Irish Times website no longer allowing comments

Priest and people faced one direction from time immemorial until some academic priests who never had a parish in their entire lives changed everything in the mid to late 60s. The parishioners who wanted their accustomed devotions were simpletons to be scorned. More and more stopped going, rest is history. Perhaps similarly journalist wokists already regard ordinary people as hatethinking plebs. Reply with a polite disagreement with an Irish Independent or Times tweet, and see how your Twitter account remains unsuspended (hint: not long). An upper class leftwinger (like Fintan O'Toole the stout working class hero from Crumlin whose sneer can be almost felt in every article) has by default a contempt for ordinary people and most rural people.

I always felt they used Breda O'Brian and Una Mullaly so much to act as stablisers for a notion of neutrality, but in reality their constant publishing of Michael McDowell is probably closer to the mindset of the south county Dublin landlord set that see the Irish Times as theirs.

The gender wars lurch in the IT after the Aisling Murphy murder alienated me in the same way british tabloids repulse with their racism. At least by the comments section in those initial days I knew i wasn't alone in feeling vilified and i noted they they changed a few headlines to be less gender warfare, but the damage was done.

In the past columnists were usually much older with a distinguished journalism career already behind them. Or maybe they had been a judge and were now retired.

But anyway the IT is a "liberal activist" newspaper, as Geraldine Kennedy made explicit in an editoral, so having Mullally in place must be considered the best way to advance the specific political agenda that the IT advocates for.

Yes, that's why they have a weekly column from the Iona "Institute" and regular opinion pieces from bishops.

The Irish Times is officially a "liberal activist" newspaper according to its own self-description.

Geraldine Kennedy announced this in an editorial.

They obviously do not see regular and occasional pieces from conservative Catholics as undercutting the official position of the paper, which is liberal activism.

Do “Liberals” care about freedom nowadays? Of course, they care about their own freedom (who doesn’t?) and support all sorts of “rights” but the IT has shut down a channel for free expression without explanation.

So much for the old liberal motto  I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It

No explanation, just a vague asssurance that they will eventually do something which they haven’t yet done.

I haven’t speculated on their reasoning.

The great thing about Boards is that it’s open to all but no one is forced to read it.Would that others with more power followed its example. Next time the IT extols virtues like “openness” or “inclusion” or even “freedom”, put a little asterisk there.

I wouldn’t object if they had a “subscriber only” comment policy, though I am seriously questioning my own subscription.

It’s quite staggering how many commentators here are quite prepared to give away their own rights to free speech and mine. Clearly the Irish times shut down the comments section because they did not like readers disagreeing with their editorials. For a long time before this website reconfiguration, comments on controversial topics were routinely not allowed. A newspaper by its very nature is there because an open society allows it, by shutting down the opinions of their readers they have taken a significant step towards their own demise as once again they too will come under the control of government interference that we see now all over the world, from Russia to Nicaragua, from Iran to China. We are now in an era of illiberal liberals who will soon like has happened in USA drive the old-fashioned liberals like myself to the right of where we want to be. The Times has deprived its readers of an important outlet for self-expression, free speech is the very crux of a free and liberal democracy. By depriving us of that outlet they leave themselves open to the conspiracy therorists that now thrive in the USA who now demonise the “main stream media”. 

2 posts in 5 years. You've been awfully quiet for a free-speech advocate!

I'm sorry, but is this a joke?

Kennedy, despite anything she might have written, was a PD and as rightwing as they come, and she turned the IT into a platform for the neocons. Neither liberal under her watch (except in the economic sense) nor activist (unless you mean active in supporting Bush II and his wars). And while it may have got rid of the worst US neocon commentators, it certainly has changed its stance in any meaningful way since Kennedy made a PD soapbox of it.

Geraldine Kennedy has been retired since 2011 and there have been two subsequent editors at the IT, I fail to see the relevance