Sir, - One theme of a very large public meeting held in Dublin this month to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Bobby Sands's 1981 hunger strike was that the media's coverage of those momentous events was a journalistic disgrace. If the author of these remarks, Sunday Business Post, editor, Damien Kiberd, meant to imply that things had changed since that period, he was mistaken.
Half an hour before the meeting was due to start, the Edmund Burke Theatre, TCD, which holds over 500, was full. A second theatre was opened and by 7.50 p.m., it, too, was full, leaving many hundreds of disappointed people outside the college. A widely advertised press conference had been held the day before with two Dail deputies in attendance. Press statements outlining a full weekend of events in Dublin to mark the anniversary had also been delivered to all the media. Yet not a single line graced next day's edition of the paper of record., The Irish Times, and there has been no mention in the paper of those historic events of 20 years ago.
A characteristic of your newspaper is its close attention to anniversaries of any significance. Anything from British imperial adventures to ecumenical, political, social and economic landmarks are faithfully recorded. That the hunger strike was such a landmark is hardly in dispute even if your editorial line was, and is, openly hostile to the 10 men who died.
I would dearly love to learn of a single justification for this studied act of censorship, something that recalls the McCarthyite culture of the Section 31 period which was so damaging to editorial standards in the Irish media. It will require a strong stomach in future to read your columnists moralising about transparency, objectivity, ethics and the like. - Yours, etc.
Kieran Clifford, Dublin 81 Committee, Granby Row, Dublin 1.