THE IRISH PEOPLE ON DCTV
May 6th, 2009 by Conor McCabe
Both myself and Donagh are part of a group called the Alternative Media History Group and over the next few weeks we’ll be working on a series of four programmes for DCTV which will look at various Irish left-wing publications from the 1960s to the 1980s. The first one will focus on The Irish People, the weekly newspaper of Official Sinn Féin (later Sinn Féin the Workers Party), and I’ve stuck the six issues that we’ll be looking at up on www.issuu.com and embedded them below. The show should be broadcast sometime this summer. I’ve put them up so as to enable the contributors easy access to the issues, but also to put them out there for anyone to read.
04 May 1973
11 May 1973
06 Jan 1978
13 Jan 1978
03 Jan 1986
10 Jan 1986
I used to buy the Irish People in the early 70s from a small newsagent shop in Ranelagh on the way walking to work. Its writing style was lively and industrial articles well informed due to trade union connections. I really enjoyed the back page Racing Correspondent with his satirical commentary on party politics. Looking back at your useful reproduction I see that some things don’t change in Irish life:-
* Then it was the sellout of mining rights in Navan. Now it is the foreign exploitation of offshore gas reserves near Erris.
* Then it was big rewards for certain directors of building societies. Now it’s the fatcats throughout the banking and financial sector getting off scot free.
* Then it was rotting prefab classrooms in primary schools. Today it is prefab rot in primary schools.
* Then it was agonised reflections about Labour + Fine Gael getting into a double bed after elections. Today c’est la même chanson. (Gilmore-Kenny Piaf: Je ne regrette rien…)
Irish politics is like a scratched long-playing record that repeats the same tracks over and over.
I was too young to remember the Irish People in the 1970s, and so this was my first time to have a read of it. I was struck by the professional level of investigative journalism, and the fact that, as you point out, the machine keeps on churning the same way.
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