When is an Irish newspaper not
Irish?
By Joe Horgan
I remember when I was a child picking up the newspaper in my auntie’s house in Cork city. It was probably, I suppose, a copy of the Cork Examiner.
I didn’t really know much about news or the media at the time but I remember looking through it. Perhaps it was just the fact that it was a big, broadsheet paper that set me thinking, but I distinctly remember looking at some foreign report and thinking to myself that this was a serious, grown-up, clever paper.
Now it doesn’t take too much to impress a kid whose only interest is football anyway, but I do remember thinking that if we Irish were supposed to be so thick how come the Irish had papers like that and England had The Sun and The News of the World.
Of course, now we have our own Sun and our own Mirror and our own homegrown tabloids and sleaze-filled Sundays. All of the English papers are available here in a display of foreign press that is unmatched anywhere else. I even know of one village shop where everything from The Sun to the Daily Mail to The Times is available, whilst for some reason the Irish Times is not. Perhaps this is some strange reflection of the demographic nature of the Irish countryside with a big influx of UK nationals amongst the green hills and lanes, but it seems mighty odd to be able to read more news from England than Ireland in an Irish village shop.
Our own Sun — “we love it” as the voiceover says on the Irish airwaves — is actually called The Irish Sun, though it’s contents differ little from the English version. Indeed, on one occasion last month the Irishness of our version seemed startlingly similar to the English copy. With one jaundiced eye on the expansion of the European Union in May the Irish Sun ran a headline of See You In May, Thousands Of Travellers Are On Their Way. The article went on to detail how hundreds of thousand of people were preparing to flood in to Ireland once the union is enlarged and travel barriers come down. The Irish Sun even went on to argue that 50,000 people could come here. On the inside page the headline ran Ireland’s Our Dream over an article about poverty-ridden eastern Europeans yearning to come to Ireland for the good life.
Strangely enough, on the very same day The mother Sun over in England was running exactly the same kind of material, though with a few subtle shifts. In this version of events See You In May was once more the headline but this time it was accompanied by a sub-headline stating that 300,000 gypsies were heading for Britain. Furthermore, The Sun — we love it — then went on to reveal that Ireland’s Our Dream was actually England’s Our Dream for all those grabbing, poor people scattered throughout Europe.
Now, the best you can say about a lot of papers that have little news in them but much gossip and innuendo is that they are harmless enough. They are not serious, nor are they meant to be. The problem is though that this kind of scaremongering is not frivolous or harmless. It stirs up a resentment and prejudice that any kind of society can do without. Of course, indigenous Irish papers can do this on their own and I have seen more than one headline here that was at best ill-thought-out. We would do well to remember that this is a Europe that has suffered even in the last 10 years from the effects of ethnic hatred.
So I don’t think we can blame the predominantly right-wing British press for the introduction of somewhat inflammatory ideas into the realms of the Irish media. The Irish press has its dark side and its taste lapses too. But there is something very salutary about papers that are English in all but name subtly shifting a few words here and there so that supposed English news becomes supposed Irish news. It is a very odd situation whereby people buy a newspaper that tells them primarily about the gossip, scandal and events of a different society.
Of course, in the corporate world as represented by the British press we may well be just another trade area. In the land of the free market it seems that we are to some businesses a mere region of the UK with some local sensibilities that need pandering to. Such as selling us something essentially the same as the British product but with the word “Irish” placed in the name of the goods to please us.
Perhaps this is what our big-business loving government means by making ourselves attractive to foreign investors? British media values, prejudices, obsessions, and politics are exported to us here wholesale and we, like the good consumers we are, just lap them up because somebody has rebranded them as Irish.
There is something very unappealing about the sense of superiority that often seems to infiltrate English nationalism. There is something deeply distasteful about the xenophobia that often seems to permeate popular British culture. It would be something of a grand irony if the expansion of the EU, the same body that Ireland has embraced so wholeheartedly, became the Trojan horse for those same sentiments to embed themselves into Irish thinking. There happens to be enough intolerance and prejudice in modern Ireland directed at minorities and economically poor foreigners without it being imported to us dressed-up as if it was our own.
Now that English prejudice has moved on from us, now that England has begun to make Ireland in its own image, all red top papers, Sky TV and Man Utd shirts, it seems like they want to enlist us in the next wave of their intolerance.
Hopefully, Ireland’s strength will be what it has always been. Its people, its culture, its distinctiveness. Now we really do love that.
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