by David Kenny
DEDICATION
To you, the reader. And to journalists everywhere, whose work one day reflects the thoughts of a nation ... and the next is consigned to history’s litter-tray. We salute you.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Diarmuid Doyle for contacting and (gently) harrying the Trib staffers and reading the final proof. His calm advice and help in general were hugely appreciated. He sends his love to his wife, Elaine Edwards, and parents Joe and Kay.
Chenile and Robert at Y Books: this project wouldn’t have worked without your vision, skill, patience and preternatural niceness.
To all those I chased and hassled: thank you for your time and generosity – in particular to John Boyne. Thanks also to my roadie, Gráinne Kenny, and family friend, Dr Richard Fitzpatrick.
Finally, and most importantly, my thanks and love go to my long-suffering wife Gillian Carroll. Your halo is in the post.
David Kenny
First published in 2011 by Y Books
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Ireland
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-908023-21-6
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General Editor’s note
An ink-veined editor once told me: ‘Great journalism is no guarantee of success – or survival – in the newspaper business.’ He then claimed it was my round, told me I was fired (although I didn’t work for him) and ordered me to phone him a cab home. Whatever about the round, he was right about journalism. We had been talking about the Irish Press and the conversation had, inevitably, turned to the perpetually struggling Sunday Tribune, where I worked at the time.
When the Press Group closed in 1995, some of the finest journalism ever produced in these islands wound up on history’s ‘spike’. In February of this year, the Tribune looked destined for the same fate. Thirty years of journalistic excellence would gather dust in the National Library. The public would soon forget the Trib’s strident, honest voice.
In March, I floated the idea for this book with Y Books. How about a compilation of best bits from Nóirín Hegarty’s tenure as editor? The timeframe would be 2005 to 2011, six of the most eventful years in recent history. We would ask the writers to choose four of their favourite articles. ‘I’ll whittle them down into a book,’ I said. It sounded so straightforward at the time.
Soon my desktop was groaning under the weight of several hundred thousand words. Having such a wealth of top-quality material made the read-through one of the most enjoyable tasks imaginable. Having finite space made the editing process one of the most painful. Inclusion was eventually based on striking the right balance between human interest, analysis and humour. The positioning of columns and bylines doesn’t denote any pre-eminence. This book is intended to be dipped into, not read from cover to cover.
These are the pieces the journalists most want you to read, and as a result The Trib is a kind of emotional bookmark – something that will prompt you to say: ‘Oh, I’d forgotten about that,’ and remind you of a moment or a buried feeling. Hopefully, it will engross you enough to make you miss your bus stop.
The Trib is dedicated to the only person who matters in the production of a newspaper: you, the reader, without whom we wouldn’t exist. Or get paid. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.
David Kenny
June 2011
CONTENTS
Editor’s Note
Foreword
NEWS ANALYSIS
Diarmuid Doyle
Terry Prone
David Kenny
Michael Clifford
Una Mullally
Shane Coleman
Claire Byrne
Justine McCarthy
Ferdia MacAnna
Helen Rogers
Olivia Doyle
Kevin Rafter
Liam Hayes
NEWS FEATURES
Michael Clifford
David Kenny
Una Mullally
Justine McCarthy
Valerie Shanley
Ken Sweeney
Conor McMorrow
John Downes
Shane Coleman
Martin Frawley
Ali Bracken
ARTS
John Boyne
Ciaran Carty
Una Mullally
Tom Dunne
Paul Lynch
Eithne Tynan
Patrick Freyne
Diarmuid Doyle
Olivia Doyle
SPORTS
Enda McEvoy
Ewan McKenna
Liam Hayes
Miguel Delaney
Kieran Shanon
Malachy Clerkin
Ciaran Cronin
Ger Siggins
NÓIRÍN HEGARTY
Foreword
It started with a phone call. Michael Roche’s name flashed on the screen of my mobile. It was just after 8 p.m. on St Stephen’s Day 2004.
‘You know I’ve always valued you highly,’ he began. It was news to me. Michael and I had enjoyed an adversarial professional relationship. His role as managing editor of Independent Newspapers was to limit expenditure, mine as deputy editor of the Evening Herald was to secure as much of the budget as I could.
‘I’m going into the Sunday Tribune as managing director. I want you to be my editor.’ I wasn’t surprised. I was utterly stunned. ‘You’ve hidden your admiration well,’ I remember answering. The call ended with an instruction to keep our conversation top secret. We would meet in the coming days to thrash out the details.
My husband Frank came into the kitchen. I was still staring at the mobile phone in my hand. ‘I’m going to be an editor,’ I told him. He knew how badly I wanted this chance and how much it meant to me.
I had experience of many editorial environments, good and bad, and I knew that I wanted to do things differently. Just over a month later, in my maiden speech to the Sunday Tribune journalists I told them so. I wanted to preside over a meritocracy. I wanted to build a creative environment where entrepreneurial journalism was critical. They would work with me, not for me, and we would create a quality newspaper together.
Most of them just looked at me dumbfounded. I thought that everybody understood how detrimental tyrannies are to good journalism, but I forgot that most people at the Sunday Tribune had no such experience and didn’t know
what I was talking about. They were much more concerned that this unknown woman from the ‘tabloid’ Evening Herald would barrel in and wreck the newspaper they loved.
The early weeks in any new job are daunting. I was lucky. From day one I had a quiet, reliable, and wise counsel on my side in the shape of Tribune ‘lifer’, deputy editor Diarmuid Doyle. For the next six years he never wavered in his loyalty and support, and without it I would have been much the poorer.
The newspaper set up was schizophrenic. We had too many feature writers in specialist areas and too few news hounds. I had not one, but two previous editors looking over my shoulder – one at the far end of the newsroom who had just vacated my new office but remained working at the newspaper, and the other employed as a columnist.
Change had to be radical but could not cause consternation. Professional systems had to be put in place. We had to break stories, build credibility, and get some attention. The way the newspaper had been doing things wasn’t working, so we had to do things differently. Some big names had to go and some new names had to come in.
Budgets were always tight and on many occasions huge sacrifices had to be made in order to attract fresh talent and ability. I saw it as a marriage between the high-quality writers traditionally associated with the Tribune and the new era. The only objective was excellence.
There were losses along the way – good people I had to make redundant for cost reasons. It was difficult, heartbreaking at times, but I had to concentrate on building a future for the people in jobs rather than focusing on the ones who had to lose out.
In spite of the limited resources, imagination was in ready supply, and when the economic picture darkened we became more and more inventive.
Everybody remembers the big stories the Sunday Tribune broke – John O’Donoghue, George Gibney, the Real IRA, Sean Quinn – and for those we have received much recognition. They are the easy ones. The real slog is in producing a relevant, exciting newspaper week after week no matter what. That achievement is credited to a top-class team of department heads. Deputy editor PJ Cunningham, who joined us that first year, greatly enhanced the newspaper and my term as editor with his strategic approach to management, sport and the newspaper business in general.
My best achievement was to assemble a team that far outshone my ability and made my job easy. Mick McCaffrey in News, Fionnuala McCarthy in Features, Maureen Gillespie in Photographic, Olivia Doyle in Arts, Neil Callanan in Business, Helen Rogers in News Analysis and chief sub editor Ger Siggins ran top-class departments and inspired all they worked with.
We made mistakes along the way, but we never wavered in our quest to become the best we could be. And in the pages that follow you will read the work of journalists who achieved that week after week.
Some good people left for new pastures – Stephen Collins, Kevin Rafter, Justine McCarthy, Emmet Oliver, Paul Howard to name just a few. I never liked to see them go, but I understood why they did, especially as our financial problems mounted.
When the end came it was via another phone call on the morning of 1 February 2011. I was in bed recovering from a chest infection when Michael Roche’s name flashed on my screen. We had shared good and bad times in the intervening six years, but this time I had an ominous premonition.
‘The day has come.’ It was all he needed to say. I understood immediately. There was no reason for the Sunday Tribune to close now rather than at any other time in the previous twenty years of non profit. Michael and financial controller Fiona Falvey had managed our affairs better than anybody else could have, but there was no surviving Ireland’s economic collapse.
As bad as it was facing into an announcement by the newly appointed receiver, Jim Luby, that we were in serious trouble, it was even worse twenty-four hours later when he told us that prohibitive libel insurance meant that we wouldn’t be publishing again.
For the first week there was hope we would find a buyer. But as the days passed, reality dawned and then settled like a dark cloud. For the wind-down period journalists, advertising and circulation staff shared tribulations. Redundancy has no hierarchy and by 1 March we were all out of a job.
The greatest testament to the talent of the Sunday Tribune team across all sections is that they are continuing to find work – some achievement in the current climate.
The six years I was in charge as editor were the best of my professional life. We built a credible, vibrant newspaper through entrepreneurial journalism, a commitment to quality and drive. And we did it despite everything.
My thanks for conceiving and compiling this eclectic mixture of the best of the Sunday Tribune go to columnist and former associate editor, David Kenny.
And I will never forget the team who made it all work: PJ Cunningham, Diarmuid Doyle, Fionnuala McCarthy, Neil Callanan, Claire O’Mahony, Eamon Quinn, Ian Guider, Jon Ihle, Olivia Doyle, Ciaran Carty, Una Mullally, Martin Brennan, Suzanne Breen, Helen Rogers, Dave Kenny, Mark Condren, Joe Coyle, Paul Lynch, Gavin Corbett, Neil Dunphy, Ger Siggins, Mick McCaffrey, Maureen Gillespie, John Downes, Ken Foxe, Jennifer Bray, Ali Bracken, Mick Clifford, Shane Coleman, Conor McMorrow, Martin Frawley, Valerie Shanley, Mark Hilliard, Katy McGuinness, Ciara Elliot, Malachy Clerkin, Deirdre Sheeran, John Foley, Ewan McKenna, Miguel Delaney, Enda McEvoy, Liam Hayes, Neil Francis, Kieran Shannon, Ciaran Cronin, Eoghan Morrissey, Patrick Freyne, Eithne Tynan, Tom Dunne, Colm O’Grady, Celine Moran, Lisa Reilly, Lisa McGowan, Shana Wilkie, Nicola Cooke, Donna Ahern, Claire Dunne, Shane McDonnell, Ken Sweeney, Roisin Carabine, June Edwards, Julie Lordan, Ros Dee, Rita Byrne, Bea McMunn, Anne Marie Hourihane, Derek McKenna and Brian Hopkins. Niamh Roth, Ray O’Connor, Jim Clancy, Fiona Falvey and Michael Roche.
It was a hell of an adventure.
Nóirín Hegarty
June 2011
NEWS ANALYSIS
DIARMUID DOYLE
Bertie is out of public sight but it’s never been more important to keep an eye on him ...
9 January 2011
Brian Cowen was far more generous than he needed to be. Bertie Ahern, he said in a long statement of tribute to his predecessor, was the consummate politician of his generation, ‘a person of rare ability and extraordinary talent’. Speaking after Ahern had announced he would not be running in the next election, Cowen waxed eloquent about the former taoiseach’s ‘immense work ethic’ and superb negotiating skills. ‘His fellow countrymen and women will always hold him in high esteem,’ he concluded.
Ahern, of course, is currently one of our most toxic assets, so Cowen’s willingness to speak of him in such glowing terms was politically risky and uncommonly decent. The past few weeks have been marked by increasingly routine and bland statements from the Taoiseach paying tribute to the latest rats to desert his sinking ship, and he would have got away with something similar on Ahern’s retirement. Instead he opted for glowing tribute.
Three days later, as we all know now, he got his reward when Ahern, in his role as highly-paid media whore, went on the attack in the News of The World. Cowen was presented as a man of many mistakes, somebody whose main fault was that he didn’t do it Bertie’s way. From the chief political culprit for the economic downturn, it was farcically deluded and very nasty, although a timely reminder of the bile and bitterness which lies beneath that old Bertie bonhomie.
Timely, because Ahern cannot yet be consigned to history. In fact, now that he will be out of public sight, it has never been more important to keep an eye on him. He remains a menace and a threat to Ireland’s prosperity through his significant, but little commented on, position as chairman of the International Forestry Fund.
So far, only the Sunday Tribune among the country’s newspapers has paid close attention to Ahern’s role in this private company. Independent TD Maureen O’Sullivan has asked a Dáil question, and Sinn Féin’s Martin Ferris has thrown a few shapes about the former taoiseach’s latest gig. But, as with John O’Donoghue’s expenses a few years ago, it is taking the political classes a while to wake up to this
issue.
Although the International Forestry Fund sounds like a vaguely cuddly group, which loves trees the way some of us love kittens, it is in fact a very profit-conscious joint venture between two private asset management companies, Helvetia Wealth and IFS Asset Managers Limited. It makes its money by acquiring existing forests on behalf of investors. As it says on its website, Helvetia has 1.1 billion Swiss Francs (€867 million) in assets ‘following a number of very successful acquisitions in the UK, Germany and Ireland’. IFS currently manages in excess of €100 million of forestry assets on behalf of 18,000 private and corporate clients in this country.
In Ireland, most of our trees and forests belong to the state agency Coillte, which owns more than one million acres of land – about 7 per cent of Irish land cover. In July last year, Colm McCarthy issued his ‘An Bord Snip Nua’ report in which he suggested, among other ideas, that the government look at fogging Coillte as part of a mass sell-off of state assets.
This obviously piqued the interest of the cash-rich International Forestry Fund and five months later it announced that Bertie Ahern had been appointed as its chairman. ‘Mr Ahern implemented bold economic initiatives that included corporate tax incentives and education reform’, the Fund said at the time. ‘His efforts laid out a welcome mat for international corporations, making Ireland an attractive location for foreign companies’.
Indeed. Seven months after that, in July 2010, McCarthy was given a new job – to look in more depth at the idea of selling off the state assets he had mentioned in his 2009 report. One of the companies specifically targeted was Coillte.
By now, the International Forestry Fund, with Bertie Ahern firmly ensconced at the top, was salivating at the prospect of getting its hands on Coillte and the 7 per cent of Ireland that comes with it. ‘We would certainly have an interest in that regard,’ Paul Brosnan, the Fund’s director, told this newspaper last year. ‘We have always had an interest in Coillte. It certainly would not be beyond the bounds of possibility that we would acquire it.’