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Life
1947- ; b. 30 March, b. Leicester, son of an
Irish doctor and his Irish wife; raised in England; lost his father
in teenage years [aetat. 15] while at Ratcliffe Coll., a Catholic
minor public school; continued with assistance from Education Authority
and the shcool; accepted by UCD [Dublin] as part of foreign student
quota on 2 “A” levels (GCE) after his mother wrote to
Prof. James Hogan, a family friend, 1969; grad. in History; worked
on Newsight and then at RTÉ; journalist in Belfast
during the 1970s, returning to Dublin to take up the “Irishman’s
Diary” column at The Irish Times, frequently devoted
to remembrance of the forgotten Irish soldiers of World War I and
victims of republican violence both in the War of Independence (1919-21)
and the Northern Irish crisis; presented Challenging Times
on RTE in the 1990s; served as member of Film Classification Appeals
Board [ie. reformed censorship]; travelled to Split and Sarajevo
for The Irish Times, June 1992; m. Rachel, 1995; issued a
first novel, Banks of Green Willows (2001), dealing with
the Bosnian tragedy; |
issued apology for remarks on mercenary motives of unmarried mothers made in the “Irishman’s Diary” (Irish Times, 8 Feb. 2005) - employing the word ‘bastards’; subject of voluntary printed apology by self and another by the then-Editor, Geraldine Kennedy; moved to the Irish Independent; issued Watching the Door (2006), a memoir of reporting on Belfast in the 1970s; also More Myers: An Irishman’s Diary, 1997-2006 (2007); subject of allegations of incitement to hatred against sub-Saharan Africans by Irish Immigrant Council, July 2008; dropped as The Sunday Times [Irish edn.] columnist following a campaign against supposed anti-feminist remarks around the equal-pay for women BBC controversy, July 2017 [‘Sorry, ladies - equal pay has to be earned’]; received apology from RTÉ for false representation as anti-semitic; returned to British journalism in late 2019; lives in Co. Wicklow; br. in law of big-house presenter Anna Nolan. |
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Works| Journalism (Irishman’s Diary) |
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| Fiction |
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| Autobiography |
| Miscellaneous |
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Criticism
Shirley Kelly, ‘Columnist Turns Novelist’, interview with
Kevin Myers, in Books Ireland (Dec. 2001), p.321-22 [infra];
Ruth Scurr, review of Kevin Myers, Banks of Green Willow, in Times
Literary Supplement, 7 Dec. 2001, p.21.); Rory Brennan, review of
Watching the Door, in Books Ireland (May 2007), p.105 [infra].
See An Answer to Revisionists: Eamon Ó Cuív, TD and others launch Sean Moylan’s Memoir (Aubane Hist. Soc. 2005), 118pp., in which Ó Cuív assails ‘trained’ historian Kevin Myers in a short introduction; and see also Martin Mansergh’s Irish Times column in Dec. 2005, asking whether Kevin Myers is still necessary?
Wikipedia - update Feb. 2020: [...]
At the end of July 2017, Myers contributed an article entitled ‘Sorry, ladies - equal pay has to be earned’ to the Irish edition of The Sunday Times about the BBC gender pay gap controversy. He speculated: ‘Is it because men are more charismatic performers? Because they work harder? Because they are more driven? Possibly a bit of each’ and that men might be paid more because they ‘work harder, get sick less frequently and seldom get pregnant’.
Myers further alleged that Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz are higher paid than other female presenters because they are Jewish. He wrote: ‘Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity’. The editor of the Irish edition, Frank Fitzgibbon, issued a statement saying in part ‘This newspaper abhors anti-Semitism and did not intend to cause offence to Jewish people’. Martin Ivens, editor of The Sunday Times, said the article should not have been published. Ivens and Fitzgibbon apologised for publishing it. After complaints from readers and the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the article was removed from the website. It has been announced by the newspaper that Myers will not write for The Sunday Times again.
Myers was defended by the chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, Maurice Cohen, who said that Myers was not antisemitic, but had rather ‘inadvertently stumbled into an antisemitic trope. ... Branding Kevin Myers as either an antisemite or a Holocaust denier is an absolute distortion of the facts.’ Myers apologised for this article on radio, saying that ‘it is over for me professionally as far as I can see’, and that ‘I think they [Jewish people] are the most gifted people who have ever existed on this planet and civilisation owes an enormous debt to them - I am very, very sorry that I should have so offended them.’
Media reporting the 2017 controversy drew attention to a 2009 column in the Sunday Independent and Belfast Telegraph opposing laws against Holocaust denial. Despite accepting that ‘the Nazis planned the extermination of the Jewish people’ and that ‘millions of Jews were murdered’, Myers wrote ‘I’m a holocaust denier’ by making hair-splitting objections to statements about the Holocaust: namely that the figure of six million Jews killed was false in that it was approximate, not exact; and that the label ‘holocaust’ was etymologically inaccurate in that, unlike a sacrificial holocaust, most victims were ‘not burnt in the ovens in Auschwitz’ but died by gunshot, overwork, or starvation. The column was subsequently removed from the Sunday Independent and Belfast Telegraph websites. The Observer referred to ‘Holocaust denier Kevin Myers’, later adding a footnote ‘Kevin Myers says he is not a Holocaust denier. He is not, in the usual sense of that term.’ In February 2018, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland by majority decision upheld an objection to a Morning Ireland presenter’s description of Myers as a Holocaust denier: ‘While noting that Mr. Myers had described himself as a ’Holocaust denier’ in a typically provocative newspaper article that he had written, it was evident from the article as a whole that his description did not in fact amount to a statement denying the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazi regime. Rather, the article was a comment on how language is used and the criminalisation of individuals or groups who engage in Holocaust denial.’
[Note: The passage quoted here contains ftns. 20-27 and 1-3 [+3] - here excluded. The page is evidently a work-in-progress with reference links which inadvertantly open the relevant pages in the current window rather than separate windows.]
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Quotations
‘Dead Men Walking’: review of Martin McFarland, 50
Dead Men Walking (London: Blake 1997), 248pp., in Spectator
([during] May 1997], ‘A most striking feature of McGartland’s
tale is the intellectual and moral triviality of those he was informing
on, IRA leaders for whom the murder of insignificant members of the security
forces was in reality no more than an index of their determination to
get what they wanted. Tree-felling could have been just as efficacious.
The creation of a united Ireland is totally unrelated to the activities
of the IRA, which were based on primitive notions of organisation and
personal gratification through violence, as if a terrorist killing-contest
could achieve political victory, rather as goals win a football match.’
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‘An Irishman’s Diary’, in The Irish Times (10 Oct. 1996) |
O YOU know that this State now discriminates in favour of terrorism? It is already the law of the land that provided a terrorist murders with a revolver, he cannot be extradited to another jurisdiction. Now the law says that suspected drug offenders (but nobody else) may be held for questioning for a week. Somebody caught with a marijuana joint can be interrogated for a week, and be extradited to Northern Ireland on suspicion of smoking a joint there; but a man responsible for the Lisburn bombing, or involved in the planning of the bombing off London with 10 tons of high explosives, would have to be released within three days of his arrest; and if he had admitted to a handgun murder outside the Republic, he could not then be extradited. Does that not make your blood run cold, that we haven’t permitted or even created legal loopholes for IRA killers, but not cocaine users, to wriggle through? Does it not chill your heart that there has been no outcry about this? Does it not put ice in your veins that this legal situation appears to represent the political will of the Irish people? The white powdered cocaine which you snort up your nose for purely personal pleasure gives you a week of interrogation; the white powdered sugar which you use to dismantle London, or the Channel Tunnel, gets you three days maximum. Then goodday sir, sorry to have been troubling you. Misrepresented Yet merely to state this simple truth is widely seen as backing for British policy or for unionism. It is neither; nor is to deplore Bloody Sunday of 1972 or the activities of the Shankill Butchers tantamount to supporting the Provos. Yet such misrepresentation is a norm in discussing the role of violence today and in the past. Recently, for example, David Moane of Dublin, following a recent critical diary about Michael Collins, said that as usual I displayed my usual wilful ignorance of "the history of Irish nationalism in (my) attempt to justify the imperialism that oppressed it." This is pathetic stuff, unworthy of the playground logic of 10 year olds. I do not and did not justify British Government misdeeds. It is possibly beyond David Moane’s powers to grasp more than one point at a time, but in the very article which prompted his letter. I specifically said my criticisms of Collins were "not to justify the crass and blundering idiocies of the British Government, nor the brutalities and homicides of its agents." To transmute that into a justification of British imperialism requires a rare alchemy. Murder justified He offers the knowing justification that one detective, Daniel Hoey, had pointed out Sean Mac Diarmada for the firing squad. The allegation without a source note, was first made in Tim Pat Coogan’s biography on Collins. It is meaningless. Mac Diarmada was a paid organiser of the Irish Volunteers, and had been one of the signatories to the Proclamation; with his polio limp he was easily identifiable, and made no attempt to conceal himself. Gerard Kenny accused me of not answering questions asked by other readers, notably Lieut. Col Duggan on August 27th, 1995. August 27th, 1995, was a Sunday. The Duggan letter appeared the year before. No answer In fact, more than 10 men were murdered. The man who shot O’Neill, Herbert Woods, an ex-soldier, was it is believed tortured after surrendering to the IRA. He and his uncle, John Hornibrook, were then murdered and their bodies secretly buried. Other killings followed, and as Tim Pat Coogan acknowledges, many Protestants fled Cork. To deny this reality is like denying the reality of the massacre of the Catholic McMahon family, very possibly by policemen, in Belfast a few weeks before. Do we never learn that there is no clinical use to violence within divided communities? It always unleashes emotions, hatreds and expectations outside the control of those who initiate it. It always ends with whimpering men being dragged from their homes and shot, whether that home is in Srebenica or in Short Strand. It is the one enduring truth we should take from our history: yet it is the lesson we ignore each generation. |
— Posted on Facebook by Ruth Dudley Edwards,
22.02.2020. |
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Kevin Myers on Ireland’s Great War (in The Irish Times, 9 Jan. 2015) |
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| In this extract from his new book, the former Irish Times writer explains how he sought to disinter a forgotten chapter of our history |
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[...] The figure [of Irish deaths in action] I came up with, first published in a feature article in The Irish Times in November 1980, was roughly 35,000. Such is the power of the press, and of my colossal influence therein, that this figure of 35,000 has had absolutely no impact whatever. Quite simply, people still prefer the mythic – and perhaps Vedic: who knows? - number of 49,400. But having since discovered the disgraceful War Office pension-saving policies of discharging injured soldiers from the army, and then not counting their deaths from war-related injuries as meriting a place in SDGW or ODGW, I feel 35,000 is too low. Furthermore, it is now clear that the military bureaucracy - like the War Graves Commission, a generally meticulous organisation determined to honour the dead - was sometimes overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophes confronting it. And this is understandable, for it had to record the same basic details for every single dead man: name, rank, number, regiment, battalion, cause of death, date of death, location of death, place of birth, place of residence, place of enlistment, decorations and former regiment. That is at least 240,000 separate facts for the 20,000 dead of the first day of the Somme alone, and without a pause for counting, because on the second day, there were 1,438 dead, and on the third, 2,338, and on the 135th day, November 13th, there were 2,504 dead; and from July 1st to November 13th, covering the duration of the Somme, there were 122,466 British dead alone, yielding at least 1,469,592 details to be recorded in S/ODGW. How does any organisation, using just clerks with fountain pens and paper, manage such a feat, while all able-bodied men are being sent off to war? So, allowing for such human failings, I would now confidently say Ireland’s war dead number 40,000. [End] |
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Available online at The Irish
Times - online.;
accessed 12.02.2020 |
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You Get What You Vote For: Irish voters need Irish journalists to tell them what Sinn Féin is really about. |
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—In The Critic (6 Feb. 2020); Available
online at The Critic - online;
accessed 10.02.2020.
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[ See Myer’s remarks on Countess Markievicz - as supra. ]
Burning Heresies: A Memoir of a Life in Conflict 1979-2020 (Dublin: Merrion Press 2020) |
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Commentary
Shirley Kelly, ‘Columnist Turns Novelist’,
interview with Kevin Myers, in Books Ireland (Dec. 2001), p.321-22:
notes that Myers was attacked with John Waters by Nuala O’Faolain
as women-haters, and calls his novel Banks of Green Willow ‘a direct
riposte’ had it not been written earlier. Written from standpoint
of Gina, a nineteen year-old American visiting the Bracken family in Mayo
in 1972, who falls in love with part-Bosnian Stefan and becomes pregnant;
marries Warren; returns to Ireland on death of her mother in a car accident;
events in Bosnia impinge on her life and Stefan’s [biog. as supra].
Ruth Scurr, review of Kevin Myers, Banks of Green Willow (Scribner), calls it a disquieting novel and writes: ‘[…] while the dismaying figures of Milosevic and Arkan maraud in the shadows, it is indirectly, through the Egyptian myths of Osiris and Seth, that Myers addresses the war itself.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 7 Dec. 2001, p.21.)
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘There’s Many a Good Heart Beats under a Khaki Tunic’ [Chap.], in Ireland’s Other: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture, Cork UP 2001), cites Kevin Nolan’s Irish Times contemporary review of Dolly Wests’ Kitchen : ‘“[T]he author wants to compare the loyalties and enmities in the dinner part with the loyalties and enmities of the parties engaged in, or neutral in the world war. Here he falls into a logical fallacy which is ultimately lethal to his drama. Sexual love or hate is not comparable to love or hate of country, so that to compare […] the resolution of sexual relationships with the end of the war is merely sentimental.” If this assertion were correct, we might have to conclude that much of the Irish drama we have looked at is “merely sentimental”. I would reject this conclusion, along with the implied denigration of sentiment as a political and theatrical force. When Benedict Anderson categorises nationalism with kinship and religion he indicates that love of one’s country is closer to passion than to intellectual allegiance. That familiar analogy between sexuality and national that McGuinness uses to structure his play does not depend on a “logical fallacy” and it is inherent in the Irish dramatic tradition.’ (p.72.)
John A. Murphy (Emeritus Professor of Irish History, UCC), writes a letter to The Irish Times (16 Oct. 2004) in response to Myer’s ridiculing his suggestion that ‘the real “no petty people” of modern Ireland [Murphy’s itals.] were the small tenant farmers of Ireland who refused to be cowed by a tyranneous Protestant gentry, magistracy, yeomanry and church establishment.’ He concludes: ‘For Mr Myers to change “in modern Irish history” to “modern Ireland” in order to submit my sentence to ridicule is a distortion for which I am owed, but do not expect, an apology.’
Books Ireland (“First Flush”), calls Watching the Door: A Memoir 1971-1978 ‘compulsive’ reading: ‘[…] Here […] is a book that may well earn the status of classic. It tells how as a young man he survived seven years as reporter (for RTÉ and for newspapers) of the Northern troubles but unlike other reporters getting deeply involved in the madness that was Belfast. Not only was he on drinking - and closer - terms with paramilitaries and paranoid petty assassins of all persuasions, but he apparently slept with any and every one of the opposite sex who happened to be available. On two occasions he was interrupted by an unexpected husband (one a loyalist cuckold, the other a nationalist) and escaped by a hairsbreadth. You keep asking yourself is this made up? Could it all be fabrication - particularly as Myers tends to emerge as hero - and yet somehow you know it isn’t. All the political and military analysis is meaningless and thin stuff beside this racy kaleidoscopic slice of life, chronicling the hatred and violence as well as the loyalties and loves of real people. it is funny and moving and in Myers’ bafflement perhaps lies as good an explanation as you’ll get for the troubles.’
Rory Brennan, review of Watching the Door, in Books Ireland (May 2007), judges that ‘for its individualism and … fideltiy to disquietening truth’, Watching the Door will take its place with Murphy’s Divided Place, McCann’s War and an Irish Town, and de Paor’s Divided Ulster (p.105).
‘Myers Complaint’ - Irish Examiner (16 July 2008) reports that the Immigrant Council of Ireland has lodved an official complaint with the Gardaí arising from comments made by Myers under the heading “Africa has given nothing to anyone - apart from AIDS” (Irish Independent,Thurs. 10 July) which it deems to be in breach of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act.
Danny Morrison: Jo O’Donoghue of Mercier/Marino Press writes to The Irish Times (“Letters”, 13 May 2000.) in answer to Kevin Myer whom she accuses of using Danny Morrison’s The Walls Came Down as ‘a launching platform for intemperate attacks on RTÉ, Irish public opinion and the author himself’ in his regular column (Irishman’s Diary, 11 May 2000). [See further under Morrison, Notes, infra.]
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Notes
A Single Headstrong Heart (2013)
- publisher’s note: Very funny, quirky and touching, A Single Headstrong
Heart describes in a first-person narrative the author’s childhood
up to the early years of his career as a journalist and his departure
from University College Dublin in the late 1960s. The grotesque humour
is reminiscent of Road Dahl. Recollections retain an authentic childlike
sense of galloping self-importance, but in an adult re-casting. Ostensibly
chronological, what emerges as the main narrative arc is the author’s
relationship with his father, and how information found after the father’s
death reshapes his memories. Related with Rabelasian verve, this work,
a prequel to the bestselling Watching the Door, has all the panache
and particularity of that masterly book. Kevin and his twin sister Maggie
are sheltered by a mother’s domestic diligence and survive a father’s
eccentricity and gradual disintegration. Being Irish and Catholic in an
English provincial town brings fascinating tensions and analysis to bear
on boarding- school experiences,social status,sport and a burgeoning sexuality.The
travails of puberty have rarely been so candidly depicted.Pop music, political
awareness and modernity break in with the advent of the sixties and modernity.
Burning Heresies (2020):
In this remarkable sequel to his critically acclaimed memoir Watching
the Door, journalist Kevin Myers reflects on his roller-coaster career
over three decades in the Irish media, from the European conflicts he
reported from, to the personal conflicts he fought. Fresh from the horrors
of 1970s Belfast, Myers took a job in 1979 with The Irish Times, and brilliantly
evokes the comical chaos of life in the smoky newsroom of Ireland’s
paper-of-record. Having taken over An Irishman’s Diary, Myers single-handedly
pioneered the campaign to rehabilitate the memory of the forgotten Irish
soldiers of the Great War, and in the process fell foul of the paper’s
editor, the legendary Douglas Gageby. He was rewarded with plane tickets
to more perilous assignments, and soon Myers was back in the frontline
of European warzones, as communism collapsed and civil wars emerged. While
Myers is at his brilliant best dodging bullets on the battlefields of
Tel Aviv, Beirut and Sarajevo, he also keenly and unapologetically participates
in the many cultural conflicts erupting within a rapidly changing Ireland,
as he opines on a broad spectrum of Irish life, covering history, politics,
religion, economics, culture and society; all explored in his inimitable
prose and sardonic wit. This courageously trenchant account of journalistic
conflict and hubris also forensically examines his very public fall from
grace in 2017, and his legal battle with RTÉ for a public apology.
Burning Heresies is a candid and eye-opening must-read for anyone with
even a passing interest in Irish life and current affairs. (Merrion Press
publication notice, Sept. 2020; see Preface - as attached;
also available at at Merrion Books - online.)
Literary agent: Myer’s literary agent was Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson in 2001.
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