Midway through James Joyce’s Ulysses, the character J.J. O’Molloy tips his hat to ‘Our watchful friend, the Skibbereen Eagle’, a playful reference to an obscure provincial newspaper in the west of Ireland. Under an ambitious new editor, the Skibbereen Eagle had risen fleetingly to prominence in 1898 for its robust response to Tsar Nicholas II’s attempts to gain a warm-water port for the Russian navy by encroaching on China’s Yellow Sea. As its editorial warned in a chiding tone, the Eagle would ‘keep its eye on the Emperor of Russia and all such despotic enemies – whether at home or abroad – of human progression and man’s natural rights’.

The Tsar, so the joke went, must have been quaking in his boots at the steely glare trained upon him from a quaint market town on the Atlantic fringes of north-western Europe.

Prof John Bew CMG

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