Why the Irish Times decided its star columnist was not fit to print
On 20 December bank robbers stole £26.5 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast. They kidnapped two employees in the process. Most people who know anything about Northern Ireland assumed that the IRA was responsible. That is certainly what security sources quickly told journalists. However, the IRA denied any involvement — or was taken to do so. ‘We are dismissing any suggestion or allegation that we were involved,’ said a spokesman on 23 December. No one seemed to notice that this did not quite amount to an outright denial.
On 24 December the Irish Times carried news of the IRA’s dismissal on its front page. Missing from that day’s issue was any contribution from Kevin Myers, its star columnist, who writes for the paper four times a week. Mr Myers’s column had been unceremoniously spiked. The reason given was that it was libellous, but no one doubts that it was pulled because Mr Myers, a notorious critic of the IRA, had suggested that the organisation was behind the robbery. This was evidently an accusation that the Irish Times did not want its readers to hear. However, in due course they did so. On 7 January Hugh Orde, the chief constable of Northern Ireland, asserted that the IRA were the perpetrators.
Mr Myers has every right to be very angry. He writes a column suggesting that the IRA was responsible for robbery and kidnapping, but this column is not allowed to appear. When the IRA is fingered by Mr Orde two weeks later, the Irish Times itself publishes a leader admitting that it has been conned. However, it does not publicly apologise to its star columnist for killing his piece. Indeed, the paper refuses to discuss the matter at all, as does Mr Myers. We do have a rough idea what the spiked column would have said because Mr Myers published a piece on 26 December in the Sunday Telegraph, a paper for which he writes. ‘Last week the IRA pulled off the biggest cash robbery in UK history,’ he wrote. ‘It’s a joke. A ghastly demeaning joke. To be sure, this thing called the peace process has brought us peace, but there were many other ways of achieving that. The price has been that the British and Irish governments have humiliatingly assented to a series of lies, and consented to the existence of two sets of rules — one for Sinn Fein-IRA, and an entirely different set for everyone else.’ A single act of censorship by a newspaper against its columnist may not seem a very heinous crime, even when what that columnist wrote turns out to be true. But the Irish Times is in a way representative of most of the Irish and British media. The paper will not — or, at any rate, did not — publish a word that might threaten the notion that the peace process is a rip-roaring success. It does not matter that Sinn Fein-IRA was guilty of spying on its opponents at Stormont at a time when Sinn Fein was part of the devolved administration. Or that the IRA refuses to submit to public decommissioning of its weapons. (So humiliating for the poor dears.) Or that last month three men linked to the IRA were jailed in their absence in Colombia for training terrorists. When one of its own columnists suggests that the IRA was responsible for a violent bank robbery, this is too much for the paper to bear. Yet it was — and will doubtless do many more bad things.
The desire for the peace process to work is wholly understandable, but journalists are not doing their job if they turn a blind eye to what is happening in Northern Ireland. Hardly anyone cares to point out that the much lauded peace process has eviscerated the moderate political parties in Northern Ireland — the SDLP and David Trimble’s Unionists. Or that Republican and Loyalist thugs control large areas of Belfast, where they support themselves through criminal activities, and practise terror against local residents. Of course, there are one or two journalists who write honestly about what is really going on, though since their own editors may not always be aware of who these free spirits are, and might disapprove if they did know, I don’t propose to name them.
Perhaps the most distressing reaction is silence. Only the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror thought fit to run a leader on Northern Ireland after Mr Orde had outed the IRA. A major political party which aspires to be part of the government of Northern Ireland is associated with a bank robbery, and not a single leader writer on any of our supposedly serious newspapers was stirred into action. The omission was most surprising in the Daily Telegraph, which originally opposed the Good Friday Agreement, though on Wednesday it did carry a piece by its Northern Ireland correspondent, Thomas Harding, arguing that the peace process has failed.
Newspapers are either so determined that the peace process will succeed that they suppress or ignore bad news; or they do not bother to notice what is going on. We can be pretty certain that the IRA’s involvement in this bank robbery will be quickly forgiven and forgotten by the British and Irish governments, and that compliant newspapers will continue to fulfil their traditional function of supporting the peace process whatever the IRA gets up to.
My suggestion two weeks ago that the Financial Times is selling only some 80,000 copies a day in the United Kingdom has drawn forth a cry of complaint from its chief executive in a letter to the editor of this magazine. Olivier Fleurot writes that my figure of 80,000 is ‘wildly inaccurate’. He says that the ‘current six-monthly average circulation in the UK is 134,450. Mr Glover’s claim that the FT has a circulation of 80,000 in the UK is completely and entirely wrong and needs to be corrected. I look forward to seeing a correction in your next issue.’ I am very happy to set the record straight. But in the interests of fairness let me examine Mr Fleurot’s figure a little. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, between June and November 2004 the Financial Times had an average daily sale of 136,113, which is very close to the figure Mr Fleurot gives. But of these only 100,913 were sold at full rate. In other words, more than 35,000 copies a day were sold at a reduced rate. So one could argue, using the criteria that my esteemed colleague Professor Roy CampbellGreenslade employs in the Guardian, that the true UK daily sale of the Financial Times is 100,913. I concede that this is more than the 80,000 I mentioned, and I apologise unreservedly to Mr Fleurot. Whether it amounts to a wild inaccuracy, I will leave readers to decide for themselves.
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