Publish and be damned

In October 1952, The Leader magazine published an unsigned and unflattering profile of Patrick Kavanagh.

The profile caricatured the now-celebrated Irish poet “hunkering over a bar stool” in McDaid’s, presiding over a coterie of much younger submissive acolytes, sponging drinks, coughing and gambling, while fantasising about London’s literary scene. Depicting him as an unsubtle, opinionated, and overbearing poseur, it also contained a (false) suggestion that his poem The Great Hunger had been banned in Ireland.

Kavanagh failed to unmask the author(s) of the offensively hostile piece, with Valentin Iremonger (Irish career diplomat and poet) and Brendan Behan among his (many) suspects.

A gruelling action

Undaunted, Kavanagh issued libel proceedings against the magazine and its printer, hoping for an out-of-court settlement of some £500. In the High Court, he experienced a gruelling 13-hour cross-examination by former Taoiseach John A Costello before a jury, which eventually found that the article was not defamatory. However, Kavanagh’s appeal to the Supreme Court – funded in part by TS Eliot and Jack B Yeats – was successful, with the judgment delivered on 4 March 1955. A majority of the court took issue with the instructions given to the jury by former Attorney General, Judge Thomas Teevan, and set aside the verdict.

Caroline Fanning is principal of the Dublin firm Fanning Solicitors. Writing in the Gazette, she looks in detail at the high-profile case involving colourful characters in Irish literature and public life in the 1950s.

• Read the full article in the March 2018 Gazette

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