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When the Writer Becomes the Subject

Tim Pat Coogan, the legendary Irish editor, historian and critic, has just published a vivid new memoir throwing light on his five decades in Irish pubic life. Celebrated for his groundbreaking studies of the IRA, Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, to date Coogan has written only about other people, never himself. But now, he's discovered the unexpected rewards of telling his own tale.

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Editor of the Irish Press for over 20 years, and author of 12 bestselling books on Irish history and culture, Tim Pat Coogan, 73, is a living authority on Ireland and its troubled history.

But his own story, it turns out, is every bit as interesting. As editor of the Irish Press, Coogan was very publically at the paper's helm during some of the most tumultuous years of the nation's history, and on more than one occasion he the made news as well as reported it.

In his new memoir titled A Memoir, Coogan puts it all out there, his professional and personal triumphs and failures, and even the eventual collapse of his marriage. He spares nothing in the telling, including himself, in a book that is nothing less than a brilliant reflection of the challenging times he's lived through, seen by a man who often found himself near the center of the storm.

What's perhaps most remarkable about Coogan's career is how quickly it commenced. As a teenager his history teacher at the upscale Blackrock College in Dublin called Vivion de Valera (the son of the famous Irish president Eamon de Valera) and told him that he had a boy in his class who would "either break his heart or turn out a genius."

De Valera was impressed enough to hire Coogan as an editorial assistant on the Evening Press, and the young Coogan never looked back.

But Coogan soon discovered the misleadingly glamorous title "editorial assistant" actually meant he who makes the tea each day. "I made a very decent cup as a matter of fact, and over the years I've often thought I really should have stuck to that," Coogan told the Irish Voice during a recent interview.

But his work ethic and his natural flair saw to it that by 1968, at age of 33, he became editor of the Irish Press, the flagship newspaper established by Eamon de Valera in 1931 as the mouthpiece of his political party Fianna Fail.

From the beginning there were some very interesting paradoxes about Coogan's unstoppable journalistic rise. For a start he was the son of a Fine Gael member of Parliament suddenly at the helm of Fianna Fail's main newspaper. He was also a Blackrock old boy at the center of Ireland's most populist and popular newspaper.

In addition, he was what many would now call a social liberal steering the course for one of Ireland's most culturally conservative editorial boards. He embodied the sweeping change of the sixties in a nation that had until recently permitted the clergy to decide what books, films and plays they could and could not see.

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