Madam, - I was surprised to read of Kevin Myers's poor opinion of his newspaper's record in relation to the Northern Ireland peace process (An Irishman's Diary, January 14th)
He disparages my affirmation, on stepping down as editor in 2002, that The Irish Times's support for the process was the aspect of my stewardship of which I "felt most proud." He describes a "continuous and unquestioning endorsement" of the peace process, implying a consequent warping of news coverage and a "deterioration of journalistic standards."
These allegations are false and they traduce not just the editorial policy of The Irish Times but the many journalists who have covered the peace process over the years in its columns.
Your diarist has some cheek to allege a "deterioration in journalistic standards," linking this, by implication to the work of colleagues such as Dick Walsh, Frank Millar, Ella Shanahan, Conor O'Clery, Fergus Pyle, Dick Grogan, Mark Brennock, Gerry Moriarty, Mark Hennessy, Dan Keenan and many, many others.
Not to mention the successive News Editors who acted as their immediate editorial supervisors - Eugene McEldowney, John Armstrong, Niall Kiely and Willy Clingan.
Cui Bono, one asks?
Had he set out these criticisms while I was his editor, I might be inclined to accord him marks for courage, if not for intellectual rigour. Indeed, if one day I find myself reading similar sentiments penned by him in regard to the Iraq war policy of his editor at The Sunday Telegraph, I would be similarly inclined.
The peace process has been abused, misused, exploited and violated. But I have yet to read An Irishman's Diary that propounds a preferable alternative to a negotiated and permanent peace.
Incidentally, your diarist's moral certainty and purported clarity of vision are hardly borne out by his own track record.
Praising the "exceedingly brave and difficult" achievements of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, he told us in his Diary of April 15th, 1998, that their "place in history is assured."
"Blessed are the peacemakers," he went on, adding: "Wrong: totally and utterly wrong, wrong, wrong. It's an unsettling, disorienting thing finally to realise that the prediction about which I have written thousands of words turns out to have been complete rubbish." And on May 21st, 1998: "For the first time in 80 years, the people of Ireland tomorrow vote together on their future. That we have got so far is indeed a miracle, and confounds a great deal of what I repeatedly predicted. I wrote nice things about Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, and I will not unwrite that which I have written..."
"I truly believe that Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams want a settlement and an end to violence. I said they didn't before, and I am now convinced that I was wrong...."
Presumably, by now, your diarist believes he was wrong about being wrong. If so, he is probably right. We shall have to see how matters stand the next time he changes his mind.
To suggest that The Irish Times in my editorship was other than consistent in demanding full compliance from the IRA/Sinn Féin is to present a serious untruth. Almost 200 editorials bear that out - they can be checked in the archive. Indeed, the newspaper became caustically dubbed in republican circles - the "Decommissioning Times."
Making peace is and has always been a complex, delicate and difficult process. Reporting it demands a great deal more than polemic. - Yours etc.
CONOR BRADY, Editor Emeritus The Irish Times