Left Archive: Irish Reporter, Issue 16, fourth quarter 1994

Please note that the contents list of all editions can be found at the following website.

To download the above document please click on the following link: IRISH REP

Many thanks to Jim Monaghan for donating this to the Archive.

The Irish Reporter is an interesting magazine, founded in the early 1990s, as the introductory page notes:

…by a group of journalists, academics and community and political activists who felt that a central element was being censored from public discussion of social and political life in Ireland – the national question. We felt that Ireland’s colonial past, and its continuation in the form of the prolonged crisis in the North permeated every aspect of life on the island as a whole and blighted all hope for social and democratic progress while they remained unresolved.

Yet there seemed to have emerged a new orthodoxy in the mainstream media and academic life that this issue – and those people most directly affected by it – were to be ignored, or demonised and marginalised.

Of course they are not the only people and issues marginalised in public debate and we have sought to give a voice also to those normally excluded when such issues as the family, the economy, emigration and the arts, are discussed; women, gays, the unemployed and working class, the rural poor, travellers, emigrants and dissident intellectual views.

Of the particular issue, entitled ‘Peace and Then What?’, which appeared after the first IRA cessation, the preface notes:

This issue of the IP was drawn together at an important turning point – just as the national question reached political centre stag, and the Souther government threw its weight behind the efforts of John Hume and Gerry Adams to bring about an end to the military campaign in the North.

And as part of engaging with that it continues:

We have the view of Mitchel McLaughlin, directly involved in that process, and Bill Rolston, directly affected by it. Importantly, we carry an analysis by Ruairi Og O’Bradaigh, a Republican opposed to the politics of Adams and Hume.

One of the most interesting articles is by Ronan Brady which argues that Conor Cruise O’Brien, Michael McDowell and others played a particularly negative role in terms of vitriol that entered into the public discourse.

It’s worth considering many of the familiar names involved, from Carol Coulter to Declan Kiberd and Mary Cullen.