had contended, without any apparent independent verification. While that in itself would have been controversial it was his stigmitisation of children born out of wedlock as "bastards" that caused this crisis.

He wrote: "And how many girls – and we're largely talking about teenagers here – consciously embark upon a career of mothering bastards because it seems a good way of getting money and accommodation from the State? Ah. You didn't like the term bastard? No, I didn't think you would. In the welfare-land of Euphemesia, what is the correct term for the offspring of unmarried mothers?"

He went on refer to single mothers as "mothers of bastards", for which he used the acronym MoBs, and later he referred to single fathers as "Fathers of Bastards" (FoBs). In all he used the term "bastard" or one of the acronyms 16 times in the column. He concluded with a reference to "the schoolgirl swamp of what is 'hurtful' and 'offensive'". And a caricature of such complaint: "thith howwid talk makes one want co cwy". The final sentence was: "But of course in Dáil Éireann we'll get some weepy sanctimonious bilge over what is 'offensive', while the rest of us reach for the ear-plugs".

The first mistake was the decision to publish the column. Geraldine Kennedy has taken responsibility for that decision and the indications are that she personally approved of its publication in advance. Her political disposition would have made her favourable to the Edward Walsh argument, one advanced in the course of the 1997 general election by the Progressive Democrats – she had been a Progressive Democrat TD for Dun Laoghaire from 1989 to 1992. But her failure to anticipate the offence caused by the language used by Myers is surprising since she herself would never stigmatise people, especially children, in that fashion.

There was then the failure to make amends the next day. Curiously, there had been no significant public reaction during the day of publication, Tuesday, but it is surprising that The Irish Times newsroom – so often ridiculed as "politically correct" – did not react on the Tuesday and prompt an immediate retraction and apology on Wednesday morning. Had that occurred, the deluge of public outrage that broke on Wednesday would, have been averted.

There had been vigorous public denouncement on radio on Tuesday evening by Michael D Higgins. That was followed by wall-to-wall outraged radio coverage on the Wednesday, on Morning Ireland, on Eamon Dunphy's programme on Newstalk 106, on the Pat Kenny programme, on the News at One, on Liveline, on Five-Seven Life, on The Last Word and again later on Wednesday evening. Throughout the day Geraldine Kennedy and Kevin Myers refused to defend on radio the column and its publication.

Among those who had spoken openly and critically of the publication of the column (not just of the language of the column) were several Irish Times journalists and columnists, including John Waters, Fintan O Toole, Mary Raftery and Michael O'Regan.

Then on Thursday morning, there was an expression of abject contrition by Kevin Myers and what was perceived as a very grudging expression of regret for offence caused in the newspaper's editorial. Initially Kevin's Myer's extravagant apology was perceived as getting him off the hook, but the claim by him not to have intentionally caused offence seemed brittle on the analysis of what he had written two days previously.

He protested on Thursday (10 February): "I was trying to hurt nobody" and intended "to hurt no one". He insisted "I deliberately used the word 'bastard' because I genuinely feel that the word has no stigma attached to it".

But, as recorded above, two days previously he had written:

"Ah. You didn't like the term bastard", he was acknowledging the offence it would cause. And he serially offended throughout the remainder of the article in using the very term he acknowledge would cause offence a total of 16 times.

And then there was the further expression of contempt for those he knew he was offended and wanted to offend in the reference "the schoolgirl swamp of what is 'hurtful' and 'offensive'". Followed by the sneering caricature "thith howwid talk makes one want co cwy"". And the final sentence: "But of course in Dáil Éireann we'll get some weepy sanctimonious bilge over what is 'offensive', while the rest of us reach for the ear-plugs".

However the public reaction was to excuse Myers on the basis of the apology. There was no apology offered by Geraldine Kennedy in the editorial.

The shortest sentence of the 450 word editorial, seven words, was the only expression of regret for publication of the column that caused more outrage than anything written in a newspaper here in a generation. "The Irish Times regrets the offence caused". No apology for the publication of the column that stigmatized tens of thousands of children born to unmarried parents with the appellation "bastards" , no apology for the publication of the depiction of unmarried parents as "Mothers of Bastards" and "Fathers of Bastards".

The other 443 words offered confused justifications for the publication of the column on free speech grounds and an opening two sentences of astounding self-regard that will haunt Geraldine Kennedy for the duration of her editorship: "Irish society has changed hugely in recent decades and at a pace that has been breathtaking. Much of this change is for the good and has been led by The Irish Times".

The editorial stated Kevin Myers was wrong to have used the "bastard" word, there no acknowledgment he had done it 16 times, no acknowledgment The Irish Times was wrong to have published the article in the first place.

Geraldine Kennedy was editor of The Irish Times when the report by the retired Canadian Supreme Court judge, Mr Justice Cory, was published in December 2003. That report showed Kevin Myers to have depicted as "fact" what he later conceded was conjecture and hypothesis. It raised serious questions about his journalistic practices and standards and yet there seems to have been no examination within The Irish Times of the significance of that report (we reproduce the relevant extracts from that report in the pages that follow). Nor were any questions raised, it appears, about his serial disparagement of a range of vulnerable groups (in the pages that follow we publish extracts from his columns which illustrate this).

The episode has done damage to the status of The Irish Times and to Geraldine Kennedy's credentials as editor. She will have been undermined in the eyes of journalists on the paper, members of the board of The Irish Times, members of the Irish Times Trust and in the estimate of the newspaper's readers. But that damage will not be fatal, unless there are other serious errors of judgment or circulation declines.

However if her strengths as a journalist and an editor come to the fore, these lapses will be overlooked, indeed barely remembered in a few years.