In 2001 Irish Times reporter Carol Coulter wrote a short article outlining allegations of abuse affecting Smyly’s Church of Ireland Children’s Home. The report referred to preparation of a report by the health board. What the report said and indeed whether it was written were never reported. The paper did not investigate further. On 16 January 2003 Coulter commented on: “…the stereotypical treatment of our longest-standing minority, the Protestant community, which has been presented as a homogenous group whose minority status somehow puts it beyond any criticism or analytical discussion”. Coulter, who was from a Protestant small-farming background in the west of Ireland, is now Director of the Child Care Law Reporting Project and Adjunct Professor in the School of Law, NUI Galway. She further observed: “In college I was puzzled, and sometimes irritated, by the distorted and extraordinarily benign view my Catholic friends had of the Protestant community in Ireland… [It did] not accommodate differences in historical origin, geography or class. It glosse[d] over the undeniably unpleasant aspects of this history, like the disproportionately powerful grip a section of the Protestant community held, up into the 1960s, on swathes of the Irish economy, and the religious bigotry which surfaced from time to time. Nor d[id] it accommodate the reality of the economically underprivileged in the community”. Coulter noted of a neighbour’s child sent to a Dublin orphanage, due to her mother being unable to manage financially on a small farm after her husband’s death: “… this girl was now the beneficiary of Protestant ‘charity’, and would be trapped in this exclusive environment at the lowest level of its rigid hierarchy, destined to work at the bottom of the service industry, often run by prosperous members of the same religion”. In the course of researching the untold story of marginalised southern Protestants, I met ‘John’, another victim of this process. He was the institutionalised son of a Protestant unmarried mother. After birth in 1946 in the Church of Ireland Magdalen Home, its associated Nursery Rescue Society farmed him out, literally. John became a free agricultural labourer from the age of five, offered to families masquerading as foster parents, who treated him appallingly. For example, Christmas Day typically consisted of eating scraps separately from his ‘family’, and receipt of a colouring book and crayons as a ‘present’. Approximately six other similar children he knew during the 1950s and 1960s descended into a life of poverty, depression, alcohol and drug misuse. Deeply affected and profoundly depressed by physical and emotional knocks that kept on coming (discovering at age 58 a separated twin sister, adopted in Northern Ireland), only he survived to tell the tale. John’s is one of many such stories, largely hidden. As Coulter noted also in her 2003 piece: “While the backgrounds and situations of the [Roman Catholic] children in […] industrial schools received widespread public discussion, no one thought to inquire about the children in Protestant orphanages. Where did these children come from? Why were they there? If these children did have living family members, why were they in institutions? None of these questions were asked, as if they fell outside the known boundaries of public discourse about Catholic and non-Catholic, rich and poor, privileged and marginalised, into which the other discussion of the children’s institutions fell”. These were, assuredly, important questions, contributed on the basis of personal and professional experience, in a newspaper that was a product of the community about which Coulter wrote. Her reference to “prosperous members of the same religion” could encapsulate the work of 1959-74 Irish Times Chairman Ralph Walker. He was involved in the regulation of unmarried mothers and their abandoned children in the Protestant evangelical Bethany Home, through his legal firm, Hayes and Sons. In addition, his father sat on Bethany’s Managing Committee, while his aunt ran it. The Irish Times The Irish Times is considered one of the more open and accessible newspapers. It was originally the newspaper of business interests within a relatively privileged Protestant and mainly pro-British unionist minority, the remnant of a colonial ruling elite. After partition came into effect in 1922, the numerically declining Protestant population adapted to life in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and Irish nationalist 26-County state. However, residual privileges remained intact, largely preserved by protectionist economic policies. Despite dire predictions, Roman Catholics generally had no interest in doing to Protestants what had been done, historically, to them, and continued to tolerate widespread employment discrimination. Under its last Protestant Editor Douglas Gageby (1963-74 and 1977-86) and in line with the progressive evolution of southern Protestant attitudes, the paper became a recognisably Irish nationalist, liberal and also pluralist newspaper. Gageby’s Irish Times’ nationalism and republicanism were nurtured as he grew up in 1930s Belfast. He was influenced by the “broad, generous doctrine” he encountered in editor Frank Gallagher’s new Irish Press newspaper. Under Gageby, the paper experienced a steadily rising circulation, attracting liberal Catholic, left-wing, and republican readers. They were disenchanted with the southern state’s facilitation of the Roman Catholic Church’s overweening conservative influence. In helping to effect change, the newspaper became a recognisable pillar in the post-1960s modernisation of southern Irish society. It was not a seamless transition. When the Northern Ireland Troubles broke out, then managing director Major Thomas McDowell and ‘friends on the board’ intrigued against Gageby and some of his reporters. After offering his services to the British government, in October 1969 McDowell advised the British Ambassador that Gageby, though “an excellent man”, was on Northern Ireland matters “a renegade or white nigger”. When news of this racist-sectarian epithet emerged in 2003, McDowell denied he had used it, though it is clear he had betrayed the newspaper’s trust. In 1974, partly in response to political volatility introduced by the conflict, the Irish Times Trust was set up, largely under McDowell’s control. Existing directors, including Gageby, were bought out. Gageby retired as editor, though he came back in 1977, due to an editorial and financial crisis. The Irish Times still operates within
