The Wide-boy

A Profile of Tim Pat Coogan by Risteard O Muirithille

When Frank Hall edited Newsbeat, a television magazine programme of the 1960s, he employed Tim Pat Coogan, then deputy editor of the Evening Press, as occasional interviewer on a nixer basis. One day, a story broke that required the presence in studio of a Soviet spokesman. There was no Russian embassy in Dublin in those days, but finally the Russian trade attache to a provincial English town was tracked down. Coogan was unleashed to do the interview.  The future editor of The Irish Press and the earnest Soviet spokesman were brought face to face. The subject for discussion, as far as our informants can remember, was the Russian involvement in the building of the Aswan Dam in Egypt.  Coogan asked the pre-planned clipboard questions. The earnest Russian clambered aboard the English language, holding on for dear life. He expatiated upon the contribution the Soviet Union was making to the cause of international relations, and specifically to the benefits the Aswan Dam would confer upon Egypt, a former British protectorate, then happily liberated and modernising itself under Comrade Nasser, with Soviet assistance.  "It must be very dusty out there", said Coogan suddenly. Immediately, the breadth of the great Sahara stretched between the earnest Soviet spokesman and the future editor of The Irish Press, across which no further communication was remotely possible. That story is central to the understanding of Tim Pat Coogan. To know how he ticks, you must struggle with all the possible reasons for that interjection, "It must be very dusty out there". Let us consider some of those reasons. There is a wide-boy thing in Coogan.  A wide-boy is the sort of character encountered in cockney films made in Ealing Studios in the 1940s. A wide-boy is someone who has graduated from the rank of corner-boy and may be progressing toward the condition of spiv. Old Burgh Quay hands remember a time when Coogan dressed in navy-blue, chalk-stripe suit and polka-dot tie. This wide-boy thing in him causes him to make cracks for the sake of making them, regardless of the effectiveness of them, or of the effect. A thought pops into his mind: "It must be very dusty out there". And before you can say, "Hold the front page", the crack is out, destroying any further possibility of consequential conversation, and perhaps destroying anyone standing in the line of fire.  Coogan bores easily. His attention span is short. Like the unruly boy in the scout troop, he has a need to disrupt the flow of orderly business and of other people's thoughts. "It must be very dusty out there", says the troop bully. The sensitive and vulnerable scoutmaster is mystified and discommoded. The troop guffaws and breaks up in disorder, in deference to the moral bully who sets the tone of the outing.  Coogan has the jackdaw mind of the successful daily journalist. He picks up bits and pieces of other men's thoughts, stows them away, remembers them almost accurately, trots them out when they are needed, and makes them sound to the uninitiated as though he had just thought of them. For the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, he produced a book called Ireland Since the Rising. It was a compendium of accessible thought, re-worked, marketed, aimed at a society in the process of change, cunningly angled toward the safer limits of acceptable liberalism, while keeping an eye on the great Irish constituency in the former British colonies, especially the United States — where Coogan has travelled the profitable Roots circuit and sat comfortably down with many a welcoming chat-show host. "It must be very dusty out there", says the man with the jackdaw mind who remembers and regurgitates something he has heard, somewhere, which now becomes eminently, if tritely, usable.  At Dublin airport, a woman walks up to a burly man in the departures lounge. At airports, one is ever likely to spot the famous, the great, the stars, the known, the makers of ripples. "Excuse me, Mister Coogan", the woman says, "may I shake your hand". Tim Pat arcs his great shoulders, as if to crush her to death, but stays his distance and accepts the tribute. "Keep it up, Mister Coogan", the woman says, fading into the queue for America.  The Irish Press may not sell as many copies as it did in its heyday. Out of its 100,000 circulation it may sell no more than 20,000 in greater Dublin. But its editor is one of the best-known faces on television and one of the most recognisable voices on radio. When Today Tonight or Day by Day or Saturday View requires a heavyweight editorial voice, it reaches for Coogan. The jackdaw factor always does the trick. Tim Pat has that knack once identified by Frank Delaney as the ability to speak in two-minute spurts about anything at all, and to make a kind of weird sense. Content is not important: What is important is to keep going for two minutes. The listeners like that. They shake your hand at airports.  Blackrock College stands in its own spacious grounds, within the ozone range of Dublin Bay, on the road that leads out of Dublin to Killiney, where Coogan lives. Eamon de Valera taught in Blackrock, so did Dick Burke, so too did John Charles McQuaid, former archbishop of Dublin and primate of Ireland. Bluffing aside, the most important subject on the Blackrock curriculum is rugby. A man may not be brilliant at English or Irish or mathematics or grammar (that old humanistic study), but if he makes the senior rugby team, he is set up for life.  One day, according to Tim Pat Coogan, Major Vivian de Valera attended a debate in Blackrock College and heard Coogan speak over the course of a two-minute spurt. Vivian marked the youth down for future greatness. After he left Blackrock, Coogan became a copy boy in Burgh Quay.  A copy boy is the lowest form of life in a newspaper. He is a messenger, a gofor, a dogs body, but if he keeps his nose clean, he may, according to the ancient mythology of newspapering, make it to the editor's desk one day. This is the stuff of fairy-tales and of the fantasies of journalists in downtown pubs.  But once in a while, damn it, it happens. The gofor becomes the man who tells others where and when to go. So, one day, in the spring of 1968, Joe Walsh, the man then editing The Irish Press, was told that he was being moved out of Burgh Quay, across the river and into the business offices of Irish Press Ltd. in O'Connell St. Simultaneously, Tim Pat Coogan, the copy boy who had worked his way up through all the newspaper grades, was moved into the editorship of the morning paper.  No one knows for sure why de Valera chose Coogan for advancement. It can hardly have been the two-minute debating spurt in Blackrock College. There is a theory abroad to the effect that Coogan's father, a former commissioner of the police, leant easily on Eamon de Valera in the bad old republican days when the going was rough, and that Vivian had a debt of decency to pay. Whatever the reason, Burgh Quay found that spring day that there had been a putsch and that the Major had put in a new man.  Just before that, Coogan had been deputy editor of The Evening Press, under Conor O'Brien. (In those days, persons in the media and on the privileged fringes distinguished between three men with similar names in the following manner. There was Conor Cruise O'Brien, an international shuttle diplomat but not yet a politician. There was Conor News O'Brien, editor of The Evening Press. And there was Conor Booze O'Brien who ... No one seems able to recall what he did.)  In his Evening Press days, Coogan could be seen outside the Burgh Quay offices of the newspaper chain, at five o'clock, dressed in the familiar chalk-stripe and bow tie, the latest edition of the paper under his arm, and his hands deep in his trousers pockets, looking like a wrestling promoter waiting for night to fall and the action to begin.  Coogan came to the morning paper with a reputation for crustiness, eccentricity and toughness. Some time before leaving the evening paper, when as deputy editor he was standing in for Conor O'Brien, he found a story on his desk about an Irish girl, working for a semi-state company, who had been through an illegal abortion in England, and had wound up in court there. He printed the story, together with the girl's name and address. Such stories did not get into print in those days, or if they did, names and addresses were not published.  Tim Pat Coogan has never made any secret of his admiration for Douglas Gageby, editor of The Irish Times, under whom he worked when Gageby edited The Evening Press. It was not surprising, therefore, that he should wish to reproduce in The Irish Press some of the characteristics that Gageby had found and accentuated in The Irish Times, many of which Gageby had borrowed from The Manchester Guardian, as it was then called. When Gageby appointed specialist correspondents, Coogan did likewise. When Gageby began to run leaders over a two-column spread, Coogan followed suit. In an effort to match what Mary Maher was doing in the women's page of the Times, Coogan appointed the unreformed Mary Kenny as women's editor of his own paper. Kenny made waves. She made them fast and she made them deep. With her hair dyed blonde, she wore hot pants to work, and sometimes she wore mini-skirts right up to here. She smoked a pipe and engaged near-celibate journalists in conversations that made them blush. She tried all the kicks of the '60s. One day, in a restaurant, she announced in a loud voice, "What I would really like to do is screw a priest".  Those were heady days in The Irish Press, and Kenny was responsible for much of the head. For this was the end of the '60s in Ireland, and many people were toying with the possibility of letting it all hang out, but of course in a restrained Irish way. Mary Kenny let more hang out than most, certainly more than Coogan wished to see. When she went to his office one day and told him that she had been offered the features editorship of the London Evening Standard, he intimated in his own way that the sooner she left the better it would suit him.  The Kenny story is a paradigm of the experiences that many Press journalists have had. Coogan blows hot and cold. When he blows hot, he pushes the work of the journalist he has selected for greater exposure. But when he blows cold, as he always does, sooner or later, the favoured person is dead, man, dead. Some months ago, a woman journalist was given a column by him. One night, he gave her a story with the suggestion that she use it. But it was his story, not hers, she protested, and she would have to check it out. The story did not appear in her column. Soon afterwards, her column was dropped.  Unlike Douglas Gageby, his admired mentor, Coogan spends a lot of time away from the office. Some years ago, a sub-editor looked up from the piece of copy he was butchering and said, "There's a rumour going about that Tim Pat has resigned, but that can't be true, because I saw him three weeks ago". The length of the first leader and the quality of its language, any morning, are generally an indication of whether Coogan has been on board the night before or not. In the early days of his editorship the attitude of the first leader to the Provisional IRA was also an indication of whether he had been around the night before or not.  The men directly under Coogan, who get the paper on the street, are the deputy editor, Sean Garvey, and three assistant editors, Jack Jones, Michael Wolsley and John Spain. Garvey is a tenacious newshound who continues the Press tradition of being first with the story, and most accurate. For him, nothing matters but getting the story, getting it fast, getting it right, and carrying a leader on it as soon as possible.  Jones is a man on the brink of retirement. He is of old Dublin Protestant stock, a nephew of Barry FitzGerald and Arthur Shields. Those who grew up with him have always known him for a modest, civilised and ethical man - a type of journalist whose standards are going out of fashion.  Wolsley came to the Press five or six years ago as features editor. Like Garvey, he is from Northern Ireland. Like him, too, he has had much experience in British newspapers. Wolsley is an all-rounder with a special talent for layout.  It was also as a layout man that Spain was plucked from the sub-editors desk and made an assistant editor. It was he, incidentally, who wrote the strongest anti-amendment leader for the Press, one night when Coogan, who had been dithering over the issue, was away.  Those four men - Garvey, Jones, Wolsley and Spain - are the worker bees of the Press. Between them they have a broad band of newspapering skills that keep the publication afloat, in spite of the neglect of management in O'Connell St. When Coogan is not around, Garvey, Wolsley and Spain write the leaders. Jack Jones, after a life in newspapers, has long ago rid himself of the worldly vanity of leaderising. Instead, in some amusement, he gets on with the business of giving shape to the front page.  The motto of The Irish Press is "The Truth in the News". As often as not, it gets as close to the truth as most publications do. And when it does, it is those four men who are responsible for it.  It is said that Douglas Gageby has an unfulfilled ambition to edit The Irish Press. The liberal streak in Tim Pat Coogan has always strove to match the liberalism of The Irish Times. Coogan's vanity has always responded to the massage strokes of praise. When his paper takes a stand that seems a little to the left of green nationalism, and he is complimented on the cocktail circuit, he takes the plaudits like a prima donna, just as, one day in the public gallery of the House of Commons, he took praise from the floor for a leader he had not written. But the bugbear of the Press is inconsistency, in its leaders and its features articles, just as its abiding drawback has been the unwillingness of its commercial management to give it more pages.  It is not known in the editorial department whether it was commercial management that suggested to Coogan that he write a column, but it was not until management advertised the column that he got down to writing the first one, which he dictated to his secretary, as he does all his journalism, leaders included. This may be the reason why his style is so diffuse, his syntax so incoherent and his sentences frequently naked of any finite verb.  "The cat is out of the bag at last", Irish Press staffers say. "Now that Coogan's by-line is up there on the column, readers can detect the man behind all the meandering waffle that has been appearing in his leaders for years. "  In the first instalment of the column, Coogan indicated that all human life was to be there: "Northern Ireland, Church-State relationships, taxation, Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, sexual revolution, trade unions, the failure to feed ourselves from our own soil, the Amendment debate, cable television.... "  Having identified the world as his oyster he went on to write about the recession. "The first thing to remember is that the situation is not unique. Not unique to Europe, to the world . . ." There is a recession on Mars too, perhaps, and a sexual revolution on Venus.  Coogan's metaphors are robustly concrete, hardly ever apt, and sometimes impenetrably opaque. They stand like a prop forward between the reader and the act of understanding. In that first column, he wrote, "We have lost the tent-pole philosophy about marriage, authority, sexual behaviour . . ." A whip around his own newsroom following publication of that column failed to identify anyone who understood the tent-pole reference, and some of the suggestions offered were coruscatingly obscene. In his second column, Coogan's populist image showed a wide crack. The Government was about to "tackle" the fee-paying secondary schools, to force them into the free education scheme. The rumour was being taken seriously by "some of the most distinguished educationalists of our time". We are back in Blackrock College again, folks, alma mater of much of the rugby-playing bourgeoisie of cosy south County Dublin.  In his fourth column he proposed a scheme of coupons for pint-drinking tourists, such as those in use during de Valera's Emergency, and then shot down his own suggestion by acknowledging that "unfortunate incidents" might occur at closing time, when tourists with books of coupons lined up to buy drink at prices lower than those paid by natives.  Undeterred by the restraints of logic and syntax, Coogan shares his thoughts with the Irish populace in his paper, on radio and on television. RTE producers grab him whenever they want a two-minute spurter to form part of a panel to talk about this or that. The man known as Rupert the Bear to his subordinates in Burgh Quay is always game to come before the public and share with it his instant thoughts - glossy and furry and beguiling.  After his first column, a Dublin woman wrote to the Press saying that she had read it three times. If he can stick the pace, which some doubt, he may be on the way towards becoming the poor man's John Healy.