Chapter Ten - Irish Periodical News

Summary

In comparison with britain and other western European countries, newspapers and journals were slow to be published in Ireland. Their late arrival is most plausibly explained by the relatively small and scattered population, generally meagre incomes and low levels of literacy. A further obstacle to the creation of a buoyant market for print was linguistic disunity. During the seventeenth century the majority of inhabitants spoke Irish rather than English, although bilingualism was growing and became widespread in the eighteenth century (Ní Mhunghaile 2012: 218–42). Printing in the Irish language posed technical and ideological difficulties and remained rare. Moreover, while the bulk of the population used Irish, only a few could read it. The absence of newspapers in the Irish vernacular was one of several factors that speeded the adoption of English, not only as the language of government and commerce, but for information, entertainment and routine tasks.

Until the late seventeenth century Ireland relied for print, including news-sheets and diurnals, on shipments from England, Scotland and continental Europe. Whereas the civil wars of the 1640s had stimulated the production of topical accounts in Britain, Ireland, although drawn into the fighting – a ‘War of Three Kingdoms’ – did not see the local printing of news. Printed propaganda was issued by the competing sides, but it remained stubbornly utilitarian in purpose and content. Only in 1660 did a newspaper appear in Dublin comparable to those which had been published regularly in London throughout the 1640s and 1650s. An account of the chief occurrences was linked with the meeting of a representative assembly. It gave a terse summary of decisions taken by the body summoned to prepare for the restoration of the Stuart monarch in the three kingdoms.

An account prefigured a longer-lasting news-sheet – Mercurius Hibernicus – in 1663. It boasted of being ‘the first attempt of this nature in Ireland’ (Mercurius Hibernicus, 1, 13–21 January 1662[3]). Its appearance was occasioned partly by the meeting of a Parliament in Dublin. However, it had been sitting intermittently since 1661, and additional impetus was given by the controversial activities of a Court of Claims. The latter was adjudicating the contests for possession of estates between displaced owners, usually Catholic, and new ones, typically Protestant. The acrimony unsettled public affairs and led to the effective suspension of Parliament and the termination of the Court.