My thanks to several readers who have pointed out that the “libelous” newspaper Con Houlihan edited in his early years – and that Myles na gCopaleen may have plagiarised on occasion – was called The Taxpayers’ News.
It was a monthly publication based in his native Castle Island (I spell it with two words, as Con always did) in the late 1950s; not in Castlemartyr, where a decade earlier he had been expelled from secondary school, for offences also related to journalism.
Houlihan had no part in the libel that shut the paper down. That was the work of title’s proprietor, one Charlie Lenihan, a local Citizen Kane who was also a member of the county council.
It began as slander, in fact, when at a meeting of the council’s housing committee in July 1957, Lenihan committed grievous verbal harm to a fellow member, Michael L O’Connell. The latter happened to be a local solicitor. Notwithstanding which, as the High Court later heard, Lenihan expressed the opinion that O’Connell was “lower than a tinker”, adding: “As a politician he is a crook, and in his profession he is a crook.”
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Lenihan withdrew this at a trial in which the High Court president lamented that if an apology had been made earlier, no case would have been necessary.
Unfortunately, in the interim, the offending sentence had been repeated in the Taxpayers’ News, turning slander into libel.
Again, the editor was innocent. As Houlihan explained in a 2011 column for the Evening Herald, local printers had been (understandably) nervous about producing the paper. It was printed instead in Dublin, to which city Con caught the first train from Tralee every publication Monday with the copy.
On the fatal month in question, however, Lenihan had been the one to bring the paper to Dublin, adding the libelous amendments en route.
Even then, interestingly, the High Court president believed the plaintiff had suffered no “actual damage” because as he put it: “His clients were mainly country people, who would be shrewd enough to assess the value to be paid to utterances of this kind.”
But perhaps some less sensible urbanites had read it as well because the solicitor was nevertheless deemed worthy of damages. The judge awarded £250 plus costs.
Houlihan meanwhile resigned as editor, over the interference with his copy.
As for the paper, he wrote in 2011, it “lingered on for a few more months and died quietly”.
Perhaps it did more than linger, because the court case was in May 1958 and almost a year after, back in Dublin, the Irishman’s Diarist was still able to give the paper a rave review. In a column of April 1959, he began: “Last weekend my Observer and Spectator were left alone, neglected and unread. There was no offence intended – it was simply that I got completely immersed in a joyful romp through two issues of a publication called The Taxpayers’ News.”
Then as now, of course, the Diary was synonymous with unimpeachable ethics in crediting sources. As Houlihan acknowledged in 2011: “Seamus Kelly, Quidnunc in The Irish Times, gave us the occasional mention and we were delighted.”
But not all columnists were as generous, apparently. Houlihan again: “Occasionally, Myles [na gCopaleen] lifted pieces from me. That was flattering.”
It may have been as much the loss of a talented editor as the libel itself that closed the paper.
If not quite in the William Randolph Hearst bracket, Lenihan had deep pockets.
His father had made a fortune in Alaska, enough for the son to buy a farm and mansion at home, as well as a butcher’s shop and dairy business.
He stood for the Dáil too and just missed out, according to Houlihan, because of a distaste for proportional representation: “He would have won that election handsomely if he didn’t despise number-two votes and told people who offered what to do with them.”
In its brief existence, The Taxpayers’ News achieved the distinction of giving John B Keane his print debut. By contrast, it also published Chekhov, Maupassant, and DH Lawrence: “This had two merits: they were great stories and we hadn’t to pay for them because the authors were dead.”
Although his had been “Castle Island’s first and probably last publication”, Houlihan believed every town should have its own magazine or newspaper.
He claimed this was a universal ambition, even in the 21st century: “Every journalist that I know in Dublin would love to go home and start a newspaper in Castle Island or Caherciveen or Newcastle West, but the tide is running against them.”
The real-life Myles, Brian O’Nolan, had long cherished such a dream, according to his biographer, but never realised it. His friend and contemporary, Patrick Kavanagh, famously had. The Monaghan poet’s newspaper didn’t even need a town.
As its title suggested, Kavanagh’s Weekly was a vehicle for his and his (bankrolling) brother Peter’s opinions, which were many and fierce.
The opening issue hit Dublin in April 1951 “like a blast from a sawn-off shotgun”. But it wasn’t sued for libel somehow, and Patrick would later claim it had sold well enough.
It ran for 13 issues and only closed, he implied, because of the disappointing quality of the readership.