This newspaper’s stance on Hume and Adams
This paper’s stance on the SDLP leader’s talks with Adams remains an open sore for many
Liam Collins remembers a newsroom where provocative columnists took a hardline position on the most popular politician in Ireland
AENGUS Fanning came striding down the newsroom of the Sunday Independent with a thunderous look on his face. Leaning over the desk, he hissed through gritted teeth: “Why did you give Eamon’s copy [column] to the lawyer?” He didn’t have to say ‘Dunphy’: there was only one Eamon that mattered in those tension-filled months in the late summer and autumn of 1993, when the Sunday Independent was dominated by a bare-knuckle campaign attacking John Hume’s dialogue with the hated and feared figure of Gerry Adams. In those hot and heavy times, the views published in the paper Fanning edited were a national talking point. Twenty-seven years later, in the week that Hume died, they were still a source of considerable controversy — and opprobrium. In the edition of August 8, 1993, Dunphy dissected what he described as the “cant” of John Hume, the most popular politician in Ireland. “Dangerous cant, designed to fool us and the watching world as to the real nationalist agenda which is to force the unionists by political means to submit to our demands,” he wrote. “This is the present policy of our government… Mr John Hume being the principal international enforcer, licensed to speak to the world on our behalf, the political bomber flying over unionist heads trying to kill them. Hume has stated with commendable clarity, which for him is unusual, that if Britain and the unionists don’t do business with him, they will have to deal with the IRA, with physical rather than political force.” He may not have meant it literally, but the piece was incendiary. What were later described as “vicious” and “personal” attacks on the leader of the SDLP pitted the paper and its formidable phalanx of columnists, including Professor John A Murphy, Shane Ross, Eilis O’Hanlon and others, against what Dunphy often contemptuously referred to as ‘Official Ireland’. “The Sunday Independent’s persistent and vicious attacks on John Hume were a serious mistake, an absolute disgrace and damaged the reputation of Irish journalism,” said the influential former diplomat Sean Donlon in a letter to The Irish Times in 2015. “Who can forget the scalding attacks in the Sunday Independent in 1993 when half a dozen articles attacked John Hume, culminating in a nasty cartoon which depicted blood dripping from John’s hands?” wrote Belfast SDLP councillor Tim Attwood in the same edition. Anne Harris, who succeeded her late husband Aengus Fanning as editor of the paper, responded with a letter the following day: “The Sunday Independent never published a cartoon depicting blood dripping from John Hume’s hands.” It wasn’t the first time — or the last — that the same cartoon was cited in evidence against this newspaper. In a 2008 interview with Jason O’Toole in Hot Press, Fanning looked back at that time and said: “We were traduced and misrepresented and lies were told. For example, there was supposed to be a cartoon of John Hume in which he was depicted with blood on his hands. That went into legend. There was no such cartoon. A couple of years later, I said to him, ‘John, there was no such cartoon’. And John said, ‘Well, I didn’t see it either, but somebody told me about it’.” While there was no dripping blood, there are those who remain adamant that the dark shading on Hume’s right hand in that illustration first used with Dunphy’s column of August 8 represented a bloodied hand. While the criticism of John Hume was frequently fierce, it was never stated in any of the coverage that he had “blood on his hands”. The artist who produced the illustration, Wendy Shea, said last week that there was no intention on her part to give that impression. “It was not blood,” she insisted. “I am humiliated and horrified that anyone could think that. I admired John Hume, I copied it from a photograph and I would never in a fit have done anything to harm John Hume, because I admired him.” I was a staff journalist with the Sunday Independent at that time and I cannot remember a single complaint about that drawing then — and the same illustration was used prominently on two further occasions in 1993. The outrage came subsequently.
IT should be remembered that Hume’s dialogue with Adams was going on against the background of IRA outrages at home and abroad, including the Warrington bomb, where the IRA killed Jonathan Ball (3) and Tim Parry (12) outside McDonald’s on a Saturday afternoon the previous February. Now Hume, the acknowledged high priest of peace, had entered into some form of discussions with Adams — president of Sinn Féin and a man widely regarded as a director of terrorism, and the personification of the ‘ballot box in one hand and the Armalite in the other’ strategy articulated by his publicity enforcer, Danny Morrison. It was a time when spindoctors waited at the newsstands in O’Connell Street at 9pm on a Saturday night when the paper hit the streets to see what Dunphy, Terry Keane, Gene Kerrigan and other contributors such as Colm Tóibín, Anthony Clare and Tony Cronin were saying, so they could report back to their masters. While some columnists, particularly Dunphy, could well be described as intemperate and provocative, Hume was by no means the only one in their sights at the time. A polemic on the Tánaiste, Dick Spring, earlier that year concluded: “He is a disgrace to the country and, to borrow a phrase from Brendan Behan, ‘a boll***s of the highest order’.” Other subjects for scorn included Mary Robinson, Michael D Higgins, Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds and others pillars of society outside the political sphere. Looking back on almost 30 years with the Sunday Independent, I can best describe those days as being part of a cult. We were all in it together and everyone seemed against us. There was no room for half-hearted opinions or mundane commentary: selling newspapers was a priority and the Sunday Independent was very successful at doing that. The newspaper radiated a kind of mystique, its columnists lunching with influential people in Chapter One or
‘We did not publish a cartoon depicting blood on his hands’
drinking Champagne with the ‘movers and shakers’ in the Shelbourne Hotel on a Friday night. The secrets of the inner circles of Dublin society were weekly fodder for the Keane Edge, topped off with ‘Sweetie’, the provocative codename known to refer to Charlie Haughey, who had not long been deposed as Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil. The reality was that the paper was put together by a small group of very hard-working people in a fairly seedy office on the third floor of Independent House, a Dickensian warren on Middle Abbey Street with a giant printing works in the basement which sent a shudder through the building when it began the laborious process of printing the paper at around 7pm on a Saturday. Although I knew Dunphy from social events and latenight dens like George’s Bistro and Joy’s, he and the other ‘stars’ of the paper rarely appeared in the office. The alchemy of what appeared on a Sunday morning was tightly controlled by Fanning and his two deputies, Anne Harris and Willie Kealy. The political direction of the paper was not a matter for general discussion. During the week, newspaper cuttings, tapes of radio interviews and other material was assembled and delivered on Friday to Dunphy, a creature of the night then living in a mews house on Heytesbury Lane. Provided with this ammunition, he would sometimes labour through the night and his column for the back page was delivered to the office on Saturday morning by taxi. “Since I brought Eamon Dunphy back to the Sunday Independent in April 1986, I have to say that, at his best, he produced superb dissenting journalism, that I encouraged and defended him, and that some of his work was a landmark in Irish journalism,” said Fanning in a confidential memo to the board of Independent News and Media (INM, owner of the Sunday Independent) in 2003. It was this “dissenting journalism” — not least the newspaper’s coverage of Hume-Adams — that is still vivid today. And Dunphy was by no means alone in his crusades, for when the Sunday Independent decided to tackle an issue, the kitchen sink was thrown at it. “If you look at the treatment of, for example, John Hume by the Sunday Independent during the early stage of the peace talks in Northern Ireland, it was an absolute disgrace,” said Denis O’Brien, the billionaire businessman who later ousted the O’Reilly family in a bitter and hugely expensive battle for INM. In Matt Cooper’s 2015 book, The Maximalist: The Rise and Fall of Tony O’Reilly (2015), O’Brien added: “Here was a man who had devoted his life to the pursuance of peace on the island and he was vilified. It took a huge toll on his health. There were many others who were subjected to poisonous attacks.”
JOHN Hume was different from any other target of ‘Official Ireland’. He was beloved of the Irish people, regarded as a prophet rather than a politician. He had given his life to the cause of peace and stood up for non-violent protest representing the majority of Irish people who were appalled at what was being done in their name at home and abroad by the bombers and death squads of the IRA. But that, in essence, was the problem. Why was he secretly talking to Adams, the leader of what the Sunday Independent insisted on calling ‘Sinn Féin/IRA’? Speaking for the Protestant community, Shane Ross wrote: “Mr Adams’s friends can now terrify them physically, while Mr Hume’s friends can intimidate them politically… The language of Mr Hume is now the language of Mr Adams.” But Hume was a formidable opponent. He had a ‘hotline’ to influential figures in Dublin, London and Washington, not to mention a long-standing friendship with O’Reilly. If the doors of the political, business, social and media establishment were open to his initiatives in the summer of 1993, there was cold comfort from the Sunday Independent. “John Hume has seduced many with his unctuous rhetoric and disingenuous proposals for peace,” Dunphy wrote, again on August 8. “The mark of his failure as a politician is that while orchestrating the nationalist consensus, he has alienated and rendered abject the Protestant people he and we must make our peace with in the end.” Mark Durkan, chairman of the SDLP, later to become Hume’s successor as MP and leader of the SDLP, tried to hit back. He submitted a rightof-reply article castigating the role of what he called the ‘Indo Unionists’ at the paper and describing Dunphy as “a bitter, ranting poisonous pen columnist with an unbridled hatred of John Hume”. He further alleged that the vilification of Hume was effectively setting up the leaders of the SDLP as targets for assassination. Even though Durkan’s contribution was as intemperate as Dunphy’s, I and a senior executive of the paper argued it should be used as a counterbalance to the hostile coverage. But Fanning said no — he wouldn’t talk to Durkan or appease him in any way. Instead, Hume’s background manoeuvring became part of the narrative. “Hume has been making representations to this newspaper at editorial and proprietorial level in an attempt to influence what we write. It is a covert attempt at censorship,” wrote Dunphy. “Having failed, Hume’s SDLP colleague Seamus Mallon and his party’s general secretary Mark Durkan went public on Morning Ireland and in the newspapers to claim that Dr [Conor Cruise] O’Brien, Professor Murphy and I were inciting Protestant terrorists to commit acts of violence against them,” added Dunphy. John A Murphy, Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork, whose opposition to Hume-Adams was reasoned and acknowledged Hume’s enormous influence, wrote that “quite independently of one and other” a number of Sunday Independent columnists “have made a sustained, critical and sometimes pungent analysis of John Hume and the SDLP’s political strategies”. Most weeks, one contributor stood alone: Professor Ronan Fanning (no relation to Aengus). A friend of Hume’s, he defended the Hume-Adams initiative — and was soon criticised by Dunphy for doing so. The respected journalist and author Ed Moloney has also added to the myth-mak
ing with a piece he wrote in 2015, when the issue became current in media circles once again, after Anne Harris wrote a piece in defence of Tony O’Reilly in The Irish Times.
Referring back to 1993, Moloney wrote: “Hardly a weekend passed for at least a month or two without the paper publishing a series of violent and often offensive articles targeting Hume for his naivete, misplaced ambition, stupidity, gullibility and credulity for entertaining the notion that Adams and the IRA could be talked out of violence.”
Moloney accused Eoghan Harris of “leading the charge”, adding: “Some weekends the Sunday Indo could have wallpapered the average Irish living room with diatribes against Hume.”
All fine, perhaps, except for this: Harris did not write for the Sunday Independent at the time, he was a columnist with the Sunday Times.
In that Hot Press interview, Aengus Fanning teased out his thought process as an editor, which those who worked with him at the time can verify as his style.
“I was driven mainly — and I have to admit this — by my desire to have well-written, intelligent, challenging copy in the paper... Now, it happened to coincide with my own general view as well. One of the strengths at the time was the support of the proprietor, Tony O’Reilly, who was absolutely steadfast when all sorts of efforts were being made — on both sides of the Atlantic and Irish Sea — for him to intervene and change things. He was absolutely rock solid. And that was not an easy thing for a man in his position.”
Publishing stories, pictures and comment that would “sell papers” was Fanning’s mantra. He had an obsession with sales, believing it was the only measurement of success in the newspaper business. But his editorship was also marked, from the very beginning, by an abhorrence of violence, which may or may not have stemmed from growing up in Tralee, the son of a Northern Irish Presbyterian mother.
Fanning did not quibble when Jason O’Toole, in Hot Press, suggested some of the coverage of Hume was “vicious” and “personal”, but he added: “I’m not saying it was wrong — it was the way he [Dunphy] chose to do it. He felt very strongly about it at the time. We were all concerned about entering into negotiations with the IRA and also the idea that we must have peace at any price.
“Eamon did that in his own unique and individual style. He was one of our top contributors at the time and I stand behind him in what he said. Even though I was broadly critical of the talks with the IRA, I mightn’t have agreed with him to that extent but it’s not really the job of an editor to censor his contributors, as far as it is at all possible.
It’s an old-fashioned idea of liberalism, one that, strangely, many journalists appear not to understand.”
IF the paper was under pressure to recant, it didn’t show in the October 3 issue, which had seven pages of news and comment under the heading ‘Hume on a Tightrope’, at a time when the SDLP leader was about to depart on a two-week trade mission to the United States.
“In supping with the devil John Hume has been using too short a spoon... I believe he is driven on by a passionate desire to bring peace in our time... But then so was Neville Chamberlain,” wrote Conor Cruise O’Brien.
“Some would see it a black malign scenario involving the political transformation of Gerry Adams and implosion of John Hume with devastating consequences for constitutional nationalism,” wrote the Progressive Democrat TD Michael McDowell.
In his spot on the back page, Dunphy wrote: “In plain English, the proposition Hume laid at our door before bolting to the US last weekend was that the Irish government engage in dialogue with the IRA while they continue to wage their terrorist campaign against the Protestant community in the North.”
But the blanket criticism was now tempered by two prominent articles on the same page, one by Ronan Fanning and the other by Richard Kearney. Both put the case for Hume-Adams. “The mockers are in full cry this weekend. They have reason to hope that the history of John Hume’s leadership has turned into rubbish and that his renown — and with that renown the future of the Hume-Adams talks — have fallen and will fail,” wrote Ronan Fanning in a defence of the process.
In that private memo to the board in 2003, Fanning described Dunphy’s writing as “responsible for much of the criticism directed against the Sunday Independent”, but he added: “The irony is that much of the controversy helped to sell the paper. An exception, I believe, was the autumn of 1993 when Eamon’s outspoken attacks on John Hume cost us sales. In fairness, we should also remind ourselves that a lot of the criticism over the years is no more than media begrudgery.”
Hume’s death last week brought with it a reminder that the episode remains, for some, an open sore.
Paying tribute to Hume, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern reflected on the 1990s’ controversy, but added: “A story many people might not know is that years later Aengus Fanning, the late editor, rang me because he wanted to make up with John. I arranged so that the three of us could meet in Fagan’s [pub, in Drumcondra]. It turned into a great day of conversation. Everything was made up, not so much with an apology but with friendly chats.”
Before that encounter, in March 2001, Fanning interviewed Hume in Derry, the pair happily posing for a photograph together. There was no mention in the article of Hume-Adams or that tumultuous period in modern Irish history.
In a 1996 interview with Joe Jackson, Dunphy described his columns as “so self-righteous ... monotonous ... predictable”. Dunphy, who had also made his peace with Hume, added: “None of this means I am taking back — or ashamed of — what I did in the Sunday Independent. I am not.”
A quarter of a century later, Sinn Féin has supplanted the SDLP in Northern Ireland, as several of the commentators in the Sunday Independent predicted.
But the peace process that the Hume-Adams dialogue launched did lead, with the help and dedication of others, to the Good Friday Agreement. Hume — and the many who hailed his achievements last week — will have seen the eclipse of the party he once led as a price worth paying for a lasting peace.
Hume was a formidable opponent. He had a ‘hotline’ to influential figures in Dublin, London and Washington