Back in the Irish Times

I have had two letters published in the Irish Times this month. The first was to correct the assertion, made by the wife of President Higgins, that Gustav Holst was German. The second, which appeared on Friday, was part of an ongoing correspondence on the need to develop and expand the Irish rail system. 

A third, which was not used, complained about the woke decision, taken recently, to change the name of the paper’s most read column, An Irishman’s Diary, to just An Irish Diary. I pointed out that in the past, when the piece, which appears daily, was written by a woman, it became An Irishwoman’s Diary. So what was the problem? What even was the issue? But the editor – he, she or they – was unmoved. 

So be it. The editor is always right. 

The plain fact is that I am unreasonably pleased to be back on the letters page, next to the diary. Many years ago, when I was but a lad, I was on the staff of the Irish Times, as a correspondent in Belfast and Brussels, as well as Dublin. For a time, before taking the rash decision to become a freelance in Germany, I even got to write the Irishman’s Diary, once winning the praise of Maeve Binchy, then the paper’s representative in London, for a piece that, as it happens, made reference to the antiquated Belfast-Dublin railway. 

Being part of a community, however defined, is important. Though an Ulster Protestant, I have always felt Irish, not British. The only prize ever awarded to me at school, when I was just 14, was A Book of Ireland, a wonderful compendium edited by the great Frank O’Connor. And my letters, slight though they are, make me feel connected to Ireland again after an absence of 45 years. 

Today’s “Irish Diary,” by Frank McNally, a Monaghan man both learned and funny, was written to mark the retirement of Malachy Logan, the paper’s veteran sports editor, after 48 years of service. Logan was “knocked down” (the Irish equivalent of “banging out” – the custom, started by printers, of giving departing colleagues a high-decibel farewell) by the assembled staff, most of whom had yet to be born when he first found employment. I wish him well in his retirement while noting, with a certain irony, that I never met him because I was already gone when he first arrived. 

Tempus fugit, as Virgil wrote when a columnist for, I think, the Roman Times. 

My years at the Irish Times were eventful. I covered the Troubles in Northern Ireland for three years, witnessing some of the worst atrocities, leaving in the summer of 1974 shortly after the first power-sharing Executive was brought down by the Ulster Workers’ Strike, an insurrection enthusiastically backed by the future Nobel Peace Prize winner, David Trimble. 

In Brussels, I found myself immersed in a stiflingly tedious sequence of agriculture councils that always seemed to end in the same thing – another penny, or two pence, on the price of a pound of butter or a litre of milk. The small coterie of Irish reporters who attended such gatherings were obliged to affect excitement or a sense of shock when things did not go our way. The fun, such as it was – and it was – lay elsewhere, in the “discovery” of Europe, which included visits by way of the Trans-Europe Express to Luxembourg, Strasbourg and, when summits rolled round, the various capitals of the “Nine”.

Ireland had joined the EEC the previous year, riding on the coattails of Britain. But whereas successive British governments made clear that they weren’t prepared to go along with the system and rather regretted their decision to join, the Irish were thrilled. There wasn’t anything about Europe that they didn’t like, and they very quickly made friends. By the time the UK made good on its threat to leave, the Republic had evolved from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to being one of the richest, with a per capita income of which the North of England could only dream. 

But all good things come to an end. And when my time was up and I had to return to Dublin, the prospect dismayed me, so when an opportunity arose to freelance in Bonn for the Guardian and Observer, I seized it with both hands. 

Regrets? I’ve had a few. But regrets are a part of life, and what lay ahead, after two years in Bonn, was seven years on the Financial Times, including spells in Amsterdam and Jerusalem, followed by time served, often riotously, on the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times. 

If I hadn’t left the Irish Times, my son and grandson would not exist. I met my first wife in London. And if I hadn’t worked at the Sunday Times, I wouldn’t have met my second wife, Louisa, an American, and not spent 14 years in New York. Nor would she and I now be living contentedly in semi-retirement in rural France. The rubik’s cube of our lives would have twisted differently. 

But I have always had a gradh, or sentimental affection, for Dublin and Ireland, which I feel I deserted back in 1977 in the vainglorious conceit that I was now a European and thus greater that the sum of my parts. So if I get to contribute now and again to the national conversation by way of the Irish Times letters page, I am grateful – though not, as you will appreciate, beyond words. 

I hope you will agree with me that letters pages generally are so much better and more civilised than mere “comments” left below the line on online news sites. You have to think for a bit before committing yourself to a letter that bears your name and address. And thinking, as Donal Foley, my news editor at the old Irish Times, used to tell me over a pint or three of Guinness in the snug of Bowe’s Bar, is frequently beneficial. 

In the meantime, as letters to Irish newspapers often used to end, is mise le meas – I am respectfully yours, 

Walter Ellis 

Plusquellec 

France