Fake News and Irish Freedom

‘People are not capable of making up their minds. They can only decide between two sets of propagandists.’ That was the opinion of Ernest Blythe, a minister in the first government of the Irish Free State and a vocal proponent of censorship. In this final episode, we explore how years of censorship, violence and propaganda transformed the media.

His name was Erskine Childers and he had one goal: to ensure the collapse of the Irish nation into anarchy. Well, that was what the government said. In autumn 1922 both the Dáil and the press were filled with stories of Childers leading the anti-Treaty war on the state. Yet there was one problem with those stories – most of them were false.

For the first six weeks of the Civil War, the anti-Treaty IRA controlled Cork City. During that time they took over the Cork Examiner, a move that was denounced by the paper’s editor, George Crosbie. He accused the IRA of turning the paper into a platform for ‘a vile and insidious propaganda containing a great deal more fiction than fact’.

‘It was a day and night job of secret and dangerous activity against terrible difficulties’. That was how Brigid O’Mullane described her role as Cumann na mBan’s Director of Propaganda during the Civil War. O’Mullane was one of many women activists who were integral to republican propaganda projects at home and abroad between 1919 and 1923.

We focus on the period between the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the early weeks of the Civil War, exploring how both sides of the Treaty divide sought to gain acceptance and to discredit their opponents. Those efforts included government censorship, competing propaganda projects and the widespread intimidation of journalists.

During conflicts, controlling the flow of information becomes a primary goal for combatants. Ireland, during the War of Independence, was not an exception to that rule. It was a harrowing time for Irish journalists, a time in which newspaper offices were burned down, a time of reprisals, bombs, and the destruction of livelihoods.

‘As soon as propaganda becomes evident, it is bad propaganda’. So said Basil Clarke, a Dublin Castle official during the War of Independence, a time in which British forces created lots of ‘bad propaganda’ – including fake photos and fake newspapers. Through such schemes they sought to undermine the Irish Bulletin, a renowned republican paper.

Arthur Griffith described censorship as a ‘Paper Wall’ that the British had erected around Ireland with the intention of controlling information. In Episode One we follow republican efforts to disrupt that censorship, hear of Dáil Éireann’s attempts to counter British propaganda and learn how journalists worked closely with Sinn Féin and the IRA.