Review by David Gardner

Published: May 24 2009 19:46 | Last updated: May 24 2009 19:46

The News from Ireland
By Maurice Walsh
I.B. Tauris, £20

The Irish war of independence of 1919-21 was the first great victory against modern colonialism. In its timing, it was triumphantly on the right side of history, against empire and for liberty. It wove effortlessly into a universal narrative in a way that is not so easy to sense nearly a century later, when Irish republicanism has a nastier and narrower connotation.

This little gem of a book, scholarly, beautifully written and narrated with verve, reminds us of all that and a great deal more. It reveals in absorbing detail and persuasive argument how the way visiting correspondents wrote up the Irish revolution helped determine its outcome. Not until Vietnam and Algeria would the so-called fourth estate exert such influence on the result of an armed conflict, delivering to Irish patriots what was a moral and political rather than military victory.

A number of stars aligned favourably for the Irish revolutionaries. The suicide of multinational empires in the first world war, alongside efforts by the combatants to incite national uprisings against their rivals, gave nationalism a huge boost. America under Woodrow Wilson dented the legitimacy of the British Empire internationally and gave currency to the notion of self-determination. In the UK, the enlargement of the electorate helped drive the development of mass newspaper audiences and political debate. Irish nationalists, moreover, consciously connected to anti-colonialism internationally; two of them, Annie Besant and Alfred Webb, even became presidents of India’s Congress party.

But the originality of Maurice Walsh’s tale lies in its account of how British and American journalists helped turn the tide in the Fenians’ favour. Part of the reason lay in the way correspondents allowed themselves to be co-opted by government during the first world war. Billeted in handsome houses with cooks, servants, drivers and military chaperones for their occasional and sanitised trips to the front, they were pampered embeds, avant la lettre. The lyrical account by Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle of the first day of the Battle of the Somme “managed to omit mentioning that 20,000 British soldiers were killed”. Gibbs, says Walsh, “became a kept man of the high command”. But he was stung by a passage in Lloyd George’s war memoirs saying: “Gibbs lied merrily like the rest of them”.

The collective sense of shame among these celebrity correspondents, whose reputation was shredded once the full horror of the trenches came to light, led them to seek redemption. In Ireland, their affinity with the forces of the British crown dissolved. The arrival of the Americans brought a Wilsonian moral dimension, an echo of American revolutionary ideals and, as Chicago-by-way-of-Kilkenny journalist Francis Hackett had it, the crusading belief that the press and public opinion could “overcome the weaknesses of political institutions” such as the British Empire.

“The idea of journalists as interpreters of reality and not mere stenographers or hired scriveners had begun to take hold,” Walsh observes. The cause of Irish independence was to benefit. The obtuseness of the British helped, as did their recourse to brutal tactics that exposed the empire as predatory and vindictive and came to be seen by men such as Gibbs as terrorism.

The campaign of reprisals by the Black and Tans triggered a revolt of the press every bit as fatal to imperial interests as the rebellion of the Irish. The judgments of correspondents such as Hugh Martin of the Daily News became the currency of debate in parliament, the evidentiary benchmark.

The propagandists of Sinn Féin, which had won a landslide in the December 1918 elections and constituted itself as the Dail Eireann or Assembly of Ireland, were, furthermore, brilliant – “the most effective operation of its kind yet seen”, Walsh judges. It was in the hands of Desmond FitzGerald (father of Garret FitzGerald, Taoiseach from 1982-87), an urbane, well-connected Imagist poet with an English drawl, and Erskine Childers, an Anglo-Irish public schoolboy and spy novelist with impeccable contacts in London. Their mimeographed Irish Bulletin, pared down on hyperbole but written with great flair, became a primary source for correspondents. They hid in plain sight in Harcourt Street while Dublin Castle became, like Baghdad’s Green Zone, a beleaguered city within a city.

Basil Clarke, a former Daily Mail correspondent on the western front, was recruited by Dublin Castle and in August 1921 proposed reverting to a system of licensed embeds living with the Crown forces. It was too late. The British had lost control of the narrative and thereby lost Ireland.


The writer is the FT’s chief leader writer and author of Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance (I.B. Tauris)
.Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009