Sometimes, if I was having a bad day at The Irish Times, I would look out of the window of the offices on Tara Street and gaze for a while at the ugliest building in Ireland. Hawkins House, a grey 12-storey pile that embodied the vandalism inflicted on Dublin in the 1960s, has since gone to its grave unmourned. But it was for me a kind of memento mori. If I was tempted by the lure of self-pity, I would remember the many evenings I had spent cleaning the toilets in Hawkins House. I would tell myself again that, whatever the occasional frustrations of journalism, it sure beats working.
As it happened, our family’s main connection to the world of newspapers was through my mother’s job as an office cleaner at the Irish Press, just down by the Liffey at Burgh Quay. She would get up at 5am and cycle in there to empty the overflowing ashtrays and hoover the floors and, I presume, clean the toilets. She would usually be gone before the reporters arrived for the early shift. Though she did sometimes have to wake the great sports writer Con Houlihan when he slept under his desk after a hard night. She had made the mistake on her first morning in the job of calling the security man to say that a tramp had broken in, but Con – a gentle, shy, dishevelled bear of a man – perfectly understood the reasons for her confusion and was not in the least offended.
As well as contributing to our daily bread, the Irish Press, Fianna Fáil’s semi-official journal, was our daily newspaper. My grandfather, who lived with us, was a de Valera man, so it was the Press and its sister papers, the Evening Press and the Sunday Press, that informed us of the happenings of the world. They were read from cover to cover with an intense interest that did not waver between the death notices, the hurling reports and the epic events of global history. In memory, I seem to have moved seamlessly from the children’s page in the Evening Press to David Marcus’s New Irish Writing page on Saturdays, which is where I first read contemporary Irish poetry and short stories.
[ David Marcus, The Irish Times and a golden age of literary journalismOpens in new window ]
It was natural, I suppose, for my mother to hope that I might get a job on the Press. No one in my family had gone to university – my parents did not even go to secondary school – so the world of the white-collar professions was very distant. But the newspaper was familiar territory, and it seemed like an obvious possibility for a son who was patently useless at almost everything.
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I edited a newspaper at school. I wrote reports for the Irish Union of School Students. (My first publication was a survey we did on the use of corporal punishment.) I got a small prize for an essay submitted for a Council of Europe competition. At University College Dublin I edited the student newspaper imaginatively titled Student. I was obviously on some kind of trajectory, but I had no idea how all of this could become a career or a way of life.
My only real thought was that I would somehow make a living from writing, and, as I didn’t write fiction, this must have meant some kind of journalism. My mother mentioned my proclivities to Vincent Jennings, who edited the Sunday Press, and he offered to see me. He was very nice, and, as my mother and I sat across from him in what I remember as a rather dingy office, he asked me some questions about what I wrote. I babbled something. He looked at my mother sadly and said, “I’m afraid it’s too late. He’ll be too old by the time he leaves UCD.” I should, he said, have gone instead to the College of Commerce in Rathmines to learn shorthand and typing.
It was obvious that he thought I had already acquired too many notions to ever be any use on a newspaper. I remember he used the word “wordsmith”, which I had never heard before, to suggest what he thought I thought I was. I could tell he did not mean it as a compliment. He stood up and shook my hand and wished me luck in the future.
He was quite right too. I never learned shorthand, and I still practise the hunt-and-peck method of typing. Back then I wrote everything out in an appalling scrawl before transferring it, slowly and laboriously, to the page on the huge old second-hand typewriter my parents had bought me for my 18th birthday. My best friend was the little bottle of a white liquid called Tipp-Ex that you brushed on to the page to blot out your mistakes. I was the Michelangelo of Tipp-Ex.
And the truth was that, although my poor mother was very disappointed that I was not good enough for the Press, I would have been much more worried if the editor had told me that, as soon as I got my BA from UCD, there was a job waiting for me as a reporter for de Valera’s papers. Beneath my diffidence and shyness I was an arrogant young pup. I had no clear idea of what a life in journalism could look like for me, but I had a pretty clear idea that it wasn’t that.
The problem really was the journalism that me and my friends were now reading. It was mostly American – Joan Didion’s The White Album, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic. But it was also Irish: Nell McCafferty and Maeve Binchy, for example, were writing journalism in The Irish Times that was something other than news reporting, that had the voice and the sensibility and the individuality of good fiction. Vincent Browne had established Magill magazine and Gene Kerrigan was writing riveting long-form pieces that fused scrupulously detailed reportage (usually of stories the newspapers did not cover) with the wit and rhythm of hard-boiled detective novels – Philip Marlowe on the mean streets of Dublin.
Artistic Dublin is a small town, and I could not avoid the people I had to write about, sometimes harshly
I was far from such levels of accomplishment, but I was lucky in that I did have a calling card: drama criticism. I had been going to plays since I was 13 or 14, and I liked to write about them, initially just as a way to define my tastes for myself. It was an endeavour where reporting (this is what I saw) could meet opinion (this is what I felt about it). I felt at home on that crossroads because I could never really write anything that did not have a point of view. Words always arrived from an emotional hinterland of deep feelings about life, especially Irish life in all its absurdities and hypocrisies.
I was fortunate, too, that there was a place where these impulses could be pursued in print. John S Doyle and David McKenna were turning In Dublin from a basic listings bulletin into a current-affairs and cultural magazine. I wormed my way in as drama critic and also wrote longer features about social changes, not least the great surge in religious reaction in the 1980s. The money was terrible, but it was a great place to be. The stable of critics – myself, Aidan Dunne, Michael Dervan, Michael Dwyer – would eventually migrate en masse to The Irish Times. The regular writers included Mary Raftery, arguably the most consequential Irish journalist of her generation, and Colm Tóibín. It was a better school in which to learn the ropes than the College of Commerce – at least for the kind of vessel I was interested in sailing.
Theatre criticism also toughened me up. It was actually harder than writing about politics. Artistic Dublin is a small town, and I could not avoid the people I had to write about, sometimes harshly. Some of them – Hugh Leonard, for example – had much more widely read newspaper columns of their own from which to launch furious counterattacks. In the late 1990s I spent three years as drama critic of the Daily News in New York, where the stakes on Broadway were ostensibly higher. But the job was infinitely softer than it was in Dublin, where WB Yeats’s “great hatred, little room” retained its salience and you had to learn to live with the fact that some people despised you. That is an essential part of the education of any serious journalist.
[ From the archive: Fintan O’Toole on Mary Raftery – The woman who opened our eyesOpens in new window ]
For a few years, at least, it was possible to make a kind of living as a journalist in Dublin without writing for the newspapers at all. Magill and In Dublin were thriving – as indeed were Hibernia and Hot Press. Nobody was making a fortune, but Ireland did have a genuinely independent and alternative media. Browne in particular was full of missionary zeal and vibrant mischief, and he was willing to give space to anyone who seemed interesting to him, regardless of age. When he relaunched the Sunday Tribune he gave me my first permanent job. At 25 I was simultaneously arts editor, literary editor, feature writer and drama critic. It was as exciting as it was insane.
The excitement was not just professional. It was also generated by the strange state of Ireland. On the one hand, it was stultifying – Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had more than 80 per cent of the vote between them, and the Catholic Church still had a lock on all legislation concerning sexuality, education and healthcare. On the other, things were patently falling apart under the pressure of the Troubles, an imploding economy and mass emigration and unemployment. It was not a great place to live, but it was – with its endless ambiguities and contradictions, the gaping distance between official rhetorics and daily realities – a great place to write about.
[ Fintan O’Toole: My personal history of modern IrelandOpens in new window ]
By 1988, when I was 30 and had a spouse, a child and a mortgage, I was ready to become semi-official myself. I had written a pamphlet called The Southern Question for Dermot Bolger’s Raven Arts Press, a most disobliging piece of work about Charles Haughey and the hollowness of faux patriotism that had been read with a certain relish by Dick Walsh, The Irish Times’ redoubtable political editor. He recommended that I be brought in as a columnist, critic and feature writer, and Conor Brady, the paper’s editor, took a chance on me.
There’s also something about Ireland that, I hope, keeps you honest. It’s intimate. Readers are neighbours, acquaintances, fellow citizens
This too was lucky. It meant that I have enjoyed the enormous privilege of never having to work for a media mogul, an egomaniacal tycoon or a political propagandist. Over 36 years I have never had a column spiked or seriously altered for any reason other than the rulings of libel lawyers. A lot of things I’ve written have undoubtedly seemed wrong-headed to editors, but the right to be wrong-headed is part of the paper’s unwritten constitution. Exasperation has never led to threats of expulsion.
This security has also meant that when I’ve written for publications outside Ireland I’ve had the luxury of not working for those I despise. It has been very easy for me to have principles. Bertolt Brecht’s dictum – “food first, then morality” – is the brutal truth. But I haven’t had to choose between feeding my family and writing what I believe.
There’s also something about Ireland that, I hope, keeps you honest. It’s intimate. Readers are neighbours, acquaintances, fellow citizens. Until the mobile phone killed the habit, it was not unusual for me to find myself sitting on a bus behind someone reading one of my columns and commenting on what rubbish it was to the companion beside them. Or, occasionally, meeting people for whom something I had written meant a great deal because it gave voice to feelings they had long held but had not felt free to express.
That intimacy mattered because Ireland was shifting, not just on the large scale of economics and identities and national narratives but in the nature of the conversations we were having with ourselves. What could be seen and said and acknowledged and recognised was changing. Reality itself – the specific gravity of our lived and local truths – was being redefined. It was possible to imagine as a journalist that you were taking part in that conversation, even if it was only by making people so cross at you that they had to articulate for themselves what they were so cross about.
I often wonder whether anyone will again have such freedom, such privilege. Newspapers are under such pressure now, in terms both of money and of the nonstop demand for immediacy, of time, that their capacity to indulge arrogant wordsmiths is increasingly limited. But there will always be those of us for whom journalism beats working.
Fintan O’Toole: A Life in Our Times, which draws on his book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, is on RTÉ One on Wednesday, December 11th, at 9.35pm
