The Irish Times was wrong

By Conor Brady FORMER EDITOR OF THE IRISH TIMES 1986-2002

To be an opinion columnist in The Irish Times is to join a small and somewhat special cohort of journalists. It carries particular privileges – and also special responsibilities.

I recruited many of them. But the genus was introduced into The Irish Times by my predecessor, Douglas Gageby, when he initiated the Backbencher column, written by John Healy, in the early 1960s. Backbencher had earlier run in the now-defunct Sunday Review.

Over the years, I added writers that included Mary Holland, Nuala O Faolain, John Waters, Fintan O'Toole, Vincent Browne, Breda O'Brien – and others. Well-written opinion material that frequently dissented from the official editorial line was something of a novelty in Irish journalism.

It wasn't simply a matter of ruling off part of a page and giving the writer free rein. The Irish Times Trust requires that "comment and opinion shall be informed and responsible and shall be identifiable from fact." (My italics.) Thus, the material presented by the columnist-of-the-day would always be scrutinised with particular care by the editor or his deputy.

If some problem were found with the copy – and if it could not be put right after review and perhaps consultation with the writer – it was standard practice to have a few spare columns on hand.

But the relationship between a newspaper like The Irish Times and its opinion columnists has the potential – as we have seen this week – to spread grief on all sides.

"Asking a string of opinion columnists to respect their newspaper's policies is like trying to promote vegetarianism on Cannibal Island," a wise American newspaper editor once told me.

Kevin Myers should not have used the language he did to describe innocent children and unmarried parents. The Irish Times should not have allowed it through its editing process.

But things go wrong in newspapers.

A newspaper and an editor are entitled to dissociate themselves – to keep a distance from the views expressed by an opinion columnist. If the columnist is an outside contributor like Martin Mansergh or Garret FitzGerald, that distance can be very considerable. But they can claim less distance when the columnist is a fulltime, salaried member of staff, like Kevin Myers.

Perhaps more so than any other opinion writer, Kevin Myers is The Irish Times's in-house polemicist. He has played that role for 20 years and for the most part he has done it with intelligence and flair.

It is important to understand too that he has made the Irishman's Diary what it is – a strong, relevant commentary on public life and public issues.

It is an extremely demanding job – one of the toughest in the newspaper. Very few people have the stamina, intellectual resources and emotional equilibrium that are necessary to turn out four or five columns a week, at the standard required – demanded – by a reasonably discerning readership.

So what went wrong this week?

I have no direct knowledge of how the editing process may have operated in this instance. But I may be able to offer some insight into how Irish Times columnists do their jobs and how they relate to the rest of the newspaper.

They can be quite different from their colleagues in the newsroom or on the sub-editors' desk or in the various departments that generate business news, sports news, features, supplements and so on. Many are not fulltime employees but contracted contributors. They are not engaged in the cut and thrust of daily news coverage. Some of them visit the office only rarely. For many, their interface with other journalists on the newspaper is very limited.

This can be their strength and their particular value. They operate at a remove from the newspaper's mainstream culture. So they can much more readily challenge its orthodoxies.

But this detachedness can also be the opinion columnists' Achilles's heel. Because they tend not to engage in discussions with colleagues at editorial conferences and elsewhere, they may not be sufficiently challenged in their convictions. Because they have less one-to-one time with supervising editors, they sometimes fail to absorb, as fully as they might, the positive disciplines of working in a newspaper that values accuracy, fairness and balance.

Editors have to walk a thin line with columnists. If they interfere in their copy they are accused of stifling independent thought. If they don't, they may leave themselves open to charges of laxity. One way or another, the same columnists may then be among the first to shout "foul".

John Waters, responding with some courage to the issues presented by the Kevin Myers diary, criticised the present editor – and me – for creating a "college of cardinals." These editorial supervisors, he said, represent a barrier between the editor and the journalists.

Indeed they do. And rightly so. Newspapers are not democracies. They are a nightly exercise in the art of the possible. Sometimes what is "possible" falls short of what is "desirable." The "college of cardinals" is there to save people like John from their own lapses, to check the accuracy of their copy and, where necessary, to challenge, to suggest, to improve, to clarify.

From the perspective of those working in d'Olier Street, if there is a silver lining to this cloud, it is the affirmation of the extremely high standards that are expected by the most important people in the extended Irish Times family – the readers.