That's more than Eddie Hobbs, Podge and Rodge and Celebrity Jigs'n'Reels put together. It's three times as many as Eamon Dunphy, Richard Littlejohn or Mary Kenny. Add the word "bastards" to the search and you'll get 420 matches alone. It's clear that if we are to go down the Celebrity Columnist road, as laid by the British media, then Myers is already miles ahead of the competition. However much he might raise the blood pressure of liberals/republicans/women/unmarried mothers/gaelgeoiri/pacifists/Travellers (continued page 94), Myers's 'Irishman's Diary' in the Irish Times provokes a stronger reaction . . . "engaging and enraging, " says one colleague . . . than anything else in the print media.

But is he worth a euro a word?

By all accounts, the Irish Independent believes he is. And so, apparently, does Associated Media, publisher of the Daily Mail. Since Myers reversed out of his Irish Times berth at the end of last month after almost 30 years with the paper, the two newspaper groups have engaged in a high-profile bidding war for his contentious take on life and the universe.

This week, it was announced that the Indo has won him . . . for a reputed annual salary of 200,000 and after negotiations took place directly with the O'Reilly family. For the Irish Times, it will be a considerable loss . . . and with the paper's other high-profile columnist, Fintan O'Toole, defecting to China, an unfortunately timed one. It's debatable whether the Times' fiercely loyal readership will follow Myers to the Indo, where he will write four columns a week, but nonetheless Myers is a scalp . . . the scalp . . . and at a time of significant posturing in the boardrooms of Talbot Street, his appointment will be regarded as a coup. "It will be fascinating to see how the columns sit, " said one media commentator this weekend. "In the Irish Times, he was the token right-wing polemicist in a paper that regards itself as liberal. In the Indo, he will be writing from within a right-wing polemic. That moves the goalposts significantly."

He was the first member of his family born outside Ireland, soon after the Myers' clan, a work-in-progress, moved from Dublin to Leicester, birthplace of the legendary Engelbert Humperdinck, in the late 1940s.

His father, a doctor, took a general practice in the city and they lived in sufficient comfort to facilitate sending their sons to public school. It was there, Myers has said, that he experienced the defining moment of his life. On the cusp of adolescence, he was woken one night in his dormitory to be told his father had suddenly died.

His world collapsed and with it the family's middle-class status. His father had died intestate, leaving a young widow and her children to scrape their way to an uncertain future. They moved to a less salubrious part of the city and Myers finished out secondary school in a lonely daze. He failed all his A-levels and brought home a report that announced him "a nice enough young man, but his limited intellect means he will never go far in life."

It took him as far as the local technical college, where he repeated his final year in the company of young people with little time for public school accents and manners. When school ended, he took a summer job sweeping the streets of Leicester, aware that his poor performance in the exams would not gain him entry to university in the UK.

So his mother wrote to an old family friend in Dublin, Professor Jeremiah Hogan, enquiring whether UCD might take pity on the underachieving Myers.

On the basis that its allocation for foreign students had not been filled, he was accepted. Writing about his passage to UCD in the Irish Times, he said, "Thus I began those first, uncertain steps to all this: to the man that I am, to the life that I live, the wife that I love and the land that is mine."

But halcyon days begat troubled times.

He emerged from UCD just as the Northern conflict was becoming entrenched and he cut his journalistic teeth in Belfast, covering the Troubles at first hand for the Observer and RTE. If it didn't make the man . . . "he was crazy, running around the North, as madly irresponsible as the people he chastises now, " says a contemporary . . . it certainly moulded the political viewpoint: he remains ferociously anti-republican and has adopted a conspicuous no surrender approach to the Peace Process. In January last year, the Irish Times refused to publish a column in which Myers blamed the IRA for the Northern Bank robbery. (It was later published by The Sunday Telegraph. ) Back at the frontline, he distinguished himself as an excellent and informed war correspondent. Subsequent postings to the Lebanon and Bosnia revealed again the quite dazzling extent of his knowledge of history, military and beyond; back in Dublin, his experiences in war zones made him highly desirable company in the close-knit journalistic circles of the day.

He was well-regarded by his colleagues . . . "funny, warm, gregarious and entertaining, " says one, "everyone would have good memories of the young Myers."

But it is the older Myers . . . he will be 60 next year . . . who is the subject of most of those 147,000 internet references. Fifteen years ago, he left Dublin for Ballymore Eustace, where he comports with horses, dogs and his wife Rachel Nolan (sister of TV presenter Anna). He stopped going into the Irish Times around the same time. Some of his D'Olier Street colleagues think that was a mistake.

"He is totally out of touch with the real world, " says one, "and yet he sets himself up as someone with some sort of unique insight into all these issues that never touch him." He has been, says another, "misused by the Irish Times for years.

He's a brilliant writer with a towering intellect who's just been allowed get cranky. The more he withdrew from the paper, the more this different creature emerged."

"An appalling snob who lives in some sort of a bubble, " is another summation.

He sometimes seems to thrive on controversy, cultivating contrary views for the hell of it. Occasionally, they swerve too close to indefensible. Much was made of a column last year in which he referred to the children of unmarried mothers as "bastards." It prompted a storm of protest and resulted in a contrite editorial from Geraldine Kennedy, and a straightforward apology from Myers. "It was absolutely terrible, " he said of the reaction. "It was emotionally and psychologically disembowelling. When you are the centre of such hatred, it is a bewildering experience."

Given the number of groups and individuals savaged by the columnist, one might expect the Myers hide to be a little thicker. But he wounds surprisingly easily . . . he was said to be deeply disappointed by the indifferent response to his first novel, Banks of Green Willow, and gratuitously insulted to be excluded from a memorial service, presided over by Mary McAleese, for Irish casualties of the first world war . . . a cause close to his heart long before it was popular or profitable.

It is unlikely that such slings and arrows will soften his line in the Irish Independent. But it will be interesting to observe how this frequently brilliant, occasionally infuriating writer's take on Ireland and the world will develop under a different regime and in constantly changing times.

"One thing is certain, " says a former colleague. "He's not going to go gently into the good night."

C.V.

Occupation: Newspaper columnist
Born: 1947, Leicester
Educated: UCD
Married: To Rachel Nolan
In the news: He has defected from the Irish Times to the Irish Independent for a reputed 200,000 salary after the Daily Mail also bid for his signature