During his spring 1922 reporting trip to Ireland, American journalist Frederick Palmer made a stop in the recently partitioned Northern Ireland. While traveling from Dublin to Belfast, he made this observation about Irish newspaper readers:

When you find that one fellow passenger in a compartment on a railway train is reading the London Morning Post with grim satisfaction and another is reading the Republic of Ireland with shinning eyes, it is folly to start a debate between them in the hope that it will result in an amicable agreement. The Morning Post is the organ of the “die hard” British Tories … As for the masses of southern Ireland, the Morning Post believes that they belong to a slave race that should be eternally ruled by their landlords for their own good.

It refers to the republican Dail Eireann as a ‘menagerie’ and predicts that Mr. Collins and Mr. De Valera will end their differences in an orgy of fratricidal ruin and disorder. And it is doing that best that it can to promote this outcome.

Compared to the violence and abusive performance of the Morning Post, which smacks of the gutter, the Republic of Ireland preserves relatively an aristocratic calm and the manners of gentlefolk. The Republic of Ireland is the organ of the De Valera movement. I have been caught in a railway compartment with both irreconcilable sheets in my possession and the stares at sight of this awful inconsistency moderated as my fellow passengers comprehended that I was one of those mad Americans from whom ignorance of local customs and any eccentricity might be expected.

Readers of both papers believe all that they read in their organs with a faith which none of us at home has in the editorials laid before us on our breakfast and dinner tables.^[1]“So Erin Drifts Into War”, Kansas City Star, March 26, 1922, and other papers in April 1922.

The passage reads like a faint homage to the American journalist William Henry Hurlbert, who visited Ireland 34 years earlier. In his book, Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, Hurlbert wrote of his Jan. 30, 1888, arrival at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire since 1920). There, a dockside news vendor named Davey was described as “a warm nationalist, but he has a keen eye to business, and alertly suits his cries to his customers.” Recognizing the conservative Member of Parliament from North Tyrone traveling with Hurlbert, Davey “promptly recommended us to buy the Irish Times and the Express as ‘the best two papers in all Ireland.’ But he smiled approval when I asked for the Freeman’s Journal also.”^[2]William Henry Hurlbert, Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. [New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888.] 38. The first two papers were unionist; the third moderately nationalist.

The Republic of Ireland, which debuted a few weeks before Palmer’s 1922 arrival, folded the following year, at the end of the Irish Civil War. The Freeman’s Journal, founded in 1763, closed in 1924. In London, the Morning Post was sold to the Daily Telegraph in 1937 and the former title disappeared from newsstands. 

See my Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited series, which explored Hurlbert’s book. For more about the Republic of Ireland, see January 1922: U.S. press on Irish newspaper news.