Ireland, 1760-1820

The Irish press developed a political tone, even if it was not a prevalentone, virtually from the beginning.Moreover, party politics intersectedwith sectarian divisions between Catholic

5 Ireland, –s

Douglas Simes

In its earliest years, perhaps through to, the Irish newspaper was

in many respects close to the model propounded by J ¨urgen Habermas.Intimately associated with learned societies and debating clubs on theone side, and with coffee shops, booksellers and other commercial enter-prises on the other, it was inextricably linked to the literary and politicalspheres.As well as philosophical and moral essays it contained practical

disquisitions on developmental issues, verse and belles lettres, and

occa-sionally political polemic Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s, who was

a leading politician and propagandist, as well as a literary lion, and whopatronised and utilised the press and maintained close ties to it, was asymbol of its aspirations, if not, perhaps, of its achievements A centuryand more later, when, in, the foundation of the Dublin University

Magazine again brought together many of Ireland’s best intellects in both

the literary and political spheres, much of the early promise remainedunrealised The Irish newspaper press was not a failure, and indeed even

in its darkest hours retained a vigour and freedom which would have beenfound astonishing in many parts of Europe It was rather that it had de-veloped less than might have been anticipated It was still dominated bysmall-scale family enterprises of marginal profitability and tenuous viabil-ity Its influence, in the political sphere, which admittedly had changedmarkedly, was still limited and uneven Above all, it had moved awayfrom rational-critical discourse, to reflect the sectarian divisions of anincreasingly polarised society

This outcome has often been explained in terms of national struggleand political repression, with special attention being given to the activities

of the executive at Dublin Castle, and the adverse impact of the Act ofUnion in  The seminal and detailed workof R R Madden, withits intense romantic and nationalist bias, has cast a long shadow, andcontinues to exert an influence Yet, while it would be foolish to denyany validity to the factors Madden identifies, they do not constitute anentire explanation of the unusual trajectory of the Irish press It was clearlong before the Union, and indeed almost from the outset, that a volatile



 Douglas Simes

mixture of sectarian division, ideological fragmentation, commercial aimsand frustrations and governmental ineptitude, inconsistency and high-handedness was likely to produce an idiosyncratic outcome

The Irish press developed a political tone, even if it was not a prevalentone, virtually from the beginning.Moreover, party politics intersectedwith sectarian divisions between Catholics and Protestants An observernoted in,

It is amazing how zealously our Roman Catholics are affected with the success of

the French in Flanders Pues [Occurrences] is their paper, the Protestants prefer

Faulkners [Dublin Journal ] and it is diverting how they fight each other with

their different intelligences .

The polemic rapidly became what Robert Peel, the Irish Secretary tween and , was later to describe as ‘high-seasoned’.Given aliterate population often raised on morality and action talessuch as The

be-History of Rogues and Raparees and The Seven Champions of Christendom,

a little sensationalism probably met a market need Certainly it rapidlyattached itself to the in-fighting of the political elites, as well as becom-ing a staple of content generally This was not uniquely Irish In Ireland,however, the political and sectarian divisions were very deep, and only avery little scurrility or vitriol was necessary to excite antagonisms.While the newspapers developed an enthusiasm for politics, intermit-tently at first and then as a staple of content, it was not their main im-perative The majority of newspapers, from their outset, existed to makemoney for their proprietors The owners were usually middle-class fam-ilies, or limited partnerships of small to medium businessmen It was arisky business, and many more enterprises failed than succeeded.Read-ership was limited by high illiteracy and Irish-speaking, and by cost, dif-ficulties of distribution and inescapable sectarian orientations.It was ahighly competitive market, and any perceived advantage was sedulouslypursued by someone Popular politics was one way of attracting sub-scribers and advertisers, and so ensuring survival It was certainly notthe only way Indeed, it may well not have been the most effective orcharacteristic way Many of the prints that adopted that strategy proved

financially unprofitable, or, like the initially lucrative radical Northern

Star, ephemeral Newspapers which eschewed political comment

virtu-ally altogether, like the specialist advertising journals, and those dedicated

to London and foreign news, frequently produced better returns and dured much longer The same was often true of those which espoused

en-elite or sectarian politics, like the Dublin Evening Mail, or which

advo-cated the governmental viewpoint and received subsidies, such as theprints associated with Francis Higgins In broad terms the Irish press

Ireland– 

was shaped by its limited market, and the resultant commercial pressureswhich made the competition intense In this context the potential attrac-tions and advantages of highly seasoned sectarian and ideological popularpolitics were readily apparent Not surprisingly, successive governments,only too aware of the tensions beneath the veneer of Irish society, sought

by recurrent bouts of intervention to offset, influence or control what theyregarded as a dangerous tendency Precisely how these interacting factorsimpacted on the evolution of the press varied from decade to decade

By thes Ireland’s newspaper press was already well established, atleast in Dublin and Belfast, and had taken on many of the features thatwere to persist well into the following century.It had grown, and to adegree prospered, in a largely free environment.There was no censor-ship, no effective guild control, no special taxation and only occasionalgovernment interference The newspapers were small-scale commercialenterprises usually owned by families or friends, drawn from within anarrow circle of printers, booksellers and coffee-house proprietors Theywere often an ancillary rather than a primary source of income Gener-ally they had to  subscribers, though one or two reached ,

or even,.Income was largely generated by advertising, althoughthe subscribers list was important, both in itself and for attracting po-tential advertisers The standardised format of the papers,which wereusually two-leaf, four-page folios, or  inches by , and devoid oflarge type or illustration, was dictated by the need to maximise adver-tising space while keeping the cost of production low Content was also

shaped by advertising An issue of Pue’s Occurrences, for example, might

have nine columns of advertising compared with two and a half of news

The Belfast News-Letter might have seven of its twelve columns in

advertis-ing Saunders News-Letter, which was primarily mercantile, had as many

as ten and a half columns of advertisements out of a total of twelve.The key to survival and expansion, in an increasingly competitiveindustry, lay in attracting new subscribers and advertisers Given thedifficulties in communications, coupled with the high levels of illiter-acy and Irish-speaking already mentioned, there was a limit to whatcould be achieved in the provinces, especially Connaught and Munster

As a result, it was necessary to maximise appeal to the anglophones ofUlster and Leinster.While it was possible to reach the English-speakingCatholics, they remained wary of sectarian bias. Among the English-speaking Protestants, the community to whom newspapers primarily ap-pealed, there were significant numbers who were illiterate or unable topay In this competition for the residual potential market, various strate-gies were adopted: including, on one occasion at least, ‘fair-sexing’ anewspaper (by making it more attractive to women readers). More

 Douglas Simes

characteristic was linking the newspaper to a supportive business such

as a coffee house, where copies could be made available to the clientele.Dick’s Coffee House, ‘a rendez-vous for literary people, wits, politicians

and writers’, was owned by Richard Pue of Pue’s Occurrences and was also home to The Flying Post.A related strategy was specifically to tar-get the literary market.James Carson of the Dublin Weekly Journal wasclosely associated with Lord Molesworth’s philosophical circle, and pub-

lished the poetry of Henry Parnell Richard Reilly and the Weekly Oracle

had the backing of the erudite and influential Dublin Society Richard

Faulkner of the Dublin Journal was not only Swift’s printer, but also a

friend of Chesterfield and Berkeley A rich man, his lavish dinner partiesbecame an important feature of Dublin political and literary life.Politics played a limited part in the search for new readers in this for-mative period through to the early s and were to be handled cau-tiously, especially since the government had occasional but recurrentbouts of utilising parliamentary privilege or the law of seditious libel to ha-rass newspapers.In such endeavours both parliament and the judiciaryproved enthusiastic partners The intense party politics of thes, andespecially of the period when Sir Constantine Phipps was rallying oppo-sition to the Whigs, effectively wrecked the Tory part of the press.Thefirst phase of Dr Charles Lucas’s controversial journalistic and politicalcareer in thes, which ended with a writ of outlawry, also producedcasualties.Nevertheless it is a mistake to assume that politics were notfrequently present, and intermittently important The careful selection

of the foreign news and the emphasis given to it often indicate politicalsympathy: stress on the persecution of Polish Protestants, for example.

More obviously, the fiery anti-Catholic diatribes of Whalley’s News Letter

or the implicitly anti-English debate about the causes of famine in,displayed a willingness to appeal to public feeling on at least an occasionalbasis.It remained safer and easier, however, to attract new customers

by obtaining the most recent British and Continental news, by ing distribution networks, or publishing some literary or philosophical

improv-‘lion’ In the lates and early s, this situation changed The rise

of a Wilkes-style charismatic politician – in the shape of Charles Lucas –willing to appeal to the public by means of the newspaper press, coincidedwith the tenure in office of a Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Townshend, whosepolicies offended much of the politically significant population Politics

in the press moved from being occasional and slightly peripheral to being

a central and continual concern

Contrary to his intentions, Lord Townshend did much to facilitate thepoliticisation of the press In many respects an ‘enlightened minister’, hewanted to make government more efficient, cost-effective, equitable and

Ireland– 

tolerant But his policies, such as proposing to tax absentee landowners,and his perceived softness on Roman Catholics and agrarian agitators,antagonised major sections of the elite His dismissal of the ‘undertakers’,

or traditional parliamentary managers, deprived him of their skills, andalienated some of the great families His concession of the Octennial Actmeant that the disaffected had a better hope of making their opposi-tion tell, since an election would occur now every eight years, not just

at the death of the monarch At much the same time, Charles Lucas,

a political outsider, was showing that charisma, a critical approach togovernment and a warm espousal of popular Protestantism could, whenbacked by close contact with the press, break down many of the tra-ditional barriers. His control and utilisation of the Freeman’s Journalpointed a message, which was lost neither on the government, nor onaspiring opposition politicians such as Henry Flood and Henry Grattan

If Lucas could arouse public opinion and forward political and personalgoals with his newspaper interest, what might an opposition Patriot whowas also a ‘social insider’ not achieve? Although Lucas died in, andTownshend went home in, the changes they had catalysed gatheredmomentum The opposition had learnt valuable lessons from a politicalmaster It was not about to forget them The imposition of the first stamptax on newspapers in  suggests that the government had learnedsomething too: specifically that there were more subtle ways of limitingthe impact of hostile newspapers than prosecutions and writs of outlawry.The period from the late s to the Rebellion of  and its af-termath was one of continuing and intense political ferment This wasthe zenith of the landowning Protestant hegemony usually known as theAscendancy, its moment of fullest freedom and maturity Initially at least,

it appeared that through enlightened debate it would evolve into a tolerantelite guiding a prosperous and progressive society In salons, debatingsocieties, Masonic lodges and coffee shops, the elite, and indeed the lit-erate generally, exchanged new ideas and mapped out strategies Thelatest British ideas and fads appeared in the newspapers weekly Frenchideas, frequently filtered through the Huguenot community, were alsoinfluential. Dublin purchased as many copies of the Encyclop´edie asLondon.Cultured politicians brought both classical and new ideas intoplay in parliament, and politics more generally Charlemont translatedPetrarch and Catullus, as well as leading the Volunteers Henry Floodtranslated Homer and Desmosthenes, in addition to propagating freertrade and constitutional amendment.Catholics and Protestants mixedand exchanged ideas in fashionable venues and societies, and not least

in Masonic lodges, the Grand Lodge having at one point a Catholicmajority.Even Lord Charlemont, an enthusiast for decorating the statue

of toleration by the Ascendancy at its most relaxed and complacent, tarianism was on the rise from thes Both Flood and Charlemontsoon reasserted their anti-Catholic convictions.The enfranchisement ofCatholics in  led to Catholic triumphalism and acute Protestantanxiety In Protestant circles talkof the massacres of being renewedbecame commonplace In, as an overspill from unaddressed agrarianproblems, and the resultant rise of the secretive peasant-based and violentCatholic Defenders, the militant Protestant Orange Order, also originallypeasant-based, was founded It spread rapidly, and was widely perceived

sec-by Catholics as expressing the attitudes of Protestants more generally Itwas not a large step, as was to be soon proved, from Volunteer threats

of force to yeomanry employing pitch-caps, nor from sectarian rhetoric

by Patriot politicians and radical newspapers to the anti-Protestantcleansing by pike at the Bridge of Wexford, or by fire at the Barn ofScullabogue.

Throughout the successive phases of Ireland’s development in thisperiod, the newspapers were to play a vital part In their differing waysthey sought to discern, articulate, arouse and exploit what Edmund Burkedescribed as ‘general opinion’, and what in common usage became known

as ‘public opinion’.The specialist reporter was almost unknown at thisperiod, but proprietors or editors often haunted coffee and alehouses andplaces of fashionable resort to learn how people felt, as well as to drum

up custom. Frequently, they accepted the input of leading literary orpolitical figures as expressing public opinion, as well as arousing it Henry

Flood, for example, in his Philadelphus Letters and Syndercombe Letters in the Freeman’s Journal fulfilled such a dual role.By thes, there werealready signs that some newspapers were actively manipulating the pub-lic response In the struggle over the Prime Minister Pitt’s commercialpropositions in, for example, the newspapers played ‘a vital part infomenting public discontent’. They did not do this by well-informedrational-critical discussion Rather, to offset ‘the general bankruptcy oftheir analysis’, ‘the emotional content was kept high’.By thes,matters were clearly worse The ‘paranoid fantasies’ by which at least onejournal sought to arouse Catholic fears were to have tragic consequences

in outbreaks of ‘sectarian cleansing’.

For all their pretensions, though, most newspapers were not drivenprimarily by ideologies or high political exigencies, but by the need to

to subscribe than previously, given the spread of more tolerant attitudes

in some parts of the press, and the emergence of Catholic proprietors.However, even if the pool of potential readers was increasing, it could not

be fully tapped The costs of production remained high, given the need

to import most presses, type and paper,and hence the price per copy

was prohibitive for many poorer literates While a titan like the Dublin

Evening Post might claim a circulation of , as early as , manyDublin newspapers, and virtually all of the rapidly multiplying provin-cials, sold fewer than , copies. Competition for the subscribersand advertising needed to sustain so many marginal enterprises remainedintense

As a consequence of the competition, various strategies were devised

for survival and expansion Saunders News-Letter successfully introduced

the daily. Finn’s Leinster Journal tookgreat care with its subscriptionlist and distribution network. The Drogheda News-Letter introduced akind of leading article. Others concentrated on specialist advertising,improved presentation, or obtaining the most recent news from London.Whilst some strategies were determinedly apolitical, most probably con-tained an element of political targeting Financially, it made sense toplease some defined segment of a rather narrowly composed ‘public’, thegovernment, or a political patron or organisation These were all sources

of supplementary advertising revenue or other funding Of course, there

were significant concomitant risks The Belfast News-Letter, one of the

oldest and most strongly based newspapers in Ireland, lost one-fifth ofits subscribers by a single miscalculation of the Ulster mood, when itblamed the death of a loyalist tradesman on the citizens of Belfast.Thepassage of time and governmental initiatives increased the pressures toaccept the risks of an explicit political line In, stamp duty was im-posed at/d per copy, and advertisement tax atd In  stamp dutywas raised tod and the advertisement tax to  shilling In an arguablypunitive measure of, stamp duty reached d, and a tax was imposed

on both home-produced and imported newsprint Advertisements fellsharply as early as, when the General Evening Post lost four columns, and the Volunteer’s Journal two of its four sheets.As a result, the price ofnewspapers continued to be forced up By, the Dublin Evening Post

 Douglas Simes

had reached d, a prohibitive cost for many. While taxes across theIrish Sea were both earlier and heavier, they were almost certainly moreeasily absorbed in the larger, more dynamic and more prosperous Englishmarket

Of the possible political strategies available to newspapers, perhapsthe safest was to become part of the emergent governmental press inter-est This could entail control, but more frequently involved acceptance

of some degree of influence Government newspapers were rarely ular, at least judged by copies sold: though to some extent this mayreflect a lackof interest in the hard workof pursuing subscribers andadvertisers, given a secure income By either choice or necessity, their in-come was largely derived from government advertising, and subventionsfrom such sources as the Secret Service Fund Proprietors and editorsmight also be in receipt of places and pensions Government-influencedjournals were most frequently recipients of government Proclamations,although occasional use was made of other kinds of funding or privilegedaccess to information It was possible to ensure a prolonged existencefor a journal, and a very satisfactory income for its proprietor or editor,

pop-by adopting this strategy During the closing decades of the eighteenth

century, John Giffard of the Dublin Journal was receiving£, per num for journalism alone, as well as holding a lucrative place in Customsand the captaincy of a Militia troop.Francis Higgins of the Freeman’s

an-Journal, who doubled as a kind of spymaster, may well have fared even

better In addition to the journalistic subsidy of £, per annum, hehad a£ pension, special payments as an agent, and as much as £per annum from gambling tables at his coffee house, an abuse in whichauthority connived. Higgins was rich enough to be able to assemblearound himself a kind of intellectual ‘court’, not unlike that of Faulkner

in an earlier period It was characteristic of the milieu that the ‘courtpoet’ was Leonard McNally, a zealous Protestant, who was informing onthe United Irishmen.Support of government was not a risk-free strat-egy The newspapers involved often lost subscribers, and their owners andeditors were subject to vitriolic character attacks by opposition, and espe-cially radical, journals.Government support was often unforthcoming

or unreliable. Journals frequently dwindled into total dependence orfailed outright Popular, if not always spontaneous, pressure could wreckbusinesses and lives. Several members of John Giffard’s family weremurdered in the Rising of ’, including a son and son-in-law George

Gordon of the Belfast News-Letter had to flee under the pressure of iterated death threats Henry Morgan of the Cork Herald was forced to abandon his native city, and W P Carey of the General Evening Post sought

re-refuge for himself and his family in England

Ireland– 

In thes, at least, a moderate opposition stance was a widely ferred alternative strategy The Patriot programme, in both its Whiggish(Grattan) and anti-Catholic (Flood) variants, had a broad-based appeal.There was genuine enthusiasm in many quarters for improved tradingarrangements, more honest government, a reformed parliament and less

pre-restrictive constitutional ties to Britain The Dublin Evening Post, which

met this market best, and appealed to Roman Catholics with its religioustolerance as well, became the largest and most lucrative of Irish news-papers for some years.The Whiggish Hibernian Journal seems to haveprospered on a similar basis. Newspapers of this kind, as well as at-tracting enhanced subscriptions and increased advertising, were also to

an extent subvented by paid communications from organisations such asthe Volunteers. A moderate opposition strategy was also not withoutits hazards On occasion, the law officers of the crown, the judiciary, andthe parliament all demonstrated a good deal of ingenuity and determi-nation in harassing temperate opponents The lurid allegations againstFrancis Higgins, made by John Magee, the admittedly erratic proprietor

of the Dublin Evening Post, involved him in an on-going feud not just with

Higgins and his prot´eg´es, but with Lord Clonmell, the most redoubtablejudge of the Court of King’s Bench The curious legal antics which en-sued were disruptive for the newspaper, and ultimately disastrous forMagee’s personal life and mental stability. Nor was it necessary to beJohn Magee, with his abrasive edge, to encounter trouble The bland and

cautious Saunders News-Letter had its problems, with one proprietor being

horse-whipped by John Giffard, and his successor being held in custodyand reprimanded by the House of Commons.

It is quite possible that the moderate journals relished a little versy and harassment as good for business They had to bear in mind,

contro-to a degree in the s, and pre-eminently in the s, the need tocompete with more radical and sensational prints for public attention

The more restrained radical publications, and most notably the Northern

Star, did manage to wed commercial aims to ideological imperatives The Northern Star may have had little literary merit, and been overly full of

undigested and indigestible details of the French Revolution, but it met,

at least briefly, a market demand It attained a circulation estimated ashigh as,,and copies turned up as far south as Waterford Its moreracy feature articles, such as ‘Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand’, may haveplayed a part in this, as may the fact that it was initially run by shrewdBelfast businessmen It is more difficult to discern any realisable commer-

cial goals in the more flamboyant radical prints The Volunteer’s Journal,

which advocated tarring and feathering, and possibly lynching, of ular members of government, the aristocratically owned Press which

unpop- Douglas Simes

deliberately and calculatedly set out to arouse Catholic fears of cide with elaborate fantasies of Orange plots,and above all the Union

geno-Star which galvanised its readers with assassination lists and dreadful

revolutionary verse, cannot really have expected conventional returns

on money invested Perhaps they were genuinely expecting a olutionary triumph and the endorsement of a grateful people? It is justpossible that tenuous links with revolutionary governments may also holdpart of the answer.

quickrev-Whatever the motivation of their proprietors, the government had nopatience with newspapers which advocated violence, especially aimed atits own members Nor was it inclined to tolerate pro-French newspapers

in war-time The full panoply of the law, and occasionally of extra-legal

measures, descended on offenders The Volunteer’s Journal claimed in

 it had faced two informations exofficio, three motions to show cause,

two indictments for misdemeanours, and four indictments for high son, in nine months.A long series of legal manoeuvres against the pro-

trea-prietors of the Northern Star, which persuaded most of them to abandon

it, only ended with the physical destruction of the press by soldiers.InDecember, the conductor of the Press, Peter Finnerty, found guilty

of seditious libel, was imprisoned for two years, fined£, and obliged togive security of£, for good behaviour on his release The true propri-etor, Arthur O’Connor, was tried for high treason a few months later.

By the later s, the parameters of acceptable political debate inIreland had tightened noticeably This was not just the result of the exten-sion of governmental control and influence through the consistent use ofgovernmental resources It was also a sign of changing attitudes among thenewspaper-owning and reading elite as the French Revolution descendedinto Terror, and Europe was embroiled in war Edmund Burke was notalone among Whigs in denouncing revolutionary excess and falling in be-hind the government In Ireland Henry Grattan, the Whig leader, fiercelydenounced newspapers that encouraged assassination.Moderate liberal

journals such as Finn’s Leinster Journal and the Waterford Herald decided

the time had come to make terms with government.The difference tween a governmental strategy and a moderate opposition one eroded, atleast to a degree The radical strategy ceased to be viable, doomed by itsown inherent weakness and folly as well as by governmental repression

be-and elite hostility The Northern Star was forced out of business in,

and the Press and Harp of Erin were extinguished in.

The rebellion of ’, and the ensuing Act of Union, are usually garded, and not without some justification, as ushering in an especiallybleakperiod of Irish press history Newspapers struggled to survive, oftenfor financial reasons, in an environment in which the government had

re-Ireland– 

largely set the parameters of debate and monitored them closely Still, it

is necessary to keep a sense of perspective Much of the cautious vatism was dictated not by government, but by the changed expectations

conser-of readers, especially in the powerful and wealthy Protestant nity Moreover, there remained a surprising amount of freedom giventhat the country had experienced large-scale internal bloodshed, and wasinvolved in a major international conflict By contemporary Europeanstandards, and indeed by twentieth-century war-time standards, the Irishnewspapers had considerable latitude for debate Highly important, andcontentious, issues such as the Union and Catholic Emancipation werediscussed in depth, and with some asperity There remained a sturdyindependent or lightly influenced press which was quite willing to askquestions, and engage in critical debate Even the government-controlledpress, with its internecine disputes, its sectarian animosities, and its oc-casional assertions of independence, was frequently a challenge and anirritant to the politicians who nominally directed it.

commu-Although an unmitigatedly gloomy assessment of the status of the Irishpress in this period is inappropriate, it remains true that it lacked the con-fidence, vigour and occasional ferocity of the preceding period No doubtthe Union with Britain in played some part in this It reduced Dublin

to a regional city, albeit an important and distinctive one, and deprived it

of a parliament readily at hand to be influenced or pressured The cians departed for Westminster, and in their wake so did hostesses such

politi-as Lady Charleville and the Countess of Blessington,and men such as the Ultra Tories S L Giffard and William Maginn of the

newspaper-Standard and St James Chronicle and the liberal Alexander Wood of the Traveller.It tooksome years for those who remained Dublin-based torealise that there were ways in which they might utilise the London Irish

to influence the British parliament and media

Probably more important than the Union, at least in the short term,were the systematic press policies of the more dynamic Lords-Lieutenantand Chief Secretaries Faced with rising sectarian tensions, and the exi-gencies of long-continuing warfare, as well as periods of economic con-traction, Dublin Castle instituted legal proceedings as and when it feltnecessary The Protestant mood ensured that it could usually do so withconfidence, even when juries were involved. Especially relentless wasthe very young and highly organised Robert Peel, whose prosecution of

the Dublin Evening Post in/ brought it, and the Magee family whoowned it, to heel The most popular paper in Ireland, although never agovernmental paper as such, became ‘Castle Catholic’. Prosecutionwas, however, only a part of the more systematic press management

by government, and not, in general, the most effective part Increased

 Douglas Simes

taxation rendered more papers amenable to government’s favours In

 the advertisement duty was raised to  shillings, and in / to

 shillings While this level was attained in Britain earlier, its impact wasless far-reaching because of the generally stronger economy In, the

Evening Post lost ten of its sixteen columns of advertisements in a week.

By , even Saunders News-Letter, which ‘specialised in advertising’,

was suffering a decline. The income from the duty, indicative of thefalling volume of advertisements, and also of dwindling returns to news-paper owners, continued to slide: in , it was £,; by , itwas£,. By the latter date even the Evening Mail, Ireland’s mostsuccessful newspaper, was encountering problems.

Although literacy rates were continuing to rise, and English-languageusage to spread,the price of newspapers was a discouragement to pur-chase especially in the post-war years At d to d per copy for mostprints it was difficult to attract new readers, or even to retain old onessuch as the formerly prosperous agrarian ‘middlemen’ of the war period.

No amount of hireage or group reading provided comfort to those whoneeded to make a reasonable profit It was possible to an extent to attractreaders and gain ground against competitors by technical innovations.The quality of presentation, in matters such as paper and type, im-proved Journalism became more professional, and direct reportage morecommon. The editorial was developed and spread rapidly Distribu-tion networks were often enhanced Only for the very fortunate few didsuch innovations suffice in themselves For most the lure of some mea-sure of governmental assistance, especially if accompanied by only lim-ited interference, was irresistible The government, when it kept withinbudget, spent approximately£, per annum About £, of thiscame from the Proclamation Fund, money set aside for official govern-ment notices Most of the rest came from the Secret Service Fund.Pension, places and privileged access to information were occasionallyused as supplements Much of the money went to sustain the government-

initiated and -controlled newspapers The Patriot, for example, with its

modest readership of , was given at least £, in , ing £ from the Secret Service Fund and £ in Proclamations.

includ-A hostile source suspected that the true figure, including pensions, was

as high as£,.The more successful Correspondent, and the declining

and ineffectual Hibernian Journal and Dublin Journal, were also lavishly

endowed. Much smaller, but still significant, amounts were bestowed

on friendly, but largely independent, publications, such as the Dublin

Evening Post and the Freeman’s Journal.

The government was frequently restive about the results of its vestment Wellesley Pole, who was Chief Secretary –, observed,

in-Ireland– 

during what was theoretically one of the high points of repressive trol, that ‘the government has been assailed from all quarters, particularly

con-by the factious prints, with the grossest abuse’.It still had to cope with

the scurrilities and horror stories of the Irish Magazine, complete with

‘Goyaesque illustrations’, and the ‘disguised near-pornographic libels’

of the Dublin Satirist. More significantly, the government had also toaccept the offsetting influence of highly organised pressure groups with

a shrewd press sense For example, the Catholic Board, a pressure group

seeking Catholic emancipation, helped sustain The Messenger. DanielO’Connell, the most dynamic Catholic political leader, bestowed favours

on such Proclamation-accepting newspapers as the Dublin Evening Post and the Freeman’s Journal, which reciprocated. The Orange Ordermade clear to its members which journals it favoured, and encour-aged a degree of Protestant zeal in otherwise reliable prints which was arecurrent embarrassment Except perhaps during Robert Peel’s tenure ofoffice as Irish Secretary, opposition influence, of various kinds, seems tohave been almost as characteristic as governmental

Governmental policies may have succeeded to an extent in dampingdown sensationalism, controversy and sectarianism during the crucial waryears, but it was a very limited and incomplete achievement Once thewar was over, governmental consensus about managing the press began

to disintegrate.Robert Peel, who was alarmed at the subversive

poten-tial of militant Catholicism, did not hesitate to prosecute the Chronicle in

, as he had the Evening Post in  His views were not, however,

shared by later office-holders such as Wellesley and Grant Governmentalpress policy very quickly lost focus and continuity The punishment of

the editor of the Chronicle, who received six months’ imprisonment and

a fine of £ for a ‘trifling and insignificant’ libel, was no doubt nificant as a last manifestation of the rigorous Peelite approach to thepress. More importantly, though, it showed the direction in which aless managed press would probably evolve In response to the prosecu-tion the newspaper ‘published a list of the religions of all those involved

sig-in the case The entire panel for both grand and petty juries, the courtofficers, the clerks – even the bailiffs sent round to arrest MacDonnell –were Protestants.’ This small outburst of sectarianism was a harbinger ofthings to come.

The nadir of the Irish press, as far as confidence and vigour of bate were concerned, was probably about, and to some extent therewas a revival in the s By , Dublin had twelve metropolitannewspapers, not including the weeklies, and there was a networkofprovincial papers which covered virtually the entire country Literacy wascontinuing to increase slowly in the two more prosperous provinces, and