The Irish Times: read by the smug denizens of Dublin 4 and responsible for the Celtic Tiger property bubble

The most successful newspapers have a distinct personality of their own with which their readers connect. In Britain, the Daily Mail and the Guardian are perhaps the best examplars of that. In Ireland, the decent, if slightly smug, denizens of Dublin 4 know exactly where they are with the Irish Times, and that it will connect with them and reflect their values.

Sometimes a newspaper’s personality even defies its actual content, and change encompasses an unexpected continuity. The Guardian moved seamlessly from being the organ of non-conformist opponents of horse-racing to the first newspaper in Britain to print the word ‘cunt’. And yet the personality remains intact — priggishness being an essential element. Similarly, the Irish Times has morphed from the entrenched champion of the British empire and defender of Protestant conservative interests to the chief advocate of same-sex marriage and unvarying paladin of the European Union. Anti-Catholicism remains a consistent motif, although today’s readers are more likely to be self-hating ex-Catholic quangocrats than the country squires who feared Fenianism and the peasants’ attachment to Popery.

Terence Brown, a Trinity College Dublin (TCD) academic — no better match for the Irish Times — has undertaken a Herculean task in telling the story of the newspaper from 1859, and he has certainly been diligent. He also seeks to put some of the historical developments into context, and, as the biographer of Louis MacNeice and W.B. Yeats, he is especially informative about interweaving developments in poetry and literature with the general culture. And yet, I think, even the most loyal devotees of the paper will find some of the narrative a hard slog: the professor lacks the journalist’s flair of injecting a little colour into a character or the newsman’s instinct to cite the telling quotation.