Newspaper Descriptors Project

Intro by Justin Furlong, NLI Newspaper Librarian

The National Library of Ireland in association with the Newspaper & Periodical History Forum of Ireland is pleased to launch its Newspaper Descriptors Project. This project hopes to provide short descriptors or pen notes for the newspaper titles listed in the National Library’s Newspaper Database. The descriptors will include such information as publication dates, proprietors & funding, editors & significant journalists, circulation figures (if known), comment on the newspaper’s political affiliation, and mention any histories written on the various titles….

To launch the project, we’re delighted to present three pieces on the Irish Press group by Ray Burke, Chief News Editor of RTÉ News

The Irish Press  (September 5, 1931-May 25, 1995)

Established by Eamon de Valera, the last surviving 1916 Rising commandant; former president of Sinn Fein and of the first Dáil; founder of Fianna Fáil and future Taoiseach and President of Ireland. Funded by tens of thousands of subscriptions from Ireland, the United States and Australia. Second biggest-selling daily in Ireland for almost 60 years, peaking at 200,000 after World War II.

The paper’s first editorial said it was “not the organ of any individual or a group or a party”. Within six months of its launch, however, Fianna Fáil had attained power and continued to be the party of government for most of the next 80 years. Two of the State’s first three Taoisigh (de Valera and Sean Lemass) and three of the first five presidents (de Valera, Erskine Childers and Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh) held senior positions on the paper.

De Valera declared that the paper’s proprietors were its shareholders and “the Irish people”. However, its articles of association, devised by de Valera, decreed that “sole and absolute” editorial and commercial control rested with the “controlling director” – successively de Valera himself, his eldest son Vivion and Vivion’s only son, Dr Eamon de Valera. At least four of the paper’s nine editors resigned abruptly, after long service, following rows with the controlling director, who also retained the title ‘Editor-in-Chief’.

In addition to the role of controlling director, de Valera – and subsequently two of his sons and his grandson – also controlled the voting shares in a US-based company, Irish Press Corporation, which effectively controlled the Irish company, Irish Press Limited. The extent of the control and of the share ownership did not become public for decades.

Despite its symbiotic links to Fianna Fail, the Irish Press was respected for its news and sports coverage. Its feature pages regularly carried articles by Brendan Behan, Benedict Kiely, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O’Brien, Lennox Robinson, Bryan MacMahon, Patrick McGill and Nuala O’Faolain. Leading Irish language writers including Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Máirtín Ó Direáin and Breandán Ó hEithir were regular contributors. The New Irish Writing page, introduced in 1968 by literary editor David Marcus, published the first works of John Banville, Neil Jordan, Patrick McCabe, Sebastian Barry, Dermot Bolger and Frank McGuinness.

Recurring questions about the paper’s initial fundraising, particularly in the US, and about the post of controlling director, culminated in a Dáil debate in 1959 in which all parties except Fianna Fáil voted to censure de Valera for continuing to control the Irish Press while serving as Taoiseach. De Valera announced next day that he would step down as Taoiseach and seek election as President of Ireland.

De Valera’s death in 1975, two years after he had completed two terms as President, was followed by a worsening of what had been a gradual decline in the paper’s circulation. Sales continued to fall due to increased competition from indigenous and imported dailies; periodic non-publication because of industrial disputes; weak management and a failed joint-partnership with a minor US publisher, Ralph Ingersoll. In December 1994 de Valera’s grandson sold 25% of the Irish Press and its sister evening and Sunday titles to its traditional arch-rival, Independent Newspapers. Publication ceased less than six months later, on May 25th, 1995, when the journalists went on strike on the same day as Dr de Valera suffered an adverse Supreme Court ruling at the end of protracted litigation against Ralph Ingersoll.

Editors: Frank Gallagher (1931-1935); John O’Sullivan and John Herlihy successively (1935-1938); William Sweetman (1938-1951); Jim McGuinness (1951-1957); Francis Carthy (1957-1962); Joe Walsh (1962-1968); Tim Pat Coogan (1968-1987); Hugh Lambert (1987-1995)

Publications:
Burke, R. Press Delete: The Decline and Fall of The Irish Press Currach Press, 2005, Dublin
Coogan, T. P. De Valera: Long Fellow Long Shadow Hutchinson, 1993, London
Oram, H. The Newspaper Book: A History of Newspapers in Ireland, 1649-1983 M. O. Books, 1983, Dublin
O’Brien, M. De Valera, Fianna Fail and The Irish Press: The Truth in the News? Irish Academic Press, 2001, Dublin

The Evening Press  (September 1954-May 1995)

Launched on September 1, 1954, promising “as much news as possible”. Editor-in-chief Vivion de Valera instructed that it should carry “no politics” and no editorials. Founding editor was Douglas Gageby (later Editor of the Irish Times 1963-74 and 1977-86).

Detailed coverage of Dublin city and county council matters and of tenant association activities in the capital’s fast-growing suburbs helped build circulation. Strong emphasis on sports included the hiring two months after its launch of well-known Raidio Éireann GAA presenter Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin, who was also a former Dublin inter-county footballer and hurler, to write about Gaelic Games every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. By 1959, daily sales topped 100,000, eclipsing the Evening Herald and hastening the demise of the Evening Mail three years later. Its team of young news reporters included John Healy and Ted Nealon, who later became prominent journalists on the Irish Times and RTE respectively.

Home of the original and long-running Dubliner’s Diary column, written under the pseudonym Terry O’Sullivan for 25 years by Tomas O’Faolain, a former teacher and Army colleague of Vivion de Valera and father of the writer Nuala O’Faolain. Home also from 1973 to 1995 of Con Houlihan’s acclaimed back-page sports columns, which appeared between four and six times each week, and of his regular literary series Tributaries. Novelist Colum McCann, winner of the US National Book Award and the Dublin IMPAC International Literary Award for Let The Great World Spin, wrote a youth affairs column and a series of despatches from the United States in the mid to late-1980s.

In January 1983 it was the first newspaper to publish details of Charles Haughey’s near one-million pound indebtedness to Allied Irish Banks, the country’s biggest banking group. AIB, in a special statement, denied the story “positively and authoritatively” and said that it was “outlandishly inaccurate”, but a Tribunal of Inquiry established by the Oireachtas was told years later that it had been accurate.

Gradual decline during the late-1980s took circulation below 100,000 by 1989, when the Evening Herald recovered the top sales position. The decline was accelerated by discord between the Irish and American partners running Irish Press Newspapers. A re-launch as a bifurcated broadsheet in 1991 was quickly reversed, but it was a marketing and commercial disaster, cutting sales to below 75,000. They had fallen below 50,000 when the paper ceased publication in 1995.

Editors: Douglas Gageby (1954-1959); Conor O’Brien (1959-1968); Sean Ward (1968-1992); Dick O’Riordan (1992-1995)

Publications:
Healy, J. Healy, Reporter The House of Healy, 1991, Achill
O’Toole, M. More Kicks than Pence: A Life in Irish Journalism Poolbeg, 1992, Dublin

The Sunday Press  (September 1949-1995)

Launched on the first Sunday of September, 1949, it promised to pursue “the nationalist tradition … embodied forever in the Proclamation of Easter Week”. Its first editor was Matt Feehan, a member of the Fianna Fáil national executive and a former Lt Col in the Irish Army.

Quickly established itself as the top-selling Irish Sunday newspaper, in part through serialisation of nationalist memoirs, notably Four Glorious Years, an account of the War of Independence; Raids and Rallies, the IRA exploits of Ernie O’Malley; and Allegiance, the autobiography of Robert Brennan, an IRA and Sinn Féin leader who became a confidant of Eamon de Valera and first general manager of the Irish Press before being appointed Secretary of the Irish Legation in Washington DC (effectively Irish Ambassador to the US). These serialisations prompted the TD Noel Browne to accuse the Sunday Press in the Dáil of “glorifying the gun”.

Circulation reached 380,000 within six years and topped 400,000 by the mid-1960s. It peaked at 442,817 in 1972. Sales dropped below 400,000 following de Valera’s death in 1975 and continued to fall each year thereafter, although the masthead was still able to proclaim “Over 1 million readers each week” until the mid-1980s. By the end of the decade, it had been overtaken in sales by the rival Sunday Independent for the first time since its launch. Sales fell below 200,000 in the early-1990s and had dropped below 150,000 when publication ceased in 1995.

Its last two political correspondents were Geraldine Kennedy, who resigned in 1987 to win a Dail seat for the Progressive Democrats party and who later became editor of the Irish Times; and Stephen Collins, who subsequently became political editor of the Irish Times.

Editors: Lt Col Matt Feehan (1948-1961); Francis Carthy (1961-1967); Vincent Jennings (1967-1986); Michael Keane (1986-1995)

Publications:
Burke, R. Press Delete: The Decline and Fall of The Irish Press Currach Press, 2005, Dublin
Coogan, T. P. De Valera: Long Fellow Long Shadow Hutchinson, 1993, London
Healy, J. Healy, Reporter The House of Healy, 1991, Achill
Oram, H. The Newspaper Book: A History of Newspapers in Ireland, 1649-1983 M. O. Books, 1983, Dublin
O’Brien, M. De Valera, Fianna Fail and The Irish Press: The Truth in the News? Irish Academic Press, 2001, Dublin
O’Toole, M. More Kicks than Pence: A Life in Irish Journalism Poolbeg, 1992, Dublin

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