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22 April 2004 Edition

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Irish Times accused of censoring sectarian racist British intelligence document

Former Irish Times editor Douglas Gageby is pictured unveiling a plaque to the United Irishmen at Clifton Street cemetery in Belfast in 1995

Former Irish Times editor Douglas Gageby is pictured unveiling a plaque to the United Irishmen at Clifton Street cemetery in Belfast in 1995

It is assumed that owners of newspapers are closely associated with the Establishment, that they are part of it.

It is seldom that evidence appears to confirm this assumption.

But now we have clear-cut evidence in the form of the 2 October 1969 letter from the British Ambassador in Dublin to WKK White in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

First Things First

However, before we examine the British Ambassador's letter, let us take a look at another newspaper.

Evidence was heard in the Moriarty Tribunal on how in 1997 Independent Newspapers switched from supporting the then Fine Gael Labour coalition to Fianna Fáil and the PDs. The paper of William Martin Murphy, which called for the execution of James Connolly, which staunchly supported the Free State and the party that became Fine Gael, was turning toward its former enemy, Fianna Fáil.

Was it part of some major re-evaluation of policy? Was proprietor 'Sir' Anthony (formerly plain old 'Tony') O'Reilly about to don the "broad black brimmer of the IRA", at least in its Fianna Fáil narrow (or 'lite') version.

Tony's Money

No, nothing so portentous. It was all over Tony's money and the threat to it from local communities. The Labour/FG coalition was not prosecuting users of TV deflector systems in rural areas and this affected the profits of Princess Holdings, owners of the Minister Ray Burke-sanctioned MMDS TV system that was foisted on unwilling rural populations. Princess Holdings is a subsidiary of Independent Newspapers. The Independent warned the then coalition of "repercussions". There were: on Election Day, when an unprecedented front-page Irish Independent editorial told voters "it's payback time" and called on them to switch their votes from FG to FF. The readers were not told the real reason.

Now let us return to the Irish Times.

Tut Tut

The Irish Times reported the O'Reilly story prominently. It would, wouldn't it? The Irish Times is above such activity. It is Ireland's newspaper of record. It is not owned by single individual, run for profit or beholden to forces outside of itself.

Or is it?

The Irish Times started life as a unionist newspaper, promoting the interests of the Protestant business class. It was sectarian. Up to 1939 "the government" was in London. The British coat of arms was still carried on the masthead. After the Second World War the Irish Times started to change and Irish society started to change also. In the 1960s, as Irish society began to shake off a narrow ideological and church controlled straitjacket, the Irish Times seemed to be there as part of the shift.

Under the Irish Times's last Protestant editor, Douglas Gageby, new radical young voices were given expression in the paper. Its readership shot up, as it was seen to be in tune with modernity, with support for women's rights, with support for the right to contraception and divorce, for women on juries, for equal pay, for tolerance and respect for minorities, with support for the rights of the nationalist minority in the North of Ireland, suffering under a unionist and British jackboot.

Wait... wind that back. What was that last bit?

Judge in Dread

This is where the owner of the Irish Times, Major Thomas McDowell began to show concern. The Major was a member of the Judge Advocates Department of the British Army. This is the section involved in courts martial. He was, according to the former owner of the Britain's Daily Mirror, Cecil King, a member of British Intelligence, MI5 (Diary 1970-74, entry for 23 Jan 1972). The Major began to see his British contacts in earnest at a high level, the British Ambassador and 10 Downing Street. According to a file of letters published under the 30-year rule in 2000, McDowell sought urgent and continuing help from the British Government in undermining the editorial integrity and independence of his own newspaper.

"Renegade" Protestant

His own editor, Douglas Gageby, although "a very fine journalist" was "on northern questions a renegade or white nigger". This racist and sectarian remark was a throwback to attitudes that drove the British Empire.

It is one of the reasons why we got rid of it.

It is why people in Asia and Africa did as well. An Irishman born in Belfast was a traitor to his assumed British caste on the basis of his Protestant religion. He had, in that most insulting of terminology, 'gone native'. This sectarianism is what drove Britain's rule in Ireland. Here it was laid bare in all its ugliness, in the apparent privacy of a cosy chat between British mandarins and their agent. Here was proof of the ascendancy sectarianism and arrogance that is hidden in ideologically revisionist historiography of Ireland.

The Ambassador's letter ends: "I am destroying the correspondence." But it was retained in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and inadvertently released for us latter day natives to gawk at. It took longer than it should have and the Irish Times is to blame.

Missing Link

The Irish Times looked at the material released under the 30-year rule in 2000, as it does every year. Its readers look to the Irish Times to painstakingly go through the material and to bring the most important elements to their attention. The file with the infamous "renegade... white nigger" letter in it was looked at. The correspondence relating to Major McDowell, the British Ambassador and (the appropriately named) WKK White in the Foreign Office was picked through. This is the headline to the Irish Times article of 3 January 2000: "McDowell prepared to act as link."

But there was a missing link.

The infamous and newsworthy letter was ignored. The story was all about the selfless Major making himself available to bring the Irish and British governments together. Nothing about the issue that was making him "hotter under the collar", nothing about the "unauthorised items" appearing in the paper, nothing about the "guidance" from Downing Street "acceptable to himself and one or two of his friends on the Board".

Major News

Nothing at all in fact on the information that even the most inept journalist would recognise as having major news value.

The story confirmed all we are expected to believe about the Irish Times: selfless dedication to public spiritedness, noble pursuit of tolerance and harmony. It was a worthy piece of shoddy journalism. There are one of two conclusions. Either (a) the letter was deliberately censored or (b) it was ineptly overlooked. The latter is not plausible.

The letter languished in obscurity until in January 2003 a researcher from the Aubane Historical Society, Jack Lane, stumbled upon it by accident. He wasn't looking for it. He just happened to be looking through the file and it popped out at him plain as day. As he wrote recently "I was stunned". He sent it off on 10 January 2003 with a covering letter to Irish Times Editor, Geraldine Kennedy. Here was the Irish Times's chance to make amends and to bring this major piece of news to its readers. The editor simply informed Jack Lane about the selfless nobility deeply enshrined in the Irish Times Trust and refused to endorse the obvious bona fides of the document uncovered by a researcher from a historical society dealing mainly with Aubane, a small townland in Cork. The Times again refused to bring the letter to its readers' attention.

Lane replied by noting that the Trust set up by the Irish Times was unique in that it gave control to one individual, Major McDowell. Therefore, the trust was the vehicle by which the Major exercised his influence.

Who Me? Never!

However, on 26 January 2003, the Sunday Independent covered the racist "white nigger" aspects of the document. Then and only then, the following day the Irish Times officially acknowledged the existence of the letter in an anonymously written piece (by "Irish Times reporter") headlined "Major McDowell rejects UK envoy's claim". The Major was quoted:

"I have never used the words 'white nigger' in my life about anybody. I have always had the highest respect for Douglas Gageby, both as a person and as a journalist."

But the Ambassador's letter contains the Major's view of Douglas Gageby as "an excellent man" and "a very fine journalist". If we accept that the Ambassador reports that accurately, why would he report the racial slurs inaccurately, especially as he observed: "It is all about something he [the Major] mentioned to me before, but now he is hotter under the collar about it".

Secret

This was a letter meant for private circulation as an intelligence document. It is marked "secret and personal". As UCD Professor Ronan Fanning reported in the following Sunday Independent, diplomats are not likely to misreport information destined for accurate intelligence assessments of the state of mind of an important intelligence asset like the Major.

The Major's denial does not hold water and neither does the denial of the attempt to subvert the newspaper's independence. The concern about the "unauthorised items" that were presumably hurting Britain's interests by exposing the sham democracy of the rotten Six-County statelet appear genuine.

It's on the Internet

The matter seemed to rest. The Irish Times seemed to have killed off the story. But inadvertently it resurfaced as a result of Fianna Fáil Senator Martin Mansergh criticising another piece of research from the Aubane Historical Society, concerning secret wartime assessments about the situation in the South of Ireland from writer Elizabeth Bowen to Winston Churchill. Technically, this was espionage. Mansergh, as an aside, also brought up the McDowell episode in his column and dismissed its importance. Then, for the first time, a widely accessible reproduction of the British Ambassador's letter appeared, on indymedia.ie. A whole new interest in the story developed. The Guardian carried a reference to the story in its media section. Radio stations began to pick it up.

The Irish Times was exposed and in much bigger trouble than if they had simply published the document the first time in 2000.

Censorship & Terror

In retrospect, as a commentator on indymedia.ie explained, the major's authorised version of events did not actually need Protestants with "authorised" attitudes. Tame taigs could do the job.

During the terrorising of southern society in the 1970s in the Heavy Gang period — when there was "official indifference (or worse)" to British involvement in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, when the Dublin Government harassed those campaigning on behalf of the Birmingham Six, when Captain Kelly was framed, when censorship enforced a neo-unionist line in RTÉ, when the President was forced to resign and when the 1976, Sinn Féin Easter commemoration was banned - establishment nationalism came into its own. The minority in the Six Counties were sold out and left to fend for themselves — which they did with republican support from all over the 32 Counties.

"Staunch" Protestants

Major McDowell did not need "staunch" Protestants. He had tame taigs to welcome into the Irish Times parlour. Kevin Myers glorified the mass slaughter on the Western Front and denigrated the relatively minuscule amount of violence that won independence for the 26 Counties and that effectively put him on his Irish Times perch.

If the Irish Times wants to survive this ignominious episode, it will have to publicly account for itself. The omens are not good.


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