They opposed the Easter Rising, they are publishing prank articles written by woke AI bots and they publish article after negative article about Catholics. Yet The Irish Times still have a stranglehold over the self perception of many bishops, priests and laity.
The paper has always been the voice of Protestantism and Unionism. In his book Enemy of the Crown, David Burke writes about British and American intelligence control of media outlets, writing of ‘‘London’s infiltration of The Irish Times ‘ownership’ level’’.
Yet despite all of their complaints about the church’s supposed lack of leadership roles for women, they have only had one female editor and only Catholic editor in their century and a half of existence.
A quick Google News search of the newspaper’s last 30 headlines on the Catholic Church reveals that almost all are negative or pessimistic about the church, either about its past or its present or warning of its impending demise. The only ‘positive’ headlines happen to be about Joe Biden and Pope Francis, both in articles interpreting them as liberal Catholic reformers of some description.
With all this fear mongering, helped in part by bishops embarrassingly offering interviews to the newspaper whenever they are installed, it was with shock that the recent Census showed that Ireland was still majority Catholic.
In a seething tweet today, the Irish Times wrote ‘Unthinkable: Why do 70% of the Irish population still identify as Catholic?’
The then advise the church to ‘get out of schools and chase the lost sheep’.
The church will not be getting out of schools anytime soon and rightfully so, for the simple reason that the Irish state is incapable of providing schools of the same quality.
The average print circulation of the Irish Times is just over 50,000, or to put into context, a fraction of the people who attend daily Mass in Ireland.
Regularly, the Irish Times drums into the minds of Irish people the idea that the church, not the English, were the true villains of history on this island. They were prominent proponents of the Tuam conspiracy theory, which alleges that nuns shoved babies into a septic tank. This has entered the public imagination, and even the Dail, as fact, despite the fact that no excavation has taken place and the fact that the paper themselves even published an article expressing doubts over the veracity of the conspiracy theory: Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story – The Irish Times
Social media users across the world recently mocked them for publishing a hilariously fake article published in recent weeks, which extolled about how ‘fake tan’ was ‘racist’ when Irish women wore it. It was ‘written’ using AI with a fake author named Adriana Acosta Cortez behind its production. Irish Times apologises for hoax AI article about women’s use of fake tan | Irish Times | The Guardian
There have also been two high profile cases involving members of staff, the cases of Tom Humphries and Frederick Hunt.
The church, globally, has around 1,300,000,000 people.
The Irish Times has in or around 50,000 print editions.
Our church needs some leadership, to move out of the 1970s and realise that the old Ireland is gone and not coming back, people do not allow ‘journalists’ to tell them what to think anymore.
The era of the Irish journalistic establishment has long since passed, we can have our debates in forums that we ourselves control rather than letting the elites control what is published of our thoughts.
Why then do Catholics still read the Irish Times? Like many problems in the church, it comes from a lack of self worth and a self loathing view of recent church history. The Irish Times should get their own house in order before taunting us, Catholicism will still be here in a century. The legacy media will not be.
