Undermining the trust

A collection of essays about the late Douglas Gageby reveals how the loan to secure the independence of the Irish Times may have been used to undermine that independence. By Vincent Browne

On Wednesday 23 March 1977 Andrew Whitaker, a former business editor of the Irish Times, visited the then managing director of the Bank of Ireland at the bank's headquarters in Lower Baggot Street, Dublin. At the time Whitaker was not even an employee of the newspaper. He was working for a management consultant, Peter O'Hara, who in turn had been advising the commercial head of the Irish Times, Major Tom McDowell.

Whitaker made an extraordinary proposal to the head of the bank which had lent the Irish Times £2m to finance the purchase of the shares in the company by a trust that had been established to secure the independence of the newspaper. The proposal was all the more impertinent, given that Whitaker had no role whatever at the time in the Irish Times.

The proposal was to get the bank to remove the then editor of the Irish Times, Fergus Pyle, and to reduce the position of Tom McDowell from executive chairman to that of non-executive chairman. In other words, Whitaker was asking the Bank of Ireland to exert its leverage over the newspaper, via its loan, to undermine the very independence the loan was designed to secure: the independence of the newspaper.

The Irish Times was in serious financial trouble then. The board of the company had projected a profit in 1976 of £110,000; the outcome was a loss of £477,000. The board had no anticipation that the outcome would be anything that bad because of the chaotic accounting system then operated internally. The paper was also losing circulation – down from 75,000 to 60,000.

Morrison revealed to Whitaker at that meeting that Douglas Gageby had suggested to him (Morrison) in the early 1960s that the two of them (Gageby and Morrison) would buy out the Irish Times. But nothing had come of that.

Whitaker got even bolder as the conversation went on. He suggested to Morrison that the bank, as the major creditor, could have a receiver installed to the Irish Times. This would get over the difficulties to do with the trust and also circumvent the contract that Tom McDowell had as executive chairman, a contract which gave him enormous powers.

Whitaker enquired why the bank had funded the Irish Times Trust in the first place. Morrison confirmed this was indeed a good question, for the Irish Times was already in debt when the trust was formed. Morrison said first that McDowell, who was responsible for establishing the trust, was a good advocate. But he added interestingly: The directors of the bank – ie the court of governors, as the Bank of Ireland directors are grandly called – in 1973 feared the conjunction of high inflation rates and the activities of the IRA. They wanted the Irish Times to be there as “at least one voice of sanity”.

Whitaker left and wrote up notes immediately afterwards in a pub of his conversation with Morrison.

This is certainly the most interesting insight into the story of the Irish Times from 1960 to 1986, as told by essayists in these reminiscences of Douglas Gageby.

The Irish Times was seen by the bank as a voice of sanity in difficult times. It would be relied upon to speak the sanity as perceived by the then largest private financial institution in the state.

The essays tell of the greatness of Douglas Gageby as editor – although two contributions demur from that assessment. They also reveal a lot about the Irish Times and, in a few instances, about the authors of the essays. The collection is edited by Andrew Whitaker, who, as business editor of the newspaper, was not noted for the elegance of his writing but, in fact, his are perhaps the most elegantly written and most interesting contributions in the collection.

Whitaker and Wesley Boyd, once of the Irish Times and later head of news at RTÉ (among others) tell of Gageby's background. Boyd says the Royal Academy, which Gageby attended as a school boy, was “a school for the middle and upper classes and was also favoured by the Jewish community”. He says: “Its pupils were sheltered from the sectarian savagery that afflicted the lower orders and enjoyed a liberal and progressive regime.”

The Royal Academy and its headmaster at the time, Alan Foster, had a profound influence on Gageby. It was from Foster he got his romantic (naïve?) republicanism. From there to Trinity, where he did brilliantly before leaving to join the Irish Army's intelligence corps, where he read letters sent to and from German prisoners. He left the army to join the Irish Press and became involved in the launch of the Sunday Press, a project initiated by Sean Lemass when he (Lemass) assumed the position of chief executive while Fianna Fáil was out of power from 1948 to 1951. He joined the Irish News Agency, started by Sean MacBride with the help of Conor Cruise O'Brien, in 1950 but then returned to the Irish Press stable to become the first editor of the Evening Press. From there he was headhunted by the Irish Times, which he had previously rebuffed.

He joined the Irish Times in 1959, not as editor but as joint managing director. He was probably uniquely unsuited to the position, especially at a time when the company required strong commercial management because it was losing money and several of its titles were in deep trouble. In the event, five of these – Radio Weekly, the Evening Mail, the Sunday Review, the Times Pictorial and the Times Weekly – were ditched. Only the Irish Times itself and the Irish Field survived, the latter being sold in recent years.

Gageby took part during that period in the curious sacking of the then editor of the Irish Times, Alec Newman, about which Donal O'Donovan, a former deputy editor, writes interestingly. Newman was a chaotic editor, often delaying the country editions of the paper, holding up the trains that brought newspapers down the country and, thereby, incurring significant fines. However, an inference in Donal O'Donovan's essay is that Newman may have been fired for another reason. Newman had campaigned on the sectarian boycott of Protestant businesses at Fethard-on-Sea, Co Wexford in 1957. A Protestant woman, Shelia Cloney, had refused to have her children reared as Catholics, in defiance of the Catholic Ne Temere decree. She left Wexford and her husband, bringing her children with her, causing the local priest, Fr Stafford, to instigate the boycott. Newman had also been critical of the then Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid.

But Newman was fired in 1961 and the Fethard-on-Sea episode occurred in 1957, so it is unlikely that that was a major factor.

However, two senior journalists, including Bruce Williamson, resigned in protest – Williamson later returned to work closely with Gageby when the latter became editor. Newman had told his colleagues, “The bastards have got me,” referring to the directors, who included Gageby. Surprisingly it was not Douglas Gageby who succeeded Newman, it was Alan Montgomery.

Montgomery was gregarious and popular and, as had Newman, he sought to change the ethos of the paper from its former unionist/colonial orientation.

But Montgomery lasted only a year. The story of his going is telling. He was invited by Guinness to join an interview board for the appointment of a public-relations officer for the brewery. In the course of that assignment, Montgomery noted how much better paid the Guinness public-relations officer would be and how less stressed he was likely to be as compared with being editor of the Irish Times. He promptly applied for the position, got it and resigned as editor.

Gageby was asked to replace him. Apparently, he hated the commercial side of the business and was delighted to be back working with journalists and involved in editorial. Nicholas Leonard, business editor at the time and later associate of Tony O'Reilly, writes: “The contrast in style between the austere, intensely focused and self-disciplined Gageby and the gregarious, companionable charm and warmth of Montgomery could not have been greater. I can still recall the sense of shock we all experienced at the afternoon editor's conference when Alan produced a bottle of whiskey and told us that Douglas was replacing him.”

Nicholas Leonard also recalls that around the time Gageby became editor, the Irish Times was in serious trouble. It was losing £30,000 a year (a lot then) and its circulation was around 30,000. In fact the circulation was probably closer to 20,000 and it was Gageby's triumph to turn this around in a decade, increase sales to 75,000 and leave the company in 1973 in a healthy profitable position.

He did this by transforming radically the ethos of the paper and recruiting brilliant journalists and writers. In transforming the ethos of the paper, he captured the ethos of a changed Ireland that was emerging in the 1960s; not only did he capture that change, he made the Irish Times an agent of that change.

One of his more perceptive initiatives was to send John Horgan (now a professor at DCU) to the Second Vatican Council in Rome. That council changed Catholicism globally but, arguably, it was Horgan's reporting of that council in the Irish Times, allied to the coverage of the council by two remarkable journalists with RTÉ, Sean MacReamoinn and Kevin O'Kelly, that changed Irish Catholicism and, thereby, Ireland.

In a stroke, almost, the old authoritarianism and certainties were gone. Intellectually the country was opened up. The authority of the bishops wilted. There was questioning for the first time in centuries and it spread to other spheres.

It could be argued that, politically, Gageby was all over the place. Certainly, the Irish Times was all over the place in the 1960s but that incoherence too probably enlivened the paper and its appeal. Gageby saw himself as an Irish republican, enthused by the changes in the South but even more so by the changes in the North, following the election of Captain Terence O'Neill as prime minister of the old Stormont regime. But Gageby was beguiled by the cosmetics of that change in the North, did not understand the deep-seated anger in the nationalist community arising from decades of oppression, the inadequacy of the O'Neill reforms and signs of an incipient rebellion.

He sent Fergus Pyle, who was later to succeed him as editor, to Belfast as the first Northern editor but the brief was to report at length on the proceedings of the old Stormont Parliament, not to gauge the mood of the two rival communities and the signs of unrest. The Irish Times might have helped to head-off the convulsion that was to follow had it uncovered the deep-seated sectarianism that underpinned that old Stormont state. But in failing to help head-off that convulsion Douglas Gageby was in the company of the editors of all the newspaper and broadcasting establishments.

As far as the South was concerned, Gageby was probably part of the consensus that the abandonment of the protectionist economic strategy, inspired by Ken Whitaker and Sean Lemass, was welcome. He was not troubled, it seems by the social fallouts. But he did give prominence to two journalists who in very different ways were troubled.

One of these was Michael McInterney, who gets only a single passing mention in these essays, but who was influential. McInerney was from Limerick. He emigrated from there in the 1930s and worked as a clerk on the railways in London. He joined the Communist Party, wrote for the Daily Worker, became a clerk for the Great Northern Railway in Belfast, during which time he edited the Irish communist newspaper, Unity. In 1946 he became a reporter with the Irish Times and in 1951 its political correspondent. He remained political correspondent until the end of Douglas Gageby's first period as editor.

It would have been fascinating had there been an insight in this collection of essays into the relationship between Gageby and McInerney. Regrettably there is nothing. McInerney pushed an agenda not just in his commentaries but in his news stories that was avowedly left wing – by then very much “soft” left. There was little disguise and it is strange it did not seem to trouble Gageby, not just became of its politics but because of its questionable journalism. McInerney was, I think, a card-carrying member of the Irish Labour Party at that time and that seemed to cause no difficulty either. McInerney was troubled by the social injustices and inequities that then prevailed.

But along with Michael McInerney there was John Healy, a colossus in the Irish Times and in journalism at the time. Healy was as uncouth as Gageby was suave. Gageby was metropolitan, Healy rural, peasant rural. But they formed a close bond and became best friends.

Healy was as avowedly Fianna Fáil as McInerney was Labour. Healy formed an association with Donough O'Malley, the rambunctious Fianna Fáil minister for health and then education. Through O'Malley, Healy got to know Charles Haughey with whom he formed a lifelong friendship and loyalty. On the granite flight of steps inside the front door at Abbeville, Kinsealy, Haughey had a bust of Healy.

Healy bought into the nascent Celtic Tiger and was unashamed, as was McInerney, in his avowal of his preferences. Gageby sided with Healy but, apparently, never interfered with McInerney, who may have been the more influential. Healy's one reserve about the direction Ireland was taking was his perceived abandonment of rural Ireland, about which he wrote powerfully in the Irish Times and in two books.

But there was a lot else going on in the Irish Times of Gageby's first coming. He brought women's journalism into the paper and it quickly became feminist, led by the likes of Mary Maher. That too had a significant influence.

But above all the Irish Times had become relevant: part of Irish society and helping to shape Irish society in a way the Irish Times had never done before.

Then in 1973 a decision was taken by the owners of the Irish Times – of which Gageby was one having acquired shares when he joined in 1959 – to sell the shares to a trust to safeguard the independence of the newspaper. It also had the benefit of hugely enriching the shareholders. The Bank of Ireland, as recalled above, funded the purchase to the tune of around £2m, a huge sum at the time. The decision was taken around the time that Independent Newspapers was sold by the Murphy family to Tony O'Reilly and when there had been some major newspaper acquisitions in the UK. There was a genuine apprehension at the time that the Irish Times would be bought over by one of these corporations and would lose the identify it recently had acquired.

The shares were sold, the shareholders enriched, but not just that – these shareholders in the main became the trustees. It seemed to many they had had their cake and had eaten it as well. But there was nothing underhand about it, let alone fraudulent.

In his essay Kevin Myers tells of how Gageby took an instant dislike to him because, Myers surmises, of his Englishness. Gageby certainly had a strong antipathy to the manners and accents of the English upper class. The studied demeanour, mannerisms and arrogance of Myers may have irked him particularly. Gageby was not an admirer either of the journalism of Kevin Myers.

By curious coincidence, nor was Myers an admirer of Gageby. Whereas everyone else who has written for this collection, bar one other, thought Gageby was the outstanding editor of the 20th century in Ireland and he more than anyone else had secured the future of the Irish Times, Myers can see no merit in the man at all. Not just that but much worse.

Myers writes: “But he was still a crook, as the creation of the Irish Times Trust suggested. Did Gageby feel guilty that he encumbered the company with debts that took 20 years to pay off, in order to buy his shares, while he remained in control of the newspaper through the trust?”

The characterisation of Douglas Gageby as a “crook” is a despicable libel, motivated, it would seem, by an impulse to seek retribution for the perceived snub Myers suffered by Gageby's failure to recognise and acknowledge Myers' enormous talents. Or perhaps a little attention-seeking? Or both?

Fergus Pyle succeeded Gageby as editor in 1973. Pyle was unsuited to the position for reasons of temperament and capacity. He was particularly unsuited to the turbulence that engulfed the newspaper shortly after he became editor. The economic depression of the mid-1970s saw advertising revenues fall back dramatically. But also the newspaper started to lose sales.

Ironically it was during the editorship of Fergus Pyle that the newspaper began to display a sharper edge. He started to publish the results of investigations by Peter Murtagh and Joe Joyce into the conduct of gardaí during this time, notably the conduct of the murder squad, known colloquially at the time as the Heavy Gang. It seems the “voice of sanity” that impelled the Bank of Ireland to fund the Irish Times Trust in 1973 was perceived as no longer that, now a threat to the established order of things.

But there is no doubt Pyle was not a success as editor and Gageby was persuaded to return in 1977 and once again rescue the newspaper.

There is little argument among the contributors that Gageby was again crucial to the survival and success of the Irish Times. But one of the contributors, who acknowledges how crucial Gageby was to that success, James Downey, is one of his sternest critics.

Downey was expected to succeed Gageby as editor in 1987 and was deeply disappointed to be passed over in favour of Conor Brady. That disappointment may have affected his judgment of Gageby, nevertheless his insights are interesting.

He writes: “[The Irish Times] needed his ruthlessness, which left a good many victims welling in the wake of his chariot wheels [regrettably, he does not cite who]. And it needed his prejudices and contradictions, his descents into sentimentality, even his bizarre tastes in literature.

“As a practitioner of second guessing, sometimes on the pettiest of matters, he had few equals. It would be an understatement to say that he was sparing in his praise. He was ungrateful, liverish, erratic, often unjust and dictatorial, sometimes deceitful.

“In the end he stayed too long. Men of his kind do.”

There is an unintentionally amusing contribution by Bruce Arnold, the art critic and writer on politics for the Irish Independent. He did not have a high opinion of Gageby either. He says of him, he was “a competent but uninspiring editor” – an assessment thoroughly refuted by many of the other essayists. Arnold had poor relations with Gageby almost from the start. Gageby, he says, disliked his Englishness and arrogance. Writing of himself Arnold says: “I was self-assured, confident in my views and not without experience of life.” He writes: “[Gageby] deliberately ignored my potential at a time when the Irish Times had a few good writers.”

Arnold goes on to allege that Gageby took the Irish Times in a wrong direction by altering the pro-British, pro-unionist stance of the paper, without acknowledging that, when the paper was pro-British and pro-unionist, it was moving towards oblivion.

Gageby hired and kept some of the best journalists of the last 40 years: Conor Brady, Conor O'Clery, Mary Maher, Nell McCafferty, Eileen O'Brien, Geraldine Kennedy, Peter Murtagh, Joe Joyce, Frank McDonald, Olivia O'Leary, Michael Viney, John Horgan, Fionnuala O'Connor, Paul Tansey, Fintan O'Toole and many others. Almost all of these speak of the man in something approaching awe, acknowledging his contradictions and his irascibility at times.

This collection of essays is almost a fitting tribute to him. π
 
Bright, Brilliant Days: Douglas Gageby and the Irish Times, edited by Andrew Whittaker, is published by A& A Farmar, €20