“They queue at the check-in desks in near silence, the weather-beaten, mountainy men in their cleanest dirty clothes with the tell-tale spatters of plaster; the sprinkling of women of a certain age, with the sprayed-rigid hair-dos in unlikely colours…” So begins a model of sloppy reporting and editing entitled “A Polish homecoming” in the Irish Times’s weekend supplement on Dec. 24th and bearing the sub-head “Kathy Sheridan joins Poles on a flight out of Dublin for a long-awaited Christmas trip home, to emotional family welcomes.” (Why Kathy Sheridan had long awaited this flight to her home, Poland, is left unexplained.)

First, the boring complaints: it’s “Zakopane”, not “Zacopane”; “Łukasz”, not “Lukas”; “szczęśliwy”, not “szosowy”; “Katarzyna”, not “Katarzaena”; “Krzysztof”, not “Krysztof”; “Janina”, not “Janena”; and “Joanna”, not “Johanna”. That’s a total of six proper names misspelled. Furthermore, there is no letter “v” in the Polish alphabet so it is unlikely that the Konrad mentioned in column two comes from “Vistola”. While the surname “Adamizyk” might be right, it’s more likely “Adamczyk” and Kielce is definitely north of Kraków, not south – I checked this in a big book called an “atlas”. Oh, and the whole tone of the piece is condescending in its pity for the poor Poles with their “near-empty, shabby little holdalls” and their “sad, beloved” country.

But it’s with the editing that things gets interesting – though I realise that not everyone will share my fascination with the art of editing. It’s a front page article, continued on page five. Apart from the photographer, Witold Krassowski, only Kathy Sheridan is credited on page one. The result is that half way through the article she appears to pull off the feat of bi-location, for not only is she on the plane from Dublin with the returning migrants, she is also on the ground in Katowice with their families waiting for their loved ones. Only at the very end of the article, at the foot of page five, is the miracle explained: “Additional reporting by Marcella Gajek”. My spies in the DfA tell me Marcella Gajek is Polish, so you might expect that the spellings would be more reliable in her part of the article. But no, it is at the Katowice end that the most outrageous mistake occurs: “‘Da! (Yes!) they’re real!’” The Polish for “yes” is “tak”, not “da” – that’s Russian, and you can probably imagine how the average Pole views the surprisingly widespread western belief that Poles speak Russian.

But was it Marcella Gajek who was in Katowice, waiting for the returning Poles? After all, the “young blonde woman” speaks to her in “perfect English”. Maybe my spies have been extracting confessions under duress and Ms. Gajek is not in fact Polish. Or maybe there were two people in Katowice – one who wrote “They [Kate’s family] chat easily” and one who wrote a couple of paragraphs later “She [Kate’s mother] can hardly speak without her eyes welling up”. Or maybe there were three reporters there – including the American who wrote about the toy “airplanes”.

These articles are sent out to the printers as .pdf files so the printers can no longer be blamed. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to treble-check the grammar and spelling of this entry…