A newspaperman's tale of thwarted ambition
Sunday November 15 2009
In My Own Time
James Downey
Gill & Macmillan, €24.99
This bitterly elegant memoir is somewhat misleadingly sub-titled "Inside Irish Politics and Society" when it should have been: "How I was passed over for the job of editor of the Irish Times".
The political side of this tale is well-observed and written with style. But ultimately, Downey was a just an observer of some of the great events that made modern Ireland. He had, for instance, lunch with Charlie Haughey in the Royal Hibernian Hotel "several times" and got a "hinted" invite to his private island Innisvickillane (as did I). Yet you don't get the feeling that he was privy to what was really going on any more than any other political correspondent of that era.
Of course there are good stories but they are newspaper lore rather than political revelations: that Haughey was a "source" for John "Backchat" Healy; Dick Walsh, the "half political correspondent" (because he shared the job title with Downey) was probably a high-ranking IRA man; that editor Douglas Gageby, a "white nigger" according to the paper's owner Major Tom McDowell, was in thrall to John Hume and that Downey himself was a committed Labour supporter and was a failed party candidate in the general election of 1969.
There is also a lovely story of how Downey landed a part-time job in RTE -- because Gageby along with several top-ranking RTE executives were members of an exclusive dining circle called "Murphy's Club" run by the notorious conman accountant Russell Murphy.
Downey, apart from stints as London editor of the Irish Times, was really a backroom figure in D'Olier Street, either as an editorial writer, chief sub and, ultimately, deputy editor when his job was to get the paper out on the streets in the early hours.
And it is here, in his tales of intrigue, double-dealing, deadly political games (played with far more malevolence than anything in Leinster House) and drink that you get the smell of printers ink and almost feel the entertaining vindictiveness that was part of life in the days before newspaper people became self-regarding.
"The editor's office floated on a sea of whiskey," during Bertie Smyllie's era, and little changed in the years that followed. Downey recounts filing copy very late from the Sunningdale conference buoyed up by glasses of brandy from Olivia O'Leary and a wonderful tale of how cub reporter Pat Nolan was arrested for smashing up a pub in Mountrath and wrote-up a court report on the incident which was published in his own paper, the Carlow Nationalist.
Downey has a wonderful sense of the way old-style journalism worked and the book is peppered with delightful anecdotes of the legends of a by-gone era from Raymond Smith asking Paddy Hillery during the Irish negotiations to join the Common Market, "Is fish a dead duck?"; to Sean Kilfeather, a reporter who constantly "misjudged" his capacity for drink and with one too many turned from a witty sports reporter into a sour rent-a-row.
Nor does he spare colleagues. "Fergus Pyle must have been one of the worst editors ever to preside over any considerable newspaper," he writes. So as the wounded Pyle awaits the axe, Downey has a very telling meeting with the "kingmaker" about his own ambition to become the anointed one.
"I met [Douglas] Gageby in his house in Rathgar and wasted a beautiful late-spring afternoon drinking great quantities of rotgut wine.
"Then he said: 'Who is it to be?'
'It has to be [Donal] Foley.'
'That would never do. It would kill him.'
'Then it has to be me,'" answered Downey modestly.
But it never was.
Gageby re-appointed himself in what became known as "The Second Coming". And when he stepped down the second time (according to Jim Downey) he manoeuvred Conor Brady into the editor's chair, where he served with some distinction.
In In My Own Time Jim Downey settles a few scores and while the snub that ultimately ended his Irish Times career does not dominate this book, which is witty, intelligent and informative, it is the central theme of the memoir.
The position of newspaper editor is a kind of feudal appointment, and one of the last jobs for which there is no obvious qualification. It is now impossible to tell whether Downey would have made a good editor or not, but it is curious that this failure became such an important aspect of his life.
For anyone interested in Irish journalism and politics in the last 50 years this book is a treat.
The debonair James Downey can still be seen sometimes standing outside the offices of Independent Newspapers smoking a cigarette and discussing his subject with undimmed intensity. His story is one of a bygone era and, to use that great old cliche, a time whose likes we will never see again.
Liam Collins is author of the recently published The Dark Side of Celebrity
- Liam Collins
Originally published in
