Sir, - As a former writer of An Irishman's Diary (Class of 194849) and a fairly consistent fan of Kevin Myers - by which I mean, of course, that he often expresses views with which I find myself in general agreement - I feel I must protest about his comments on that column in what he calls "the good old days". Apart from everything else, it is an insult to great journalists such as the late Patrick Campbell, Brian Inglis, Seamus Kelly and Tony Olden, to name but a few; in fact it is probably true to say that the Irishman's Diary produced, or discovered, a very high proportion of extremely talented writers over the years.
When I joined the newspaper in 1940, the Diary was a contributed column to which any staff member could contribute. The pay was 3s 6d (about 17p) per paragraph. It had been started in 1927 by the legendary R. M. Smyllie and was then being edited by his deputy, Alec Newman. Never in my day - nor, I think, for a long time before that - did it contain items about the fictitious Distressed Widows of Pembroke and District Unionist Association or any of its real-life equivalents, nor did it ever, so far as I am aware, include lists of hyphenated titled nonentities who had just arrived in Dublin from Britain.
It is true that when I was writing the Diary, Barbara Dickson used to phone all the top hotels and check through the list of members of the gentility and nobility who had arrived in Dun Laoghaire on the mail boat, but this was for the Social and Personal column (known to us as the "fash") and not for the Diary, and it was at a time when the circulation of The Irish Times was wobbling along well under the 30,000 mark and the paper was read almost exclusively by Protestant West-Britons. This was one of the things that Smyllie and, to a far greater extent, men like Alec Newman and Lionel Fleming set about changing. One of the eventual changes was to turn the Irishman's Diary into a personal column, initially written, though still signed Quidnunc, by Paddy Campbell, arguably the funniest Irish writer of our time. - Yours, etc., Tony Gray,
Crossways, Crookham Village, Hampshire, England.