Honesty: The stinging fly on the rump of free state respectability

Abstract

This essay will examine the exposé of the realities regarding poverty, immorality and sexual crime in the Irish Free State by the radical journal Honesty (1925-1931). Honesty was edited by the socialist republican James W. Upton, a man with a longstanding commitment to the rights of women and the poor. Upton was by instinct anti-establishment in an era when the country’s religio-political leadership was insecure and keen to manage the Free State’s news agenda. Something they attempted in the service of projecting what was viewed as an ideologically acceptable image of life in the Free Sate, to both domestic and foreign audiences. Upton viewed this policy as a manifestation of the social and political cant favoured by the Free State’s leadership, which was aided and abetted by, and gave succour to, the hypocrisy of wider bourgeois Free State society. A coalition of forces, Upton reasoned, that damaged the interests of the most vulnerable sections of Irish society, in particular, the nation’s women and children living on or below the breadline. However, notwithstanding it radicalism and reputation in the Free State, Honesty has been largely lost to the history of Irish journalism.