Dublin Journalism

"You needed to be a Sinn Féin/IRA sympathiser to get on in Dublin journalism in the late eighties." This bare-faced, black-is-white untruth was spoken to Meejit recently by a person too young to know better, with a mind overstuffed by Myers/Harris paranoia.

As it happens, Meejit's first experience of Dublin journalism came in the late eighties, trying (and failing) to produce a funky magazine with a few remnants of the now-suddenly-notorious grouplet, Revolutionary Struggle (RS). By then, that name was long gone, and its people were moving more or less quickly toward respectability; Frank Connolly was not among the group I knew, and only became a vague, nodding acquaintance years later.

Meejit's involvement was more personal accident than political statement, but everyone knew that visible association with obvious left-republican politics not only opened a Garda file, but was a potential bar to mainstream media employment. At RTÉ, the censorious Section 31 was regarded less as an imposition than as an article of faith, and the mentality was implanted in other outlets. In the Irish Times offices from 1990 Meejit heard editors warned from above against freelance journalists and stories that might glow too green. Also from 1990, the new Sunday Business Post was quickly notable for the evident absence of a blacklist.

Of course quiet progress was possible. Indeed "Dublin journalism" (including the Sunday Independent) is scattered with talented people whose full CVs include dim-and-distant membership of variously initialled revolutionary-Marxist groups, including Provo-supporting ones. It shouldn't matter in the least, of course, but they can't be best pleased that their publications are flinging McCarthyite (McDowellite?) stones at Frank Connolly when there is so much more glass around.

The funny thing is that former associates and supporters of the Official IRA – whose record of crime and violence makes RS look like the playschool revolutionaries they arguably were – seem prepared to launch the Inquisition.

The history of the Officials/Workers Party sheds a rather different light on the recent controversy, and the civil war it has unleashed in Irish media circles. Kevin Myers' already-notorious column of 15 December – "I do not regard Frank Connolly as a fellow-journalist", wrote Myers, because of Connolly's alleged politics – was most interesting because it attributed to the Provos a 1980s conspiracy to insert "dupes and moles" to subvert "Irish institutions".

One would hate to adopt his hysterical language, but Myers knows full well it was WP members and supporters who in that period exerted concerted influence in media and unions, in particular. Indeed, it was amusing in the early 1990s to watch them simultaneously stand down from the struggle when the WP split and Eoghan Harris changed tack.

Thankfully, democracy still permits this sort of "subversion" – call it the healthy, dialectical interplay of ideas. And even if you believe the full-blown Myers/McDowell thesis (pretty cuckoo, to Meejit's mind, same as most conspiracy theories), it sure beats bombs and bullets.

All the same, while Meejit has occasionally spluttered at Michael McDowell's nerve in recent days, the Minister's behaviour fails to unleash the full force of this column's moral outrage. So the State is playing dirty against a perceived enemy? So what else is new? You would think from some of the complaints about lack of "due process" that our judicial system actually routinely dispenses justice.

The most heartening aspect of the affair is that anyone could even pretend to regard Frank Connolly and the CPI as a threat to the State, which must be far more fragile than it looks. After all, the "lavish funds" that the CPI enjoys wouldn't cover the Independent titles' entertainment expenses.

Perhaps, in fairness, its high-falutin' name and high-minded board have led some people to think the CPI needs to be a quasi-judicial paragon of virtue. Rubbish. It's a few researcher/reporters with decent time to produce good documents, subject to the same laws as the rest of the media, that either stand up on the evidence presented or they don't. It's simply journalism without the market forces. Long may it last.