Kevin Myers - New Memoir

Myers - 'I was cast out as a Jew-Hating Pariah'

Kevin Myers: 'The purpose was to destroy me … but people have come back from the dead'

As his new memoir is released, Kevin Myers speaks to Dónal Lynch about regrets, cancel culture and the controversy that ended his career in journalism, defending his views on gay marriage and the Holocaust.

September 13 2020

It's one of the more curious aspects of cancel culture that the cancellations themselves never seem to be especially permanent. The attention span of the mob wanes as new victims are sought and yesterday's heretics are pulled from the fires to discuss their singed careers and shaken self-belief. JK Rowling has a new novel in the pipeline. Louis CK was back onstage just last month. And now Kevin Myers, against whom JK herself led the pitchfork charge, has prised the nails from his own coffin.
He has a new book out. It's a memoir of his long career in journalism, spanning a Douglas Gageby-era Irish Times through periods as a war correspondent in the Middle East and the Balkans. There are gripping, and at times moving, accounts of his scrapes in war zones, where his instinct for self-preservation vies with his obsession with generating good copy. There's sex - he reveals he had one encounter with Monica Carr and turned down Frankie Byrne.

And there's a sense of him that was thoroughly lost in the orgy of outrage at his fateful Sunday Times column - that he can be quite funny. At one point, half-cut on champagne, he can't remember how to address the Queen, who is standing in front of him, and so settles for Mumm - the brand of said champagne. If One was amused, One didn't let on. The wry humour is a reminder that there was always so much more to Myers than controversy.

And yet the title of the book, Burning Heresies, inevitably draws us back to the Sunday Times article which finished his journalism career. The 2017 column had a headline which he says he didn't write: "Sorry, ladies - equal pay has to be earned", and noted that two of the best-paid female presenters at the BBC, Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, were Jewish. Myers wrote: "Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity."

He got his first inkling of the storm to come as he drove to Cork on the Sunday the article appeared. "That's Kevin Myers, he's very, very famous," he heard a man in a petrol station tell his young son. "And he's in big, big trouble."

The Sunday Times apologised but the damage was done. Rowling called the column "filth". Leo Varadkar deemed it "misogynistic and anti-Semitic". Dara Ó Briain tweeted that a national "blowhard" had found a bigger stage. And you suspect that there was a tiny part of Myers that relished the infamy. Although North Korea had just fired a nuclear missile, his ill-advised column was the biggest news story "around the world", he notes.

He was dropped by the Sunday Times and there was a general pile-on, with his former colleagues at the Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole and Kathy Sheridan, among those lambasting him in print.

"There are no words to describe what happened to me," Myers says over tea at a Dublin hotel. "I don't think there was a single other journalist in Irish life who has experienced anything like it… I completely withdrew, I didn't sleep for three days and then, I think on the Thursday, I got something like two or three hours' sleep. The purpose was to destroy me."

Given his reputation as a fearless controversialist, it might have been satisfying if he had stuck to his guns regarding the sentiments and language in the piece but once the storm gathered, Myers was full of regret.

"Obviously what I said was very foolish and I bitterly regret not only my foolishness but the offence I caused," he says now. "But the whole thing has to be taken in the context of the person making the observation and his intent. Was it my intent to make an anti-Semitic observation? No! Was it my intention to make a misogynistic observation? No! Over the previous 17 years, nobody had accused me of any of those things."

And yet while the spectacle of the pile-on was itself a bit nauseating, there was a sense that Myers had this reaction - or something like it - coming. A rummage through his archive reveals that while the pot-stirring pieces were not quite as frequent as they seem in memory, he certainly ran roughshod over a lot of political correctness, and got away with it in a way that others didn't.

While the mob was coming for John Waters during the marriage referendum, for instance, it ignored Myers, who had even more objectionable views on gay marriage. While deploring the earlier criminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland, Myers also wrote that he would not like it if gay marriage became part of international law. He doubted in print how a gay couple - male or female - could consummate a marriage. Of gay adoption, he wrote: "Today babies are to be allocated in order to enrich the adoptive parents' lives, and make menopausal lesbians feel useful."

"That's not anti-gay! A lot of gays would say that," he responds when I repeat the quote. "It's just an opinion. You can't pigeonhole someone into groupings like misogynist, anti-gay, merely because they have opinions about how family life should be conducted."

His statements on the Holocaust seem, if anything, even more filled with contradictions. He once wrote a column in the Irish Independent with the headline, "I am a Holocaust denier" (which he says he didn't write) but RTÉ, which took this literally, later had to make an apology because Morning Ireland apparently failed to look at the overall context, which showed that he definitely was not a Holocaust denier.

Even here, there is an intellectual maze in which the listener might struggle to locate the exit. The most famous Holocaust denier of the last few decades has been David Irving, whose research Myers once wrote was "often brilliant" and whose "work on Hitler is conclusively adamant". "Any researcher who has looked at Irving says that his research is brilliant," Myers tells me. "His research is astonishing. His judgments based on that research are mad."

What of Irving's belief that three million, rather than the more widely accepted six million, Jews were murdered during the Holocaust?

"Even the Holocaust museum in Israel still hasn't got a handle on the number," Myers responds. "In this book, I say that the number could be well over six million because of the numbers of Russian Jews killed as soldiers. These number things get us nowhere. The numbers change every day."

As with the gay issue - where his talisman against accusations of homophobia was his admissions of his own adolescent homosexualcuriosity - he has (to him) an unimpeachable alibi on the Jewish question. "Why would the Jewish Council of Ireland have said that Kevin Myers has told the Irish people the truth about the Holocaust? They wouldn't have invited me to so many events if they thought that I was in any way anti-Semitic."

I feel slightly guilty at re-litigating these arguments with him, even if controversy was once his stock-in-trade. He reserves the right to disagree with his old columns, which seems fair enough. And there is a note of vulnerability in his otherwise imperious manner. The last few years have been tough on him. His hair went white. He didn't sleep well for years. I catch sight of the old-fashioned Nokia on the table in front of him and it's a reminder that this is a 73-year-old man who lost his livelihood.
His florid and sometimes archaic speech reminds me a little of Stephen Fry and, like Fry, he had a difficult adolescence, only flourishing when he went to college. Myers grew up in Leicester in England in a very Catholic household. His father, a GP, died when he was 15 and he says he suffered grief for years after that, which impacted his performance in school. Ireland represented an escape from all that.

"I failed all my A-Levels twice over and that was why UCD was so significant to me. The only place that offered me escape from mediocrity was Ireland. I had lots of family living in Dublin."

As he describes it, he sort of fell into journalism. "There was no plan. My only plan was to bring about revolution and have sex with as many women as possible. Neither of those was especially successful."

He worked in Northern Ireland for much of the Troubles, a period covered in his brilliant 2006 memoir, Watching the Door. He speculates that by the time he came back to Dublin, he was suffering from a form of PTSD, for which he self-medicated. "My drinking at all hours in my flat in Mountjoy Square was deranged but I never had counselling or therapy. But it never goes away. I tried to bury the trauma, and walk away. I still remember events regularly but I don't have flashbacks. They're fleeting, not obsessive."

He began contributing to the Irish Times but he and the then editor Gageby had a clash of personalities. Gageby "has a family who will not like it [the new book]. I had a great deal of respect for him, he was a complex man. He didn't like me but he ran a good newspaper. We had different personalities and different perspectives. He knew quite early on that I didn't subscribe to the general myths that he did. He didn't subscribe to the idea that I was a rising star. He didn't want me to write An Irishman's Diary but a lot of people didn't want the job, which was five days a week at that time."

The idea that it was an incessantly pot-stirring column is wrong, he says. "In the early days, the 1980s, it wasn't an opinion column, it was taking the odd and ends of country life and writing approvingly of them. The reputation of me holding controversial opinions was put about by people who disagreed with my views but for the most part, there was no controversy. Throughout my years as a columnist, many more people agreed with what I wrote than disagreed, that is just historical fact. I never set out to provoke."

Myers met his wife Rachel, a musician and 22 years his junior, when he wrote about her for the Irish Times. A working-class Dubliner, Rachel is a sister of broadcaster and former Big Brother star Anna Nolan. To some he and Rachel might have seemed an unlikely pairing. "We were an unlikely pairing in that the age difference was so vast," he responds. "Otherwise no, because she and her entire family - there are seven children - are incredibly intelligent and conversational and they were the most incredible family to marry into." She has sometimes taken issue with what he has written, he adds, but for the most part they have not discussed his work.

He sounds a bleak note about modern media - "the Titanic is going down with astonishing speed. There will hardly be a newspaper left by 2030" - but you get the feeling that he would still like to be a part of it. "I would like to contribute, but what journalist today would take the risks that George Hook, John Waters or Mary Ellen Synon - none of whom I agree with - took?"

He spends his days now "walking my dogs, reading and writing articles and books that might possibly see the light of day when sanity is restored to the world, probably around 2045".

Could he foresee a rehabilitation for himself? "People have come back from the dead - Toby Young has done so in England. But there is a resistance now to being exposed to ideas with which one disagrees. I'm very sorry I'm not writing now, I'd love to be writing about events in the world, but let's face it, it's not going to happen."

Burning Heresies: A Memoir of a Life in Conflict 1979-2020 is published by Merrion Press €19.95