‘Too often in the banquet hall of history’, wrote press historian Jerry W. Knudson in the American Historical Association's Perspectives (xxxiii, no. 7 (Oct. 1993)), ‘newspapers have been relegated to the corner like country cousins or scullery maids.’ Acknowledging their limitations as factual sources, Knudson nevertheless argued that newspapers are ‘the most valuable index we have of measuring popular attitudes’. In many cases, they are ‘actors in the historical drama’, as opposed to mere detached onlookers. In the Irish context, one only has to consider the profound impact which a single newspaper interview given by Éamon de Valera had on Irish-American activism in the United States in 1920. This rang true closer to home, where regional newspapers played their own substantial and often direct role in the national experience of war and revolution.
Irish press historiography has been well served by the late Marie-Louise Legg's enduring study of nationalist newspapers in the mid to late nineteenth century. But as Christopher Doughan argues, the historical canon has, surprisingly, generated little in the way of detailed analysis about regional newspapers during the Irish Revolution. Maurice Walsh's aphorism that ‘newspaper evidence is often cited but rarely analysed’ nicely encapsulates this gaping historiographical lacuna, which the author endeavours to fill in this well-structured study. An impressive prosopography of seventeen newspapers across the four provinces between 1914 and 1921 forms the methodological spine of Doughan's thesis. For each title examined, personal and political affiliations of the editors and proprietors are explored, as well as the evolution of their editorial stances, and the nature of the newspapers’ interactions with competing authorities (British and Irish) and wider Irish society.
Doughan presents the regional press as a force for middle-class moderation in the years preceding the War of Independence. The vast majority of editors and proprietors of nationalist newspapers were men of means, devout Catholics and intimately associated with John Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party. There were some exceptions to the latter criterion — notably, publications like the Enniscorthy Echo, Roscommon Herald and Meath Chronicle, which eschewed Redmondism and entertained more advanced nationalist ideas. But for the most part, prior to 1918, the regional press advocated home rule, and was supportive of Redmond's Woodenbridge strategy as well as Britain's position during the First World War. Their reaction to the 1916 Rising was generally critical of the rebels, though often ‘tempered by a distinct sense of anger with the British government’.
The author correctly identifies the 1918 election as a watershed moment for the regional press, when the national link with the Irish Party was broken. Traditionally Redmondite newspapers were then forced to walk a tightrope between staying in touch with public opinion and avoiding state repression. For titles like the Tuam Herald, persistent and often vituperative criticism of Sinn Féin ‘dissipated almost completely’ after the 1918 poll, and later evolved into support for the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Meanwhile, newspapers which had dissented from the Irish Party line before 1918 became more pronounced in their pro-Sinn Féin views, leading to reprisals against several publications, including the Midland Tribune, Meath Chronicle and Enniscorthy Echo. While the actions of Crown forces and government censors in suppressing these titles are well known, the dynamics of the Irish Republican Army's (I.R.A.) relationship with the regional press are less familiar. The author covers this untrod ground by examining how the I.R.A. defined its relationship with various local newspapers; ‘drastic action’ could be prescribed by a local brigade commandant against a title deemed ‘hostile’ to the movement, as the editor of the Skibbereen Eagle discovered.
Doughan's cross-provincial approach yields a library of interesting observations: for example, the idiosyncratic neutrality adopted by the Clonmel Chronicle during this period of flux, or the wildly varying positions taken by two unionist newspapers — the Impartial Reporter (Fermanagh) and the Cork Constitution — on the subject of partition. While the editorial stances of many Ulster titles were governed by a ‘God-fearing Presbyterianism’, the author finds that the regional press in Leinster, Munster and Connacht was motivated editorially by fealty to the positions taken by the Catholic hierarchy. Thus, while advancing key Sinn Féin demands, lamenting Britain's bad faith or romanticising the birth of the Irish nation, local newspapers also acted as a powerful conservative bulwark against those who would ‘hurl the little streets upon the great’.
A welcome inclusion in this book is the set of appendices, which comprise valuable factsheets on regional newspapers for historians of the revolutionary period. These include a list, broken down by county, of all newspapers circulating in Ireland between 1914 and 1921, followed by a comprehensive guide to all titles, including details of key people, political leanings, years of circulation, and whether or not the title was censored or suppressed during the period. The data assembled and tabulated by Doughan will be referenced by historians of Ireland's revolutionary period for years to come, as indeed will this work as a whole.
