The foreign Mail

One of the more striking aspects of the media's recent behaviour over "Bertiegate" has been the identity of the newspaper most vigorously inclined to go in for the highly dramatic kill on the poor old Taoiseach.

No, it hasn't been the Irish Times, despite that newspaper's apparent mini-renaissance and its astonishing and admirable late conversion to the principles of civil disobedience. (It's almost three years now since I had a commissioned opinion piece on a planned anti-war road-blockade near Shannon Airport rejected because, according to an editor's email, the Irish Times could not be "associated with... a call to break the law – a step too far!")

Surprisingly, it's a tabloid that has treated this Irish political soap-opera as though its readers were chomping at the bit for news and views – a paper whose title, tone and most of its advertising come from Britain. Even as other newspapers were letting Bertiegate slide into the realm of diminishing returns, the Irish Mail – "Daily" and "on Sunday" – was hammering Ahern in high-dudgeon editorials and splashing with page-one headlines about, for example, "The tape that could destroy the Taoiseach" and Bertie's alleged 24-hour deadline to "come clean".

It's been an intriguing piece of niche marketing. While the journalistic bastion of the Irish right, the Sunday Independent, has largely backed Bertie, the Mail has calculated that its typical cocktail of negativity and seething resentment, usually directed at celebrities from the entertainment world, could be turned on a popular Taoiseach. (Prior to the fateful Cyprus weekend, the Mail was also among the most nastily anti-Staunton of the papers, a stance that then rather lost its niche.)

A bit Irish

If the Irish Mail's attitude is a predictable transliteration of its English parent's successful approach – in Britain, cabinet ministers are regularly lined up beside Posh 'n' Becks for slaughter-by-Mail – it may also be a sign that the paper's executives feel it needs to leave a deeper editorial mark on the Irish media scene. Its circulation was always likely to fall from the heights of the first months, when readers tried it out amid heavy promotion; but despite the Brit-bashing from the Indo and the widespread schadenfreude at the abandonment of the Ireland on Sunday title, the Mail gives every impression of being "Irish" for the long haul.

Indeed, the recruitment of Fiona Looney as a columnist for both the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday gives the paper a line-up of genuinely well-known Irish writers that you'd be hard-pressed to match in any other publication. Looney's columns, beside those of Eamon Dunphy and Mary Carr, also indicate the Mail's understanding that it can't fill its pages with Irish Littlejohns: Irish liberals can be as effective at being Mailers as conservatives, so long as they're complaining about something.

Contemporary Ireland offers countless opportunities for the cultural complaints of left and right to converge, superficially at least.

Hold the Mayo

Deep down, the Mail must almost by definition be a reactionary paper – this is the title credited with starting the first world war, after all. Hypocrisy is built into its modus operandi: its love for family values wrapped round salacious serialisations of memoirs full of adulterous romps; its role as tribune of the ordinary tempered by its snobby denunciations of wealthy "chavs"; its tentative approval of successful women reserved for those (like Sarah Brightman in last Saturday's magazine) whose "yearning to be a mother was as powerful as her desire for stardom".

Early on in this month's latest outbreak of trouble over the Corrib gas project, the paper covered the local protests with surprising sympathy. But on Saturday 7 October the Mail copped itself on, with Paul Palmer's "special report", headed "What RTÉ don't tell you about Rossport". (It might have been subtitled "but what the Sunday Independent generally do".)

The story, similar to one in the next day's Sunday World, was a hatchet-job on protesters, with a large-print introduction: "The silent majority of locals SUPPORT Shell's gas refinery and believe that it will be SAFE. What's more, they've been victims of a TERRIFYING campaign of bullying and intimidation – much of it led by Sinn Féin THUGS." The story itself didn't remotely stand up a single one of these assertions, and just for fun let stand a quote saying Shell (as in Royal Dutch Shell) is a "British company" (explaining the Provos' obsession, you see).

Sad to say, such rubbish is a proven recipe for journalistic success.p